Tag: Hobbes

On Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cass Sunstein, and Other Public Intellectuals

I have a long piece up at The Chronicle Review on public intellectuals. It’s an adaptation of the keynote address I gave last fall at the Society of US Intellectual History. Here are some excerpts… What is a public intellectual? As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions. On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky. On the other hand, the public intellectual is supposed to […]

Thomas Hobbes on Daylight Saving

Hobbes, Leviathan: NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? Don’t forget to set your clocks forward tonight.  

The History of Fear, Part 2

Yesterday, I inaugurated my series of posts on the intellectual history of fear with a discussion of Hobbes’s theory of rational fear. Today, I continue with a discussion of Montesquieu’s account of despotic terror. (Each of these discussions is an excerpt from my book Fear: The History of a Political Idea.) Montesquieu is not often read by students of political theory. He’s become a bit of a boutique-y item in the canon, the exclusive preserve of a small group of scholars and pundits who tend to treat him as a genteel guardian of an anodyne tradition of political moderation. With their endless paeans to the rule of law and the separation of powers, these interpreters miss what’s most interesting and disruptive […]

Libertarianism’s Cold, Cold Heart

For some time, I’ve been going back and forth with the libertarians, trying to suss out the extent of their commitment to freedom. As readers of this blog know, I don’t think it extends very far. While libertarianism may begin as a critique of state coercion in the name of personal liberty, it invariably ends up as an apologia for the absence of freedom in large parts of most people’s lives. But over the last few months, I’ve gotten some interesting push-back from one of the more thoughtful subsets of that crew—the Bleeding Heart Libertarians— who insist that their commitment to freedom is real, even in places like the workplace. In a new piece just posted over at Crooked Timber, […]