I’ve been reading Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” series at the rate of about one a year. This one is the sixth one. I guess I have another fourteen years to go before the thrilling conclusion! This one is concerned with politics in the early years of the Second Empire, when Napoleon’s dumbass...
Liberalism! The great empty hole in many radicals’ understanding of the political spectrum. In many respects, we treat it like a fact of life, like the weather, but also as something ephemeral, something that will just go away as soon as the real shit, the facts, the structural realities, assert...
Who does half-smart like a renegade Trotskyite? From what I can tell of his biography, James Burnham didn’t come to Trotskyism the way you think a political figure born in the first decade of the twentieth century might — after becoming a Communist and growing disgusted by Stalinism. No, he...
It’s honestly getting to be like Charlie Brown and the football, me and these right-wing intellectuals. I mean it when I say I expect more from these people. I didn’t expect the world from Hayek. I know how much a “Nobel” in economics is worth. The Road to Serfdom might...
Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for...
I read this out of a desire to get a more finely-grained picture of the recession of the Black Freedom Movement in the 1970s, and what came after. The more I think of it, the more I think that this defeat shaped everything that came after, in much the same...
George Mosse had the sort of career that the history profession doesn’t really allow for today. No matter how brilliant an individual historian might be, the way the profession is now structured does not allow for the kind of pivots Mosse pulled. Starting as a specialist in the Reformation, Mosse...
I’m not one hundred percent certain I know what a “thriller” is, and especially where the line is drawn between thrillers that depict crime and conventional crime fiction. As it happens, I know the author of this new thriller, so I asked him. He said “Fair Trade” and its predecessor...
Who does half-smart like a renegade Trotskyite? From what I can tell of his biography, James Burnham didn’t come to Trotskyism the way you think a political figure born in the first decade of the twentieth century might — after becoming a Communist and growing disgusted by Stalinism. No, he...
I remember when I was a little kid driving back and forth on errands with my parents that there was a lot more graffiti on the granite rocks along the highways than there seems to be now. Maybe penalties got stiffer or the culture as a whole just moved on...
