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Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Lukacs and Tocqueville on Democratic v. Aristocratic History

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The central tension of Marxist history is summed up in a famous passage from the opening lines of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte : “Me...
Friday, December 18, 2020

Gramsci on Historical Materialism: Political not Metaphysical

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(I owe the great title to my friend, James) A running theme through Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is a critique of historical material...
Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Gramsci on Retributive Punishment

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 Gramsci's Prison Notebooks   defends a retributive theory of punishment: If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of ...
Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Gramsci on Caesarism and Napoleon III (and Trump?)

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Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have much to say about moments of crisis and Caesarism. Because I have a parochial mind, I cannot he...
Sunday, December 6, 2020

Gramsci on Parties and Political Order

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 Antonio Gramsci writes in his   Prison Notebooks : all political parties (those of subordinates as well as ruling groups) also carry out a ...
Thursday, December 3, 2020

Hobbes, Newman, Huck Finn, and the Failure of Conscience

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Thomas Hobbes is famously skeptical of private judgment and individual moral conscience. From Leviathan chapter 29, " Those Things that...

Huck Finn as Democratic Freedom

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 cf. Plato v. Marx on democratic freedom. From chapter 6 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer : Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. ...
Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Gramsci on Liberal Education

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Antonio Gramsci is surprisingly defensive of traditional, liberal education in his Prison Notebooks . In his day, as in our own, there was g...
Monday, November 9, 2020

On Friedrich Meinecke's Cosmopolitanism and the National State

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A few months ago, some friends and I read Friedrich Meinecke's wonderful Cosmopolitanism and the National State , originally published i...