Contributions by:
Geoffrey Kurtz
If two books constitute a trend, then these two announce a shift toward a new political style on the American left: a style that is simultaneously lively and lonely, furious and vacuous. This style has precedents, but it is unique in the way it synthesizes existing themes, and it marks a break with the approaches…
Read Full Article...Benjamin Franklin recounts in his Autobiography that during his years as a printer’s apprentice he developed a “bookish inclination” and a fondness for “the arts of rhetoric and logic.” He writes: About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them.…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Lane Kenworthy. Social Democratic America. Oxford University Press, 2014. James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch, eds. What’s Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times. Duke University Press, 2011. What use might the European tradition of social democracy be to the American left? Lane Kenworthy’s answer…
Read Full Article...There is something way too flat about horizontalism. The political style associated with Occupy Wall Street has its defenders, including writers like Marianne Maeckelbergh and David Graeber, who find something lively and colorful in the horizontalist enthusiasm for long consensus-seeking meetings, rejection of “vertical” structures like representation or formal leadership, and conviction that a group’s…
Read Full Article...Poking around a used book store during my third year of college, I came across a copy of Michael Walzer’s 1980 essay collection Radical Principles. Walzer’s name was familiar: I had browsed Dissent, the journal he edited, in the college library, and my social theory professor had assigned an essay from that book, a critique…
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