Digressions&Impressions

Adam Smith and the 'liberal' Swedish revolution of 1809

[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 ] As regular readers know, (recall here; and her...

On the latest controversy in the philosophical blogosphere.

[Over time I plan to phase out this blog at typepad. This post was first published at digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at ] At Leiterreports (h...

When Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand became Coupled.

"That to these causes, thus necessarily proceeding from this great principle, we are to ascribe in particular both the opulence and prosperity of our own nation, and the necessary diffusion of the arts, manners, language, and race, wit...

On What we Owe the Future, Part 2 (some polemic)

A full account of abolition would require a book in its own right and would cover the countless acts of resistance, subversion, and bravery by enslaved people throughout history. It would also cover efforts from formerly enslaved peopl...

A rant on FTX, William MacAskill, and Utilitarianism

Philosophy goes through self-conscious, periodic bouts of historical forgetting.* These are moments when philosophical revolutionaries castigate the reading of books and the scholastic jargon to be found in there, and invite us to think ...

Hayek, Colonialism, Kantian Perpetual Peace, and a bit of Foucault

It is true that with the formation of such regional federations the possibility of war between the different blocs still remains, and that to reduce this risk as much as possible we must rely on a larger and looser association. My poin...

On Foucault and the Anxiety of the Left; pt.1: 'Economic Liberalism'

What both Foucault's critics and his defenders have failed to consider is a deep affinity between Foucault's thought and neoliberalism: a shared suspicion of the state. Foucault's antistatism was, in the first instance, theoretical. He...

Perry Anderson, and the Political Failure of the Rawlsian Project: Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 3

If we compare the general fortune of these thinkers of the radical Right to that of more conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, may have accumulated more scholarly...

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on Rawls and Liberalism

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response...

RiP: Myles Burnyeat (1939-2019)

Michael Morris informed me that Myles Burnyeat has died (see also Leiterreports). Burnyeat was a visiting scholar at The University of Chicago* in 2001 (or so) and gave a most memorable seminar on the Republic. (He also gave some eventfu...