High Plains and Small Animals; Not Habermas; Sisyphus the Director
Early August Dispatch
Greetings!
Inordinately proud of this landscape. Sometimes, heading east, the sun going down behind you, big weather patterns — apple sized hail and a tornado warning that didn’t amount to much in this case just off to the south — and things just explode in the low light.
As frequent readers of Intermittent Signal know, I love big animals, “charismatic megafauna,” and I’m lucky to live among them, and sometimes I travel to see others. One of the cool things about living with beasts is you start to recognize individuals. I’ve recently been watching pair of handsome mule deer bucks, big racks in velvet, that have been hanging out together between me and town. And there is another doe who keeps charging my neighbor and her dog— so far without mishap. She leaves me and my dogs alone, just saying. In a few days I hope to get some alligator pictures, and we’ll see what else.
Small animals can be just as amazing, however, so that’s what we are doing this time ‘round. But not hummingbirds, which deserve a whole album.
Not a hummingbird! White lined sphinx moth.
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Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party is coming out on August 18th. You can preorder at the link, or on Amazon. Here are very some kind words, because if you don’t promote yourself . . . uggh.
“A deeply thoughtful, genre-blurring meditation on the collapse of meaning in our data-saturated age.” – , computer scientist and author of The Myth of AI
“Westbrook is a Renaissance man, whose breadth of knowledge makes him an icon in dialogues between the law and other disciplines: anthropology, sociology, history, literature, art, economics and international relations, dialogues that wrestle with the key issues of our times. Echoing Quixote’s shift in the twilight of his life [wait, what?!!] from the idealism of the bygone cavalry of the Middle Ages towards the realism of the age that Sancho Panza exemplified, Westbrook shakes the narrative to explain contemporary challenges in the search for a new spring.” – Rosa M. Lastra, Queen Mary University of London, Law
Speaking of Quixote’s Dinner Party, I want to address a comment that has come up among a number of readers, notably
in his fantastic review of the book, Waiting for the Homecoming Dinner Party of Meanings, or as I like to call it, “Bakhtin & Me.” Several folks have asked: your book is about conversation, so why don’t you discuss Jurgen Habermas? Jurgen Habermas, in case you don’t know, is a German philosopher who, over many years, has said a lot about conversation, liberalism, and democracy. In fact, Habermas has gotten himself associated with conversation like Adam Smith = invisible hand; David Ricardo = comparative advantage; Knight = uncertainty; Schumpeter = creative destruction, Keynes = multiple equilibria, and so forth, and those are just economists. One of my many regrets is that my name is not understood to be synonymous with a concept, Westbrook = “weary yet generous sympathy,” or some such.
Junco that has failed to launch. This seems to happen pretty often. One of the parents, foraging, ended up in the house because I left the door open. No harm done.
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But Habermas doesn’t appear in QDP. Why not? Maybe I should have stuck him in, and avoided these questions? To be honest, I didn’t think about it, but on reflection I think not, for reasons that are layered.
First, and most simply QDP is a memoir of conversations, and we simply didn’t talk about Habermas. If he had really been on my mind, in respose to some of these conversations, I might have included a discussion of Habermas, but that simply, as a factual matter, didn’t happen.
Second, and more substantively, QDP is written to some degree “against” theory. In the critical social sciences and the humanities, facility with the canon (however defined at the moment) demonstrates that one belongs in the discourse, and ultimately that one might be credentialed as a member of the discipline in good standing. At some deep level, this is inimical to real thinking, to thinking afresh. So much of the book struggles with the desire to take reading, and thinking about books, seriously, which in some real sense means not professionally. But not every sense! So “obligatory citation to Foucault” was a running joke in our conversations. Adding Habermas would have simply compounded the problem, no offense to either thinker meant, not here, anyway.
Third, and more fundamentally: Habermas is a neo-Kantian thinker, a liberal. He believes in things like equality, autonomy, and rationality, and thinks conversation should proceed on those lines. This is fine, but as Hyun Woo Kim points out, QDP is a deeply erotic book, even loving. None of this is rational or even autonomous, not in any clean sense. (“What does Leviathan want for his children?” is not a liberal question, at least not directly.) By the same token, bureaucracy is often not rational, anything but, and is even more often heierarchical, especially in it’s claims to authority resting upon expertise. QDP discusses things like our understanding of power in situ, messy, compromised, anxious, uncertain, hopeful. Not liberal in any philosophical sense.
Cute, but I really like the geometry. It has been a huge summer for chipmunks, I have no idea why. One of my dogs, who can look at all sorts of animals with equanimity, has a passionate hatred for chipmunks.
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Sisyphus the Director: Why is the "Discerning Question" Rarely Asked and Never Finally Answered?”
“Sisyphus the Director” is a bit more academic/professional than the usual fare on Intermittent Signal, and many of my readers simply won’t care, so I’m just going to provide an excerpt and links. Amy and I were asked to write a book chapter for the 25th Anniversary of the Weinberg Center at the University of Delaware. As you are probably aware, Delaware is the center of corporation law.
On the surface, “Sisyphus the Director” is rather breezy corporation law scholarship, addressed to other professors, judges, and sophisticated practitioners. Amy and I have both written a lot of this over the course of our careers, both jointly and severally. And, despite the breezy tone, there is a lot “under the hood,” as you’ll pick up from the footnotes.
A pika, related to a rabbit. Talus slope hanging off side of a cliff, about 12,500 feet. Crappy picture, but very hard to photograph. They winter over in these rocks. Amazing.
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The reason I include the essay here, however, is that the real topic is the limitations of law, and the ultimate dependence of law upon political institutions, some sense of community. For reasons discussed, there is no way to convene a group of people and ensure that they reach good decisions. This has profound consequences for how we think about not just corporation law, but constitutionalism, treaties, and the like. Sorry, I didn’t make the rules.
ABSTRACT: Sidney Weinberg and his son John Weinberg both served as Chairmen of Goldman Sachs for many years. Recently, a memorandum and speech of Sidney’s, and John’s undergraduate (although John was a war veteran) thesis, came to light. The documents all addressed the same fundamental issue: what should be expected of boards of directors? This question first arose, in essentially its contemporary form, in the 1930s, in light of widespread corporate failures. So, it came to be thought, that directors were not merely advisory supporters of the founder or centralized management. Instead, managers and directors are, if not exactly opposed, not entirely aligned, either: the former is to be accountable to the latter. For the Weinbergs, the practical question then, was how do we, in business and law, help directors hold managers accountable? What can we do to foster “the discerning questions” that will lead to good leadership. Here the Weinbergs have many ideas that have since become orthodox, involving independent directors, diverse boards, distribution of written materials in advance, and the like.
Young red shafted flicker (a kind of woodpecker), trying to get on a log. Can’t really fly yet. He makes it.
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Nonetheless, despite sensible corporate governance reforms, corporations and entire industries continue to fail, sometimes spectacularly. We discuss why it is so hard to ask the right questions under three broad themes: the risk and uncertainty central to the idea of business; the formal process required for large enterprises and to financialization generally, entailing abstraction and so loss of context; and the trust required by collective enterprises, which inevitably carries the risk of groupthink. Underlying these problems is a difficulty discussed by Kant in his work on judgment: abstract logic does not determine particular questions.
Unfortunately, the difficulties confronting boards (and other political institutions) are in principle insoluble. Law, understood as principle, is limited. The best that can be hoped is a well-functioning institution, in which a common sense, a consensus, emerges that justifies the firm’s decisions and its general conduct. Boards will fail, corporations will fail, occasionally spectacularly, but more often in small ways. A degree of impossibility is inescapable in corporate governance as in other human enterprises. We are left where Sidney and John Weinberg started: with hope for sound institutions, and insistence on prudence.
Westbrook, Amy and Westbrook, David A., Sisyphus the Director: Why is the "Discerning Question" Rarely Asked and Never Finally Answered? Chapter 10 in Boardroom Legacy: The Weinbergs of Goldman Sachs and the Evolution of Corporate Governance (Lawrence A. Cunningham ed., forthcoming 2026).
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The geometry!
Enjoy the rest of your summer!
— David A. Westbrook
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