Wright's Writing

Probably unwisely, I've posted my lifelong intellectual journal online, specifically on Google Books . It's a very long document that no...

[This article was published in The Philosophical Salon.] In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the...

[Published at Dissident Voice and other places.] Twitter conversations with public intellectuals are rarely worthy of note, but a recent...

[This article was published at Sublation and other venues.] Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and...

[A book review published at Common Dreams.] As I was reading Norman Finkelstein’s new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It!:...

Here's an insanely long post. It's actually a "literary experiment" I wrote almost twenty years ago (as the following preface says, which...

One of the first laws of human existence, or at least of existence in class societies (determined by anti-human institutions that mold...

[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...

In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...

Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...

David Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...

I was recently skimming old notes of mine and came across the following thoughts from a two-volume book on "humanism" I wanted to write...

Many years ago, when I was a simple boy who thought he ought to know a lot about Hegel, I took masses of notes on his philosophy. Below...

When I read old books or articles that are totally forgotten despite being brilliant, it saddens me. Siblings of Donald Trump publish...

This is going to be a whiny, self-pitying post. Just to warn you. The question is sometimes asked, "Why are stupid people frequently so...

Today I came across a copy of Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and was reminded of myself in my twenties, when I was...

[These notes, for what they're worth, are from, respectively, 2010 and 2018.] Reading Raymond Williams’ classic Marxism and Literature...

I've been reading Camille Paglia's collection of essays Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992). I disagree with a lot of Paglia's...

As a leftist, "I wish we could all just get along." Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe it would get boring pretty quickly. But a little less...

This is from a letter Sigmund Freud wrote to his pastor friend Oskar Pfister: I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I...