
The Cosmic Tragedy of Modernity and the Virtues of Liberalism
Safeguarding personal and social autonomy from the ever changing conditions of modernity
Safeguarding personal and social autonomy from the ever changing conditions of modernity
What if the population of Ireland today was seventy million?
Sortition can make the university system more egalitarian.
Samuel Moyn argues that Cold War liberals abandoned liberalism's revolutionary promise.
Western liberals have not extended the same solidarity to the Palestinian people that they did to the Ukrainians.
Joe Biden started his political career blasé about the Vietnam War. He is ending it blasé about Palestinian genocide. In 1972, while campaigning for his first term in the senate, Joe Biden couldn’t muster up the moral outrage needed to condemn the Vietnam War. Despite the twenty-fold increase in
Identity politics is vital for liberalism precisely because oppression is never neutral, color-blind, or universal.
Liberal Currents offers discussion, elucidation, and defense of liberal principles and institutions.
From Russia to China, from Azerbaijan to Israel and Palestine, fascist political projects are gaining strength.
To be a liberal is to be for the party of humanity: For human rights and human dignity for all persons regardless of nation, color, or creed. Last Saturday, Hamas perpetrated a horrific attack on civilians, in violation of these universal rights. Hamas should immediately free its hostages without condition.
Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” This question, asked by English writer Samuel Johnson in 1775, still touches a nerve today. Americans on the one hand carry the pride of one of the oldest sets of representative institutions in the
It is not easy to leave your home and move elsewhere. It’s harder when you are moving to another country, leaving behind your old home and neighborhood, and harder still when you are fleeing persecution and violence because of who you are. These difficulties are only compounded when the
In the context of castigating authors’ servile dedications to superiors, and dedicating his own (1757) Four Dissertations to his cousin the playwright John Home, David Hume offers ‘liberty of thought’ as an example of ‘true liberty.’ When I first read it, I thought he meant to discuss what we now
In 2016, the Washington Post ran a remarkable piece of journalism. Derek Black, a pedigreed, up-and-coming white nationalist leader had experienced an ideological transformation while a student at the New College of Florida. After he was outed by another student as a white nationalist, the school reviewed Black’s academic
In his bestselling new book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything, Christopher F. Rufo describes a pivotal moment in the history of critical theory: the 1969 break between two of its leading thinkers: Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. The men were early members, and for decades,
The latest person touted as national conservatism’s trendy intellectual is more than a little sympathetic to fascism—quelle surprise. Former DeSantis staffer Nate Hochman has joined Pedro Gonzalez as another DeSantis orbiter unable to stay off the third rail of modern conservative politics: being an (open) fascist. Gonzalez, an
…We may reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if
In 1774, Thomas Paine arrived in America having left a string of odd jobs, a twice-failed career as an Excise officer, and the remnants of two marriages back in England. The pamphlets he penned in America served as the spark (Common Sense) and the fuel (the Crisis series) for a
Many liberal theorists have an implied distaste for politics. One prominent type of this liberal anti-politics presupposes a harmony of interests. This is visible, for example, in the following passage in Rawls: “Assume further that expectations are close-knit: that is, it is impossible to raise or lower the expectation of