Foucault introduces the art of government as a theme on 1 February 1978, which is the fourth lecture at Collège de France of the series translated as Security, Territory, and Population. After discussing it through the subsequent lectures and the famous| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Today’s post is digressive.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Later in the week, I’ll be at Villanova University for a talk on The Art of Governance from Adam Smith to Michel Foucault.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Regular readers will not be surprised that I decided to check all the explicit references to Machiavelli in Smith’s oeuvre.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Today’s post has two themes: the first may be a modest scholarly discovery that could be the foundation for a fun paper.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Qua scholar, I view myself as part of a wider trend in scholarship on Adam Smith that emphasizes the political ambitions for (1776) Wealth of Nations. I think more than most scholars I have emphasized in my recent work, especially after my 2017 book, that Smith has a theory of governance and an art of government explicitly inscribed in the Wealth of Nations. In many ways this is a recovery of the early reception of Smith by Bentham and Constant (and others).| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
This week I’ll be in Rome, so I expect somewhat less regular digressing.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Yesterday, DigressionsNimpressions received a surge of new followers directed here by The Hinternet. You are most welcome, and welcome to stay! I was puzzled by this new traffic, so I wrote Justin Smith-Ruiu to ask if he had mentioned me somewhere.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
{UPDATE: A revised version of the essay appeared (here) at CrookedTimber.]| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
As the lovely poster (above) suggests, I’ll be in Rome next week for a paper on Adam Smith and indignation.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Yesterday, I awoke to learning an old piece, “Condorcet’s Bottom Up Federalism,” published in Isonomia Quarterly, was featured on the front page of the Realclearhistory website (dated Wednesday September 17).| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
“One can doubt to what extent these individuals who mouth the words “freedom of thought” are themselves actually willing to admit freedom of thought, which they most often lay claim to primarily for their own incidental opinions, while considering themselves justified in assailing other opposing views by any means that stands in their power”—Schelling| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Yesterday, I attended a fascinating, public conversation between Stuart Warner (Roosevelt) and my current colleague, Ronna Burger (Tulane) on Montesquieu’s (1721) Persian Letters. I have read passages in these Letters, but I have never had the dedication or opportunity to puzzle my way through it.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
In my first post (here) in the series on the Dewey-Lippmann debate, I noted that Walter Lippmann’s (1925) The Phantom Public anticipates many themes that became prominent in Burnham’s great works (The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians) from the 1940s, while remaining a friend of democracy.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
There is a passage early in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (first published in 1837, but from the 1820s) that set off a train of digressions. But to get to there I want to start with a theme from Samuel Clarke’s (1704) A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
If you spend any time in a serious social science department, you’ll notice how little of the headline policies of any government are underpinned by solid, robust social science.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
In the (1958) Human Condition, Arendt first introduces Smith in an odd footnote, where she lets Myrdal claim that before J.S.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
The Dewey-Lippmann debate and all that, pt. 3;| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Neoliberalism is dead; Long live Neoliberalism! (pt. 3)| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Yesterday, Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) alerted me to a thoughtful and stimulating guest-post (here), “On the tension between liberalism and animal rights,” by his colleague, Jonathan Birch (LSE). I won’t deny that I think the singular (‘the tension’) understates the situation.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
I have been unable to blog because I had an unusually busy week with travel to Amsterdam, Cambridge, and now New Orleans, where I will be a faculty fellow at The Murphy Institute (Tulane) for a good chunk of this academic year.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Some few years ago now, I sold my old white truck for scrap.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
As regular readers know I think it’s a mistake to treat Locke as the founder of liberalism.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
As regular readers know, I champion ‘synthetic philosophy.’ I tend to present synthetic philosophers as being hybrids: drawing on the more general art of recognizing conceptual patterns combined with a foundational expertise in some generic scientific/mathematical model or technique.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
In the dog days of Summer, in a very stimulating Substack post (that is worth re-reading), Carlo Ludovico Cordasco (Manchester) made a useful distinction between two features of markets:| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
One really nice, underappreciated feature of mid-twentieth century neo-liberalism (sometimes also known as ‘classical liberalism’) is that within it there was a very fertile and often unpredictable interaction between philosophy of science, political philosophy/theory, and social policy orientation without demanding from itself a strict systematicity.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Fairly or not, neo-liberalism (and its cousin new public management) ended up being associated with monopolistic privatization, the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, Austerity, and Pinochet.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Liam Kofi Bright, writing as a SootyEmpiric, has another banger blog post (here), “Wokeness: a Retrospective.” Go read it (soon)!| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
In chapter 10, “Causality and Indeterminism in Physical Theory, of his (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, Ernest Nagel addresses the status of the principle of causality (not the least in light of then recent developments in quantum mechanics).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
I have been privileged to have been published a few times in Liberal Currents, a zine that I support financially (albeit modestly).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
One of the oddities of philosophy as a kind of disciplined practice (so being inclusive of the professionals and the serious (ahh) amateurs) is the surprising lack of sustained interest in the conditions that give rise to philosophy as (ahh) a social kind.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
The Dutch University system doesn’t have a lot of money per student; so class-sizes are pretty large, especially in the social sciences (where I teach).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Last week I read and digressed (recall) on Josephine Quinn’s excellent (2024) How the World Made the West: a 4,000 Year History. Along the way I expressed some misgivings on how she tells the story about her main polemical target, the tendency to treat civilizations as social kinds, especially associated with the idea of superiority and homogeneity. I added Quinn “associates this idea with eighteenth century stadial thought, and especially nineteenth century Victorian (and French) imperia...| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
While reading Joseph Tainter’s (1988) The Collapse of Complex Societies (recall this post; and here), I had noted that he frequently criticizes Alfred Kroeber’s analysis of the collapse of societies.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
I recently read Vivek Chibber’s (2022) Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change it (Verso).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
A familiar narrative goes something like this: back in 1958, Isaiah Berlin somewhat confusingly defined two (one positive, one negative) concepts of liberty.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
One reason why so much recent political philosophy/theory is (recall) obsolete is that it fails to take seriously the possibility of ‘despotic Bonapartism’ as an inherent feature of liberal democracy.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
It is a fine convention to treat the University of Bologna as the first, degree-granting university in the modern sense that has stayed in continuous operation (see, for example, Wikipedia).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
More than a month ago, I agreed to an offer to be a visiting scholar at a private US university next year.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Building on work by Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment and Jeffrey Friedman (2019) Power without Knowledge, I have argued (recall here; and earlier here) that the advanced division of epistemic labor (hereafter: hyper-specialization) creates the conditions for the need/demand for synthetic philosophy.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
This is the second post in a series of posts on Russell Vought’s programmatic (2022) essay “Renewing American Purpose: Statesmanship in a post-Constitutional moment,” The American Mind. (The first was here yesterday.) Yesterday, I focused on Vought’s diagnosis of the failures of Trump 1, and I explored some of the intellectual roots of the framework he proposes to take up in — as one may surmise from what is unfolding already — in Trump 2.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
After they leave office or government service, high ranking, former government officials usually do not present a vision of how things might well be improved in their former abodes.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Regular readers know that I am not the greatest admirer of Pierre Manent’s (2015) Beyond Radical Secularism (translated in 2016 by Ralph Hancock).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Relatively quickly after the start of President Trump’s second administration, critics accused it of generating a constitutional crisis (see here in the NYT).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
One of the most delicate problems of political thought is to criticize an attractive normative ideal while sharing in the underlying ambitions that give rise to the ideal.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Once upon a time, university presidents knew that by mid May campus would be emptied of most students, including the student activists and the student reporters of the campus daily zine, all of whom had impressive internships lined up with NGOs in DC or foreign countries.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Before Rawls’ shadow in political philosophy there was in left-liberalism, Arnold S.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
Jennifer Frey is Inaugural Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa (and a trained philosopher).| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
For those people who would like to see and hear me in Dutch, there is a video of me talking on Adam Smith as a political theorist (here) a few months ago.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com