Commonplace Book

The Social Gospel softened the impact of industrialism and brightened the lives of many men, and the policies it recommended still have merit. It did, however, strengthen that tendency of American thought that identified fraternity simply with solidarity. By adding...

American theorists sought for some element of fraternity some suggestion of bonds uniting man and man. Yet the Enlightenment doctrines made the object of that search difficult to attain. Reason, conceived as the “servant of the passions,” could not unite...

The Revolution of 1689 put matters on a different basis. James II had been New England’s unambiguous foe, an enemy to provincial autonomy and a Roman Catholic. Pardonably, the clergy could not resist the temptation to regard the Glorious Revolution...

Americans, especially young Americans, cannot find their country in the land about them. Often, in fact, they cannot find the land, hidden as it is by the cancer-growth of concrete and the slow poisoning of air and water. Wealth accumulates,...

American socialists, like all Christian socialists, had to cope with the fact that socialist rhetoric about abolishing capitalism evoked fears of class war and proletarian smashing. Christian socialism, wherever it took root, sought to mitigate this threat. Marxists, radical democrats,...

By the end of World War II the divergence between democratic socialism and social democracy was something quite definitive, not merely a rhetorical convention, albeit with room for exceptions at both ends. Democratic socialists held out for some form of...

Though the slogan “The personal is political” initially called attention to how personal life was affected by political arrangement, it also captured the sense that transforming American life could begin at the personal level. Much of a generation was inspired...

The world of the diversity engineers is a world in which virulent white racism and white supremacist attitudes still reigned unchallenged, a world of victims and victimizers, a world in perpetual recovery, a world of endless slights. Here racist crimes...

It is vital for historians to reckon with the flaws of their profession as an institution, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the nation that supports their institution, and to reflect on the ways that...

The Twitter mob in too many ways defines the current Internet. The objective of the mob is to stamp out apostasy. We are righteous. We are correct. We conform to the current patterns of behavior–and you’d better too. Ultimately, what...

The notion of identity, now so popular among those who look for it in gender and race and sexuality, implies the possibility of resolving the self in some binding manner. If Freud is right and the psyche is always churning,...

I love my students–I surely do. But there is no way I would want to be one of them, or part of what’s now being called “Generation Z.” They’re stepping into the arena grossly underequipped to fight: no sword, no...

Make use of power? What a pernicious illusion. It’s power that makes use of us. Power is a difficult horse to lead: it goes where it must go, or rather, it goes where it can go or where it’s natural...

If you ask people only to pay attention–that is, to obey their super-egos all the time–they will almost inevitably resist. Attention is an imprisoning of the mind. If you don’t put attention to a higher purpose–one associated with absorption–the mind...

A less persuasive argument [for the creation of ethnic and race studies programs at universities] is rooted in the psychologistic language of identity politics. The demand to see oneself in the text easily reduces to narcissistically anti-intellectual twaddle, as anyone...

At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to a shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group’s collective interests. This...

Communities and neighborhoods are sites of political disagreement and contest just like every place else: “the grassroots” and “the people” are only more abstract and diffuse forms of the same imagery. They aren’t pure, and they don’t act with one...

I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely...

When we fight for justice and stand up for the oppressed, we are knowing God, making him known, demonstrating by the spirit his own passion for justice. When we delight in beauty and create more of it, God the glad...

The liberal method of taking part in the political contest cannot be qualified; it is not and cannot be either bourgeois or socialist, conservative or revolutionary, though its very nature tends to make it favor the forces of progress. As...