Essays

“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…

This paper will try to analyze a curious intellectual phenomena: a group of Jewish-German authors that developed, during the Weimar Republic, a radical anti-capitalist and anti-protestant argument, directly inspired by Weber’s Protestant Ethic. They did not hesitate to denounce capitalism as a sort of diabolic religion (Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin), or as the product of…

Surrealism had the longest tenure of any avant-garde movement, and its members were arguably the most “political.”1 It emerged on the heels of World War I, when André Breton founded his first journal, Literature, and brought together a number of figures who had mostly come to know each other during the war years. They included…

Few questions of theory are as salient today as that of the relation between capitalism and social rights. Amid the rise of capitalism, during what became known as “the age of democratic revolution,” progressives placed primary upon constricting the arbitrary exercise of authority by defenders of “throne and altar” and the traditions associated with the…

The “audience question” within rhetoric and composition needs to be turned on it its head, re-examined in light of new and compelling evidence, and subjected to a new analysis—an analysis which might have far-reaching political implications for our very understandings of whether or not satisfying an audience’s psychological needs should necessarily be the foremost factor…