When you’re a kid, authority isn’t the stuff of political theory, it’s a feature of the landscape. A natural characteristic. Parents and teachers and some other adults have it. They also seem to know everything there is to know, as if adulthood means getting let in on
Against a liberalism of pre-political foundations and historical destiny, Jacob Levy has been working hard to recover a vision of liberalism that appreciates the complex patchwork of social life, is historically contingent, and accepts the existence of irresolvable tensions. Though he has been influenced by Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of
F. A. Hayek was, to use Peter Boettke’s phrase, a “lifelong learner,” changing his position on a variety of topics throughout his long career as he tested the boundaries of his framework and sought to iron out its contradictions. The Hayek I wish to present here is therefore just
My fellow editor Paul Crider has critiqued and expanded upon a summary of the history of capitalism and what we mean when we use the term “capitalism” today, which appeared in the pages of Teen Vogue. While Paul’s piece is exemplary for its use of system-level analysis, I think
It is impossible to change people’s minds. Every new fact is taken as confirmation of pre-existing bias, every criticism of our in-group taken as a sign of the critic’s bad faith. We are more sure than ever that we are more sure than ever, we are of one
Estimates of the headcount for the Tea Party protests of 2009 vary, but no one can deny their long-term significance. While the protests themselves were only organized in the loosest sense, their impact on our politics and culture can be seen mostly in the response of formal organizations to the
America is a nation overflowing with love for our sports, if not always for our teams. There is a special place in our hearts for those most American of sports: football, baseball, and basketball. What could be more American than the spirited and divisive team rivalries, overcome only by a
The power of the written word is hard to overestimate. The printing press is usually blamed for the European wars of religion, with the resulting multiplication in ways of life ranging from Calvin’s Geneva to Puritan Massachusetts and the Dutch experiment in toleration. Later, the Republic of Letters would
One common approach for discrediting an opponent’s ideas without engaging with them on their merits is to attempt to place them in an unsavory history. Critics since Nietzsche and his On the Genealogy of Morality have been drawn to the power of this method. Recent projects in this spirit
Drawing primarily on Karl Popper, Oliver Traldi argues that hot take culture diminishes our desire or ability to quietly reflect on events. In addition, they subsume complex human events into simplistic and pre-determined theories. Against this, I will draw on Charles Taylor’s philosophy of language and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s
It has been almost eight months since Donald Trump took office. If the rest of his term looks like these first months, we may have dodged a bullet. Rather than the authoritarian we feared, we would end up with a buffoon who almost reflexively self-destructs. In spite of having both
“Hot take” is among the most withering of insults available to describe a piece of opinion writing these days. We are told that the proclivity to author such “takes” is a symptom of frivolity or cynicism. Beyond their not-so-hot quality, the quantity of “takes” is also supposed to be a