Category Archives: Politics

Here are some highlights from this 2011 book: * …* more difficult for intellectuals to sustain the type of vertical authority that is associated with the first two types of public intellectuals. With education comes a growing awareness of the … Continue reading →

Professor Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at Yale, writes in this 2012 book: * Being a public intellectual, in other words, is not just a matter of telling the truth and of being separate and free-floating and truly representing the universal. … Continue reading →

Professor Jeffrey Alexander writes in his 2003 book, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology: * In June 1972, employees of the Republican party made an illegal entry and burglary into the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel … Continue reading →

Ezra Klein writes: In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms. I refresh my Twitter feed to keep … Continue reading →

Stephen Turner writes about models for balancing the power of expertise: * “High politics” is the politics of leaders. It involves agonistic decision making, and, more generally, decision making in the face of inadequacies of comprehension, typically, it is decision … Continue reading →