Sadly, strict egalitarianism requires us to destroy the works of Anderson to create parity between her citations and everyone else's.

That's what the philosophy librarian suggested. I emailed Dave but haven't heard back.

And here's the review article from your faithful egalitarian gumshoe: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

You can, for now, find Anderson's reply via the Wayback Machine, which Annual Review agreed to cite. Download while you can, before this gets totally Library of Alexandria'd. I'm still working on figuring out what's happened, and recovering it, but who knows. web.archive.org/web/20001019...

Was there some general decision at Brown to move/take down the whole "BEARS" repository? Nobody seems to know--again, not even the librarians! So the Anderson reply, and for that matter the others' critical pieces, are functionally gone. (Anderson's website links only to the now-dead link.)

Here's the mystery: nobody seems to know what happened. The Brown librarians, including the philosophy librarian, don't know. The online symposium was maybe hosted by the philosophy department, but the (helpful!) dept staff don't know what happened. Ditto the Brown U. Web & Digital team.

When the good people at Annual Review of Political Science copyedited my piece last December, though, the editor--apparently industriously checking every citation--told me the link to the Anderson piece didn't work. And she was (of course) right. It had worked in July, but now was down.

Working on my own review article in July 2025, I followed Nath's link, and downloaded Anderson's reply piece. It's pretty interesting--to my mind, mostly because she doubles down on an oft-missed point in her article, i.e., that welfare payments to the able may be (must be?) conditional on working.

It turns out that David Estlund and James Dreier, philosophers at Brown, had put together a symposium on Anderson's article. Arneson, Christiano, and Sobel gave critical remarks, and Anderson answered. Sounds pretty great! And then someone put all this on a symposium repository at Brown.

In a review article by the (excellent) theorist Rekha Nath, I learned of a work by Anderson I had never heard of: a "reply to critics" of her famous 1999 article, "What Is the Point of Equality?". These critics were major philosophers themselves: Richard Arneson, Thomas Christiano, and David Sobel.

They're a reliable synecdoche for "poor servant/menial laborer, whom we're not going to bestow with much individuality or internality," in a lot of great 18th and 19th c. English novels.

He was visiting Harvard. Not sure in what capacity, but the class I took was a junior seminar in Social Studies, and I think Social Studies at that time was short in people teaching those, especially in the social/political theory subfield. He was a great get!

I was kind of the opposite: I took his theory class because it seemed really interesting (it was), and I never thought he might be the James Miller whom I knew of because of his writing on Bob Dylan and others . . . until I started seeing stuff like the tote bag in class!

I took a class with James Miller on "Modernity and Its Discontents" (basically Continental social theory) in college. He was great! I enjoyed seeing the occasional hint of his other life as a rock writer. I still remember and envy his Van Morrison "No Guru, No Method, No Teacher" tote bag.

I am always obligated when Niall Ferguson is mentioned to point out that he encouraged some of his students to go after another student whose politics he didn't like. One of the most unethical things I've ever seen an "educator" do.

www.theguardian.com/media/2018/j...