Digressions&Impressions

On Realism, Theoretical Modesty, Systematicity, and Prefiguration

We have now seen how realists, especially through their focus on legitimacy, tend to be committed to strongly contextual approaches to political normativity. Contextualism also provides a way into the last and so far least developed fo...

Gellner on Nationalism and Liberal Self-Deceptions

The basic deception and self-deception practised by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in som...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 ...

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...

Heidegger, Frege, Antisemitism, and worse

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be ...