Digressions&Impressions

Once more on Socrates and Thrasymachus

Do you think that a city, an army, or bandits, or thieves, or any other group that attempted any action in common, could accomplish anything if they wronged one another?” “Certainly not,” said he. “But if they didn't, wouldn't they be...

Recognition as Terrorism Prevention

[I]f you recognize another person with regard to a certain feature, as an autonomous agent, for example, you do not only admit that she has this feature but you embrace a positive attitude towards her for having this feature. Such reco...

Our Manichean Madness into Civil War

A few days ago, in the context of a (relatively minor, albeit symbolically intense) controversy, I described the debates over Zionism and the BDS movement as exhibiting the character of "Manichean battle" that should not be encou...

On Total Humanity, The Origins of Human Rights, and Unreasonable Pluralism

[T]he totalitarian rebellion of our time is not only directed against nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy. It attacks the sum total of the tradition of the Western world, its religion, its science, its law, its State, its prope...

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...

Getting Thrasymachus right, the Comfort College, and the Fate of Liberal Education

Thrasymachus, a post-modernist a couple of millennia ahead of his time, denies there is such a thing as justification — there is only motive and cause. There’s only one answer to the question Why should I be just? Swords and spears. I...

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...

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...