Digressions&Impressions

On Herland, Utopian Racism, and the Analysis of Patriarchy

The women of Herland have no fear of men. Why should they have? They are not timid in any sense. They are not weak; and they all have strong trained athletic bodies. Othello could not have extinguished Alima with a pillow, as if she we...

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...

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...

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 Plato's Ship of State Analogy

There is the ship-owner, larger and stronger than everyone on the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather short-sighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight. [1] The sailors are quarreling among themselves over captaincy of th...

On (Runciman on) Knowledge That Cannot be Acted On (again)

[It] was hard to know what lessons to draw. The democracies had shown their resilience in the long run. How they had done it, and what it meant for the future, was much less clear. The knowledge of their hidden strengths the democracie...