"Fake news," wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies—citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way. The problem may be novel in some of its details—including the role of today's politic ...
In The Psychology of Inequality , Michael Locke McLendon looks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought for insight into the personal and social pathologies that plague commercial and democratic societies. He emphasizes the way Rousseau appropriated and modified the notion of self-love, or amour-propre , found in Augustine and various early modern thinkers. McLendon traces the concept in Rousseau's work and reveals it to be a form of selfi ...
Although truth and reconciliation commissions are supposed to generate consensus and unity in the aftermath of political violence, Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies cacophony as the most valuable and overlooked consequence of this process in Ghana. By collecting and preserving the voices of a diverse cross-section of the national population, Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission (2001-2004) created an unprecedented public archive of posti ...
Although Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard are both major figures in nineteenth-century Western thought, they are rarely considered in the same conversation. Marx is the great radical economic theorist, the prophet of communist revolution who famously claimed religion was the «opiate of the masses.» Kierkegaard is the renowned defender of Christian piety, a forerunner of existentialism, and a critic of mass politics who challenged us to ...
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence o ...
From the University of California, Berkeley, to Middlebury College, institutions of higher learning increasingly find themselves on the front lines of cultural and political battles over free speech. Repeatedly, students, faculty, administrators, and politically polarizing invited guests square off against one another, assuming contrary positions on the limits of thought and expression, respect for differences, the boundaries of toleration, and ...
Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics, secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture. The belief that humans are capable of making lasting improvements—intellectual, scientific, material, moral, and cultural—continues to be a commonplace of our age. However, events of the preceding century, including but not limited to two world wars, conflicts in K ...
In the early twenty-first century, the citizens of many Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, elected left-wing governments, explicitly rejecting and attempting to reverse the policies of neoliberal structural economic adjustment that had prevailed in the region during the 1990s. However, in other countries such as Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru continuity and even extension of the neoliberal ag ...
Writing in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Baghdad, Alfarabi (870-950) is unique in the history of premodern political philosophy for his extensive discussion of the nation, or Umma in Arabic. The term Umma may be traced back to the Qur'ān and signifies, then and now, both the Islamic religious community as a whole and the various ethnic nations of which that community is composed, such as the Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Examining A ...
