The Liberal Order

  • Hazony vs. Neo-Marxism

    I wouldn’t be giving Hazony this much air time if I didn’t think that it was important to understand what people on the Right like him are saying. He doesn’t fit into most of the cubbies that most Americans put someone who is MAGA friendly. As I said in a previous post, his team that

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  • Hazony’s Conservative Paradigm

    Is Hazony a Continuist or a Discontinuist? I thought before that he’s more of a Discontinuist, but maybe he needs another category, say, Re-Contintuist. There’s a part of me that thinks that Hazony would be better off if he called what’s he’s talking about something other than ‘Conservative’, perhaps a Whig. I don’t think the

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  • Continuists vs Discontinuists: Setting Up a Critical Look at Yoram Hazony

    Let me start by saying that I don’t think that Yoram Hazony is an ideological hack, even if he's associating with hacks that I think diminish his credibility with the non-hack community. Nevertheless, I think he's writing in good faith, and his ideas have to be taken seriously if for no other reason that they

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  • J.G. Herder’s Nationalism

    Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of their living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man–as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection

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  • Enlightenment v. Counter-Enlightenment: Hamann’s Particularism

    I’ve started Hazony’s most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and find it a better book than the one on nationalism. There is much in it I agree with because when push comes to shove, I am a small ‘c’ conservative. The problem for me is that in the condition of Postmodernity, there’s nothing left to

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  • Hazony v. Klein v. Me

    I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Yoram Hazony shortly after posting “Taking a Step Back" yesterday about the Good Society. This is a very interesting conversation, and I encourage you to listen to it. Hazony and Klein in their different ways would find my ‘Rescuing Aristotle’ argument weird, so I thought it might be

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  • Epstein’s Revenge

    And a project at the University of Maryland to track radicalization by QAnon found that 83 percent of the women who had committed crimes in the name of the conspiracy theory had children who had been abused by a romantic partner or family member. The QAnon movement doesn’t draw adherents online the way it once

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  • Christopher Lasch on Late Capitalism

    Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and (notwithstanding its initial misgivings about government) toward the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle—the cardinal principle of liberalism—that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and

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  • AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 2: Alienation, Boredom, and Technology

    So last week we talked about if—and it’s a big IF—AGI becomes something real, we will be looking at ourselves as if in a mirror and that these AGI machine/persons will be looking back at us. What will they see? The best of us, or the worst? So following John Vervaeke, I explored the implications

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  • Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World

    I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who admires Wendell Berry, but who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I

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