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
In 1982, Ursula K.| 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 my regular readers probably know, Dugald Stewart’s “Life of Adam Smith” was the first substantive biography of Adam Smith to appear in print initially in the transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1794).| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
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’s Substack
In section six of the second Enquiry (The Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals (1751)), Hume claims that “all the qualities, useful to the possessor, are approved of.” Here by ‘qualities’ Hume means enduring features of one’s character (also sometimes ‘a virtue’).| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Earlier today Adam Gurri (from Liberal Currents) published a piece, “Pluralism, Partisanship, and Patriotism: There is no conflict between liberal institutions and liberal partisan politics,” (that’s a title even longer than what I usually inflict on my readers) defending his rhetoric against| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
I have been interviewed (here) at The University of Chicago’s The Inequality Podcast by the economist Steven Durlauf, who is a very gracious host.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
One of my loyal readers, Talli Somekh, alerted me to a long essay, (here) “From Philosophy to Power: The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
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
It’s fair to say that because of his racism and segregationist administrative policies as well as, of course, the failures of Versailles and thereafter liberals prefer to forget and quietly set aside Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924).+ That’s pretty difficult if one cares about transnational liberalism, European twentieth century politics, or reflection on legislative politics and the administrative state.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
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’s Substack
To read is to feel oneself in no place and time, that is, utopian.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
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
There are very few works of political theory that defend status quo bias as such — as distinct from a particular, preferred status quo bias — and that do so with realist presuppositions.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Liam Kofi Bright, writing as a SootyEmpiric, has another banger blog post (here), “Wokeness: a Retrospective.” Go read it (soon)!| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
“We should impute rebellions, wars, and contempt for, or violation of, the laws not so much to the wickedness of the subjects as to the corruption of the state.”—Spinoza (Political Treatise, 5.2, translated by Curley)| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
A few days ago, I was checking some passages in Aquinas (as one is wont to do in a scholarly life), and as I was about to log off, my eye fell on a ‘Question’ regarding the relationship between the New Law (as revealed by the Christian Gospels) and the Old Law (as promulgated in the| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
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
If one has some familiarity with Russell Vought’s ‘radical constitutionalism’ or (which does not amount to the same thing) ‘national conservatism’ (of which Hazony is the pre-eminent thinker), one recognizes that Hamilton’s views are in the ascendancy.| 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
I have a corner full of false flowers I need to make tidy.| 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
