Digressions&Impressions

On Hobhouse (with some mention of Adam Smith, Ingrid Robeyns, Pareto and Rawls)

These principles may appear very abstract, remote from practical life, and valueless for concrete teaching. But this remoteness is of the nature of first principles when taken without the connecting links that bind them to the details ...

On Structural Explanations in Political Rhetoric.

In this post I want to express a suspicion about the use of certain academic concepts in some species of political rhetoric. That's not a noble enterprise, which is why I do it on the week-end. And before I express that suspicion I also ...

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 the Implosion of Liberal Democracy in 1940, and the Roots of the European Union (Burnham, Pt 1)

Only the hopelessly naïve can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine that might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal milita...

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 ...

7 March 1979: Foucault on the Radicalness of Liberal Governmentality (XXV)

First of all, we should not forget that the diffusion of the German neo-liberal model has taken place in France on the basis of a strongly state-centered, interventionist, and administrative governmentality, with precisely all the prob...

On Plumbing for Capitalism; or, on Indirect Public Philosophy

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a sup...

Mises, Liberalism, and the Spiritual Life

Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important n...

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...

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...