Category Archives: Politics

From the 2013 book, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences: While not turning Janes into Joes, the universal architecture of primates, including humans, also permits measurable biological changes based on environmental situations. For example, remove the alpha … Continue reading →

From Scientific American, Oct. 26, 2020: * …conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. * Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level … Continue reading →

Harvard Political Science professor Dennis F. Thompson writes in 2008: * Citizens and their representatives are expected to justify the laws they would impose on one another by giving reasons for their political claims and responding to others’ reasons in … Continue reading →

Here are some highlights from this 2013 book: * In the years since World War II, the prevailing paradigm of politics has largely centred on the redistribution of resources. Hobbes and Schmitt, by contrast, help us appreciate two other conceptions … Continue reading →

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 →