Corey Robin

Reading Samuel Freeman’s review of Roger Scruton in the latest NYRB, I had a mini-realization about my own work on conservatism, which features Scruton quite a bit. In the mid-1970s, conservatism, which had previously been declared dead as an intellectual and political force, began to have a major impact on liberalism. Politically, you could see that influence in the slow, then sudden, retreat from traditional New Deal objectives, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton. What that meant was a massive turnaround on economic issues (deregulation, indifference to unions, galloping inequality) and a softer turnaround on social issues. While mainstream Democrats today are identified as staunch liberals on so-called social or moral issues like abortion and gay rights, the truth of the […]

Last week I met with a group of ten interns at a magazine. The magazine runs periodic seminars where interns get to meet with a journalist, writer, intellectual, academic of their choosing. We talked about politics, writing, and so on. But in the course of our conversation, one startling social fact became plain. Although all of these young men and women had some combination of writerly dreams, none of them—not one—had any plan for, even an ambition of, a career. Not just in the economic sense but in the existential sense of a lifelong vocation or pursuit that might find some practical expression or social validation in the form of paid work. Not because they didn’t want a career but because there was no career to be […]

I’m going to float a series of vast and quick historical generalizations in order to try and get at something that is distinctive about the present moment in US politics. Beginning in Europe in the 19th century, liberalism has been engaged in an on-again, off-again, two-front war: against the right and against the left. Against the right’s revanchism and the left’s radicalism, liberalism has held itself up as the original Third Way. It is the reasonable and moderate alternative to the extremes, offering men and women the promises and profits of a capitalist, vaguely democratic, modernity but without its revolutionary perils and reactionary mystique. Though it has on occasion entered into a more productive, albeit tension-filled, front with the left, liberalism has always been […]

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Here’s my summary of these weeks that were. Merrick Garland 1. President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland as the replacement to Antonin Scalia was accompanied by this tweet from the White House. “Merrick Garland would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.” —@POTUS #SCOTUSnominee — The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2016 Last Sunday I said we were still in Reaganland. Now I think we’re still in Nixonland. 2. That tweet was no errant message. When it comes to the rights of criminal defendants, Garland is no judicial liberal: The former prosecutor also has a relatively conservative record on criminal justice. A 2010 examination of his decisions by SCOTUSBlog’s […]

For the last two weeks or so, I have been trying to stay focused on my work on Clarence Thomas, but all the liberal commentary on the Democratic primary has gotten me so irritated that I keep finding myself back on social media, posting, tweeting, commenting, and the like. So I figured I’d bring everything that I’ve been saying about the election campaign there, here. In no particular order. 1. Clintonite McCarthyism According to The Guardian: The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to the Guardian by a source who would only agree to be identified as “a Democrat”, alleges that Sanders “sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War” because he went on a trip there to […]

Today is the anniversary of two 9/11’s. The one everyone in the US talks about, and the one not everyone in the US talks about. Greg Grandin, who’s got a new book out on Kissinger that everyone should read, writes in The Nation today about Pinochet’s violent coup against Allende—fully backed by Kissinger and Nixon—and how Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is completing the work that Kissinger, Nixon, and Pinochet began. Forty-three years ago today. The TPP includes one provision that will, if activated, complete the 1973 coup against Allende: its Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. ISDS allows corporations and investors to “sue governments directly before tribunals of three private sector lawyers operating under World Bank and UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for any […]

My Sunday column in Salon uses the latest campus controversy—the Duke student who refuses to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—as an opportunity to take a second look at what these students with their trigger warnings and sensitivities are trying to tell us. I’d really like to get this aspect of the controversy into the conversation, so even if you disagree, it’d be great if you could share this column as widely as possible: No one knows the power of literature better than the censor. That’s why he burns books: to fight fire with fire, to stop them from setting the world aflame. Or becomes an editor: Stalin, we now know, excised words from texts with about as much energy and attention as he excised […]

Just before he launched The New Republic, Herbert Croly told the New York Times that the magazine would “devote a good deal of attention to the feminist movement, in general.” In his opening statement as editor of the magazine, Gabriel Snyder suggests that he intends to make good on that commitment. In part by hiring more women writers, in part by opening the magazine to the world from which it has been cloistered for so long. But if our founders sat down today to settle on the best way to achieve this mission, they would not have picked a weekly printed magazine and ignored a vast array of digital publishing possibilities. And just like any publication with hopes of success in the […]

Alex Gourevitch and I have a piece in Al Jazeera America on the demise of The New Republic. Here are some excerpts: “When intellectuals can do nothing else they start a magazine,” socialist critic Irving Howe, an erstwhile contributor to The New Republic, said. If he’s right, what does it mean when that magazine dies? That intellectuals have something else to do? Or that it’s no longer an intellectual magazine? … The New Republic was founded by intellectuals whose main aspiration was to represent the moral authority of the state and its culture over and against the self-interest of capital. Not by aligning with the labor movement or a socialist party but by bringing to bear the force of reason […]

The New Republic is coming to an end. And the autopsies have begun. So have the critiques. But the real problem with The New Republic is not that it was racist, though it was. It’s not that it was filled with warmongers, though it was. It’s not that it punched hippies, though it did. No, the real problem with The New Republic is that for the last three decades, it has had no energy. It has had no real project. The last time The New Republic had a project was in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when it was in the journalistic vanguard of what was then called neoliberalism (not what we now call neoliberalism). That is what a great magazine […]

Over at The National Interest, my Crooked Timber co-blogger Henry Farrell has a dissection of a certain strand of contemporary liberalism—embodied in the critiques of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald offered by Sean Wilentz, George Packer, and Michael Kinsley—that is well worth reading. Some highlights: Yet their problems go deeper than sloppy practice and shoddy logic. For one thing, Wilentz, Packer and Kinsley are all veterans of the Clinton-era battles between liberals and the Left. Wilentz in particular poses as a latter-day Arthur Schlesinger, shuttling backwards and forwards between his academic duties and his political fealties. As for Packer, he has championed a muscular liberalism, pugnacious in the fight against moral purists at home and political Islam abroad. And Kinsley, a […]

I haven’t had time to read much beyond the basics about today’s Hobby Lobby decision, but here are a few posts I’ve written over the years that should help put the Supreme Court’s decision in theoretical and historical perspective: 1. First, a general primer on neoliberalism, which makes the point—contra many on the left and the right—that at the heart of our contemporary capitalist economy are not individualistic choosers but men and women, in semi-“private” institutions, in thrall and subjugation to their superiors. It’s the Feudalism, Stupid! 2. Second, two posts on free-market types and birth control, how even the most libertarian-ish free-wheeler seeks to control women’s bodies: Love For Sale: Birth Control from Marx to Mises and Probing Tyler […]

MIT economist Esther Duflo: We tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, “Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?” And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life….Stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are […]

For the last few months, I’ve had a draft post sitting in my dashboard listing all the words and phrases I’d like to see banished from the English language. At the top—jockeying for the #1 slot with “yummy,” “closure” and “it’s all good”—is “public intellectual.” I used to like the phrase; it once even expressed an aspiration of mine. But in the years since Russell Jacoby wrote his polemic against the retreat of intellectuals to the ivory tower, it’s been overworked as a term of abuse. What was originally intended as a materialist analysis of the relationship between politics, economics, and culture—Jacoby’s aim was to analyze how real changes in the economy and polity were driving intellectuals from the public […]

In yesterday’s New York Times, Robert Pear reports on a little known fact about Obamacare: the insurance packages available on the federal exchange have very high deductibles. Enticed by the low premiums, people find out that they’re screwed on the deductibles, and the co-pays, the out-of-network charges, and all the different words and ways the insurance companies have come up with to hide the fact that you’re paying through the nose. For policies offered in the federal exchange, as in many states, the annual deductible often tops $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple. Insurers devised the new policies on the assumption that consumers would pick a plan based mainly on price, as reflected in the premium. But […]

On Bloggingheads, Mike Konczal and I talk about Nietzsche, the Austrians, and neoliberalism. I explain the weird ways in which Hayek’s view of judging mirrors America’s belated feudalism, how my thinking about the Austrians has changed, why academic theorists and leftists wrongly elevate Strauss and Schmitt above Hayek and Mises, and how we might think about neoliberalism differently. Unfortunately I can’t seem to embed the video here, so you’ll have to click on the link and watch it over at the BH site.

Here are some of the articles I’ve written over the years.  For a complete list, go to my CV. “Without End.” New Left Review (December 31, 2023). “How Do We Survive the Constitution.” The New Yorker (October 4, 2023). “The End of the Take-Home Essay?” The Chronicle Review (August 24, 2023). “The Clarence Thomas Scandal Is About More Than Corruption.” Politico (April 18, 2023). “The Trouble With Money.” The New York Review of Books (December 22, 2022). “Empathy and the Economy.” The New York Review of Books (December 8, 2022). “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Clarence Thomas.” The New Yorker (July 9, 2022). “Republicans Are Moving Rapidly to Cement Minority Rule. Blame the Constitution.” Politico (January 5, 2022). “Why the Biden […]

Corey Robin Distinguished Professor of Political Science Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center 2900 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, NY  11210 corey.robin@gmail.com Download as pdf (last updated October 2023) Education Ph.D., Yale University, distinction, 1999 A.B., Princeton University, high honors, 1989 Oxford University, Jesus College, 1987-88 Fellowships, Grants, and Awards Best Book in American Political Thought Award, American Political Science Association, 2020 Fellowship, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, 2018-19 Rockefeller Fellowship, Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2007-8 Fellowship, Program in Ethics and Public Affairs, Princeton University, 2007-8 Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2007-8 Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2007-8 (declined) Fellowship, National Humanities Center, 2007-8 (declined) Burkhardt Fellowship, American Council of Learned […]

If you’re in Brooklyn tonight, I’ll be joined by financial journalist Moe Tkacik, economist Suresh Naidu, and intellectual historian Thomas Meaney for a Nation-sponsored discussion of my essay “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” in the May 27 issue of the The Nation.  The discussion will be at Melville House in DUMBO (145 Plymouth Street) at 7 pm. Here’s a write-up of the event: Is the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek the link between the übermensch and the businessman? In a provocative essay for the May 27 issue of The Nation, Corey Robin offers a radical reconsideration of the work of Hayek, its influence on neoliberalism and its elective affinities with Nietzsche’s thinking about labor and value. How did Hayek’s conservative ideas become our economic reality? Robin asks. By turning the market into the realm of […]

I’ve been traveling for several days, but in the last 24 hours, a bunch of people have responded, all critically, to my “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children.”  I just got back and have a bunch of teaching to do, so I haven’t had time to read them all and may not be able to get to them for a while. But I thought I’d post them here.  I’ll try to get to them as soon as I can. Kevin Vallier, one of the sharpest libertarian theorists out there with whom I’ve argued in the past, has what seems on a very quick glance to be a thorough critique (not trying to suggest it’s not thorough; I just only had time to skim […]