The rise of Akrasia.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: It seems that there is a degree of intellectual weakness which is creeping into modern scholarship. This is not a lack of cognitive function or a poverty of theory. It is what Plato described as akrasia: the ability to act against one's own better judgment. This occurs quite often when a thinker gets seduced by an idea and, so taken with its elegance, wants to use it and advocate it while knowing full well that to do so will be detrimental to the perspective itself. This is the intellectual equivalent of obsessive lust.

Akrasia is not only prevalent on the political margins--one sees it often in centrist liberal debates. In international law, for example, one sees advocates of pluralism pushing for the division of power to the extent that it becomes tantamount to a division of sovereignty and therefore the death of any real pluralism. Similarly, dyed-in-the-wool liberals often attack ...