iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Thank you! By the way, your excellent book (duly cited!) helped me with another article from the more recent (APD) end of this project. I was just talking about it at an admin law conference over the weekend. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Delighted to see my article, "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory," in print in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social. It is my favorite thing I've written, and I hope you'll read it. Like most people, I learned in school that political theory began in Athens in the 5th c. BCE. This is wrong. (1/)

The abstract for the article titled "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political
Theory: Administrative Labor in the 'Other Half' of the History of Political
Thought," which reads: The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. In doing so, the article expands political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by calling for a new research agenda that will recover questions of public administration as a major thematic throughline in the 5,000-year global history of human political ideas. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their public administrators and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of enchantment and wonder. Revealing public administration to be an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic rhetorical claims in contemporary democracies that the “administrative state” is a recent alien imposition.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Grading interrupted again by a friendly anole.

A photo of a green anole (colored brown at the moment) on a laptop keyboard.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

How am I supposed to finish grading with this beautiful visitor on my laptop?

A photo of an unexpected green tree frog sitting comfortably on a laptop computer.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

A story in three parts about summer 2025, which will live in infamy…

A graph from the Financial Times showing a >40% reduction in container orders between China and the US in April 2025

A graph from the SF Federal Reserve Bank showing the tendency of inflation to rise and then peak around 8 months after a global supply chain shock

A graph of the causal relation between supply chain shocks and inflation from 1998 to 2023

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Habits of democracy are longer (1965 v 1990s) and expectations of middle class stability as a birthright are much stronger in the US. As these expectations crumble (it’s starting), I expect violent repression to make up the difference.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Think of all the empty slogans about "the taxes are too high" and "government spending is out of control." Most students NEVER get exposed to actual information about these things.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

one in the storm drain outside my son’s college dorm this week…

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

6. And Winters’ book gives a rich conceptual vocabulary for explaining what’s happening. Musk is clearly trying to transition the US from an already “elite-biased democracy” (@mikealbertus.bsky.social and Menaldo’s term) into a “sultanistic oligarchy.”

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

4. Bagg makes a compelling case that centralized public administrative power is good for democracy b/c it enables effective prevention and opposition to the accumulation of private oligarchic power. Why is centralized public administrative capacity necessary for this?

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

2. From Ziblatt: weak conservative parties (i.e. 21st c. GOP) can tempt organized wealthy interest groups to turn instead to extra-party organizations (religious, nationalistic, etc.) to GOTV in support of their unpopular economic preferences. These groups can then take over the party.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

10. In fact, bureaucracy has been a fundamental institutional building block of human civilization from the very beginning in ancient Mesopotamia—compatible with forms democracy for over 5,000 yrs. bsky.app/profile/dith...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

9. And in my own research, I show that the “administrative state” is as American as apple pie. Bureaucracy has been part of democracy in America from the very beginning. doi.org/10.1177/0090...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

8. Bernardo Zacka argues that bureaucratic agencies can deliver morally significant policy implementation and care. www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

7. … and so does Lisa Disch. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

6. @stevenklein.bsky.social makes a similar argument about bureaucracy and democratic political mobilization from a different angle. www.cambridge.org/core/books/w...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

5. And @katejackson.bsky.social, argues that public bureaucracies perform important functions of political representation, enabling constituencies to participate actively in democratic politics. scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcont...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

3. And @samuel-bagg.bsky.social argues that public administrative power is necessary as a countervailing force against private concentrations of oligarchic power. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

2. For example, @blakeprof.bsky.social argues that bureaucracy transforms rights and freedoms from mere words on paper into a material reality. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

If you’re worried about oligarchic state capture (as well you should be), and you want to know more about countervailing power that can fight it, then read my colleague @samuel-bagg.bsky.social’s excellent recent book about it: The Dispersion of Power. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

The cover of Sam Bagg’s book, The Dispersion of Power, with an image of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

And here are the 1934 House and 1936 presidential election maps. It turns out that “We the people” really like the administrative state that is currently being dismantled … when we understand the oligarchic alternative.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Amen! Here's my proposal... www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Melville the highly effective research assistant

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

These two are pretty great, too. There's no one quite like him.

An image of the cover of Jon Lucien's album, Song For My Lady

An image of the cover of Jon Lucien's album, Mind's Eye

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Melville loves a good meeting.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

1. AMAZING new article in APSR by Shoufu Yin. He traces the transmission of a concept of liberty in multiple directions across Afro-Eurasia from 1000-1600 CE. This should change the way political theorists address questions of context when doing historical work. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

A picture of the front page of Shoufu Yin's excellent new APSR article, titled "The Global Network of Liberty: Toward a New Framework for Understanding the History of Political Concepts"

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

I hope the good people at Tayto are open to greater “viewpoint diversity” than this in their human ingredients…

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Reentering Bluesky to hear about everyone’s excellent academic research, I must pay the #BrookeEntryTax with #ProofOfCat and #ProofOfDog. Here are the magnificent Melville, Dickens, Rosie, and Peggy.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 29/02/2024

Fortunately, the only country on earth where people drive around in monster trucks also produces the most skilled drivers. Exhibit A: this street parking job.

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 13/11/2023

It’s impossible to rein in the photo possibilities when teaching the 1970s

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Doug Thompson @dithomps.bsky.social · 29/10/2023

I’ve got two, and they both deserve a treat after hearing the US commentators repeatedly congratulate someone named “Sayah Kolosi”

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