Posthumous Publication, Again

The MOA blog has referenced my short discussion with Ken McIntyre back last December.  Going to comment, I typed a response in the box, hit ‘submit’, and then had a page come up saying I needed to sign in.  Cutting my losses, I thought I might as well respond here instead.

So, the MOA post ends with the thought that a possible implication of McIntyre’s anti-publication position (a position that, I think, the MOA blogger broadly shares) is that publishers are or should be ‘somehow responsible for other people’s use or misuse of what they publish’:

University PhD assessors may have a professional duty to reject works of insufficient originality, but are publishers in general, or academic publishers in particular, also bound by such an obligation?

The post leaves the question open.  My response is as thus:

Empirically-speaking, it is plainly not the case that publishers are bound by such an obligation – at the risk of sounding flippant, the absence of it is why things like the third edition of Rawls’ Political Liberalism come out! Even normatively though I’m not sure how the proposed norm is supposed to work, since wouldn’t edited Selections From AN Author-type books fall under it? More to the point, I don’t see why the market shouldn’t be left to judge what is and what is not worth publishing. If a load of gullible students buy a book of questionable originality, then so be it – if nothing else, it’ll teach them that respecting the authority of the lecturers or whoever it was who recommended the book to them isn’t the same thing as having those lecturers taking their own decisions for them.

Separately, given the context of McIntyre’s comments was his scholarly disagreement with Luke O’Sullivan over matters of substantive interpretation (or so I inferred), the idea that one should bring in talk of censorship seems a bit extreme to me. Indeed, one of my objections to McIntyre’s argument was precisely that without publication, it would have made it much more difficult for an outsider interested in the interpretive issues in question to form his or her own reasoned judgement about them.

Lastly, the idea that people generally will suddenly see What is History? (or any of the other Inprint volumes) as a key Oakeshott text, as McIntyre implied, seems just silly to me. For better of for worse, it will be RP, OHC and EM, in that order, for evermore – for a Collingwood analogy, look at how outside the small milieu of commentators proper, The Idea of History is still almost exclusively quoted for his philosophy of history even though The Principles of History volume has been out since 1999, a fact that is reflected in the two books current sales (IH still making a tidy profit I believe and PH nowhere).