Departments

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Political theory

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    7/20/2022

    Fanaticism May be Alarming, but It's Not New

    by Zachary R. Goldsmith

    The term "fanatic" evolved from a value-neutral name for participants in Roman religious cults to describe someone with dangerous and erroneous beliefs in religion and then in modern politics. Philosophers from Kant to Burke show the need to pull back from such absolute judgments of our adversaries. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    7/5/2022

    Explaining the Complexities of the Great Vibe Shift

    by Tom F. Wright

    As pundits invoke the nebulous concept of "vibes" to try to explain and predict incoherent and emotionally volatile politics, it's worth considering how the outdated (but not very old!) concept of charisma has served the same role. 

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    6/9/2022

    What's Really New about the "New" American Right?

    by John Ganz

    There's something familiar about a secular nationalist movement that mobilizes property owners through a narrative of national decline and the promise of controlling or purging enemies of a unified people through force, recently described in a Times op-ed. If only there were a word for it....

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    4/11/2022

    Authoritarianism Isn't Just About Personality Cults

    Recent books on "strongmen" reduce the problem of authoritarianism to the phenomenon of charismatic leadership and ignore many of the structural factors contributing to democratic collapse. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    4/4/2022

    Gramsci's Gift

    by Alan Wald

    As the political thought of the Italian marxist is increasingly used and misused in popular discourse, including in right-wing attacks on "cultural Marxism," has the time come for this generation's biography of Antonio Gramsci? 

  • SOURCE: The Week
    3/21/2022

    The Thrill of Teaching Mill

    by Samuel Goldman

    Mill was prescient in focusing attention not only on the restriction of speech by the state, but on the cultural and social obstacles to dissenting opinion.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    3/17/2022

    Now is the Time to Revisit Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism

    by Anne Applebaum

    The political and economic supports for stability and prosperity in the developed world are more precarious than ever; the revival of authoritarianism that Arendt predicted may be at hand, making her work more vital than ever. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    1/6/2022

    The Deep Structure of Political Crisis

    by Ruth Berins Collier and Jake Grumbach

    The economic model of post-industrial America has produced the kinds of organization and disorganization, and mobilization and demobilization, that have led to profoundly antidemocratic politics. 

  • SOURCE: National Interest
    1/2/2022

    How Willmoore Kendall Invented Trumpism

    by Jacob Heilbrunn

    Christopher Owens's biography places Willmoore Kendall in the first rank of postwar conservative intellectuals and identifies him with the fusion of populism and traditionalism associated with the Trumpist right and the burgeoning "national conservative" movements.

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    12/16/2021

    Review: Digging For Utopia

    by Kwame Anthony Appiah

    "There was a stepwise connection, we think, between sowing cereals in our primeval past and waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles." Do David Graeber and David Wengrow effectively demolish this assumption in a new book with implications for how we understand freedom and civilization? 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    9/20/2021

    Beyond the State: An Anarchist History of Humanity

    by Daniel Immerwahr

    The late radical anthropologist David Graeber, with his posthumous collaborator David Wengrow, looks to the long sweep of history to assess the prospect of human self-governance without a powerful state. 

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    8/30/2021

    Histories of Violence: When Freedom Turns Ugly

    American Studies scholar Elizabeth Anker's work examines "ugly freedom," in which the capacity of one group to dominate another is constructed as the positive social value of liberty. She discusses it with philosopher Brad Evans.

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    8/20/2021

    Review Essay: Freedom for Whom?

    by Michael Mirer

    Two recent books, by Tyler Stovall and Annelien De Dijn, interrogate the history of the idea of freedom and the question of whether western liberal democracy can be freed from its historical roots in exclusion and domination of others. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    3/22/2021

    Liberty’s Discontents: The Contested History of Freedom

    Annelien de Dijn's book examines the tensions and contradictions inherent in the idea of freedom, arguing that the individualistic, liberty-focused ideal is a recent phenomenon and has obscured ideas of freedom rooted in democracy and collective security. 

  • SOURCE: Aeon
    3/9/2021

    Lessons From All Democracies

    by David Stasavage

    The idea of the "torch" of democracy passing from one historical society to the present blinds us to understanding how popular sovereignty arises and why it's resilient. If we are concerned with protecting democracy, we must first understand it.

  • 3/7/2021

    Was Madison Mistaken?

    by Carl Pletsch

    The divisive Trump years have called the wisdom of the Framers into question, but the author contends that James Madison in particular anticipated how a republic would be challenged by partisanship and designed one that could withstand that challenge (he just never claimed it would be easy).