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Free Market Fairness
Yesterday, Big Think‘s Peter Lawler extolled the virtues of political theorist John Tomasi’s new book, Free Market Fairness. Tomasi’s project is to massage away any underlying tension he sees between...
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Manufacturing Generation Me
Cover via Amazon Two intellectual trends dominate the burgeoning, nonexistent field of Millennials Studies: one is a few years old, but the other one seems to just be catching on. The older trend is,...
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Reverse Corporate Personhood
Anyone remember The Corporation, either the book or the documentary? If not, here’s a refresher on some of its basic ideas: Granted, much of the movie tends toward the breathlessly hyperbolic, and its...
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Rawls, Economic Liberty, and Lack Thereof
Gary Oldman as George Smiley -- I mean, John Rawls (Photo credit: Wikipedia) A recent-ish post at Understanding Society leads back to this old Will Wilkinson post suggesting that the great philosopher...
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The Religious Attitude
The above clip comes from Adam Curtis’ four-part BBC documentary series, The Century of the Self, in which he tries to show how the modern West came to be ruled by (in his eyes) an ideology of radical...
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Notes on Notes on “Notes on Hype”
Rob Horning in The New Inquiry: Hype already presumes that no one completely buys into it; the passive dope who just responds to hype with naive enthusiasm is obviously a straw man, the creation of...
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Vaclav Havel and the Religious Attitude
(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) Replying to my first post on the subject, friend of the blog Dara Lind suggested to me that Vaclav Havel’s political ideas were a good match for what I argued...
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All the Lonely People
There’s a whole subgenre of pop sociology and social psychology dedicated to enumerating all of the causes and consequences of the modern American’s crushing loneliness. The latest entry is Steve...
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Policy Is the Best Policy
The concept of policy is the American political imagination’s self-circumscribed border. You can do what you like with policies–build, mold, destroy, rearrange–but the context in which policies appear...
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To the Barricades
Cover of The White Album I recently read Joan Didion’s The White Album, which was my first real extended contact with Didion, and my first experience with her explicitly political work. Predictably, it...
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