Digressions&Impressions

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...

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...

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...

On The Brexit/Lexit Pseudo-Democrats and Pseudo-Internationalists

Brexit offers a historic opportunity for democratic and economic renewal. This opportunity is being squandered by Britain’s political class. The Full Brexit will set out radical arguments for a clean break with the European Union. Inst...

On the Paris Statement

We are not passive subjects The true Europe is a community of nations. We have our own languages, traditions and borders. Yet we have always recognized a kinship with one another, even when we have been at odds—or at war. This unity-i...

On Srinivasian on Nussbaum; on Anger in Politics.

But it is not radical in the sense of being unfamiliar. With the notable exception of black and feminist thinkers who have defended anger as a vital tool of the oppressed, almost all of Western political thought since the Stoics has la...

On Bonevac's What it’s like to be a college professor who supports Donald Trump

Other professors used to ask me questions about politics: “You’re smart. You’re knowledgeable. How can you support” whichever Republican was running for president that year? Far from being dismissive, that used to lead to interesting a...