The day he learned of the fall of Bastille, the ever-punctual Kant was late for his morning walk. That’s what the frenzied pace of the French Revolution did to people’s experience of time. It’s now been almost a week since we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation with North Korea. I wonder how cultural historians of the future will record or register the changed sense of felt time in this era.

For a change of pace… In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt makes the argument that one of the reasons the French Revolution took such a violent and authoritarian turn was that it allowed the social question—simplistically put, issues of poverty and the poor—to enter and then dominate public discussion. Unlike the American Revolution, which was more properly concerned with truly political questions like the organization of public power, constitutions, and civic action. Once issues of economic need are put on the table, Arendt suggests, tyranny cannot be far off. So pressing and overwhelming are the physical needs of the body, so much do they cry out for our response, that they almost introduce, by their very nature, an element of compulsion […]

On Saturday night, I wrote a post about a curious argument I’ve noted among a subset of liberal bloggers. On the one hand, they claim Obama is radically constrained (by Congress, the Republicans, etc.); on the other hand, they claim progressive activists and citizens are radically unconstrained. I noted that activists and citizens are far more constrained than Obama and that a chief constraint they face is the federated and decentralized nature of the American state and politics. At least that’s what I thought my post was about. I went to sleep, checked in on the blog the next morning, and then went apple-picking with my daughter and some friends in upstate New York. I got back Sunday night to […]