BOOKS, DEBATE, SPECIFICITY.

• Author: Katyal, Neal Kumar
• Position: FOREWORD

Political discourse in 2018 was driven by vague notions of extreme positions attributed to unnamed people and forces. Whether it was the national debt or the border wall or Syria, President Trump kept asserting that an entire party or vague group of people believed something quite extreme, and he would then answer that extreme claim with an extreme counterclaim of his own. (1) This phenomenon was an escalation of Trump's earlier realization that by attributing views to some amorphous set of people, he could frame the debate without taking responsibility or providing an accurate target for opponents to criticize. Thus, he said about Obama's birth certificate in 2013, "You know, some people say that was not his birth certificate." (2) During the campaign, he said, "Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails." (3) Other examples abound. (4)

The theater of it all called to my mind a different form of pretend argument: high school and college policy debate. In high school debate, like in the 2018 political discourse, the two sides would present outlandish claims (with virtually anything leading to a nuclear war through dubious chains of causation), (5) and both would be locked in polarized combat. But there was a difference--each debater would have to provide a source for every claim she was making. And the other side could then go and impugn the expertise of the source, instead of being stuck having to refute some vague, undifferentiated claim allegedly attributed to some party or force.

I never thought I'd say this, but it turns out that policy debate was a lot more focused and realistic than last year's presidential political discourse. How could a bunch of naive high schoolers--obsessed with winning through extreme and escalating arguments--somehow end up more grounded?

The books being reviewed in this issue begin to point to an answer. In short, critical to the advancement of ideas is a discourse of specifics, not generalities. When a specific person advances a claim, one can refute that specific claim and contextualize it within other claims made by that same individual. The upshot is a far more productive democratic dialogue.

We can see this with virtually any book being reviewed in this issue. Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman's Free Speech on Campus is notable because it takes seriously specific proposals to restrict campus speech, instead of just condemning a mushy "safe spaces" movement. (6) The upshot is a much more nuanced description of the debate over speech on campus today and a solution that attempts to balance competing, serious concerns. Readers may disagree over where the line should be struck, but one comes away knowing that the authors took the specific animating concerns of both sides seriously.

Or, take another example of a tract being reviewed in this issue, the great Apology of Socrates by Plato. (7) The Apology is Plato's defense of Socrates. But the defense is not written as an attack on some broad, undifferentiated accusations against Socrates. Rather, it is specifically a rejoinder to attacks by Lycon, Anytus, and Meletus. (8) The trio of accusers levy concrete...