Common Decency: Kurt Vonnegut as Moralist

Kurt Vonnegut is often remembered these days as a humorist, a cynic in the Mark Twain mold, a novelist whose imagination ranged far and wide but lacked gravitas, even though he dealt with tragic themes like the Dresden firebombing and the fictional apocalypse of ice-nine.  These recollections are, I believe, ...
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Sheldon Wolin

The political theorist Sheldon Wolin passed away on October 21 at the age of 93. Wolin was a significant figure in the Humanities and Social Sciences, for three key reasons: a challenge, a book, and a thesis. The challenge: the consensus, at the start of Wolin’s career in the 1950s, was ...
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You Say You Don’t Want a Revolution

Conservatism, radicalism, and democracy in 2015

The New York Times’ David Brooks has long been the conservative that liberals hate to love (or at least like). It is easy to see why. Brooks accepts the possibility of reasonable disagreement with the likes of liberals such as Mark Shields or E.J. Dionne, ...

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Diagnosing American Politics

What the rise of Trump says about American democracy

I have a morbid fascination with Carl Schmitt. Morbid, because he manages to condense, in his political theory and philosophy of law, pretty much everything I find repulsive about the radical right. His pessimism about “human nature” is raw and simplistic and, unlike Hobbes, whom he superficially resembles, ...

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The Ethics and Politics of Responsible Belief

On liberalism and faith

Prior to his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty turned his attention to religious belief and its place in the public sphere. Rorty had long been presenting himself as the “village atheist” in the domains both of academic philosophy and public intellectualism: he viewed religious belief as the ...

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Religion, Essentialism, and Violence

Cherry picking on the left

There has been a contentious theme circulating around the Left-wing blogosphere for quite a while now, sharpened by the atrocities of ISIS and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. The theme usually begins with the accusation that Islam as a religion is soft on violence, a consequence of its vehement rejection of ...

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