Pages

▼
Thursday, April 30, 2020

Community, Cooperation, and the Division of Labor

›
A famous passage from the first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations : Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or...
Sunday, April 26, 2020

Carlyle's Dead Sea Apes

›
From Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present : Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of...

Walter Lippmann Against Monism

›
A nice passage showcasing Walter Lippmann's pragmatism, and his disdain for monistic, theoretic approaches to political reform. From Dri...
Saturday, April 25, 2020

Lippmann on Literal and Spiritual Immigration

›
I recently read Walter Lippmann's wonderful Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest . The book is well-worth readin...
Monday, April 20, 2020

Rousseau and Smith on Trinkets and Baubles

›
The most interesting of Adam Smith's three uses of "the invisible hand" comes from the Theory of Moral Sentiments , in a famou...
Saturday, April 18, 2020

Marx on True v. Vulgar Criticism

›
I like this passage from Marx's " Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law :" Hegel's chief error i...
Saturday, April 4, 2020

Marx on Feeling and Philosophy

›
Karl Marx's PhD dissertation  begins from a puzzle: Democritus and Epicurus seem to defend very similar philosophies of nature. Indeed, ...
Saturday, March 21, 2020

Boccaccio's Typology of Plague Responses

›
Completely coincidentally, I happened to be part of a Decameron reading group as the Coronavirus pandemic hit. We have managed to continue t...
Monday, March 16, 2020

John Stuart Mill on Tone Policing

›
I had forgotten this argument from the final few pages of JS Mill's famous chapter, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion"...
Saturday, March 7, 2020

Necessary Capitalist Deceptions

›
A professor recently brought to my attention this wonderful passage from Keynes' A Tract on Monetary Reform ': No man of spirit w...