Harvard University Press Blog

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

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In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.

Budgets, Ethics, and Social Darwinism

In a speech widely considered to be his first blow in the general election campaign against likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama last week denounced the budget proposal put forth by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan. Whereas Romney has described Ryan’s budget as “marvelous,” Obama made his own opinion of the budget clear:

Disguised as [a] deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly-veiled Social Darwinism. It’s antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it— a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that's built to last—education and training; research and development—it’s a prescription for decline.

Those comments have been a hot topic on the news shows, with Ryan himself weighing in to describe Obama’s remarks as a “verbal tantrum” more petulant than presidential. “He’s trying to use this kind of rhetoric to distort away from his failed record,” Ryan told NBC.

Yet, writing at the NYT blog The Stone, philosopher Philip Kitcher notes that while the common conception of “Social Darwinism” actually has little to do with the ideas of Charles Darwin, the term as generally understood does, in fact, apply to this Republican budget proposal. He outlines the concept’s meaning:

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer).

There are very good reasons to think both theses are false. Especially in the case of the Republican dynasties of our day, the Bushes and the Romneys, success has been facilitated by all kinds of social structures, by educational opportunities and legal restrictions, that were in place prior to and independently of their personal efforts or achievements. For those born into environments in which silver spoons rarely appear—Barack Obama, for instance—the contributions of the social environment are even more apparent. Without enormous support, access to inspiring teachers and skillful doctors, the backing of self-sacrificing relatives and a broader community, and without a fair bit of luck, the vast majority of people, not only in the United States but throughout the world, would never achieve the things of which they are, in principle, capable. In short, Horatio Alger needs lots of help, and a large thrust of contemporary Republican policy is dedicated to making sure he doesn’t get it.

Second, even if rigorous competition enables the talented — or, better, the lucky — to realize their goals, it is completely unwarranted to suppose that their accomplishments will translate into any increased benefit for the overwhelming majority of those who are less fortunate. The strenuous struggle social Darwinism envisages might select for something, but the most likely traits are a tendency to take whatever steps are necessary to achieve a foreseeable end, a sharp focus on narrowly individual goals and a corresponding disregard for others. We might reasonably expect that a world run on social Darwinist lines would generate a cadre of plutocrats, each resolutely concerned to establish a dynasty and to secure his favored branch of industry against future competition. In practical terms it would almost certainly yield a world in which the gap between rich and poor was even larger than it is now.

The End of the Luzin Affair

One of the hopes of any book publisher, especially a University Press, is that its books will have an impact out in the world. And there’s no single metric for that. Sometimes books find a wide audience, sometimes they revolutionize a discipline, sometimes they win awards, or sometimes they become mainstays of college courses. At HUP we’re fortunate to have grown familiar with our books having these kinds of impact, but we recently learned of a real-world effect that’s almost certainly the first of its kind for an HUP publication: a large Russian bureaucracy has officially changed its position in large part because of an HUP book.

The presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences has passed a resolution clearing the name of the mathematician Nikolai Luzin, whom it had condemned in the 1930s because of his ideological views. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, authors of Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, have received word from the Academy that their book played a large part in the discussions that led to the passing of this resolution.

Naming Infinity, which we described on publication in 2009 as “an exciting mathematical mystery tour,” is about the founding of set theory, and a conflict between French and Russian mathematicians over the nature of infinity. The debate centered on the relation between math and mysticism, and we’ll take a stab at an explanation, though surely an oversimplified one.

Mathematicians deal in geometric perfection (like perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines), but such things can’t actually be found in the natural, physical world. The same is also true of numbers, in that they must consist of perfectly equal units (speaking purely in mathematical terms, you cannot count two oranges if the two oranges you count are not exactly, perfectly similar). Okay, so if the objects studied by mathematicians don’t exist in this world then they must exist in another transcendent realm, one where perfection is possible. Or so said mathematicians.

The problem, though, was the question of how mathematicians gained knowledge of the objects in this other transcendent realm, or how anyone’s physical brain could grasp a non-physical reality. Now, you can basically get around this problem by using your imagination and a little common sense (you’ve experienced an orange, and you can pretend that the two you’re counting are identical). But the concept of infinity throws a roadblock on that shortcut, because we have no physical experience of the infinite. We cannot encounter a full infinity in the natural world. And, given the trouble conceptualizing a single infinity, wrapping one’s mind around the thought of an infinity of infinities, which calculus logically required, was nearly impossible. It presented such a complication that Aristotle actually banned infinity from Greek thought, but modern applied mathematics really couldn’t do without.

For French mathematicians, who were as advanced as any but still very much Descartes’ intellectual descendants, a phenomenon couldn’t be understood if it couldn’t be stated clearly. They resisted fuzziness, shunned metaphysics as theology. Not so for a group of Russian mathematicians who happened to be influenced by a heretical religious sect that practiced “Name Worshipping.” They believed that they could achieve union with the divine by chanting the name of God over and over; they believed, in other words, that Name Worshipping could connect them to another, transcendent realm. Just the sort of portal the concept of infinity seemingly required. So this sect of Russian mathematicians, Nikolai Luzin among them, “named” infinity. And this is one of the central arguments of Graham and Kantor’s book: that a religious heresy in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church (Name Worshipping), was actually instrumental in helping the birth of a new field of modern mathematics.

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

Michael Dummett (1925-2011)

Influential British philosopher Sir Michael Dummett died at 86 in the last days of 2011. Over the years we’ve been the publisher of many of Dummett’s books, including his classic studies of the 19th-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes the importance of Dummett’s work on Frege:

Dummett has argued that analytical philosophy is based on Frege’s insight that the correct way to study thought is to study language. He holds that Frege advocated a realist semantic theory. According to such a theory every sentence (and thus every thought we are capable of expressing) is determinately true or false, even though we may not have any means of discovering which it is.

Perhaps Dummett’s own most significant work was the development of “anti-realism,” a way of thinking that took issue with Frege’s realist theory. From The Guardian’s obituary of Dummett:

Dummett believed that Frege made certain assumptions concerning truth and falsehood that could be called into question. Frege allowed for the possibility of a thought that was neither true nor false. An example would be the thought that Father Christmas smokes. Given that there is no such person as Father Christmas, then neither is there anything to make this thought true or false. But Frege was not in the least reluctant to admit that a thought could be true or false without our having any way of telling which. An example might be the thought that Plato would have enjoyed smoking. This is what caused Dummett to pause.

He did not see how we could understand a sentence without having some way of manifesting our understanding. And he did not see how we could manifest this without being able to tell whether the thought expressed was true or false. So the assumption that a given thought could be true or false even though we had no way of telling which – an assumption that Dummett called "realism" concerning the thought – was immediately problematical.

In another of his influential works, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Dummett sought to help bridge the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy by revisiting the moment when the traditions diverged. Simon Critchley quotes the following passage from Origins in a recent appreciation:

I do not mean to pretend that one should pretend that philosophy in the two traditions is basically the same; obviously that would be ridiculous. We can re-establish communication only by going back to the point of divergence. It’s no use now shouting across the gulf. It is obvious that philosophers will never reach agreement. It is a pity, however, if they can no longer talk to one another or understand one another. It is difficult to achieve such understanding, because if you think people are on the wrong track, you may have no great desire to talk with them or to take the trouble to criticize their views. But we have reached a point at which it is as if we’re working in different subjects.

At the NYT Opinionator, you can read reflections on Dummett from over two dozen fellow philosophers, including Timothy Williamson, Dorothy Edgington, and Hilary Putnam, who notes of Dummett that he “cared about ideas, he cared about people, he cared about society, and he rightly connected caring about any one of the three and caring about the other two.”

"Can you have work and love in a damaged world?"

The duo behind the Thinking Aloud video archive recently interviewed George Kateb about the possibilities of living a good life in our damaged world. Kateb, one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the past several decades, is the author, most recently, of Human Dignity, a secular defense of a concept that has received little true scrutiny.

We encourage you to watch the full video of his interview, available at The Stone. Here, though, is a bit of what Kateb had to say about how to live:

The point is to live one’s life, whether or not you think the world is damaged. To live a life. But, never, never to think that you can lead a good life. Never, never to think that you can lead the good life.

I think of two things that help to define a tolerable life that people need and are right to need and want. And they are the two that Freud comes up with: work and love.

Can you have work and love in a damaged world? Yes, you can, but not with an easy conscience. Why not an easy conscience? Because it’s never justified. There’s always too much damage in the world for you to think that the world exists for your work and your love.

We are oblivious, and can’t help but be to some extent oblivious. We would die from the impact of true knowledge of the amount of suffering existing just around us at any given moment in time. This is a lesson taught powerfully by George Eliot in Middlemarch. We’d die if we could hear the heartbeat of a squirrel. We would die from the roar at the other end of silence.

So how does one live against a backdrop of nothingness? What does one do about the pathologies that seem to make life less worth living, rather than more worth living?

Once you’re determined to do something, the obligation is to do your best. Should you assume an obligation to do something? I think one should. It’s not the same thing for everybody, though. But, to sort of struggle against pathology on the one hand, and the temptation of destructive nihilism, on the other hand, it’s enough to keep you going… fill up a life.

Praise Be to Copying

Last week’s sensational book news was the revelation that Q. R. Markham’s Assassin of Secrets, the first in a new series of spy novels, contains dozens of chunks lifted from other books without credit. The scandal prompted Markham’s publisher, Little, Brown, to recall all 6,500 copies in print. They seem unlikely either to issue revised editions or to continue with the rest of the series.

Those who follow the book world are by now fairly accustomed to such developments. Whether it’s another memoir taking liberties with the truth, or a talking head’s new “history” book playing it loose with the facts, people in the trade are all too familiar with books not being what they claim.

But Markham’s is a particularly interesting case. The New Yorker Book Bench blog ran a post titled “Q. R. Markham’s Plagiarism Puzzle” that explores the possibility that Markham had intended his book as a collage, rather than a novel:

In the hundreds of newspaper articles and blog posts that have been published on the subject of Markhamgate in the past twenty-four hours, one question appears over and over: How did Rowan think he’d get away with this, especially in the era of Google? It’s the natural question, but in the spirit of playing detective I must ask: Is it the right one? We do not yet have all of the facts—Rowan and his agent have been silent since the scandal broke, and much of the book has yet to be mapped—but those we do have point to something much stranger and more richly textured than your run-of-the-mill plagiarism case.

Allow us to add a piece to the puzzle. Markham is a part owner of the NYC bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown, which hosted an event for our author Marcus Boon last year, to celebrate the release of his latest book, In Praise of Copying. The event was billed as a “Borgesian Book Launch”:

Instead of reading from his book, as is traditionally done at a launch, Boon will read from books selected at random from the copious and wide-ranging shelves of Spoonbill, revealing the secret Borgesian omnipresence of copying in even the most obscure or popular places, recreating the argument of In Praise of Copying using materials found in the store.

Surely a coincidence. But, either way, hats off to the synergy.

On our website, you can read more about Boon’s book, and even download a free PDF. 

Long live copying.

Martha Nussbaum on the Capabilities Approach to Human Development

Traditionally, a country’s Gross Domestic Product has been used as a rough measure of its quality of life. If Country X’s GDP is higher per capita than Country Y’s, the thinking held that we should be able to assume that people in Country X have a higher standard of living than people in Country Y.

But that’s not actually the case. It turns out that an increase in GDP is not very strongly correlated with improvements in many of the areas that affect the lives of a nation’s people. So how should we comparatively assess quality of life, if not via GDP? And how can we shift the conversation from a purely economic basis to one focused on people? As an alternative to the focus on GDP, the Capabilities Approach (also referred to as the Capability Approach and the Human Development Approach) was developed to help the world think about what it means to live a full life, and how governments can provide the opportunities to help their people do so.

The philosopher and University of Chicago Professor of Law and Ethics Martha Nussbaum has been one of the leaders in developing this approach, along with the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. This way of thinking about development led to the creation of the Human Development Index, a UN-backed measure that has thankfully been replacing GDP as a metric of quality of life in policy discussions.

The conversation about this approach has been conducted in academic circles, mostly among development economists. However, we recently published Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, the first book intended to outline the approach for non-specialists. In the book, she outlines what it means to use an approach that takes each individual person as an end. She explains what’s meant by “capabilities” (“not just abilities residing inside a person but also the freedoms or opportunities created by a combination of personal abilities and the political, social, and economic environment”), and presents her list of the ten most central capabilities, the threshold requirements for a life of human dignity.

In the video below, Professor Nussbaum explains why the Capabilities Approach is superior to a focus on GDP, and why good governments should be supporting the kinds of vulnerability that enrich life while helping to shield people from the kinds that don’t.

 

As Creating Capabilities makes clear, the embrace of the Capabilities Approach has entailed a shift from a conversation about economics to a conversation about justice.  

Who Was Walter Benjamin in 1910?

How best to describe Walter Benjamin? Philosopher? German-Jewish Intellectual? Marxist? Moralist? Critic (as argued by Daniel Bell when we began to publish Benjamin’s work)?

Benjamin was all of those things and more, of course. Much of his reputation is based on his writings of the ’20s and ’30s, when he produced works like his best-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” But where did that Benjamin come from? How did he develop? Who was he as a young man? Our latest Benjamin volume, Early Writings, 1910-1917, shows that, even at 18, Benjamin was already Benjamin.

A quick digression: this fall we’re publishing Becoming Dickens, a new bio of Dickens that looks just at the first half of his life, with a particular focus on the pivotal years of 1833-1838. That book lays bare all of the contingency of becoming, with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst showing that the man who became Dickens actually nearly didn’t. As origin stories go, Benjamin’s is strikingly different. The early writings in this new volume make especially clear the philosophical foundations on which Benjamin never stopped building—the concern with the role of the present in historical remembrance, the concern with truth in the work of art, and the anxiety over language’s mediation of life.

Benjamin was heavily involved with the German Youth Movement in the years before WWI, and much of the writing in this volume reflects that association. Howard Eiland, the editor and translator of this volume and others, including The Arcades Project, notes that these zealous youth- and education-focused writings clearly reflect what we know of the adult Benjamin:

In these polemical writings, exhorting the sons and daughters of the German middle class to “awaken,” we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The pieces are concerned with matters ranging from the spiritually fruitful appropriation of history to the intellectual relevance of Romanticism in particular, from the theory of education to the idea of experience and the idea of love. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the Twenties and Thirties are already in evidence here.

Of the forty-five pieces in this volume, over thirty are presented here in English for the first time. Many are articles that were published by Benjamin in various outlets; others were never published in any language in his lifetime. The works fall into four principal subject areas: personal writing (poetry, fiction, diary); education and its reform; youth (with essays on love and eroticism); and literary subjects. These early writings lack some of the polish of his later work, and also absent are the sociological perspectives and montage techniques that Benjamin wouldn’t develop until his freelance writing days after his student years. But, as Adam Kirsch notes, through these seven years one can see Benjamin develop “from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker.”

We’ll just end here with a snippet of the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”:

What does language communicate? It communicates the spiritual essence corresponding to it. It is fundamental to recognize that this spiritual essence communicates itself in language and not through it. Hence, there is no speaker of languages, if that means someone who communicates through these languages. Spiritual being communicates itself in, not through, a language: this is to say, it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is communicable. What is communicable in a spiritual entity is its linguistic being. Language, therefore, in each case communicates the linguistic being of things, but their spiritual being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is communicable.  

As this short excerpt makes clear, one other notable Benjaminism was already well-developed in his youth: his –abilities.

What Is a Palestinian State Worth?

Much of the effort to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians has focused on establishing a mutually agreeable two-state solution. And yet, despite wide public support, negotiations to that end break down repeatedly. What Is a Palestinian State Worth?, by Sari Nusseibeh, is an attempt to step back and reassess the basis of this seemingly intractable conflict. If the goal of a Palestinian state cannot be achieved, Nusseibeh suggests that perhaps it is a goal that should be set aside.

Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and a noted Palestinian intellectual, has written a deeply personal examination of the everyday lives of Palestinian people. Though the book is a work of political philosophy in which Nusseibeh earnestly addresses the worth of a Palestinian State, his approach is universal in its attempt to identify the role of the state in modern life. Nusseibeh carries the questioning spirit of his title through this whole work, and in chapters headed “What Makes Life Worth Living?” and “What Are States For?, he thinks his way to answers.

States for Nusseibeh perform a utilitarian function, providing to their citizens such things as health, education, and safety. As a younger man, he saw a state as the only possible means to those human ends. Now that, as he writes, “the state, as we had conceived it, is no longer practical or realistic,” Nusseibeh has written this book to reconsider the ultimate human desires embedded in the longing for a Palestinian nation, and to provoke the consideration of alternatives. “Politics for me has always been a means, not an end,” he writes, and the aim of his book is to put forth an alternative means.

What he offers is a challenging prompt, which he himself labels a “thought experiment.” From the book’s Introduction:

…let me propose that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship. Thus the state would be Jewish, but the country would be fully binational, all the Arabs within it having their well-being tended to and sustained. Given Israel’s demand to be recognized as a Jewish state, and as long as it refuses to grant those Palestinians full citizenship, their next best option is to have full civil rights even without the right to hold elective office—so that they can enjoy the civil benefits of the de facto single state without being accused of diluting or “defiling” its Jewishness. In any case such a scenario would provide them with a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation or would have under another projected scenario: Israeli hegemony over scattered, “autonomous” Palestinian enclaves.

Nusseibeh describes this approach as “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state.” Though modestly proposed, the provocation of this thought experiment is clear. Israel could not accept such a compromise and remain both Jewish and Democratic. Palestinian leaders could not offer it without formally legitimizing an occupation they’ve fought for nearly fifty years.

Whether his proposal is actually politically tenable is mostly beside the point for Nusseibeh. As he explained to Haim Watzman in an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nusseibeh isn’t really intending to offer a solution. “It's not like going to the supermarket and they're out of two-states so you pick up a one-state. It looks like we are stuck, so the question arises: What are we to do?” He says of the book that “A lot of stuff in there is questions, things I haven't worked out properly… I hope people who read it will be able to think about it, raise more questions, that it will allow them to find new ways of going forward.”

In the month since its publication, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? has been received as the provocation it was intended to be. Long, thoughtful pieces in the Chronicle, the New York Review of Books, Tablet Magazine, and Open Letters Monthly respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm to the content of Nusseibeh’s book. All, though, agree that what Nusseibeh has done is issue a life-giving intellectual challenge to this deeply lodged conflict. As Greg Waldmann put it in his Open Letters Monthly review, “An oddly detached sense of hope runs through What is a Palestinian State Worth?; there is nothing like it in the literature of this conflict. Every year thousands of articles and blog posts are produced about how to end the conflict. They all feel stale. This book does not.”