What We’re Reading
Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is a seminal work of modern political philosophy and, to some, the beginning of modern political science. Hobbes holds an…
Utnapishtim Takes Gilgamesh’s Hand
Humbaba never tires, Never sleeps. Protector of the Cedar Forest, He inflicts eternal unconsciousness, On naifs and wise alike. Irony abounds. "Enkidu, what men do is nothing,…
AI-dolatry — Imitation by Any Other Name?
We bounced off the tree in the middle of the woods, and I knew right then our Humvee would come out of our practice nav session with…
Lost in the Labyrinth: a Dialogue with Andrea Colombo on the Ideological Tribulations of Modern Writers
Robert Lazu Kmita: Dear Andrea, first of all, thank you for agreeing to engage in this discussion on topics that are both challenging and important. Over the…
Toward a Critique of Non-Aesthetic Judgement
The following reflection on Joshua Foa Dienstag’s 2016 article in Perspectives on Politics—“On Political Theory, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences”—comes from out of a relatively longstanding…
I want to fall like rain…
I love you from the emerald ocean to the dusky mountain From crimson sky to bountiful Earth, from sunny sun to the slicing moon, from summer sweet…
Mad Poet Passes
b.Ber. 55B I.22.D Said Raba, “People are not shown in dreams [such impossibilities as] either a golden palm tree or an elephant going through the eye of…
Coming to Terms with Nature in Thomas Mann’s Black Swan
I have found that it is difficult to live in Western New York and not appreciate nature, especially during the late fall and early winter, from the…
Eye for an Eye: A Review of Perestroika by João Cerqueira
As a historical fiction novel, João Cerqueira encapsulates Soviet Union and Communist history during and around the time of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s reign over the…
Jonathan Swift: A “Modest” Political Theorist
“Much as he relished the fray, Swift would always deny that he had turned renegade. The degenerates who had taken over government, Parliament, the Crown – it…
The Meaning of Economic Freedom: An Anatomy of the Rising “Economic” World
All four figures in the history of the emerging French economic thinking wrote their works at the very end of the 16th and the first 15 years…
The Meaning of Economic Freedom: The Emergence of the Economy
We, all of us in the modern world, are used to consider the existence of something like “the economy” as a trivial fact of life. In the…