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Postliberalism: a brief history of a resurgent ideology
This scumbag is a "postliberal." [The following interview was published here .] Introduction : Like any “ism,” liberalism is many things,...
Feb 228 min read


Thoughts on the Gaza genocide, the worst crime of the 21st century (so far)
My journal helps keep me sane. From January to March I've occasionally jotted down thoughts on the horrors occurring every day in Gaza,...
Apr 17, 20246 min read


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...
Oct 16, 202325 min read


Resisting fascism (a book review)
[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...
Oct 10, 20219 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...
Jul 10, 202115 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 24, 20204 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....
Aug 5, 20206 min read


Grad-school notes on Populism and Progressivism
In The Populist Vision, Charles Postel argues persuasively that Populism, the greatest popular movement in American history, should not...
Jul 25, 20188 min read


The Destruction of Reason
Just a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...
Mar 23, 20181 min read


A Marxist history of World War II
I recently read a book by Chris Bambery called The Second World War: A Marxist History (2014) and decided it was good enough to take...
Nov 17, 20161 min read


Climate change, capitalism, and state violence
In an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...
Jul 27, 201610 min read


Random notes on Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, economics, and traditional China
Years ago I read and took some notes on various works by Hannah Arendt. In particular her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. It's a...
May 31, 20161 min read


On "The Reactionary Mind"
Reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), by Corey Robin. An elegant and erudite elaboration of...
Sep 25, 20154 min read


On late-19th-century decadence and its aftermath
What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...
Aug 14, 20153 min read


Bureaucratic fanaticism
It might seem wrong to maintain, as I have in many writings, that the modern predominance of bureaucratic social structures and their...
Aug 5, 20152 min read
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