“It was a bit random,” Robbie Shilliam tells me of his decision to become a political scientist. A professor at Johns Hopkins, Shilliam returned to school in his late twenties, planning to major in history. But he happened to see a poster about the UN, and suddenly thought he could
This is part one of a two-part essay, discussing the controversy surrounding Kathleen Stock. Part two covers the case of Peter Boghossian. Each year when fall arrives, the leaves change color, the students return to campus, and the media rings one of its favorite old bells: academic freedom is under
Civil libertarians assume that democracy relies on privacy. We cannot have autonomous citizens if privacy is not sacrosanct. Citizens require a protected space in which they can make up their minds, understand what they truly want and believe, free from outside influence or coercion. The journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped
The poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and who, while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to
The novel coronavirus pandemic has thrown a lot of major political and economic issues into sharp focus. One of the greatest challenges of the pandemic is the endeavor to get the entirety of the world vaccinated. . Despite the production of several successful vaccines, many countries are still struggling to get
Two years ago, I published my book The Rediscovery of Tobacco, in which I made a case for taking a liberal approach to tobacco regulation with an emphasis on encouraging harm reduction. The timing coincided with a low point for the cause in the United States. A deadly outbreak of
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only
Some day 83-year-old Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court will die. It may be tomorrow. It may be in a decade. But it will happen. The dream which animates his professional life, however, is dying before our eyes. Justice Breyer dreams that Supreme Court Justices, while
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and
All social relations create vulnerabilities and dependencies that are subject to abuse. This is a fundamental fact about the social nature of humanity, a baseline from which all specific arrangements need to be judged. Most of our public debates,however, take the posture of implying that the mere occurrence of
One of the themes of Greg Sargent’s 2018 book, An Uncivil War, is that our politics is caught in a “downward, self-reinforcing spiral.” Unsurprisingly, the two parties view each other as the primary reason we’re caught in a dysfunctional tailspin. From the Republican point of view, “Democrats regularly
I want to see The Economist do well. With a few gap years, I’ve subscribed to The Economist for well over a decade—ever since I could enjoy the still-expensive student price in grad school. I place a high value on having an old, venerable institution with deep journalistic