Social Justice: An Analysis
Cosmic Justice: Infantile and Nihilistic Social class, home environment, genetics and other factors all contribute to differences between individuals. People differ in looks, height, income, social status,…
Platform: A Ground-Eye View of Uneven Development
Recently I watched Platform 《站台》, the third of Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 full-length films. Following a group of young musicians from the death of Mao through the era…
The Coen Brothers and the Comedy of Democracy
FADE IN: INT. HOUSE. EVENING. Mother (47) walks down a dimly lit set of stairs into a smoke-filled basement. A circle of candles cast light on a…
Review of The Coen Brothers and the Comedy of Democracy
The Coen Brothers and The Comedy of Democracy. Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. This is both a thoughtful book and a…
Democracy and That Other Sort of Man
"Thus the world is like an oil press: under pressure. If you are the dregs of the oil you are carried away through the sewer; if you…
Nicolás Gómez Dávila: The Nietzsche From the Andes
The common retort by opponents of the idea of the canon of Western literature is that it is preferential to just one dimension of human history and…
Individualism Waning in the West
Conservatives, by nature, are individualists. While valuing faith, flag, and family, they are skeptical of ideology and of utopian solutions to social problems. But they have been…
The Subversiveness of Desire: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Thought
While images of philosophers floating among the clouds, untethered from real-world concerns, or falling into wells while gazing at the stars, having allowed their abstract speculations to…
Monsters of Duty: Cordwainer Smith’s Attack on Kantian Morality and the Suppression of Feeling in Scanners Live in Vain
The Best of Cordwainer Smith. Cordawiner Smith. New York: Ballentine Books, 1975) The scanners in Cordwainer Smith’s story “Scanners Live in Vain” are heroes who have…
Kant on History and Culture as a Means to Ethical Evolution
The “Conjectural Beginning of Human History”[1] is Kant’s attempt to recast the creation story of Genesis. The procreative act of Yahweh is cooperative in the sense heaven and…
Plato’s Apology and the Gorgias: Yearning for Political and Spiritual Regeneration
In the Gorgias, like the Protagoras, Socrates must confront one of the great figures of his time, Gorgias of Leontini, who is not merely a rhetorician, but…
The Contribution of Roman Law to Modern Legal Systems
Roman law was the law of the city of Rome and subsequently of the Roman Empire. The influence of Roman law on modern legal systems has been…
Globalism, Technology . . . and the Humanities?
I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for…
James Burnham’s and Daniel Bell’s Critiques of Globalization and Liberalism
We like to say that every idea, every thought, every emotion—no matter how novel—has already been conveyed by someone, somewhere; such is the nature of the “universality”…
Globalization’s Liberalism
It is not possible to separate globalization from liberalism. Without the political foundation that liberalism provides, a project of such scale would have been unfathomable. But just…