The distinction between “Athens and Jerusalem” plays a large role in literature (Matthew Arnold and Eric Auerbach), political theory (Leo Strauss), and philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche). It plays little, if any, role in economics, or at least in making sense of the history of economics. If we think about some critical theorists—Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Keynes, Friedman, Mises, Ricardo—it actually seems central. Not for nothing, but Marx, Polanyi, Friedman, and Ricardo were all Jewish (not to mention figures like Abba Lerner, Kenneth Arrow, Paul Samuelson). How, you might ask, does this distinction play out in economics? To a surprising degree, in much the same way that Hellenism versus Hebraism plays out in Arnold, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Strauss. Instead of questions of reason […]
If you’re roughly of my generation or older, you might remember Saul Bellow’s telling a New York Times journalist, back in the 1980s, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them.” It quickly became a notorious remark, which one of my later housemates loved to hilariously mock. It was also one of the many opening shots of the canon wars, which continued into the 1990s, when those arguments finally sputtered out, only to be revived with the backlash against Barack Obama. It says something about the state of things today that back then it was one of the most esteemed men of American letters, a Nobel Laureate to boot, who […]
Three weeks after Jane Doe was gang raped at a frat house at Cornell, she phoned one of her alleged rapists, sophomore Winston Lee. According to records released to the New York Times, Lee allegedly forced oral sex upon Jane Doe and snorted ketamine off her body. He was suspended for two years, put on probation upon his return, and required to write an essay about what he had learned from the experience. Yesterday, we learned that this is what Lee said to Jane Doe on the phone: I’m so sorry about all, like, the backlash you’re getting from this, by the way…Oh, dude, I’m, I’m so sorry. Like, I feel so bad for you, dude. Almost immediately after the […]
At the New York Review of Books, I talk with the novelist Karan Mahajan about literature and politics. Karan’s got a wonderful new novel, The Complex, which I highly recommend. It’s about a right-wing Indian politician, who hails from an illustrious family of Indian founders. It’s an uncommonly subtle, at times sympathetic, account of a man, and his family, who are charming, ugly, lovable, impossible, cruel, selfish, narcissistic, people who live in a complex, both architecturally and psychologically, and who are complexed by that living. What I love about Karan’s writing is that he’s absolutely unafraid to go places where a lot of other writers would hold back or judge or feel the need to remind the reader that they’re […]
Over the last 24 hours, it’s become clear that the “statement” Jane Doe gave to the Cornell University police, which was then delivered to the Tompkins County District Attorney, was not anywhere close to the initial statement she gave to the police. As Paisley Currah has been saying for days, it’s critical we understand this piece of the puzzle because otherwise we can’t make any sense of how this case of gang rape at Cornell was handled. After she was gang-raped, Jane Doe talked to the Cornell police for hours. The transcript of what she said to the police is about 120 pages. Here are some of the statements she gave them: “I can say with 100 percent confidence I […]
In all the conversation about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, few people have focused on what I think is the real lunacy at the heart of that story. Though Hannah-Jones mentions it in her piece, it comes out most clearly in an exchange, on This American Life, between Hannah-Jones and her daughter Najya: Nikole Hannah-Jones: It’s not like I never had any doubts about my choice. I did. And the only reason I’m OK with my choice now is I’m like, you’re fine. I felt this was important. I tried to do the right thing. Najya Hannah-Jones: And I think I’m fine because I’m in the school I am now. I feel like if I picked a different choice that you wanted […]
Mayor Mamdani has created a new program—70,000 free tickets, every year, for students, citizens, residents, workers, immigrants, toddlers, grandparents, homeless people, anyone and everyone who lives in the city, to go to the Metropolitan Opera. To see La Boheme, Macbeth, Cosa Fan Tutte, Tosca, The Magic Flute, Samson and Delilah, Aida, Parsifal, and more. Sign up here. While you’re waiting to sign into the lottery, savor these words of John Maynard Keynes, writing at the height of World War II, reminding us what the idea of a “commonwealth” really means: I should like to see that war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population. Why should […]
One conclusion from the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece, which I loved, that I hope everyone on the left can agree upon is that whatever you think of Hannah-Jones, her politics, or the piece itself (and, please, I beg of you, don’t use this post as an opportunity to rehearse your tired opinions and beefs that have been already stated by a thousand other people), it does an amazing job of showing how much barbaric, and it really is barbaric, pressure our society puts on individuals—whether as families, parents, children, but particularly as parents—to address problems that are collective in origin and can only be political in solution. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, our society has relegated it to the […]
The writings and posts about 9/11 in the last 48 hours tend to follow an arc. They begin with people’s personal narratives of the day, where they were when they heard the news, how they felt, and then some larger reflections on the 25 years of history that followed. I want to do something similar, only I want to turn the personal wheel of history backward. Twenty-five, or maybe 26, years before 9/11, I had my first encounter with the World Trade Center. My family had recently returned from living in Argentina and Uruguay. We had settled in Chappaqua, a suburb thirty miles north of New York City. Friends from Uruguay came to visit. We took them to Manhattan. One […]
One of the things that Leo Strauss does quite well, as a writer, which I never really noticed before, is that when he rehearses the arguments of others—what we today would call a lit review—he provides a genuine sense of drama to his account. That is, lit reviews are often the occasion, in our academic literature, for showing the reader that you have done your due diligence as a scholar or for offering an account of what everyone else gets wrong, thereby setting yourself up for giving to the reader what’s right, what’s correct, what’s true. Strauss doesn’t do that. Or he doesn’t do that in an obvious way. Instead, though he disagrees with all the other accounts that he’s […]
Two of my favorite historians, Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, are teaching a course, starting in mid-September, at the New York City DSA Academy—yes, an actual socialist school for the left!—that I think will be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog. It’s called “Red New York: A History of the Left in America’s Most Radical City.” Seems pretty timely and relevant, no? There are just five classes, and having listened to both Josh and Steve for years, I can tell you that there are not two people who know more about the NYC and the left and are better pedagogues than these two! Seems like a real treat. You can sign up here.
Gloria Steinem, who just died, said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” Hear, hear, for the writing life, and for a woman affirming its centrality, above and beyond other goods and values, including motherhood. Incidentally, one of the really nice things about the unjustly criticized Devil Wears Prada 2 is the last scene, where Meryl Streep says to Anne Hathaway, by way of discussing the sacrifices she has made over the years for her career as a journalist and an editor, including sacrifices foisted on her children, “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?” I thought it was a gutsy way to end the movie, particularly […]
The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. I say was because I just had to cut it. It doesn’t work. But I thought I’d share it here, as a public service. If you’re ever the victim of antisemitic insults and want to know what to do, check out how a master rhetorician—Heinrich Heine—dealt with that kind of abuse, though please don’t use the homophobia he does in response! Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: […]
In a recent post, Jodi Dean offers the most radical analysis of AI that I’ve seen. Using a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theoretical smarts and humor, Dean detects a far graver significance to the loss of reading that Large Language Models are enabling and pushing, far graver than what we’ve all been fretting about with the decline of reading skills, student literacy, and all that. According to Dean, Lacan tells us that language—and, through language, we might infer reading—is what infants learn through their separation from the mother (the mother in scare quotes; it’s really whoever is the provider of care). Language is how—or a representation of the fact that—the infant learns that its mother has desires independent […]
It seems like we’ve been going through an epidemic of plagiarism scandals for the last couple of decades. (This is a topic I’ve written about a lot.) You see it in the political elite. Where once upon a time Joe Biden’s plagiarism of Neil Kinnock destroyed his presidential campaign (in 1988), politicians, even Supreme Court justices (paging Neal Gorsuch), routinely get exposed for plagiarism, and it doesn’t affect them at all. Same goes for journalists. For a time, I thought this surfeit of scandal was a sign of a declining ruling class or something. Some loss of a sense of liberal ownership, of the connection between property and self and all that. (Not for nothing, Adam Smith seems to have […]
I don’t have a problem with the idea that what wins in New York City is not the same as what wins in Iowa, that the US is a big country with all kinds of diversity, etc. But when I read an article in the New York Times like this—so prominently featuring a photograph like this—I don’t see Iowa, or what a moderate Democrats needs to do to win in Iowa. I see an Upper East Side Jewish guy’s idea of what a moderate Democrat in Iowa looks like and needs to do. Ben Rhodes, who wrote the article, grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, got an MFA at NYU, was so mobilized by a sense […]
Who was the first to come up with the “wages of whiteness” thesis, broadly construed as a theory of how racism works and functions in a hierarchical society? I’m not referring to Roediger’s book by that title, since the theory predates his book, as you can see below. I’m more interested in the general idea of it, which we can see across Europe and North America and across several centuries. For example, Ludwig Börne, a Jewish convert to Christianity, wrote this about German antisemitism in 1832: The poor Germans! Living on the bottom floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes above them, they resolve their feeling of anxiety by speaking about people who live even further below […]
I hesitate to give this issue any attention, lest it suck out more oxygen than it already has from Abdul El-Sayed’s inspiring campaign and yesterday’s victory in Michigan. But here goes. This morning, in his victory speech, El-Sayed stated: To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety — to Jewish safety — is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters. Usually, campaign rhetoric doesn’t tell us much. But in the context of other conventional political statements about American Jews and Israel, what El-Sayed says here speaks volumes. Simply compare it […]
I’ve been fighting the Nietzsche Wars for nearly two decades now. For those of you not familiar with this epochal struggle, the Nietzsche Wars are the deep disagreements between liberal and left scholars about whether Nietzsche should be considered a right-wing conservative, which is how some of us think of him, or a serious left-wing thinker (few people actually think this anymore) or, short of that, a freeingly apolitical or antipolitical or ambiguously political thinker whose insights are useful to the left. It just occurred to me, however, that all this time we’ve been arguing about the wrong person. The person Team Nietzsche really wants to conscript for its side, and could legitimately conscript, is Heinrich Heine. Now, before everyone […]
For Americans my age or older, Ravel’s Boléro will always be the music of Blake Edwards’ film “10,” which came out in 1979. Starring Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, the romantic comedy introduced Bo Derek, she of the braids and breasts, to the world. Thanks to Bo and Blake, Boléro came to be associated with sex of the pure fucking sort, so much so that Allan Bloom singled the music out for criticism (along with “rock ‘n roll”) in The Closing of the American Mind. More innocent times, those were. Last night, at the New York City Center, my daughter and I saw Boléro performed as a ballet. A ballet is what the music was originally commissioned as, but it’s […]
Ashley Parker, a journalist in DC, posted the comment I’ve screenshotted below on social media. Read her post carefully and remember that the person who wrote it is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a veteran reporter of the New York Times and the Washington Post, has won a Pulitzer Prize, and is now a writer at The Atlantic and an analyst at MSNBC. Parker has hit all the familiar markers of status and success in an industry where is not so easy to succeed or acquire status. She’s obviously smart and skilled. She’s not a conservative. She’s more of a vacant lot, a person whose profession is devoted to words yet pays little attention to her own, […]
As everyone in the country who’s not a fanatical Trumpist breaths a sigh of relief over yesterday’s Supreme Court affirmation of birthright citizenship, it seems like a useful moment to reflect on Israel. The principle of birthright citizenship states that it matters not a whit who your parents are or where they’re from; you are a citizen of the United States merely by the fact that you were born on its soil. That’s it. Birthright citizenship is based on the principle of jus soli—Latin for “right of the soil.” The opposite of jus soli is jus sanguinis—”right of blood.” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neal Gorsuch, who dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision, were arguing against jus soli, and much […]
Stepping back from today’s Supreme Court rulings to consider the broad cast of the year, there seem to be three main areas in which the Court significantly pushed back on Trump. They are: 1) independence of the Fed; 2) tariffs; 3) birthright citizenship. As it happens, these were three of Trump’s biggest challenges to prevailing conservative and Republican orthodoxy. And on each one, he failed. How to read that failure? I think the simplest explanation is that the Roberts Court is, above all, a neoliberal Court. Trump’s challenge to free trade and independent monetary policy—as well as the idea of the United States being a nation of the people who are born there, not a nation of blood but a […]
In a probing Substack, John Judis writes, “In ten or fifteen years, it is very possible that the Democratic Party will be known as ‘democratic socialist’ in the same way it is now known widely as ‘liberal.’” Before you dismiss this as ideological patter from a political adventurer, you should know that Judis is a relentlessly unenthusiastic realist, who’s been watching and commenting on the American political scene longer than I’ve been alive. I’d like to take up his thought, with two tweaks. First, I’m less certain if the Democratic Party is going to be the vessel of this transformation. Though it may be at this point the oldest political party in the world—and, as Kevin Phillips famously called it, […]
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Categories
Economies, Political Theory, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Arthur Schlesinger, democratic socialism, John Judis, liberalism, Louis Hartz, New Deal, Philip Roth, Richard Hofstadter