articles
The American federal system and the various Supreme Courts that have defended its boundaries impose firm limitations on what system-wide reforms are possible. To many it seems impossible to make any meaningful improvement to American governance without amending the Constitution, something that requires a massive supermajority. But American federalism need
articles
Illiberalism is something of a fashion around the world today. Sometimes it goes explicitly by that name, such as with Viktor Orban’s self-declared “illiberal democracy.” In other instances, it has a more amorphous character, such as with American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher’s self-description as a post-liberal, which suggests
articles
For a long time, the animosities of the Cold War ensured that Marx was treated by friend and foe alike as the unrepentant foe of liberal democracy. For his most scathing liberal critics, Marxism constituted a regression to a distinctly pre-liberal way of thinking: collectivist rather than individualistic, committed to
articles
In part two of this series, here, I discuss the cases of Peter Boghossian and Beverly Gage, the final two academics discussed in the Twitter thread by the Economist on October 19, 2021. Part one discussed the controversy surrounding Kathleen Stock. During this discussion of academics silenced by a stifling
articles
“It was a bit random,” Robbie Shilliam tells me of his decision to become a political scientist. A professor at Johns Hopkins, Shilliam returned to school in his late twenties, planning to major in history. But he happened to see a poster about the UN, and suddenly thought he could
articles
This is part one of a two-part essay, discussing the controversy surrounding Kathleen Stock. Part two covers the case of Peter Boghossian. Each year when fall arrives, the leaves change color, the students return to campus, and the media rings one of its favorite old bells: academic freedom is under
articles
Civil libertarians assume that democracy relies on privacy. We cannot have autonomous citizens if privacy is not sacrosanct. Citizens require a protected space in which they can make up their minds, understand what they truly want and believe, free from outside influence or coercion. The journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped
articles
The poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and who, while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to
articles
The novel coronavirus pandemic has thrown a lot of major political and economic issues into sharp focus. One of the greatest challenges of the pandemic is the endeavor to get the entirety of the world vaccinated. . Despite the production of several successful vaccines, many countries are still struggling to get
articles
Two years ago, I published my book The Rediscovery of Tobacco, in which I made a case for taking a liberal approach to tobacco regulation with an emphasis on encouraging harm reduction. The timing coincided with a low point for the cause in the United States. A deadly outbreak of
articles
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only
articles
Some day 83-year-old Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court will die. It may be tomorrow. It may be in a decade. But it will happen. The dream which animates his professional life, however, is dying before our eyes. Justice Breyer dreams that Supreme Court Justices, while