Hegel’s World Revolutions; Richard Bourke An absolute will is bound to be an arbitrary one, since it would cease to be absolute if it respected laws and moral imperatives. The mere existence of something other than itself poses a mortal threat to it, and it ends up crushing everything that moves. Hegel sees the revolution… Read More Seeds of What Ought to Be: Hegel’s World Revolutions
Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine Reviewed by Jonathan Rée Marx’s optimism proved to be ill-founded. The proletariat did not live up to expectations, leaving latter-day Marxists scrambling to find alternative superheroes. Hence, according to MacIntyre, the multitudes of ‘conflicting … political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners’, all expressing a well-founded hatred of capitalism but none offering… Read More Like a Top Hat
Akhtar Balouch; November 4, 2015 Jogendra Nath Mandal has the distinction of representing the Muslim League as minister in the 1946 pre-partition political setup of India. Later, he presided over the historic session of the Constituent Assembly on 11th August 1947, where Mohammed Ali Jinnah was sworn in as the first Governor-General of Pakistan. Jinnah… Read More Jogendra Nath Mandal: Chosen by Jinnah, banished by Pakistan’s bureaucracy
HARTOSH SINGH BAL This is an edited excerpt from a keynote address delivered at Stanford University, on October 10, 2023; while accepting the Shorenstein Journalism Award on behalf of The Caravan. I know that I speak against the backdrop of the horrors unfolding in Israel and Gaza. At such a time, there is little reason to stress the… Read More The Broken Compact
Since 2018, the US military has been ramping up its use of gaming to recruit more people, at a critical time when the US armed forces face the worst recruitment struggle since becoming an all-volunteer force after the Vietnam war. Targeting gamers makes sense from the military’s perspective, as it gives them access to the young, tech-savvy population they want joining up. But… Read More The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits
“He is one of very few scholars now alive who have, in effect, invented a field of study” Peter Brown: A Life of Learning – American Council of Learned Societies; Haskins Lecture, 2003 I remember the occasion when, in 1988, I had to perform the sad duty of writing the obituary of my friend and mentor,… Read More Peter Brown: A Life of Learning (2003)
Incidentally, there is no IPC section which criminalises ‘insults’ against individuals, regardless of what position they hold or have held. ‘Insulted’ individuals have the right to file a defamation case if they wish but third parties or the police cannot do so. Pune police have filed an FIR (first information report) against journalist Nikhil Wagle… Read More Bharat Ratna to Advani, Free Speech Ban for Critics as Police File FIR Against Journalist Nikhil Wagle
In this weird India, bizarre scenes are witnessed daily. Words of wisdom come from a villager in Haryana. He says what a scholar could have said: “Modi ji, Hinduism continued to survive centuries of foreign rule because religion was not associated with the ruler. If it were associated with a Prime Minister or President or King,… Read More Modi’s Strange India of Celebrations and Superstition
Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West; 2015 Reviewed by Warren Brown “The medievalist Philippe Buc discerns Christian tropes of holy war and martyrdom in seemingly secular movements with terroristic potential. A brilliant and disturbing interpretation of the religious origins of redemptive violence in the West, this is a book… Read More Christianity, Violence, and the West
First posted December 04, 2011 Reading HamletTo the right, wasteland by the cemeterybeyond it the river’s dull blue.You said: ‘Go, get thee, to a nunneryor get a fool to marry you…’ Though that’s always how Princes speak,still, I’ve remembered the words.As an ermine mantle let them stream,behind him, through endless years. ‘Hands clasped under the… Read More Anna Akhmatova: Three poems including ‘Requiem’ / Friendship in the time of terror: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s tribute to Akhmatova
After the truth-shower 