Kant on Righteous Spinoza, and some Adam Smith
Last Friday I attended a fascinating paper by Shterna S.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Last Friday I attended a fascinating paper by Shterna S.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
One reason why I really enjoyed reading David Graeber’s collection (2024) The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World: Essays (edited by Nika Dubrovsky; my page-numbers below refer to the Farrar, Straus, Giroux edition) is that certain themes emerge that help round out or illuminate his (ahh) philosophical and political anthropology.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
One of the many joys blogging has given me is that I have many more and many diverse kinds of intellectual conversation partners than I ever could have hoped for.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Despite my many political and intellectual differences with him, I am a natural admirer of Graeber’s writings.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Next week, at the invitation of Jack Statter, I’ll be visiting Louisiana State University (see the attached poster).| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
One of the minor oddities of the intellectual scene of the last few decades was the pervasive nostalgia for the social democracy/New Deal of, say, the 1950s and 1960s that shaped so much political philosophy/theory without really much critical scrutiny or curiosity about why these relatively paternalist and bureaucratic projects were not sustained in relatively free political societies.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
I was introduced to the writings of Guy Davenport (1927 – 2005) by Joey Keegin, an erudite advanced PhD student at Tulane, who is himself a distinctive essayist (he writes for The Point; Plough; and the Chronicle inter alia).| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Yesterday it was election day in New Orleans.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith famously takes “Aristotle” and “humane Plato” to task for condoning infanticide, which Smith regards as “dreadful a violation of humanity.” The long paragraph in which Smith discusses this issue has generated quite a bit of interpretive controversy.| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
Near the start of The Social Contract (1762), in his criticism of Aristotle, Rousseau (recall) diagnoses the phenomenon of adaptive preferences. What we desire is not just shaped by society, but what we desire is itself the effect of the objects available to us. I had never noticed before that Rousseau articulates the underlying principle in the (1750) First Discourse (or| digressionsimpressions’s Substack
A few weeks ago (recall), I noted that in the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli uses Plutarch’s account of the senior Cato’s banishment of the Greek philosophers from Rome, to introduce an important distinction between two kinds of philosophy: (i) the philosophy that generates false glory in virtue of generating private esteem and undermining public utility; (ii) and the practically useful philosophy that generates true glory in virtue of enhancing the common good.| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
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
Neoliberalism is dead; Long live Neoliberalism! (pt. 3)| digressionsimpressions.substack.com
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
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
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
