"Secular eschatologies" - thanks Glenn for the Instalanche!

Instapundit has been kind enough on occasion to post a link to something on this blog, and boom, a couple of thousand visitors. It's incredibly cool. But today Glenn was kind enough to link to an academic article, actually a book chapter, of mine posted on the Social Science Research Network, SSRN. Larry Solum, my old and dear friend, and publisher of the very great Legal Theory Blog, had posted a reference to it on his blog, and it had immediately had a very respectable 20 downloads, almost certainly by law professors. Then Glenn gave it the Instalanche, and it has been downloaded an addition hundred times or so - and this with an article that, because it is a scan of a chapter, takes a while for the pdf to download.

Think about this for a moment in the distribution of legal scholarship. The article is an obscure book chapter in an obscure book from the late 1990s, Religion and Human Rights: Competing Claims?, ed by Peter Juviler and Carrie Gustafson; it's a very fine book, in fact. That article received some attention at the time because it got picked up as a foil by Michael Ignatieff in a New York Review of Books article on the "midlife crisis" of the human rights movement. It's not a long article, less scholarship than a somewhat satirical essay applying New Class theory to what was then just starting to bill itself as 'global civil society'.

I finally posted it to SSRN in a long running attempt to get my published stuff all in one downloadable place. It gets noticed by Larry and Glenn, and revived. I daresay it has more new readers today than it had when the book first came out.

You can, by the way, get to the article at SSRN, here. It takes a little while to download. Glenn and Larry, thanks!