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 […]
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’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 […]
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
Last week, I delivered a paper at a conference about the work of Sheldon Wolin in Lausanne, Switzerland. For those of you who don’t know the name, Wolin was a political theorist who taught at Berkeley and Princeton. I took undergraduate courses with him on modern political thought and radical political thought; many other political theorists, including Wendy Brown, Cornel West, and Hanna Pitkin, studied with him as graduate students. He was one of the most influential teachers of political theory in the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. Though I’ve always valued him most as a reader and teacher of political theory, he also had a wide audience as a political theorist in his own right. […]
In his Deontology (1834), Jeremy Bentham anticipates our world of “steps” and smartphones: A whole kingdom, the great globe itself, will become a gymnasium, in which every man exercises himself before the eyes of every other man. Every gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible influence on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down.
I’ve been following the online debate over the slogan “no kings” with some interest. On the one side, critics argue that it’s a normie notion, which obscures all sorts of questions about imperial war, Palestine, oil, and oligarchy. On the other side, defenders say it appeals to a broad set of values and voters, providing the basis for a popular movement against not just Trump but all the ills he stands for and promotes, not to mention the kind of state he is trying to create and consolidate. Interestingly enough, as Bruno Leipold shows in his magnificent book, Citizen Marx, Marx struggled with this very question across the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. While most readers associate Marx with the claim […]
If you watch this short clip of Zohran Mamdani getting heckled, you’ll see why he’s the greatest living politician in the United States today. Without batting an eye, Mamdani says, in response to the heckler: I want that man to be able to afford to keep living in New York City. Because the day that I don’t hear him yelling at me, it means he got priced out of this place. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for him. I don’t want that for anybody in this city. We need to make this a city where it’s affordable enough to yell at your politicians. Notice the four things Mamdani is doing. First, he remains unflappable, gracious, calm, […]
Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, doesn’t do introspection. So he tells David Senra—whose great point of pride and life achievement, according to Senra’s website and statement to Andreessen, is that “I’ve read obviously four hundred, I think now, ten [that’s 410] biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs”—in a conversation that’s been making the rounds online. Many commentators seem intent on challenging Andreeseen’s claim that he doesn’t do introspection. It is, after all, a bit of a performative contradiction, since the mere affirmation, when asked if he has any levels of introspection, “Zero, as little as possible,” would seem to require at least some introspection and stock-taking. Otherwise, how would he know? But I’ll believe Andresseen. […]
Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? . . . [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle! —Dostoevsky One of the most powerful insights of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, and the reason we return to it, is that he, almost alone among all the people who set out to answer the Jewish Question in the early 1840s, saw that the question itself was not really about the Jews at all but about […]
In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]
It’s interesting how many commentators on Marx’s relationship to Judaism focus on his father’s conversion to Christianity. Marx’s mother also converted to Christianity, and from what we know, hers was a more bitter and forced conversion than his father’s. Marx’s father converted entirely for professional reasons: he would no longer be able to practice as a lawyer if he hadn’t). But Marx’s father wasn’t that bothered by any residual attachment to Judaism or Jewishness, despite the fact that his father and then his brother were the chief rabbis of Trier. Marx’s mother, however, resisted conversion for as long as possible. She insisted on waiting till her father died (she, like her husband, came from a long line of rabbis), and […]
Under the headline, “There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro,” Bret Stephens writes: Whether failing to remove the regime is a possibly disastrous oversight or part of a yet-to-be-revealed plan, the administration will have to figure out how to get rid of it for good in favor of a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government. Now Stephens is someone who’s on record as claiming that Trump and/or his regime are fascist, authoritarian, and autocratic. Just this past year, he has compared both to North Korea, Nero’s Rome, and much else. Yet here he is, writing as if it’s a real question as to whether this very same leader and this very same regime can create “a legitimate, stable and democratically […]
If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer. Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him. Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule: No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and […]
Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and beloved by midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So we now have, in the twenty-first century, at the invocation for a Muslim political leader, a Muslim religious leader repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family that had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century. That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no? If you stayed […]
I read a lot of books this year. A lot of great books, on the principle that the older I get, the less time I have for bad books. But since everyone’s time is finite, I thought I’d just list here my ten favorite books that I read this year. Favorite for different reasons. The sheer joy of reading them, page to page (Ernaux and Kempowksi and Wilson). My appreciation of the scholarship and what I learned from them (Battistoni, Reitter). The way they’ve sat with me long after I finished them (Alexievich, Butler). My appreciation of their sheer achievement (McNally, Clark). And some were all of these (Kempowski, Wilson, Reitter, Butler). And, oh, I cheated: I’ve listed eleven books. […]
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll once again be working with my friend and co-author Alex Gourevitch on a new writing project: an introduction to a new edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. The translation will be done by the excellent Paul Reitter, who did that new translation of Capital, and will be published by NYRB Classics, which has issued so many wonderful translations since its founding. It’s hard for me to think of a more timely text than On the Jewish Question. Despite his traffic in antisemitism, Marx is trying here to get us to think about religion, identity, and politics outside the framework of culture war, which had engulfed so many intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Instead of […]
Last Friday, I spoke on a panel at NYU on political theorist Alyssa Battistoni’s new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The room was packed, somewhat unusual for an academic book of political theory. But if you’ve read Battistoni’s book, or know of her work, you’ll understand why. The book is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Marx, feminism, and the politics of care—if you were just looking for an excellent account of the last 50 years of political theory, plus Marx and a lot of twentieth-century economics, this would be your book—but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The State
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Tags Alyssa Battistoni, David Ricardo, Grotius, Karl Marx, Plato, Pufendorf, Sianne Ngai
I’m re-reading J.G.A. Pocock for the first time in many years, and it’s surprising to me how obsessed he is with what used to be called, back in the heyday of the Cold War, “psychological man.” Pocock was a historian of early modern political and historical thought. His great subject was civic humanism, and his touchtones were Machiavelli, Savonarola, Harrington, Hume, Gibbon, and so on. His frames were virtue and rights, commerce and property. But the not-so-latent thread of his writing is anxiety, personality, hysteria, lethargy, melancholia, disintegration, and so on. On the page, he presents himself as the Anglo man of remove. But the writing betrays a midcentury, vaguely closeted Freudian who perhaps had done a stint or two, […]
We’re coming up, in two years, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Some of you may know of Hirschman as one of the main characters in that not-so-good, pulpy Netflix series Transatlantic, which depicts the efforts of Hirschman and others to rescue European Jewish intellectuals from the Nazis in France. If you’re a political scientist or sociologist, you may know of Hirschman for his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. If you’re a theorist, you may know his Rhetoric of Reaction. If you’re an economist or a Latin Americanist, you might know of his work in development economics. But, for me, Hirschman will always be […]
One of the elements of Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction that surprised me most the last time, or maybe the time before that, that I taught it, was just how much attention he pays to the Radical Republican’ vision of congressional power and congressional government over and against a Constitution based on presidential power and presidential government. Du Bois even suggests that had the Radicals won, we might have had a system more like the parliamentary democracies of Europe, or at least of Britain, where the chief executive is simply the leader of the party in parliament, and not an office completely apart from that party and that parliament. For Du Bois, that vision of parliamentary government, as opposed […]
Among the political emotions, vengeance may be the most terrible of them all. On the one hand, vengeance is different than justice. It authorizes those who act in its name to do all sorts of things that they would normally not feel themselves authorized or entitled to do. Vengeance has an extraordinarily permissive licensing structure, freeing the vengeful from any and all restraints. On the other hand, as any reading of The Oresteia will show, vengeance contains a strict and stern element of obligation, even injunction: Whatever else you may do, you are not authorized or allowed not to take vengeance. To not avenge—to forgive or acquit, to do anything that might break the link between the iniquitous past and […]
In early modern Venice and Florence, a new form of pooling capital emerged. It was called the “compagnia,” which translates into English as “company.” The literal meaning of the word is “with bread.” Why and how does “with bread” produce a notion of pooling capital and our modern word for an economic enterprise? Because those capital-pooling efforts were often family efforts. The early modern Italian usage points us forward and backward in time. Forward because, in recent years, there’s been a big literature on the rise or return of “family capitalism” or “dynastic capitalism” or “patrimonial capitalism.” Where the 20th century was supposed to be the realm of the managerial corporation, with control and ownership separated, and ownership in the […]