Questioners of the World, Unite!
For this semester I’ll offer my reflections on an introductory, freshmen-level course on western core texts that I am teaching. Maybe the most influential text written in…
(Without) the Reason of State, with the Autonomous Technicality of Disease Prevention
Can we arrive through reason at knowing what is the reason of state? For if unreason should come into conflict with reason, we shall then reason and…
Notes on Early Marx, Religion, and Recent Scholarship on Marxism and Religion
Introduction St. Augustine’s City of God offers a vision of harmony that serves as a lasting contrast with the conflict model of reality espoused by the Dialectical…
Marx’ World View – Conjectures and Aberrations. A Critical Assessment
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was not a philosopher in the Socratic sense of the European tradition of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Kant and Hegel. While…
James Madison, Justice, and the Summer of 2020
On February 5, 1794, Maximilian Robespierre, a provincial lawyer turned revolutionary, addressed the French National Convention as the leader of the twelve-man Committee on Public Safety. The…
Henri Lefebvre and the Urban Revolution
A sociologist born at the turn of the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre is a figure whose writings shed light on questions pertaining to rural life versus urban…
Political and Artistic Divides in Baudelaire: An Aesthetic of Evil Baudelaire and Benjamin: Persons or Monads?
For Baudelaire, being an artist cannot be separated from the kind of person one is. And in ‘Benediction’, the first poem in Flowers of Evil, after the…
Walter Benjamin’s Folly
Baudelaire Contra Benjamin: A Critique of Politicized Aesthetics and Cultural Marxism. Beibei Guan and Wayne Cristaudo. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Walter Benjamin was one of the…
Christopher Hitchens is Not Great
Self-Sealing Fallacy Some modern militant atheists like to claim things like “religion ruins everything.” Or that the planet would be so much better off without a belief…
Cultural Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, and The Frankfurt School
In Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), Ludwig Feuerbach's 1841 scathing criticism of Christianity, the German anthropologist pontificates on the nature of divinity by attributing…
Economic Phenomenalism (with a Note on Karl Marx)
. . . . In the case of economic theory we have again a science of phenomena operating with certain assumptions such as a rational, economic individual,…
The Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin
Part 1 of the Audio Recording may be listened here. Eric Voegelin: You have something about history. May I ask you just for a piece of paper…