Wright's Writing

Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...

A long time ago I posted some thoughts on America's use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. I happen to be reading parts of...

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...

Here's another over-long blog post. It's a chapter from my dissertation, on homeless men during the Great Depression. I'm not sure it's...

[From Notes of an Underground Humanist.] How is mass inhumanity possible?— When I ask myself how it’s possible that so many white...

[Excerpts from this book.] Collectivism comes in both noble and evil forms. In the former, the principle of the individual is paramount;...

In an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...

Years ago I read and took some notes on various works by Hannah Arendt. In particular her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. It's a...

[Excerpt from this book.] A celebrated bureaucrat.— In the library today I happened to pass Harry Truman’s memoirs. Picked the book up...

What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...

I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...

It might seem wrong to maintain, as I have in many writings, that the modern predominance of bureaucratic social structures and their...

Albert Camus: “We [moderns] read more than we meditate. We have no philosophies but merely commentaries. This is what Étienne Gilson...

Part 2 of "Thoughts on the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust." Part 1 is here.— While the industrialized murder of six million...

[Excerpt from a book.] The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said it simply—one of those simple but profound truths worth remembering: “It is...

[Note to my first blog post: Much of this blog will consist of excerpts from books and other writings. Here's one of them--a rather grim...