(This is another post in my series on Michigan politics, broadly construed.) Why am I thinking about 1961? Because that was one year before University of Michigan students published the Port Huron Statement, a pivotal document that laid out the intellectual foundations of New Left student activism. (Excellent UM exhibit on the statement here.) I […]
Academia
Over the last year, I’ve been working on a trade book on limitarianism (USA, UK, NL), on an edited volume on pluralism in political philosophy by bringing various (including ‘non-western’) perspectives together around questions of economic and ecological inequalities (forthcoming with OUP but not quite there yet), and on an edited academic volume with political […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how society, and people in my profession (academics), think about activism. It seems to me that there is a widespread insufficient appreciation for the importance of activists in the world; often that attitude is even plainly dismissive. If this is true, then why is this the case, and […]
A few weeks ago I read Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach (1975) for the first time. It is worth doing so if you are one of the few who have not because it very neat to see how ideas around ecological sustainability were conceived back then. In what follows, I will […]
In my first post (here) on Mary Harrington’s (2023) Feminism Against Progress, I focused on her views on the family and suggested that not unlike Yoram Hazony (in his (2022) book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery), she rejects the patriarchic ‘nuclear family’ embraced by American, Christian-ethno-nationalists. Instead they both defend what they call the ‘traditional family,’ which in Harrington’s argument […]
Most visitors to Argentina are attracted by its famous meat and wine. Personally, I come for the Freudianism and Marxism. I grew up in north west London in a family of socialists and psychoanalysts, acutely aware of the contempt with which most of Great Britain held both of those vocations in the late 1980s. So […]
I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she […]