Digressions&Impressions

Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV

[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understa...

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...

On Baggini’s How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy

[This is an excerpt of a commissioned book review that became a victim of the pandemic.--ES] Julian Baggini’s (2018) How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy is wonderfully written and provides a highly compelling comparativ...

Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the Rise of Fascism: Religion and Liberty

Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be...

Lenin and The State's Essential Coerciveness

In what follows I use Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917; hereafter S&R quoted by chapter and section) as my guide to an orthodox Marxist interpretation of Marx and Engels on the nature of the late nineteenth century capitalist-imper...

On Stebbing, Spinoza, and the Cognitive Demands of Political Freedom, Part 2

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ] For Stebbing (recall) clarity is a property of ...

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...