Edmund Burke to Niall Ferguson: You know nothing of my work. You mean my...
A minor footnote to the controversy over Niall Ferguson’s homophobic remarks about John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson claimed that the key to Keynes’s economic philosophy is a selfishness and short-termism...
View ArticleThe False Attribution: Our Democratic Poetry
Every two minutes on Twitter, someone tweets, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” and wrongly attributes it to Edmund Burke. Burke never said any such thing....
View ArticleI feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings
I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings: We charge this Offender with…nothing, that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle; that does not manifest...
View ArticleBurke in Debt
Some day someone should write an essay on the struggles of Edmund Burke in his final years to overcome his considerable debts—some £30,000—by securing a peerage and a pension from the Crown. Throughout...
View ArticleAristocrats of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your…shame.
I just heard Ari Shapiro report on NPR about an effort in Britain to “modernize” the aristocracy by allowing women of the nobility to inherit the titles and estates of their fathers. Current British...
View ArticleWhy Arendt might not have read Benito Cereno (if she did indeed not read...
For a change of pace… In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt makes the argument that one of the reasons the French Revolution took such a violent and authoritarian turn was that it allowed the social...
View ArticleDavid Brooks, Edmund Burke, and Me
David Brooks: Burke is famous for his belief in gradual change….I’m sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow. Society has structural problems, but they have to be...
View ArticleThe Definitive Take on Donald Trump
Sorry, that’s just my self-aggrandizing way of introducing this Salon column I wrote about Trump and what he means within the long arc of conservatism. My frustration with much of the discussion about...
View ArticleCapitalism in the Age of Revolution: Burke, Smith, and the Problem of Value
I’ve got an essay in Raritan about Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the problem of value. The essay is part of my long-term book project, on the political theory of capitalism, which I’ll be coming back...
View ArticlePeggy Noonan Speaks Truth: The Circuits Are Overloaded
Peggy Noonan’s in the Wall Street Journal today with a genuine and useful insight: Mr. Trump has overloaded all circuits. Everything is too charged, with sparks and small shocks all over. “Nothing...
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