Tag: Political Theory

  • Voice Beyond Recourse and Rights (Workplace Domination Part Four)

    I’ve been putting off finishing my series on the Bleeding Hearts/Crooked Timber debates, because Chris Bertram had suggested that there might be a reply to critics. Now he says it might be a while longer, so I’m going to finish up. In my last post, I suggested that none of the methods proposed by the…

  • Consider the Bathroom Break (Workplace Domination Part Three)

    The virtue of the Crooked Timber bloggers’ objections to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians’ line is that it implicitly suggests the difference between liberal and republican conceptions of freedom. Libertarians have usually substituted theories of interference and coercion for a full-blown theory of domination. When Chris Bertram stopped by, he suggested that they wanted to avoid…

  • Anarchy, the Black Bloc, and Gandhian “Non-Violence”

    Let me start with a correction. Anarchy isn’t really as interesting as you think it is. In fact, Anarchy is Boring: Figuring out how to run a sustainable anarchist household (that values time spent washing the dishes and time spent making money as a computer programmer equally) isn’t as headline-grabbing as a downtown smashup. But Seattle…

  • Reason & Rallying

    I had the pleasure and discomfort of attending parts of the Reason Rally on Saturday, a march on Washington by atheists, agnostics, and heathens. It was cold, rainy, and frequently quite boring. I mostly went to see Bad Religion, but I enjoyed Eddie Izzard’s routine and Cristina Rad, who responds to theists this way: “You…

  • Greece and the European Union

    This Newsnight piece paints a picture of the widespread breakdown of the Greek social compact: What was no joke were the clashes between police and the hardline protesters.[…] Time and again, on the grounds of confronting the rioters, police made incursions into large masses of peaceful protesters. […]I can tell you from repeated experience, it…

  • The Middle Class is Losing the Race for Second Place

    I think about inequality a lot. But I also think about the middle class a lot, which isn’t quite the same thing. Generally, my sympathies lie with the “least advantaged” or “subaltern,” but I also feel the pull of the American cultural commitment to the middle class. There can be little doubt that we are…