In our age of global conflict, István Hont is finally having his moment Danielle Charette and William Selinger In 2001 a dispute over hiring in Harvard’s government department briefly became national news. The faculty had voted unanimously to offer a tenured position to the historian István Hont (1947-2013), a specialist in Enlightenment political thought at King’s College,… Read More The Political Prophet Harvard Didn’t Want
Alex Henderson Right-wing libertarians and socially conservative MAGA Republicans disagree about many things, but one thing they do have in common is an affection for cryptocurrencies. It isn’t hard to find people on the right who are unapologetically bullish on cryptocurrencies. But one person who doesn’t share their enthusiasm is liberal economist and New York… Read More Paul Krugman warns of collapse of crypto institutions after FTX debacle
Gordon Brown There is no longer such thing as the international community,” a prominent African leader recently complained to me, lamenting that this week’s G20 would, like September’s UN general assembly, October’s IMF-World Bank meetings and this month’s Cop27, fail to combat the world’s food, energy, debt, inflation, currency, pollution and poverty crises. At the very moment… Read More Nationalism is the ideology of our age. No wonder the world is in crisis
First posted October 01, 2016 Debora Mackenzie Try, for a moment, to envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security – without mentioning countries. Try to describe… Read More End of nations: is there an alternative to countries?
George Blecher The red tide never surged but the re-election of numerous brazen careerists and hardline crazies is bad news for the next two years and beyond, particularly since the Democrats have little idea about how to oppose this new breed of politician. ‘It could have been worse.’ That was the prevailing sentiment among left-liberal… Read More It could have been worse
S.K. Arun Murthi I wrote a short critical article a few weeks ago on the ideas of some ancient Indian schools of thought. My critique was aimed at revealing how such ideas are pseudoscientific and pseudo-philosophical and, therefore, incompatible with that of modern science (I had written this article in the context of ISRO co-hosting the ‘Akash… Read More The Illogic and Inanity of the Religious Right in India
By KATHRYN JOYCE Amid conservatives’ disappointed hopes for a “red wave” in the midterm elections, one of the biggest losses appeared, at first, to be the ideological movement of Christian nationalism. In Pennsylvania, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — who rejects the label “Christian nationalist” but perhaps best exemplifies it, with his campaign full of prophets, shofars and… Read More ‘Christian nationalism’ in American politics: the Republican hotline to Jesus
Aditya Chakrabortty What kind of government is this? You can almost see the puzzlement on pundits’ faces as they try to work it out. Is it the technocratic dictatorship of Jeremy Hunt, or the banal nastiness of pound-shop mafioso Gavin Williamson? Is it Rishi Sunak bro-hugging Emmanuel Macron, or Suella Braverman banging up “invaders”? Is… Read More Discipline the poor, protect the rich: same old Tories, same old class war
Infinite progress means the valuelessness of each moment of progress: Stanley Rosen; The Ancients & the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (1989), Chapter One By Sam Pizzigati / Inequality.org Great thinkers, down through the ages, have regularly had to watch the movers and shakers of their epochs shrug off their core insights. One of our contemporary great thinkers… Read More Herman Daly: An Economist whom we dare not ignore
First posted January 24, 2017 Jerzy Krzyżanowski The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published – Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he… Read More The Captive Mind revisited
