Ideas
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Liberalism 5.0?
The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old
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Robert Kuttner on Albert Hirschman
Two of his finest books as economic philosopher are The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in 1991 when Hirschman was 76, and Rival Views of Market Society,published in 1987. In Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman goes back several hundred years and identifies three basic strands of conservative argument against social reform that keep recurring. He calls them Perversity, Futility and Jeopardy. These
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Scoundrels and Prigs
Nobody with any common sense believes the Warren Commission explanations for the Kennedy assassination. Nobody with any common sense believes that the reason we went into Iraq was to liberate Iraqis from Saddam's despotism. Nobody with any common sense believes that corporate education reform is about what's best for kids and not about a privatizing
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Quote of the Day: Jackson Lears
These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things
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Practical Wisdom vs Moralism
Nobody with any common sense believes the Warren Commission explanations for the Kennedy assassination. Nobody with any common sense believes that the reason we went into Iraq was to liberate Iraqis from Saddam's despotism. There are the official cover stories, and then there's what really happened. The problem lies in that while the cover stories
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Beast + Angel = Mensch
I hope you'll forgive my mania for diagrams lately. I'm just practicing for stuff I have to do for work. But a couple of years ago I put up a reflection piece on Steinbeck's East of Eden entitled "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves." About a year before I reread The Brothers Karamazov.