Essays
The purpose of law is to produce different results in the real world than would obtain in the absence of law. The purpose of criminalizing murder, for example, is to deter murder. If absent law people did not commit murder, due (say) to a universally shared moral commitment to everyone’s inalienable right to life, then…
Read Full Article... about White Supremacy, White Insecurity, and the Struggle for a More Egalitarian Social OrderI was a 16-year-old virgin when Jeffrey Epstein first raped me. I was naive and gullible. He was a pillar of finance and a giant in the world that I was an insignificant part of. I was so impressed that this great man would even talk to me…[1] To demystify Jeffrey Epstein, he must first…
Read Full Article... about Demystifying EpsteinUS President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about white Afrikaners draws on older patterns in American conservative politics, but it also marks an important shift. In earlier periods, solidarity by American conservatives with white South Africa rested on two linked ideas: a racial logic that cast whites as uniquely capable of governing over blacks, and an anti-communist…
Read Full Article... about Donald Trump and the Afrikaners“Me! Me! Me! Me! Don’t you ever get tired of thinking about your dull, greedy, small self?” — Dave to his brother Frank, from Vincente Minnelli’s film Some Came Running, 1959 1 A Short History of America, in the Statements of Five Presidents 1941: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing Congress: “…we look forward to a world…
Read Full Article... about Education, ReducedThe German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died on Saturday March 14th, 2026, aged 96. With his passing the public lose a philosopher, social theorist and public intellectual who has arguably done more than any other to explain, protect and promote the ideals and actuality of universal morality, liberal democracy, and democratically legitimate law. He was honored…
Read Full Article... about Habermas’s Legacy: The Philosophy of the Public SphereJürgen Habermas, one of the most influential philosophers of the last half-century, died last March at the age of 96. Despite his many important contributions to philosophy and social theory, he will perhaps most be remembered as a theorist of the public sphere. This was the topic of his first book, The Structural Transformation of…
Read Full Article... about Habermas’s Case for Democracy: the Public Sphere, Communicative Reason and the ‘Co-originality’ of Public and Private Autonomy“it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. […] one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love.” – Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy” Early Frankfurt…
Read Full Article... about Jürgen Habermas’s Image of the United States as a Model of “Modernity”: From Attachment to MelancholyI won’t be a dictator, “except on day one” – Donald Trump Axios (Basu & Davis, 2024) holds that President Trump promised to make 59 major policy changes the first day of his second term. The president’s declaration about limiting dictatorship to “day one” may lack veracity, but he has followed through on many of…
Read Full Article... about Implementing Project 2025: Day One and AfterIdeology is the most devilish variation of the lie – Hannah Arendt To speak of reaction is to counterpose it with progress. This terminology is not helpful. Stable issues of political life, such as legitimate authority, justice, transparent government, clarity on the means vs ends problem; along with issues of character such as fair-mindedness; respect…
Read Full Article... about Domination and Chaos: India’s Radical ConservatismThe contentious United Nations COP30 climate summit, held in November 2025 in Belém, Brazil, provides a useful reference point for making sense of the host country’s global agenda, as well as president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s third term in office and broader political project. Analyzing the linkages between the domestic and international aspects of…
Read Full Article... about Lula, Brazil, and a World in Flux
Latest Issue
2026: Vol. 25, No. 2
Latest Issue
2026: Vol. 25, No. 2
Between The Issues
