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,...
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Oct 16, 202325 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 10, 20219 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...
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...
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...
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....
Jul 25, 20188 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...
Mar 23, 20181 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...
Nov 17, 20161 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...
Jul 27, 201610 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...
May 31, 20161 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...
Sep 25, 20154 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...
Aug 14, 20153 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 5, 20152 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...
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