Commonplace Book

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 […]

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 […]

Liberty can never be won through tyranny or dictatorship, or even through being granted from above. Liberty is a conquest, a self-conquest, which is preserved only through the continual exercise of one’s faculties and individual autonomies. For liberalism, and hence […]

Socialism is not socialization; it is not the proletariat in power; it is not even material equality. Socialism, grasped in its essential aspect, is the progressive actualization of the idea of liberty and justice among men: an innate idea that […]

The threat to domestic tranquility is not that people take sides and disagree, but that the sides of a political division will assume the purity and passion of moral absolutism or moral allegory, in which the people on each side […]

You don’t have to agree with the historical interpretations of Leon Trotsky’s old Fourth International to respect and benefit from the institutional stance it has taken–almost alone–against the false statements printed, and sensationalized, by the New York Times in the […]

Though the evidence of the dead end of Father Greed is found everywhere in history books and is all around us now, greed with us at present is not a sin. With us, it cannot rise, like abortion and racial […]

Consider Thomas L. Friedman’s announcement (New York Times, January 9, 2019): “I believe there is only one thing as big as Mother Nature, and that is Father Greed–a.k.a. the market. I am a green capitalist.” As a green capitalist, Mr. […]

…according to our dominant legend, the route of success or career advancement or the realization of one’s “potential as an individual” has led away from one’s origins in family and community and into the “public sphere.” By now the rural […]

Debs’s call for united political action and, to a limited degree, unified economic organization…in no way reflected a growing class awareness on his part. Rather, his increasing anger drew strength and justification from a specific American tradition that stressed economic […]

So people whose views have been religiously formed have to learn, and many have learned, to express them in ways that make sense to irreligious or differently religious fellow citizens. Talk of God’s will and appeals to revealed truth are […]

It is no affront to liberal socialist egalitarianism, as I understand it, if the entrepreneur who sells portable ventilators makes more money than I do and is more widely known than I am. The socialist state should not interfere with […]