Digressions&Impressions

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...

On Philosophy’s search for the ‘naturally articulate’ victim; ‘White men saving brown women from brown men.’

Our Indian government need not proselytize to offend the religious feelings of the people, for when confined to its most strictly civil functions it will do so equally. And so it has been found already in the few feeble efforts that ha...

Isaiah Berlin's Criticism of Cassirer

[Due to technical problems this post appears a few days late--ES] With this special sensitivity to concealed connections and affinities, for transitions and cross currents, went [A] a rooted distaste for sharp delineation and the draw...

A Note On Cover Letters

During the last year, I have read more than 400 cover letters (I have lost track) in the context of four (junior) job searches. These jobs were all advertised in political science, but three of the positions also encouraged applications ...

The Theological Political Problem in More's Utopia

I have noted before that in (part I of) More’s Utopia we can find a proto-Spinozistic (and proto-Hobbesian) attitude toward Mosaic revelation (recall). And, indeed, while in Utopia (the island) there can be holy men (100), there is no ho...

On Foucault on 17 January 1979 On Two Concepts of Freedom (IV)

So, there is a shift of the center of gravity of public law. The fundamental problem of public law will no longer be the foundation of sovereignty, the conditions of the sovereign’s legitimacy, or the conditions under which the soverei...