Steven Pinker recently penned a piece reflecting on all the noise surrounding his recent book, Enlightenment Now. He says, You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they
What is America? The question has been asked endlessly. And I’m not going to answer it here. Asking “what is America?” is like asking “what is liberalism” or “what is an apple?” On first glance, it seems simple. But then you start asking questions and thinking about all the
Relatively free and open markets have always accompanied liberal societies, and they have been most thoroughly suppressed by some of the most illiberal regimes. But the historical connection between liberal democracies and markets seems stronger than the theoretical connection, at least at first glance. Political liberalism builds in part upon
“Care always expresses an action or a disposition, a reaching out to something…what it means to be a citizen in a democracy is to care for citizens and to care for democracy itself,” argues Joan Tronto, a prominent care theorist.[1] By living in a democracy, we reach out
A common complaint in our era of global populism is that certain politicians are making a mockery of our institutions. Don’t they realize politics is more than just a game? They should take politics seriously and stop playing. Any observer of politics can sympathize with this complaint. But what
* The following undated sermon was left by Dr. Johnson to be published by the Rev. John Taylor. The Johnson scholar Donald Greene noted of this sermon and another accompanying sermon: “That they were written by the Tory Johnson to be delivered by the Whig Taylor from his pulpit demonstrates to
When you’re a kid, authority isn’t the stuff of political theory, it’s a feature of the landscape. A natural characteristic. Parents and teachers and some other adults have it. They also seem to know everything there is to know, as if adulthood means getting let in on
“One of the best jokes of democracy [was that] it provided its mortal enemies itself the means through which it was annihilated,” claimed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, articulating what we now call the paradox of democracy.[1] It was precisely this concern that drove political scientist Karl Loewenstein to coin
The American eugenics movement aimed to improve our national destiny by gatekeeping the gene pool out of which would be forged future great Americans. Eugenics’ proponents successfully erected pseudo-intellectual justifications and legal barriers that prevented people with traits they deemed undesirable from having children. They implemented immigration restrictions for disabled
With a breezy preface that approvingly references recent political developments in America and Britain, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism offers a defense of the nation state. Now, there is a case to be made; indeed, there is a liberal and cosmopolitan case to be made. The nation state
Against a liberalism of pre-political foundations and historical destiny, Jacob Levy has been working hard to recover a vision of liberalism that appreciates the complex patchwork of social life, is historically contingent, and accepts the existence of irresolvable tensions. Though he has been influenced by Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of
Slate chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie set off a heated online debate with a series of tweets[1] claiming “the concept of race was birthed by the Enlightenment,”[2] which then sparked a full-length article fleshing out his position.[3] His key claim is that colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and racism