Category: politics

• February 12, 2011

  Walter Russell Mead on The Art of War as a manual for living in the modern world

  In his American Interest blog entitled “Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind,” Walter Russell Mead provides an eloquent, prescient exposition of Sun Tzu’s seminal work. Near the end of the essay he writes, “The Art of War is a handbook for living in an uncertain and dangerous world.” Throughout, he stresses–rightly, in my opinion–that…
• February 5, 2011

  On Bloomberg’s self-love and our narrow political imagination

  Update: A revised version of the essay is available here at Counterpunch. * * * Mayor Bloomberg is featured on the cover of the Feb. 7 New Yorker. Entitled “Bloom in Love,” the watercolor depicts our vain mayor smitten with his image. It is Valentine’s Day (or perhaps, it’s implied, every day for Bloomberg is…
• February 3, 2011

  Rita Koganzen heaps scorn on “emerging adulthood”

  In her polemic entitled “Slacking as Self-Discovery,” Rita Koganzen calls into question the view that “emerging adulthood” is a vital exploratory period in the life of twenty somethings. I think Koganzen’s article is smart, albeit one-sided. Smart: Like Michael Sandel, she argues that the conception of the “voluntarist self”–a self unencumbered by external influences and concerned…
• January 31, 2011

  Michael Lind on the 5 worldviews dominating American politics

  In “The Five Worldviews That Define American Politics,” Michael Lind constructs a powerful conceptual framework in order to explain the trenchant, abiding political disagreements among Americans. The reason that you and I can’t see eye-to-eye is not that we disagree about the facts on the ground; it is that we begin from entirely different first…
• January 30, 2011

  Notes toward an understanding of anarchism

  Update: Is there an anarchist revolution going on in Egypt? * * * According to the political philosopher Raymond Geuss, there are two kinds of anarchism. Philosophical anarchism involves rejecting the moral authority of the state while believing that the state is a “necessary evil.” Political anarchism goes further, arguing from the premise that the state’s…