Why the Enlightenment Matters
Iona Italia talks to lawyer and historian Adam Wakeling about the enduring importance of Enlightenment values and how to defend them today.
Iona Italia, Adam Wakeling
· 29 min read
Political Philosophy
A collection of 29 posts
Power Beyond Realpolitik
In geopolitics, moral culture shapes whether influence is experienced as leadership or domination, cooperation or coercion.
Scott Atran
· 8 min read
MAGA’s Weak Gods
Rusty Reno and the American postliberal revolt against the postwar consensus.
Matt Johnson
· 23 min read
Against Utopianism
The world is not waiting for our utopian visions to make sense of it and order it. Liberal democracy works when it assumes as much.
Dustin N. Sharp
· 8 min read
After Liberalism
The core principles of liberalism—freedom and equality—are insufficient for the good life. We need to supplement them with a more robust, metaphysically thicker understanding of human nature and the good.
Alan S. Rome
· 17 min read
Trump and the Necessity of Democratic Struggle
Liberal pluralism remains the best way to secure as much freedom as possible for a nation with 340 million diverse inhabitants, and this point should become clearer as clashing illiberal forces compete to impose their own versions of law and morality on everyone else.
Matt Johnson
· 15 min read
Talking Philosophy with Bob Goodin
The case against retweets, what’s wrong with the War on Terror, equality in light of difference, and more.
Holly Lawford-Smith
· 8 min read
Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’
Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning.
Matt Johnson
· 25 min read
Raymond Aron and the Art of Politics
For Aron, politics is the art of living together, the art of the possible, and requires an “acute awareness” of the limitations of our power to influence reality.
Alan S. Rome
· 13 min read
Meritocracy and Its Discontents
Meritocratic reformers claimed that they wanted equality. But instead they sought to replace the aristocracy of birth with an aristocracy of ability.
J. Michael Yarros
· 13 min read
The Seven Laws of Pessimism
If life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing?
Maarten Boudry
· 16 min read
The Rise of Post-Liberal Man
This kind of regime-analysis disappeared with the rise of classical liberalism, which supplied an altogether different language of politics.
Mathis Bitton
· 8 min read
Dumbing Fascism Down, Then And Now
Stalin publicly misused the term so often, in fact, that Princeton history professor Stephen Kotkin has suggested he lacked a fundamental understanding of the word’s meaning.
Bradford H.B.
· 8 min read
COVID-19 Is Not the End of 'The End of History'
As COVID-19 suffocates the global economy, borders remain closed, and tensions mount between EU countries, the US and China, etc., Fukuyama’s critics are taking the opportunity to dismiss the “The End of History?” while ignoring its basic premises.
Matt Johnson
· 13 min read
My Former Life as a Radical
They believe in the perfectibility of man in their own image: a combination of unscrupulous optimism and narcissism.
Gerfried Ambrosch
· 11 min read