socialists of the chair

One of the great great things about the blogosphere is the discovery of smart and talented people I'd never meet offline.

Vache Folle -- who was once a cop, but never I suspect a thug -- has a new blog with this great post about egalitarian indoctrination in the Ivy League:


Power relations in musical chairs
I have a thing about decorative shell barter, cigarette money, online game economies, and now also the chair-rich and the chair-poor.

(And once again, I note the pervasiveness of the chair itself in academic metaphors. In undergraduate philosophy, we were always talking about chairness and what features of a chair were accidental or essential. My father says, "Those who see the Institutions' arse are beneath the Institutions' notice." But apparently academics notice what's beneath their arses all the time.)

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I should probably explain the title of this post. Ludwig von Mises was educated in Vienna at a time when the dominant economic thought in the German-speaking world was called Historicism, and its political wing was the Kathedersozialisten -- Socialists of the Chair, which to me implies armchair socialists (parlor-room Marxists, limousine liberals, et al.) but the "Chair" turns out to refer to the tenured position of full professorship in the Central European university system. I guess American academia has chairs, too, like the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics, but I don't think I ever hear the word used that way outside official titles. Anyway, Kathedersozialisten might best be translated as "Socialists With Tenure".