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: […]
The BungaBunga podcast had me on to discuss my Nation review of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global history. It was an excellent conversation. Both interviewers, Alex Gourevitch and Alex Hochuli, pushed me to think beyond what I had written. Among the issues we discovered in our discussion: Anyway, you can listen to it here or below.
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 […]
One of the principles of the Zohran Mamdani campaign that is not getting sufficient attention is the second sentence of his platform: The goal is to “make life easier” for New Yorkers. I come at this from two angles. Let me start with the personal. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older—I’m now 57—and became a parent at 40, when I had less energy than I had when I was in my 20s, which wasn’t a lot to begin with. But I’ve become increasingly cognizant over the lifetime of my child and my time as a parent, just how difficult everyday life is, what a struggle it is to deal with daily needs and demands, and how much of […]
I did a lot of writing this year. This is a brief list of some of my favorites. My book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, came out. It got some pretty great reviews. You should buy it. I began writing for The New Yorker Online, which has been a joy. My first piece was on political converts, men and women who make the journey from one ideology to another, and why the move from left to right has mattered more, over the course of the last century, than the move from right to left. My second piece was on Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist and a historian, and how his failure at the first made possible his success at the second. […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Law, Media, Race, The Left, The Right
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Tags Adam Smith, Alex Gourevitch, Clarence Thomas, Hayek, Jodi Dean, Max Weber, New Yorker, Obama, Vivian Gornick
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 […]
My Little Pony My daughter loves My Little Pony. So does this guy. And that, apparently, is a problem. Grown men are not supposed to like the same things as young girls. The guy—though Gawker has done a story on him, he remains anonymous—is a dad in his late 30s. He calls himself “a fairly big fan.” He made the picture of one of the show’s characters the background image on his desktop. He talked to the boss’s 9-year-old daughter about the show. His co-workers, and the boss, got freaked out. According to the guy, the boss told him that “it’s weird and it makes people uncomfortable that I have a ‘tv show for little girls as a background.’” Now he’s been […]
Since my last roundup on the response to Chris Bertram’s, Alex Gourevitch’s, and my piece on workplace tyranny, there’s been a lot of action. But before I get to that, there are a couple of dispatches from the front that are just doozies. Down in Australia, a company issues guidelines for how its employees ought to keep their work stations clean: Cold soup can be freely enjoyed in communal hubs on each floor, but hot soup is only permitted on the “top deck”, an area devoted to eating and socialising on level 45 with sweeping views of the city and beyond. While gum, throat lozenges and lollies can be consumed at desks, the privilege does not extend to “chocolate, fruit, […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Alex Gourevitch, Alex Tbarrok, Brad DeLong, Chris Bertram, Daniel MacDonald, Frank Pasquale, Henry Farrell, Jacob Levy, Jason Brennan, Judith Shklar, Julian Sanchez, Matt Zwolinski, Mike Konczal, Peter Dorman, Roderick Long, Tyler Cowen
The Crooked Timber post on libertarianism and freedom that Chris Bertram, Alex Gourevitch, and I wrote has been heating up the interwebs. So much so that the three of us have now been dubbed “BRG.” We’ll be responding in due time, but for now here’s a roundup of all the links. Tyler Cowen: “I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece. How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the context of a boss wishing to search an employee?…If I ponder my workplace at GMU, I see many more employees who take advantage of the boss, perhaps by shirking, or by not teaching well, than I see […]
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, […]
Over at The American Conservative, political theorist Sam Goldman offers a thoughtful response to The Reactionary Mind. Among its many virtues, Goldman’s post manages to get my argument right. As we’ve seen, that can be something of a challenge for some reviewers. Goldman also agrees with me on some fundamentals. Conservatism, he says, is a reactionary ideology. It is a defense of hierarchy against emancipatory movements from below. It’s not a disposition or an attitude; it’s not a philosophy of liberty or even of limited government. (It supports the idea of limited government, Goldman says, but that’s a consequence, not a premise, of the theory.) It is first and foremost a coherent set of ideas about inequality that gets […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Alex Gourevitch, Antonin Scalia, Ayn Rand, Bentham, Carl Schmitt, Diderot, Edmund Burke, Foucault, Joan of Arc, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Mark Lilla, Nietzsche, punishment, Robert Nozick, Samuel Goldman, Sankar Muthu, Sarah Palin
I’m supposedly on vacation this week and next, yet I somehow find myself caught in the interwebs. Anyway, a few things of mine came out recently that you might have missed. Once upon a time I wrote a book on fear. I hadn’t been thinking much about that book in recent years, but Sasha Lilley, host of the fantabulous radio show “Against the Grain” out in the Bay Area, tracked me down for a one-hour interview about it. Turned out to be one of the most engaging interviews I’ve done, all thanks to Sasha’s excellent questions. It’s every author’s dream to be interviewed by someone like Sasha. You might want to check out some of her other interviews as well. […]
This morning, my Facebook page exploded. It all started when I posted this excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald about Obama and the debt-ceiling deal. Greenwald says that those who think Obama is weak and lacks backbone, or that he got suckered by the Republicans or is somehow being held hostage, are full of shit. With a few exceptions, Obama got what he wanted. Greenwald has a lot of evidence to back up his claims, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. So I put the question to my FB friends. Is Obama politically inept or does he want these massive cuts? And if he wants them, is it because of political calculation? Is he a true believer in neoliberal economics? A hostage […]
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Categories
Economies, The Left, The Right
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Tags Adolph Reed, Alex Gourevitch, Anne Norton, Doug Henwood, Jay Driskell, Jodi Dean, Joe Lowndes, Josh Cohen, Katha Pollitt, Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Obama, Rick Perlstein, Shane Taylor, Thad Russell, Tom Sugrue