By Jaime Karnes. "I folded my problems into pretty paper animals to keep me company. I set them on the Formica dinette set. I jammed some into cracks so they'd stand up straight: organized warfare." A...| Tumblr
By Yascha Mounk. “Philosophy is about deciding what to think, not about convincing other people what to think.” In his most extensive interview to date, Tim Scanlon talks about free will, choice, punishment, blame, tolerance, and the future of liberalism - as well as about his childhood and intellectual development. ______________________________________________________________________ This is a lightly edited and significantly shortened version of the interview. For the full version, whi...| The Utopian
By George Kateb. “Our quarrel with populism is a quarrel with democracy. ‘The more democracy, the better’ is not true - whether in political, social, or cultural life.” Six points on populism and its perils. ______________________________________________________________________________ Our quarrel with populism is a quarrel with democracy. We often do not seem to know what we are quarrelling with: democracy in general or populism in particular. In the United States, there were quite a...| The Utopian
By Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. “We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.” In 1956, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer sat down to write an updated version of the Communist Manifesto. These are previously unpublished notes from their discussions. __________________________________________________________________________________ 12 March 1956 (as recorded by Gretel Adorno and translated by Rodney Livingstone.) Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of...| The Utopian
By Adam Etinson. “Rather than worry about how we might preserve the utopian status of human rights into the future, we ought to worry about how to rescue utopia from the clutches of human rights. ” A plea for substantive utopias. _______________________________________________________________________________ A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it...| The Utopian
By Samuel Moyn. “There is a risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many.” A response to Adam Etinson. _________________________________________________________________________ After Utopia is the title of a little-known book — her first — by the great political theorist Judith Shklar, one of my favorite authors...| The Utopian
By Yascha Mounk. “Let us drop the deluded pretense that the defense of intellectual property is inherently conservative, or even reactionary.” Why our society would be less egalitarian and artistic without intellectual property rights. ________________________________________________________________________________ Given how technical a topic intellectual property is, most debates about it are strikingly emotional and partisan. Opponents of intellectual property cast movie studios, record...| The Utopian