In the longer perspective of history, “multiculturalism” does not denote one moment in a local debate about American identity; it signifies the normal condition of humankind.
“The time is coming fast when the whole world will gather here.” Sathya Sai Baba
Is it true that there's nothing wrong with commodification that fair terms of social cooperation cannot cure?
Those committed to human rights at the global level should seek not to universalize the particular but rather to particularize the universal.
Thinking more deeply about how we can inhabit the public sphere with others.
Western conceptions of political secularism do not appear to have travelled well to other societies.
For the people to be sovereign, they need to form an entity and have a personality.
The root notion of the secular is a contrast not to religion but to eternity.
The unending high-decibel partisan warfare has led many Americans to look back with nostalgia to the old consensual, if muddled party systems.
The nature and purposes of the family, education, science, faith, business, the media, and government itself are all disputed at a fundamental level.
The Frankfurt School scholars were motivated by their admiration for and their critique of American social science.
Rare are intellectuals who both achieve a leading status in their field and relentlessly pursue knowledge that seeks to better the lives of ordinary people. Amartya Sen is one.
Cities are capable of uniting people, especially compared to the isolation found in that great object of nostalgic fantasy, the family farm.
Elster’s analysis is not another interpretative rereading or even a systematic dissection.
To what degree have we turned away from the public sphere and the obligations it lays upon us? Has this happened across all realms of life, or more in some realms and less in others?
How America has long viewed China exerts no small influence on which path Washington will follow in its material and cultural relations with the People’s Republic.
An Modern Language Association (MLA) study calling for curricular reform that addresses the need for increased language instruction and incorporates cultural and historical reflection.
The civic and practical goals of humanistic learning are necessarily related to the project of human autonomy, for there can be no autonomy apart from the provisos and attributes of self-knowledge.
In a world filled with mobile people—economic immigrants and political exiles in particular—an old humanist ideal might help us to give shape to our lives.
If the clever human life form were to project its power in the form of technologically advanced, artificial offspring, would Nietzsche offer a principled objection, and if so, what would be its basis?
The lack of focus on the self-made man in recent times is remarkable when one considers how intensely, and how long, it has functioned as a central trope of the American experience.
Among their many meanings, zombies have come to symbolize the force of globalization.
MLK’s American Dream always appealed to the value of equality.
The original definition of the American Dream was rooted in the democratic principles of both the Founding Fathers and nineteenth-century transcendentalists.
Training in objective, scholarly techniques would produce particular types of ethical subjects.
We have become a nation and a people that simply cannot abide risks.
Venues now available for many more competing voices, together with the multiplying perspectives of our times—hailed as liberating diversity—serve as dispensation to believe in anything, everything, or nothing.
Much like the old wars of religion that shaped Europe, the new wars are fought on the ground of the image.
The aim is to re-examine the period up to the 1923 establishment of the Irish Free State in order to get beyond traditional approaches to understanding revolutionary change in terms of class or ideology.
Taking the Socratic tradition to Palestine, Indonesia, New York’s Hasidic community, Brazil, and the Akwesasne Territory.
According to the realists, power is real, and all else is illusion.
How Chinese and Indian modernizers adopted and transformed modern Western notions of “spirituality” in order to criticize Western materialism.
Herbert Hoover’s US Food Administration did more than simply change Americans’ eating habits.
This was the nightmare of scientific progress: The truths of today would become the falsehoods—or at least the errors—of tomorrow.
Since 1970, temporary labor has become part of the everyday fabric of work across all segments of society, from the bottom to the top.
The role of frank speech in democratic culture is something worth considering, especially in light of the renewed ferment over political correctness.
Selfish dreams and the pleasures of individualism never go away.
Between Jefferson’s profession of faith in the virtues of republican simplicity and the style of his own life the contradiction could hardly be greater.
The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed.
Today the threat against liberalism is one of atrophy rather than violent death.
The first time I heard about Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, I was in the Attica Correctional Facility’s auditorium-chapel, attending a twelve-step meeting.
American politics thrives on exploiting confusion about real and perceived interests, whether those interests are tied to region or class, or both.
We have harbored an ideology expressive of all-inclusiveness—one referred to with deceptive informality as the “American way of life.”
The image moved me: Robert E. Lee, that icon of the Confederacy, whose likeness in bronze once towered several stories over New Orleans, was, after 132 years, gone, relegated (for now) to municipal storage.
Race is an absurdity. Yet as a means of defining and separating people, it retains its power.
Death is experienced as the total absence of meaning and, consequently, as something not to be understood but merely to be managed by drawing on medical ingenuity, pharmaceutical resources, and the (increasingly limited) forbearance of insurance companies.
Far from being the hope of cosmopolitan liberal democracy, Europe is experiencing a reemergence of the national identities and antagonisms that European values and the union they were meant to bring about were supposed to prevent.
If we succeed in growing meat, we will do more than change human subsistence strategies forever.
If there is one, overarching, redeemable quality to our moment, it is that ours is a time in which there can only be alternatives.
What emerges in the essays in this issue is actually not one secularism, but rather a range of secularisms—French, American, Indian, and other—that can be compared, evaluated, and improved upon.
While structures of power may change quickly, the building of a new social order is a longer and more precarious process.
How the American Dream—hope in the future—competes in these times with a pervasive pessimism.
Education in the service of reparation can heal and make whole both individual persons and all of us.
Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.
The Great American Novel? Why are we still banging on about that old thing?
If projects like E-Estonia mark a break with paper, they also represent the continuation of an administrative order made possible by the first paper revolution.
Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely.
We are living through a vertigo in political culture.
Both Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey endorse the same belief: that there are only winners and losers.
As a child, I thought that to be American was to believe in individuality, to support pluralism and equality, and to celebrate common holidays and eat common foods.
True crime is not quite about watching people die, but it does require an interest in the subject.
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
We are coming to see our world as increasingly discontinuous with the twentieth century.
Technology always holds the key to our salvation. The question is whether it also played a role in our original sin.
Genuine risks to public health are commingled with selective punishment and prejudice.
Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens.
Metrics do not and, in fact, cannot measure any intelligible conception of excellence at all
Péguy’s critical stance toward both broad coalitions made him neither a modernist nor an antimodernist, but something quite distinctive and instructive.
Modernity needs to be revealed to us, because it so successfully hides its true character, insulating itself against revision and correction.
For Faulkner, all of time existed as a moment, during which all could be changed: past, present, and future.
As the crisis wears on, I find myself wondering about the code of hospitality.
King’s arguments for freedom and justice were not only constitutional but also profoundly ethical.
Cosmopolitan liberalism has reshaped international institutions and practices.
Every society in history has limited speech in some way, yet some have remained freer than others.
It is fair to say that a new economic populism has been rendered impotent by cultural identity markers that shape voting patterns.
Once attacked for rejecting American exceptionalism, liberals now are in almost sole possession of it.
It is the irreducibly human dimensions of the radical life that are to be most cherished, and most feared.
The humanities may have suddenly mattered more than ever, but their support was also as fragile as it had been for decades.
A historian charts the evolution of her own center-right liberalism.
Far beyond the opera house and the concert hall, we are living in a world Wagner helped make.
A corollary of giving priority to invention is that imitation, once the foundation of creativity in architecture, is banished.
If John Brown failed at anything, he failed at saving us from ourselves.
We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
All modern forms of government presume an objectification of their citizens.
On locating the sublimity of art within the world and within history.
On the surface, “normal” might seem harmless, charmingly self-deprecating, maybe even endearing.
In studying Keynes, we watch radical ideas emerge filtered through a conservative sensibility.
As a history of art and thought in the Cold War era, The Free World is enthralling but unsatisfying, inevitably so.
One of the problems with crises is that they require too much time and attention.
Despite obvious differences and contradictions, “we” extended across class and race and stressed our common vulnerability.
Privilege today still comes with strings attached, but they are different now.
Over the last half century, there has been a transition from regular to irregular forms of cultural and political combat.
Because so many of our material and technological advances have been inherited, we take them for granted and demand more.
Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.
If not minimized as an aberration, mob violence is often justified as the legitimate expression of popular will.
Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.
Learning to read for the possibility or the certainty of laughter in the writings of Phillis Wheatley.
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
We used to want to assimilate into the mainstream. Now identity is front and center of what we want the world to know about us.
Augustine is crucial to determining the continuity and dissimilarity between the Romans and ourselves.
The liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subordination of the prepolitical child.
Virtual worlds have to be built by someone, and whoever builds them tells the story, writes the rules, composes the laws of physics, inscribes the boundaries of the possible, exerts an imperceptible influence on every thought, act, and outcome.
Putting the cult back into culture in the analysis of politics.
We can’t properly define the Enlightenment without making reference to happiness.
Understanding how the shambolic marriage of private and public coverage costs so much and delivers so little.
Olmsted’s landscape creations, especially his urban parks, are anything but relics of the past—they remain a vital part of the present.
The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness.
The eureka moment came when Popper perceived an affinity between Plato and fascism.
We see the peculiar features of neoauthoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations of the ancient tradition of divine kingship.
Carrying forward an evolving “we” of the democratic imagination.
Were it not for this creative, constructive impulse, the fire next time would have burned this country down many times over.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American.
Ehrenerklärung—public acknowledgment of false accusations—is not one of the options offered by our social media culture.
The bulk of The Dawn of Everything is devoted to the exceptions.
Perhaps we can tuck our disagreements about fundamental things away into our private lives, and let the public sphere be a place for adjudicating public things.
Viewing the Anthropocene as “a measure of human impact on the planet” allows us to tell only one story.
As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.
We are living through a time, however, when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.
Putin continues to play the Third Rome card that has brought him this far.
What prospects are there today for assessing American politics and history from an early Hofstadterian remove?
It is nearly impossible to be a white, American Christian without being an evangelical.
Fantasies of freeing ourselves of the baggage of the past run aground on the fact that humans are history-bearing animals.
Tocqueville was acutely conscious of living in a special moment in history
What, then, of democracy? I doubt it will survive—at least in the form we know.
The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term.
Dostoevsky is an author who takes risks, makes us both laugh and wince.
Does anyone still need advice on how not to think like a liberal?
The essential component of the liberal project might be the marketplace of ideas.
Bellah held the conviction that religious matters were not purely intellectual, much less merely academic.
Contending with a radical distrust of the created world.
I’ve been cursed to envision peace without ever experiencing it myself.
The resurrection of Carne-Ross’s book should give a little bit of hope
Mantel demands that we inhabit Cromwell’s story along with him.
The practice of exercising judgment requires that very common sense upon which a common world is based.
There is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time.
Amid the social turmoil of postwar Vienna, Othmar Spann’s class auditorium became a political battlefield.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
What if the work-week were fifteen hours a week? What if it were zero?
Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?
MacIntyre is philosophically an antiliberal, yet he provides no real alternative to liberal democracy.
Costică Brădățan’s argument in praise of failure rests on its ability to make us humble.
Tradition is stalked by the uncertain possibility of either faithfulness or infidelity, handing down or handing over.
Pentecostal Christianity remains oddly ignored and misunderstood.
Have we actually shifted the cost to those who take outsized risks?
We are witnessing the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.
When all the bad things America did are true, but none of the good things, something is amiss.
The verbomania that compelled ordinary Russians to devour thousand-page books appears increasingly remote, even mythological.
Turning the history of capitalism into a morality tale about good guys and bad guys is tempting.
Transparent has become one of the staples of our commercial discourse, a form of bureaucratic-corporate-therapeutic-speak.
Cities are palimpsests, their contemporary surfaces concealing, though not entirely effacing, their more remote past.
The US economy has succeeded with a most often nationalistic industrial policy in which government and industry work together.
Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.
Deneen’s politics of resentment primarily seeks to seize power from political enemies.
We have a book that seems aimed at thwarting efforts by decent humanist scholars to read Heidegger for any reason other than to condemn him.
The case for defending democracy abroad needs to be made anew.
At the climax of this progress into the inner depths of the mausoleum, a glimpse of Lenin himself suddenly appeared before us.
The young will be formed. The question is how.
The histories and literatures of antiquity can help us address some of our contemporary ethical deficit disorder.
This is why the stories we surround ourselves with and immerse ourselves in matter.
The Claphamites unquestionably launched a revolution in manners that shaped what we have come to know as Victorian morality.
Calling the idea of wilderness into question makes as much sense as asking whether the United States is a democracy.
Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.
The historian is our most modern of all scholars.
Moyn’s Cold War liberals might rightly be called “post-Holocaust liberals.”
Criticizing modern society because it falls short of normative ideals.
Considering how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.
We would do well to heed Kafka’s insight that Flaubert found in family life a kind of flourishing he himself failed to seek.
A world that has tossed out the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.
All “authentic” travel becomes a kind of secular pilgrimage.
The cases for travel are often sillier than the cases against, and I think it’s important to question them.
Revisiting Meredith v. Fair, we get the inside story of how critical race theory was developed in the years after Brown.
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was far less cordial than the film’s version.
The Freudian stain upon the literary imagination cannot be rinsed away. What, then, is the proper relation between psychoanalysis and literature?
How did we reach the age of the average, and what did it mean for American democracy?
Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark.
Christians will soon be a minority here, which was for most of this nation’s history unthinkable.
The case for reading Anthony Trollope begins by recognizing that he should be read because he is not of our time.
The necessity of a genuine exchange (not just fatuous “dialogue”) between Christians and Buddhists is as important as ever.
A new book finds Auden negotiating and renegotiating his relationship with the island on which he was born.
Were the signs and wonders of the early modern mystics divine or diabolical?
Returning to base, Davis and the other pilots heard their orders for the next day: Attack Kiska Harbor with everything they had regardless of the weather.
When El Greco heard the insultingly low valuation for his work, he launched a long and bitter court battle that quietly changed the perception of artists and art in Spain.
Do Trump’s supporters represent a new Know-Nothing movement?
As we remember the Challenger disaster, let’s not forget the engineers who tried to convince NASA not to send up the Space Shuttle on a cold morning thirty years ago.
Just as Obama became a symbol of progressive diversity, Trump has become a symbol of longing for a pre-Obama America.
There is a risk that we will compensate for the current sense of crisis and isolation with too much closeness.
Faulkner’s treatment of the past means much for the nature of our future.
The man who approached me on Chartres Street looked like he’d been tossed away.
Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
The events of January 6 went off script.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.
It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
To measure the Wealth of Nations, you had to inspect the shirts on people’s backs and the shoes on their feet.
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
The question I want to ask is simply this: Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played?
Once upon a time there was a publication that was doing all it could to tell a straight story and to listen to all sides.
Western liberal democracy is something worth aspiring to—an optimal destiny, not an imminent fate.
Postliberalism comes to embody a form of cultural criticism that ultimately does not believe in culture itself.
The secrets of Jerusalem are also lodged in Jacksonville, Joplin, and Joliet
It would be prudent to take the Chinese at their word––especially if it is bound up in the mystifying language of Carl Schmitt.
Nature knows what is best for itself better than we do.
Media executives have honed the craft of attracting national interest to flair-ups and clashes over school board proceedings, controversial small business practices, or more recently, police misconduct.
A conversation about the role of mythmaking in modern politics.
Ukraine has become the geography of vicious truths
Where is culture that gave humanity the symphonies and operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov?
There is no shortage of jeremiads about the American university.
The circumstances that led to veneration of the tsar and his family cannot be so easily reduced to a reactionary craving for Christian theocracy.
Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.
We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.
Viktor Orbán has become a canvas for the projection of hopes and fears about the future of democracy in the West.
The face we present to the world is the primary signifier we possess.
The genealogical approach has found surprising success in an unlikely genre.
The world circa 2000 was not Napoleonic.
It seems that neo-paganism is attractive in part because it offers an identity to those who have rejected postmodern, deracinated versions of Christianity.
Benedict shared with skeptics, postmodernists, and existentialists the suspicion of the modern trust in the benevolence of the human will.
What if Ann Rutledge had lived, and she and Lincoln had married?
An institution entering the last of its salad days while still running on the fumes of its preening self-importance.
What to become? Dissident or emigrant? Move abroad?
It took the roiling events of 1963 to open the ears and hearts of the American public to the Beatles.
The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.
The cultural legacy of Bruno Schulz.
Whether or not we find beauty in rhetoric, its eloquence depends on its power to persuade.
Plausible forecasts may help us avert the worst political calamities.
That I have no idea who Barbara Walters is doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that this is the Times.
Kundera chose to take the long view, reflecting on the relationship between the Jews and Europe, and, more broadly, on the Jews and that European, literary spirit to which he saw himself heir.
John von Neumann’s life ended the way many of those of his intellectual caliber end: in madness.
Memories are important because—and when—they are selective, and few.
I remember hearing the news and thinking that this was going to end badly for everyone. I had no idea just how bad things would get.
Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it.
Turkey presents an inversion of the usual presumptions about the current global struggle between liberalism and conservatism.
The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.
The historical novel strives to recreate not only the material dimensions of a past age but also its mindset.
Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective.
What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?
A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.
Dick Allen faced racist taunts and boos so numerous and unrelenting that he became the first player in baseball to wear his batting helmet out in the field.
Camus embodied an existence that was itself conflicted, caught between the vectors of history and lived experience.
As he roamed the edges of Lake Como, Romano Guardini foresaw the birth of a new world.
Scheherazade’s story is about stories themselves.
Shakespeare’s plays are full of suicides, some noble, others not very.
A renewed attention to the American literary tradition may be one of the most important imaginative and spiritual exercises for restoring our liberal way of life.