Postliberalism: a dangerous “new” conservatism
[This article was published in The Philosophical Salon.] In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the...
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Sep 8, 20238 min read
Postliberals against the common good
[Published at Common Dreams.] “The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems...
May 18, 20239 min read
Love of freedom defines the political left, not the right
[This article was published at Sublation and other venues.] Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and...
Jul 10, 202115 min read
Against liberal "pluralism"
In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...
Jun 26, 202149 min read
On the inhumanity of Illinois's government in the 1930s
In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...
Apr 5, 202130 min read
The rise of right-wing libertarianism since the 1950s
Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...
Sep 24, 20204 min read
A despairing rant
These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...
Sep 8, 202022 min read
From Steve Fraser's "The Age of Acquiescence"
I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...
Aug 27, 202021 min read
The remarkable perversity of idealism
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...
Aug 5, 20206 min read
Thoughts on classical fascism
[Student notes from ten years ago.] Reading Robert A. Brady’s classic Business as a System of Power (1943), which influenced Chomsky....
Jun 29, 202015 min read
Laboring Against Racism: The Textile Workers Union of America in the South during the 1960s
[An old student paper.] The conventional understanding of labor unions and their membership in the 1960s is of a conservative and...
Jun 26, 20208 min read
Capitalism and colonialism
As I frequently and tiresomely reiterate, academic writing tends toward sophistry, superficiality, and obscurantism. Personally, my...
Jul 13, 20184 min read
Critical thoughts on "The Alchemist"
[Notes from 2006.] Reading The Alchemist, the novel that has sold tens of millions of copies. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s...
May 28, 20185 min read
"Social Democracy Is the Best Form of Government"
[As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University I wrote hundreds of essays not all of which, I think, are worthless. Here's a short one on...
Mar 31, 20188 min read
Progressivism, or "the Triumph of Conservatism"
Years ago I took some notes on Gabriel Kolko’s classic The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900–1916...
Mar 21, 201812 min read
Notes on Marxism and empiricism
(Also see these notes.) Reading Maurice Cornforth’s Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965). A good book, not dogmatic or...
Jul 9, 20165 min read
Elite pretentiousness
The following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...
Jun 15, 20163 min read
"Sunbelt capitalism"
[Random journal notes.] Reading Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (2013)....
May 23, 20163 min read
Far-left, i.e., rational and open-minded
[Old notes from my journal.] A lot of mainstream people would criticize me for immersing myself in leftist scholarship and journalism,...
Jan 12, 20166 min read
Fragments on bourgeois ideologists
On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...
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