Essays

Introduction During the run up to the 2010 mid-term elections in the United States, the NAACP published a controversial report on “Tea Party Nationalism,” documenting what was perceived as racist elements within the emergent conservative grassroots organization.[1]  The NAACP’s report became a lightning rod against which supporters and critics of the Tea Party vented their…

Preliminary Observations. While the meaning and possibility in modern times of democracy has been a central concern for Weber and Habermas, and both thinkers’ political theories have been the subject of several inquiries, there is a lack of comparative investigations on this particular subject. This may be surprising as Habermas is himself a Weberian scholar,…

When one decides to take the trip into the jungle city of Iquitos – the largest city in the world inaccessible by road – there are two options.  The first is a flight by one of Peru’s many domestic airlines, 5 to 10 times per day, with a flight time of approximately 2 hours.  This…

“If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in darkness, cold, and silence… Life knows us not and we do not know life—we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after…

“I become holy by initiation. The Lord [Jesus] reveals the Mysteries. He marks the worshipper with His seal …” Clement of Alexandria, from The Protreptikos (Exhortation to the Greeks), ca 190 AD. Here in America, Darwin is on the ropes again. After winning round after round since the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925, he’s facing…

The Right’s dream of demolishing the modern welfare state is as old as the New Deal itself. [1] A “Conservative Manifesto,” drafted in 1937 by a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats in the Senate called for a balanced budget, tax reductions, the curtailing of union power, and an end to “unnecessary” government competition with private…

As a “public intellectual,” Christopher Hitchens’ eminently readable writings helped cast people and events from a different perspective – mostly, it must be said, one based on reality rather than received “wisdom” and prejudice. While his work was certainly refreshing in this age of competing groupthink and duckspeak across the political spectrum, unlike his hero…

Human rights and political realism offer two very different ways of approaching international affairs.[1] Here is not the place for an extended philosophical disquisition on the relationship between them, let alone their connection with the history of American foreign policy. Human rights and political realism have their unique traditions that are usually seen as starkly opposed…

1. Immortality For Badiou, our mystical participation in the heroic Event is our triumph over mortality. Badiou’s Ethics includes a sustained polemic against a contemporary ideology of human rights that juxtaposes the “passive, pathetic or reflexive subject,” the mere suffering victim, to the “active, determining subject of judgment” that fights on behalf of the hapless…