Category: political theory
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Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy: A Proposal
(The proposal sketched in this post is further developed in my paper “Hobbes’s Theory of Peace,” presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.) 1. What is the point of Thomas Hobbes’s moral philosophy? What question or questions of moral theory did he think he had settled? In writing Leviathan, Hobbes evidently took great pride in his would-be…
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A Tainted Election? “Hamlet” and Politics
For roughly the first half of Hamlet, the audience is left in suspense as to whether or not Claudius, the present king, had in fact secretly murdered his predecessor, Prince Hamlet’s father. Then the prince devises and executes a plan to find out, and deems his suspicions confirmed; we in the audience get to be…
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What might Arendt have to say about Trump?
A few people have been asking me my thoughts on the recent surge of interest in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, in relation to our present political crisis. I’m working on writing something on the subject, but meanwhile – to air some rough ideas – I offer the following snippet of a conversation I had last week…
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Arendt: “The reality in which we live”
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who…
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Misremembering Plato’s Noble Lie
Back when I taught at Yale, I used to give a quiz about Plato’s Republic in the first class meeting for one of my upper-level seminars. The students were all supposed to have taken at least one prior course in which the Republic was read, and I wanted to see how well they remembered it. (I also…
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Thoreau the Revolutionary
1. In “Thoreau and the Tax-Collector,” I looked at Thoreau’s reasons, as stated in “Civil Disobedience,” for refusing to pay his poll-tax. My concern was to emphasize Thoreau’s political purpose, his understanding of the act as a practical step toward combating the evil of slavery. As I noted, this side of his argument in “Civil Disobedience” has often been slighted, when readers focus…
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Thoreau and the Tax-Collector
There’s a side of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” that I believe is often misunderstood – or maybe just misremembered. We remember his refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax, even at the cost of going to jail. But what is it that he hopes this act will accomplish, practically speaking? Perhaps that question seems…
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