In 1774, Thomas Paine arrived in America having left a string of odd jobs, a twice-failed career as an Excise officer, and the remnants of two marriages back in England. The pamphlets he penned in America served as the spark (Common Sense) and the fuel (the Crisis series) for a
Many liberal theorists have an implied distaste for politics. One prominent type of this liberal anti-politics presupposes a harmony of interests. This is visible, for example, in the following passage in Rawls: “Assume further that expectations are close-knit: that is, it is impossible to raise or lower the expectation of
Sex and Gender. These are the terms at the heart of the latest right-wing moral panic, used to explain why trans people are who they say they are—or why they aren’t. In common parlance, ‘sex’ usually refers to the physical attributes of an individual’s body, while ‘gender’
The entrance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the Democratic Primary and announcement that Cornel West will be seeking the nomination for the Green Party in 2024 have both sought to turn what is usually the automatic re-nomination of a presidential incumbent into a heated contest between rival factions like
Those who live in the West have the tendency to view history, and their societies in particular, as getting more progressive with time. It certainly does make sense in many instances. Same-sex relations were criminal in the past, now they are completely legal, with Western countries increasingly allowing gay marriage.
Thomas Nipperdey began his magisterial history of modern Germany proclaiming, “in the beginning there was Napoleon.” In the popular conception of G. W. F. Hegel as a political philosopher, Nipperdey’s notion can be inverted: “In the end, there was Napoleon.” So many accounts of Hegel’s political philosophy begin
There’s a new program of anti–trans and increasingly anti-queer simpliciter politics sweeping across America. After they lost on gay marriage in courts of public opinion and Supreme, Republicans went looking for a new bogeyman. They found it in trans people. Their new hate campaign is focused on the
This essay is cross-published on Substack for the author’s paying subscribers. In the Smithian version of its origin story, liberalism takes the modern (Mercantile) state for granted and understands itself from the start as a reformist and ameliorative project of the many violent tendencies in it. The key conceptual-political
Conservatives recently had an apoplectic fit over Bud Light’s product placement making some sort of partnership with transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. There have also been conservative freakouts at Mulvaney partnering with Nike, a man screaming obscenities over a Lego pride set, and around one stupidly outraged viral tweet
For friends of liberalism, to be liberal-minded means possessing a broad curiosity about all things unbridled by prejudice or contempt. As the Roman playwright Terence once put it: “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” For critics of liberalism this self-ascribed broadmindedness is either or
Since 1980, the average price of tuition has risen over 1000%, far outpacing the rate of inflation. This presents a challenge for teenagers who are graduating high school and planning their next steps. While college has historically led to an outsized increase in wages over time, students are now re-evaluating
I am a child of the 90s. America had emerged from the long twilight struggle of the Cold War victorious, materially and ideologically: liberal capitalism was, it was said, the end of history. As such it was hoped that free trade and free exchange would slowly see the People’s