Digressions&Impressions

On Marilynne Robinson's Edomites

Assmann’s argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of interpreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the...

When the Top Just War Ethicist Calls for Proxy War

[A]irstrikes against targets within the cities that the Islamic State controls will almost inevitably cause disproportionate harm to innocents. The West must not adopt the tactics of Assad. Ground forces capable of discriminating betwe...

Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)

Scientific knowledge does not depend on the possession of an esoteric capacity for grasping the necessary structure of some superior reality, nor does it require modes of warranting beliefs which are discontinuous with operations of ...

Ibn Khaldun, Discursive Power, and the Invention of Whiteness.

The four other zones are intemperate, and the physique and character of their inhabitants show it. The first and second zones are excessively hot and black, and the sixth and seventh zones cold and white. The inhabitants of the first a...

Quentin Skinner, Paley, Tocqueville, and the Charge of Utopianism (III)

A number of critics [of neo-roman liberty] argued that, even if this contention is not actually incoherent, the suggestion that an equal right to participate in government is indispensable to the maintenance of civil liberty is so Utop...

On the Political Order of Bacon's Bensalem (I)

There reigned in this land, about 1,900 years ago, a King, whose memory of all others we most adore; not superstitiously, but as a divine instrument, though a mortal man: his name was Salomana; and we esteem him as the lawgiver of our ...

On David Graeber Against Adam Smith

[1] Adam Smith…was determined to overturn the conventional wisdom of his day. Above all, [2] he objected to the notion that money was a creation of government. [3] In this, Smith was the intellectual heir of the Liberal tradition of ph...

Ibn Khaldun, Prophets, and his Critique of Martyrdom

[E]very mass (political) undertaking by necessity requires group feeling. This is indicated in the aforementioned tradition: "God sent no prophet who did not enjoy the protection of his people."...To this chapter belong cases of revolu...

Butcher's Crossing, on the Fate of the Emersonian Oversoul and Thoreau's Experiment

[T]he wildness and freedom that his instinct sought...He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that was the central meaning he...