The Uncompromising Richard Weisberg: An Affectionate Critique

Abstract

A central theme of Richard Weisberg's recent work is the inadvisability of compromising one's central values. He has coined the term “flexiphobia” to describe his position, which he sees as a necessary correction to the presumptive “flexophilia“ that characterizes many positions today. In this essay, I examine the structure of Weisberg's arguments, which focus on the admirable refusal to collaborate with Nazis during World War II. Although one can admire his particular subjects and the courage they displayed, I go on to suggest that they do not in fact provide an adequate basis for a general argument in favor of “flexophobia.” Whether compromise is advisable or condemnable inevitably depends on highly particularistic contexts.

Keywords:

• compromise
• pacts with the devil
• U.S. Constitution
• slavery
• Israel

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Oxford University Press, 2014.

2. Princeton University Press, 2012.

3. Quoted in Sanford Levinson, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 40.

4. Ibid., 33.

5. Ibid., 40.

6. It must be emphasized that anti-slavery delegates would have preferred that slaves not count at all in computing the number of representatives to which states would be entitled. The slaveholding states fought unsuccessfully to count slaves as full persons, secure in the knowledge that they would, of course, never have the right to vote or otherwise participate in politics. The compromise of counting slaves as only three-fifths persons was, it should be clear, a victory for the slave states.

7. See Walter Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of Wm. Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 205.

8. Princeton University Press, 2010.

9. Margalit, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, 2.

10. Robert H. Mnookin, Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, when to Fight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

11. Sanford Levinson,Torture: A Collection (New York: Oxford University Press, pb. ed. 2008).

12. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1965).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sanford Levinson

Sanford Levinson is the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, University of Texas Law School, and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of many books and articles on American constitutional law and development, most recently An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21^st Century (Yale University Press, 2015). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010. He can be reached by email at: [email protected]