Political Philosophy
Story Stream
The New Control Society February 24, 2025
Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even break...
The Meaning of Political Philosophy August 26, 2024
Klingenstein: What is political philosophy?Ellmers: It has two parts: the philosophic study of politics, and the political study of philosophy. The second one means that the human things are always the gateway to thinking about abstract ideas like tr...
Does It Take a Government to Censor? August 19, 2024
Certain sorts of events, none of which directly involve government action, are what we often think of when contemporary notions of freedom of speech, political correctness, and cancel culture come up in conversation: A speaker is disinvited from a co...
The Concept of the Political Belief July 08, 2024
Some books are most profitably read backward, or at least with their endings in mind. Once you’ve read an Agatha Christie novel, you derive a new enjoyment from finding and parsing the clues and hints she leaves throughout the book that point to the ...
In Search of an American Aristocracy July 02, 2024
When in 1813, early in the epistolary reconciliation of their twilight years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson shared their mutual preoccupation with the idea of a natural aristocracy, they could not set aside biography entirely. As Jefferson conclude...
The Virtues of Settler Colonialism May 24, 2024
A few years ago, law professor Gail Heriot pointed out a problem that some on the Right have been noticing for quite some time: “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” She argued that at its core, dispara...
Arendt Chic May 09, 2024
Hannah Arendt was a titan of political theory, an original thinker who put modern politics in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition and helped the 20th century understand itself. She was also, as University of Birmingham professor Lyndsey...
Liberalism Hijacked May 02, 2024
Liberalism has been getting a bad press. Even self-described liberal Francis Fukuyama endorses “the substantive conservative critique of liberalism - that liberal societies provide no common moral horizon around which community can be built,” proof o...
American Aristocracy April 25, 2024
The meta topic sitting beneath the surface of Daniel Miller’s sprawling essay on revolution is a study on the nature of aristocracy and its role in an ordered self-governed society.In the modern context, “aristocracy” is believed to be those possessi...
Bronze Age Menace April 22, 2024
At 15, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in a used-book store. Nietzsche glared in angry profile on the cover. His gaze drilled into the surface of reality, and a walrus-like mustache covered his mouth. The publisher’s blurb on ...
Leo Strauss and the Promise of Political Philosophy April 17, 2024
The year 2023 witnessed two significant anniversaries related to the life and thought of the political philosopher Leo Strauss: the 70th anniversary of the publication of his best-known and most synoptic work, Natural Right and History (1953), and th...
When All Is Cultural, Nothing Is Natural March 27, 2024
Thinkers from nearly every intellectual tradition agree that we live in an age when ideology dominates public life. Who or what we can accurately label as ideological is as essentially contested as the rest of politics. Most of us certainly don’t vie...
The Battles Over Beginnings March 11, 2024
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: ‘Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.’ With apologies to Nietzsche, the ‘questions of origins and beginnings’ are in fact more controversial and hotly debated. The ongoing Israel-Ga...
"American Spirit or Great Awokening?" by Bruce D. Abramson March 04, 2024
America is suffering from a deep spiritual crisis. The national polarization that so many miscast as political is really a conflict between two spiritual solutions pointing in drastically different directions. One is Wokeism, a new religion that spea...
Living in Arendt’s World February 26, 2024
Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently publishe...
Will Harvard Get Another Prof Like Harvey Mansfield? February 23, 2024
Over the six decades that Harvey C. Mansfield taught political philosophy at Harvard, he came to seem like the last of his kind. ...
