Essays
Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1900, Erich Fromm completed a sociological dissertation with Alfred Weber at the University of Heidelberg in 1922 and then became acquainted with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (for Fromm’s biography, see Funk 2000, pp. 78-103; 2019; Hardeck 2005, pp. 30-40; Friedman 2013, pp. 28-62). In 1930, he completed his therapeutic training…
Read Full Article...Prologue: A Personal Statement on the War I am not neutral. As a citizen of Israel, I hurt and cry with my fellow Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs, victims of Hamas’ barbaric attack. Struggle for national liberation does not justify a crime against humanity and war crime. Glorifying the murder and abuse of innocent human…
Read Full Article...Justice Antonin Scalia passed away in 2016 but his legacy and the myths surrounding his jurisprudence still impact our politics and our courts despite his often controversial and bigoted views on most of the important civil rights issues of our day. For example, not long after his death, George Mason University received a substantial amount…
Read Full Article...Misogyny — contempt for women — is as old as patriarchy. However, it has taken new forms globally as women have increasingly gained prominence in fields like politics. Assertions of women’s power in domains that were traditionally the purview of men have given rise to new anxieties among some men, resulting in verbal, digital, and…
Read Full Article...Shortly after he was elected, Emmanuel Macron mused about “successful people” and “people who are nothing.” To his critics, these remarks—made before an audience of entrepreneurs at the inauguration of a “start-up” campus—distilled everything they disliked about France’s new president, a former investment banker who assumed the nation’s highest office at the age of thirty-nine.…
Read Full Article...Introduction: The Viral Black Dead My adolescence is marked by the viral Black dead as dead Black people dot chapters in my life and mar my psyche. Simultaneously, and perhaps equally correlated, my psyche is also transformed by the internet. These two have come together to greatly contextualize my understanding of myself and my position…
Read Full Article...What’s the matter with Tennessee? To an observer, it looks like the Volunteer State has something in the water making its public officials anti-comics. In the 1950s, Tennessee’s Senator Estes Kefauver chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency which investigated the comic industry. Kefauver, who had previously led a Senate investigation into organized crime, was…
Read Full Article...In 1906, Benedetto Croce, in his What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, inquired about philosophy in a new way. Instead of asking what is true and what false in the established idiom of philosophy, he posed the question in a way that was immediately historical: what was true might…
Read Full Article...Introduction I adopt the basic outline of this essay from Miguel Abensour’s distinction of “two interpretations of totalitarianism” in Lefort’s work. In a word, his first critique was directed at defining, denouncing, and overcoming the practices of Soviet totalitarianism (and its influence on the politics of western Communist parties and their intellectual camp-followers). Step-by-step, beginning…
Read Full Article...
Between The Issues
The (Sad) Fable of Humanity
Adorno’s humanism is radical both in its stubborn desire to retain the human coupled with its willingness to concede the end of the fable of humanity.[1] There was once a small tribe of primates… “Archaeology is demolishing a sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of…
Read Full Article...