I’m doing a bunch of public events this semester. Here’s the schedule. On Tuesday, February 13, at 6 pm, I’ll be joining Ruthie Wilson Gilmore and Tom Sugrue on a panel about Nikhil Singh’s new book, Race and America’s Long War, which I highly recommend. Singh puts the current moment in a broad historical context, tracing Trump’s licensing of new states of cruelty back to the earliest days of America as a settler society. The book is full of surprises, which will shock even the most jaded observer of American life. The panel will be at NYU, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor. On Thursday, February 22, at 4:30 pm, I’ll be delivering the Oscar Jászi Memorial Lecture at Oberlin College. Jászi, […]

My weekly digest for The Guardian, looking back on Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama with the help of Brecht and Weill, Sheldon Wolin, Matt Bruenig, and Eddie Glaude. Some excerpts: Since Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama, when the mild centrist Doug Jones defeated the menacing racist Roy Moore, social media has been spinning two tunes. Politicians tweeted Lynyrd Skyrnyrd’s Sweet Home, Alabama. Historians tweeted the 1934 classic Stars Fell on Alabama. My mind’s been drifting to The Alabama Song. Not the obvious reference from The Doors/Bowie version – “Oh, show us the way to the next little girl” – but two other lines that recur throughout the song: “We now must say goodbye … I tell you we must die.” It’s a lyric for the left, which can’t seem to let go of its […]

At the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, which met in Philadelphia this past weekend, I participated in a panel commemorating the life and work of Sheldon Wolin, who died last year. Here’s my contribution. * * * * As a political commentator and witness of his moment, Sheldon Wolin is primarily identified with the 1960s. With the passage of time and recession of those years, that identification—coupled with his partiality to the local and penchant for the past—has earned Wolin a reputation for quaintness and nostalgia. Yet what has struck me most, in re-reading some of his archive these past few months, is how alert and alive Wolin was to what came after the 1960s: not only the conservative backlash […]

Sheldon Wolin, the political theorist, has died. In the last five years or so, we’ve seen the exit of an entire generation of scholars: David Montgomery, Carl Schorske, Peter Gay, Marshall Berman. This was the generation that taught me, sometimes literally. But Wolin’s death hits me hardest. I took two courses with him as an undergraduate: Modern Political Theory (Machiavelli to Smith) and Radical Political Thought (Paine to Foucault). The first in my freshman year, the second in my sophomore year. I would have taken more, but Wolin retired the following year. Those courses set me on my way. I would never have become a political theorist were it not for him. There will be many texts and appreciations in […]

Sheldon Wolin‘s the reason I began drinking coffee. I was a freshman at Princeton. It was the fall of 1985. I signed up to take a course called “Modern Political Theory.” It was scheduled for Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 am. I had no idea what I was doing. I stumbled into class, and there was a man with white hair and a trim white beard, lecturing on Machiavelli. I was transfixed. There was just one problem: I was—still am—most definitely not a morning person. Even though the lectures were riveting, I had to fight my tendency to fall asleep. Even worse, I had to fight my tendency to sleep in. So I started drinking coffee. I’d show up for […]

For political theorists like me, Jack Schaar is one of the vital presences of the last half-century. He and his wife Hanna Pitkin—along with Sheldon Wolin, Norman Jacobson, and Michael Rogin—helped define the “Berkeley School” of political theory, which not only introduced generations of students to the western canon but also made it relevant to contemporary politics. Though I seem to know more people than I count—including my wife—who were touched by his teaching and writing, it’s a shame still more don’t know about Schaar and his work. Schaar recently died. Joshua Miller, a political theorist at Lafayette College, wrote this brief obituary, which he has not been able to place in the press. I am reprinting it here with […]