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Henry Farrell

Henry Farrell is associate professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University. He blogs at Crooked Timber and The Monkey Cage.

Recent Articles

Karl Marx, Republican

Henry FarrellAug 29, 2012
Via a Tweet from Ned Resnikoff, this letter from Karl Marx, congratulating President Lincoln on his re-election. We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver? … The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of...

Politics in Everything: Cupcakes Edition

Henry FarrellMar 17, 2012
Flickr
With special guest appearance by Jeff Henig , now at Teacher’s College, once of GWU ’s political science department (before my time). The Cupcake Wars came to Public School 295 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in October. The Parent-Teacher Association’s decision to raise the price of a cupcake at its monthly bake sale — to $1, from 50 cents — was supposed to be a simple way to raise extra money in the face of city budget cuts. Instead, in a neighborhood whose median household income leaped to $60,184 in 2010 from $34,878 a decade before, the change generated unexpected ire, pitting cash-short parents against volunteer bakers, and dividing a flummoxed PTA executive board, where wealthier newcomers to the school serve alongside poorer immigrants who have called the area home for years. Such fracases are increasingly common at schools like P.S. 295, where changing demographics can cause culture clashes. PTA leaders are often caught between trying to get as much as possible from parents of...

Is Climate Change Likely to Increase Conflict?

Henry FarrellFeb 03, 2012
Likely not, according to Nils Petter Gledditsch, in the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Peace Research on this topic. Research to date shows little evidence for systematic relationship between increased global warming, water shortages, etc., and violent conflict. Climate change is the world’s first truly global manmade environmental problem and a firm warning that human activities can influence our physical environment on a global scale. The range of possible consequences of climate change is so wide, even for the limited temperature changes foreseen in the IPCC scenarios, that it is difficult to sort out the main priorities. Obviously, if a reversal of the trend towards a more peaceful world was one of these consequences, it should have a prominent place on the policy agenda. Based on the research reported here, such a pessimistic view may not be warranted in the short to medium run. In other words—there are a large number of unhappy consequences that may flow from...

Google and the Dread Pirate Roberts Strategy

Henry FarrellJan 13, 2012
A blogpost that I wrote elsewhere , complaining about Google, has led to a disagreement between Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. Drum Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that “don’t be evil” stuff? I mean, Google’s a big corporation. They’ve been a big public corporation for nearly eight years. Big public corporations are in business to make money and enhance their stockholders’ wealth, and that’s that. Google has long been big enough and profitable enough that they could sort of pretend otherwise now and again, but even that was only bound to last as long as their competition remained weak and ignorable. That’s no longer the case, and Google is responding normally. Yglesias “Just out of curiosity,” asks Kevin Drum, “did anyone ever really believe that ‘don’t be evil’ stuff?” I sort of did. Not because I expected Google to stop acting like a money-making operation and start running itself like a charity, but because I thought “when faced with a short-term tradeoff...

A Veto for Inequality

Henry FarrellJan 11, 2012
The Linz and Stepan article that I linked last week suggests that we need to look to comparative politics rather than Americanist political science in order to understand the sources of American inequality. The preoccupation of many Americanists with America’s distinctive governmental institutions—Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court—obscures this inequality and what it means for the U.S. political system. It thus seems to us that Americanists’ ability to analyze American politics would be enhanced by locating these problems in a larger, comparative context. Such a reconceptualization of American politics could help to broaden our discipline and enhance the quality of its generalizing theories. To bolster this broad argument, they argue that the unusually large number of veto players in the US political system is a major cause of inequality. A question thus arises, one both simple and surprisingly understudied by scholars of American politics: From a comparative perspective,...

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