Two Liberalisms of Fear

John Gray

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 New Political Economy and Its Culture

Richard Sennett

I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where people are in relation to each other.

Making Sense of Cosmopolitanism

Joshua J. Yates

Cosmopolitanism commits you to a global conversation, or a set of global conversations, about the things that matter.

The Meaning of Secularism

Charles Taylor

For the people to be sovereign, they need to form an entity and have a personality.

Why a Hyper-Polarized Party System Weakens America’s Democracy

William Galston

The unending high-decibel partisan warfare has led many Americans to look back with nostalgia to the old consensual, if muddled party systems.

Polarization and the Crisis of Legitimacy

James Davison Hunter

The nature and purposes of the family, education, science, faith, business, the media, and government itself are all disputed at a fundamental level.

The Myth of a Non-Polarized America

Carl Desportes Bowman

American differences are neither random nor ad hoc.

Non-Public Opinion

Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin

The Frankfurt School scholars were motivated by their admiration for and their critique of American social science.

An Interview with Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell

Richard Madsen

When people’s personal friendship networks become more religiously diverse, that seems to make them more accepting of other faiths, but it also turns out that if you add friends within a congregation, more church friends, you actually become more civically engaged.

Meaningful Work and Politics

Russell Muirhead

The relationship of money to the romantic ideal of meaningful work is profound and problematic.

Problems and Promises of the Self-Made Myth

Jim Cullen

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.

The American Dream

Lawrence R. Samuel

The original definition of the American Dream was rooted in the democratic principles of both the Founding Fathers and nineteenth-century transcendentalists.

One Nation Under Fear

Mark Edmundson

We have become a nation and a people that simply cannot abide risks.

Re-enchantment and Iconoclasm in an Age of Images

Anna Marazuela Kim

Much like the old wars of religion that shaped Europe, the new wars are fought on the ground of the image.

Asian Re-enchantment

Benjamin Schewel

How Chinese and Indian modernizers adopted and transformed modern Western notions of “spirituality” in order to criticize Western materialism.

On Frank Speech

Matthew B. Crawford

The role of frank speech in democratic culture is something worth considering, especially in light of the renewed ferment over political correctness.

A Distant Elite

Wilfred M. McClay

Rule by merit is, after all, no respecter of persons.

Branded!

Jay Tolson

We’re talking about something with far more power than a marketing tool.

The Jefferson Brand

Timothy C. Jacobson

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.

Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project

James Davison Hunter

The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. 

Not Melting into Air

John M. Owen IV

Today the threat against liberalism is one of atrophy rather than violent death.

Belonging to Europe

Jonathan D. Teubner

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.

Return of the Repressed

Jonathan D. Teubner

The post-Auschwitz consensus that made overt anti-Semitism strictly forbidden is rapidly fading.

There Are Only Alternatives

Ajay Singh Chaudhary

If there is one, overarching, redeemable quality to our moment, it is that ours is a time in which there can only be alternatives.

Friedman’s Demon

Phil Christman

Can neoliberalism’s conceptual structure be traced directly to medieval Western Christianity?

The Phantom Economy

Joseph E. Davis

The highly abstract and immaterial phantom economy is inextricable from the “real economy.”

The Roots of the Arab Spring

Joseph E. Davis

While structures of power may change quickly, the building of a new social order is a longer and more precarious process.

Truth and Consequences

Sophia Rosenfeld

Untruth—information that could be described as unverified, misleading, or an out-and-out lie—has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect.

Liberalism Strikes Back

Rita Koganzon

Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.

Does Philanthropy Subvert Democracy?

Nick Burns

Is modern-day philanthropy a disease in the democratic body politic?

The Great Wall of Trump

Nancy Isenberg

What historical category truly contains a Trump? 

You Are What You (Don’t) Eat

James McWilliams

The personal diet has become not only a cult; it has become a political statement.

The King’s Two Bodies and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity

Isaac Ariail Reed

We are living through a vertigo in political culture.

You Know This

John Thomason

A neglected hard-boiled novelist wrote on the greatest conspiracy of all.

Richard Nixon, Modular Man

Phil Christman

What to make of Richard Nixon?

The Odd Couple

Natasha Zaretsky

Both Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey endorse the same belief: that there are only winners and losers.

Unbecoming American

Johann N. Neem

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.

The Means of Production

Bradley Babendir

Could the great size of companies like Apple and Walmart actually be a good thing?

A Grand Turk in Washington

Kevin Blankinship

Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.

Cohesion

Nadav Samin

America is at an inflection point.

Dissent and Solidarity

James Davison Hunter

King’s arguments for freedom and justice were not only constitutional but also profoundly ethical.

To Make the World Select for Democracy

John M. Owen IV

Cosmopolitan liberalism has reshaped international institutions and practices.

Scientific Authority and the Democratic Narrative

Jason Blakely

Democracy and science can be mutually reinforcing only if there is a recognition of the limited authority of each.

America, the Exceptional?

Steve Lagerfeld

Once attacked for rejecting American exceptionalism, liberals now are in almost sole possession of it.

Why I Am a Socialist

Sam Adler-Bell

It is the irreducibly human dimensions of the radical life that are to be most cherished, and most feared.

Another Betrayal of the Intellectuals

Jonathan D. Teubner

A historian charts the evolution of her own center-right liberalism.

Cancel

B.D. McClay

Cancel ’s murkiness has made it a very useful word for pushing already contentious or delicate matters into the realm of total confusion.

Thinking the Worst of Ourselves

Jackson Arn

We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.

Puritans’ Progress

Peter Skerry

What do we mean by culture? Don’t ask me, I’m a political scientist.

Left Behind

Nancy Isenberg

The trouble with euphemism.

The Unchosen Condition

Malloy Owen

Is there really anything left to say about White Fragility?

By Whose Waters We Wept…

Charles Mathewes

“White Christian nationalism” remains a grievance-driven mode of whiteness.

The Brass Ring

Jonathan B. Imber

Is credentialism “the last acceptable prejudice”?

The Man Who Saved Capitalism from Itself

Charlie Tyson

In studying Keynes, we watch radical ideas emerge filtered through a conservative sensibility.

Through a Monocle, Selectively

Jackson Arn

As a history of art and thought in the Cold War era, The Free World is enthralling but unsatisfying, inevitably so.

Opinion Fetishism

Alexander Stern

In any case, trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration.

The Long, Withdrawing Roar

Philip S. Gorski

Over the last half century, there has been a transition from regular to irregular forms of cultural and political combat.

The Endless Pursuit of Better

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

What is clear is that the great divisions in our country rest on our different systems of cultural capital.

Identity Tethering in an Age of Symbolic Politics

Mark Dunbar

The less politics effects change, the more politics will affect mood.

Is There a Place for Utopia?

S.D. Chrostowska

Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.

Democracy’s Thorn

Nancy Isenberg

If not minimized as an aberration, mob violence is often justified as the legitimate expression of popular will.

Awareness Daze

Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Awareness is not the opposite of ignorance. Rather, it’s a stand-in for performative gestures of all kinds.

Masks Off

Charlie Riggs

The pandemic-era “doctrine of masks” contained no playfulness or irony.

Authenticity in Fashion

Richard Thompson Ford

Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.

The Fake Book of Negroes

Gerald Early

Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.

You’re Not the Boss of Me

Rita Koganzon

The liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subordination of the prepolitical child.

The House Always Wins

Malloy Owen

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.

Myths Have Their Reasons…

Isaac Ariail Reed

Putting the cult back into culture in the analysis of politics.

A Happier Enlightenment

Richard Hughes Gibson

We can’t properly define the Enlightenment without making reference to happiness.

The Once and Vital Center

Antón Barba-Kay

The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness.

The First Authoritarian

Tae-Yeoun Keum

The eureka moment came when Popper perceived an affinity between Plato and fascism.

The Return of the King

Philip S. Gorski

We see the peculiar features of neoauthoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations of the ancient tradition of divine kingship.

A Democratic Mythic?

Stephen K. White

Carrying forward an evolving “we” of the democratic imagination.

There Are Thousands of Other Ways

Jackson Arn

The bulk of The Dawn of Everything is devoted to the exceptions.

Awaiting a New Prophetic Dispensation

Ian Marcus Corbin

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.

Russia’s War, and Ours

John M. Owen IV

If Russia did not exist, we would have to invent it.

Politics, Anyone?

Charles Blattberg

Rawls tried to avoid metaphysics because he felt that it interfered with his great game.

A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation

Johann N. Neem

We are living through a time, however, when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.

Vladimir and Volodymyr: A Pivotal Moment in History

Martha Bayles

Putin continues to play the Third Rome card that has brought him this far.

The Tragedy of the American Political Tradition

Nick Burns

What prospects are there today for assessing American politics and history from an early Hofstadterian remove?

Pastlessness

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Fantasies of freeing ourselves of the baggage of the past run aground on the fact that humans are history-bearing animals.

Following Alexis de Tocqueville: A Conversation with Historian and Biographer Olivier Zunz

Jay Tolson

Tocqueville was acutely conscious of living in a special moment in history

On Patrimony

Brian Patrick Eha

In my father’s house are many rooms, but all are empty.

Democracy Disrupted

Eric B. Schnurer

What, then, of democracy? I doubt it will survive—at least in the form we know.

You Won’t Miss Them Till They’re Gone

Paul Franz

Does anyone still need advice on how not to think like a liberal?

Market Failure

Jay Tolson

The essential component of the liberal project might be the marketplace of ideas.

Robert Bellah’s Search for Unity

Philip S. Gorski

Bellah held the conviction that religious matters were not purely intellectual, much less merely academic.

Gnosticism in Modernity, or Why History Refuses to End

Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman

Contending with a radical distrust of the created world.

Getting Liberalism’s Attitude Back

Charles Mathewes

Ambivalence captures the internal nature of liberalism’s discontents.

From Frankfurt to Fox

Malloy Owen

There is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time.

Jumping Over Fire

Ohad Reiss-Sorokin

Amid the social turmoil of postwar Vienna, Othmar Spann’s class auditorium became a political battlefield.

The Monster Discloses Himself

Phil Christman

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.

The Satmar Option

Rita Koganzon

Where do the Hasidim fit in the American picture of religious liberty?

The COVID Regime and the Liberal Subject

Matthew B. Crawford

COVID made visible the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological.

Transparent

Wilfred M. McClay

Transparent has become one of the staples of our commercial discourse, a form of bureaucratic-corporate-therapeutic-speak.

The Myth of the Friedman Doctrine

Kyle Edward Williams

Friedman’s viewpoint went far deeper and has been more lasting than the politics of 1970.

Name Your Industry—or Else!

Sarah M. Brownsberger

Are we all in an industry? What happened to “occupation”?

How We Obscure the Common Plight of Workers

Jonathan Malesic

Work is hard in large part because it is a site where people place serious demands on each other. Meeting those demands can be painful.

Profit, Power, and Purpose

Michael Lind

The greatest challenge presented by modern corporations, small as well as large, involves purpose.

An Economic Theology of Liberalism

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

True adulthood in a true liberalism depends on properly using God’s gift of liberty of the will.

Friendship and the Common Good

Andrew Willard Jones

Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.

No Exit

David Bosworth

For many tech billionaires, citizenship is just one more consumer option in a competitive global marketplace.

The New Prince

Andrew Lynn

Deneen’s politics of resentment primarily seeks to seize power from political enemies.

What Heidegger’s Notebooks Don’t Tell Us

Michael Weinman

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.

Defending Democracy Abroad

John M. Owen IV

The case for defending democracy abroad needs to be made anew.

Lenin’s Tomb

Christopher Sandford

At the climax of this progress into the inner depths of the mausoleum, a glimpse of Lenin himself suddenly appeared before us.

The Denial of the Moral as Lived Experience

James Davison Hunter

The young will be formed. The question is how.

What the Ancients Knew

Ryan S. Olson

The histories and literatures of antiquity can help us address some of our contemporary ethical deficit disorder.

The Coddling of the American Undergraduate

Rita Koganzon

Today, the “college experience” centered on a residential life that promises to envelope students in a warm, intimate community has hardened into something more totalizing than even the blundering late-twentieth-century project of enforcing political correctness.

The Basis of Everything

Joseph E. Davis

The growing damage to truthfulness reflects something more—not just a personal discrepancy but a deep social discrepancy as well.

Cold War Liberalism in the Courtroom

Ohad Reiss-Sorokin

Moyn’s Cold War liberals might rightly be called “post-Holocaust liberals.”

There Goes the Neighborhood

Stephen Assink

For Marc J. Dunkelman, the verdict is clear: “The township, in essence, is dying.”

The Daily Show in the Age of Irony

Johann N. Neem

Jon Stewart and the age of irony.

Can Evangelicals Agree With Bernie Sanders?

Jeffrey Guhin

Bernie Sanders at Liberty University is more than a momentary truce in the culture war.

What’s Behind Trump’s Wall?

Johann N. Neem

Do Trump’s supporters represent a new Know-Nothing movement?

Speaking Truth to Power

Leann Davis Alspaugh

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.

It’s the System, Stupid

Ned O’Gorman

In identifying “the system” as the issue of this election, Trump has managed to find a singular concept by which to encompass issues from wage stagnation to political corruption.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Politics

Ned O’Gorman

Many began watching last night’s debate wondering: Which Trump would it be? But there’s only one.

High Hopes

Carl Desportes Bowman

Just as Obama became a symbol of progressive diversity, Trump has become a symbol of longing for a pre-Obama America.

The Art of the Possible

B.D. McClay

A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else’s loss, exists in a constant state of crisis.

Liberalism Strikes Back

Rita Koganzon

Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.

False Positive

Eric B. Schnurer

How are we to respond when faced with competing  uncertainties?

Wearing a Mask in France Would Be a Revolution

Frédéric Keck

In France, wearing a COVID-19 mask will mean a real revolution in norms governing behavior in its public space. 

Our Once and Future Citizens

Richard Hughes Gibson

How might the pandemic alter civic engagement?

Healthy, Wealthy, or Wise?

Mark Hoipkemier

Aristotle and the pandemic debates we aren’t having.

The Price of Freedom

Eric B. Schnurer

The point of reopening is not to free voluntary workers but to place more into the category of “mandatory worker.”

Our Chekhov Moment

Eric B. Schnurer

Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?

Alexander Herzen and the Plural World

Alan Jacobs

Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.

When Disaster Is an Invaluable Lesson

Jay Tolson

Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.

A History Lesson from Alexander Hamilton

Richard Hughes Gibson

The events of January 6 went off script.

Is Trumpism Marxism?

Ronald Osborn

On the dangerous absurdity of political caricature.

More Than Just a Word

Richard Hughes Gibson

Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.

Dare We Call It Charisma?

Mark Edmundson

A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.

Frederick Douglass and the American Project

Richard Hughes Gibson

It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.

The Compatibility Trap

Siobhan Lyons

As the titans of big tech see it, the reticence to upgrade is nothing less than resistance to progress. But a willingness to upgrade does not benefit customers in the long run.

Critical Theory and the Newest Left

Alexander Stern

Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.

Who Killed Essentialism?

Charlie Riggs

We seem to be unable to do without our essences.

Changing Times

Mark Edmundson

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.

Finding Fukuyama’s Ends

Addis Goldman

Western liberal democracy is something worth aspiring toan optimal destiny, not an imminent fate.

In the Sideshadows

Richard Hughes Gibson

Everyone contributes to the pandemic, so all bear responsibility.

Looking Under the Hood of AI’s Dubious Models

Ethan Edwards

Models are only valuable in the long run if we are free to take them apart.

Where the Critics of Liberalism Go Wrong

Andrew Lynn

Postliberalism comes to embody a form of cultural criticism that ultimately does not believe in culture itself.

Neither This Nor That

Rhoda Feng

We view the concept of “compromise” from all sorts of oblique angles.

A Vision on a Summer Night

Alan Jacobs

Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.

Why Carl Schmitt Matters to China

Addis Goldman

It would be prudent to take the Chinese at their word––especially if it is bound up in the mystifying language of Carl Schmitt.

The Kierkegaardian Leap of Climate Activism

Rhoda Feng

Throughout the book, Sherrell eschews the phrase “climate crisis,” substituting a much more nebulous term: “the Problem.”

Between Utopia and Disaster

Malloy Owen

The modern state is founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power.

It’s the Status, Stupid!

Michael Signer

Because this cannot be ignored. And because it may be prologue to the future.

Athelstan the Woke

Alan Jacobs

I myself stopped using the term a while back.

Time to Quit

Richard Hughes Gibson

Facebook is free only in the most superficial sense.

Race, MLK, and the Allure of Made-for-TV Justice

Andrew Lynn

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.

States of Purple

Richard Hughes Gibson

The red vs. blue electoral map has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.

The Unintended Consequences of Christian Politics

Myles Werntz

Mainline Protestant ministries to migrants had unintentionally opened the door to their diminished cultural dominance

Podcast: Political Mythologies

The Editors

A conversation about the role of mythmaking in modern politics.

The Coming Clarifications

Alan Jacobs

We’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior

Ukraine: Against History and Geography

Richard Hughes Gibson

Ukraine has become the geography of vicious truths

The Russo-Ukrainian War and Global Order

John M. Owen IV

The war has ruined any chance of Russo-Western cooperation any time soon; whatever hope the Biden administration has had of peeling Russia away from China lies in tatters.

How to Destroy a Civilization

Walter C. Clemens, Jr.

Where is culture that gave humanity the symphonies and operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov?

A Fragile Future for Democracy

David Bosworth

It is my belief that rapid technological “progress” will always threaten a culture with social regress, and that mitigating that threat should be a priority.

Reaching the Adjacent

Alan Jacobs

Are we willing to undertake the long, slow work of persuasion in a time of the politics of personal destruction?

In Praise of Bewilderment

Alan Levinovitz

You can trade false simplicity for complicated truth.

Why American Conservatives Get Viktor Orbán So Wrong

Adam Kovach

Viktor Orbán has become a canvas for the projection of hopes and fears about the future of democracy in the West.

The Model Minority Might Be Too Good at the Game

Johann N. Neem

Warikoo might have explored the ways in which Asian cultural repertoires matched up with the neoliberal transformation of our schools and colleges.

Pretending to Destroy Art to Save the World

Chiraag Shah

What we are seeing, then, is a fictional spectacle—a pseudo-iconoclastic event.

David Hume’s Guide to Today’s Politics

Alan Jacobs

The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.

The Leaning Tower of Progress

Travers Nisbet

What might the world look like if we refined our understanding of progress?

The Art of Prediction and the Arc of the Moral Universe

Eric B. Schnurer

Plausible forecasts may help us avert the worst political calamities.

Fourth of July Democracy

Emery Roe

We don’t wait. We start our own constitutional convention.

Had Any Candidate Explanations Recently?

Vincent Ercolano

Candidate as an adjective—was this the newest lingo, something a copy editor like me should know about?

You Can’t Fact Check Propaganda

Jonathan D. Teubner and Paul W. Gleason

Could it be otherwise? Probably not, at least at the moment.

Democracy and Dr. Kissinger

John M. Owen IV

Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it.

Autocracy Rising

Eric B. Schnurer

Turkey presents an inversion of the usual presumptions about the current global struggle between liberalism and conservatism.

Presentation and Power

Mark Dunbar

The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.

Return of the False Messiah

David Stromberg

Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective.

The Arts as Resistance

Arthur Aghajanian

What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?

Hatred Alone Is Immortal

Alan Jacobs

What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?

Something Happened to Me the Other Day

Mark Edmundson

When someone so much as touches a state vehicle, the wheels of justice begin to turn, and that’s that.