Can what remains of the status quo survive? Does it deserve to? These are always pertinent questions, of course, and recently the brooding dynamics of change were posed in a thoughtful way by Jacob ...

From “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment,” an essay from the collection Splinters in Your Eye, which will be published this month by Verso. On July 22, 2011, a neofascist Norwegian terrorist named ...

The last days of Jenny and Karl Marx were marked by sickness and enfeeblement. On December 2, 1881 Jenny died, breaking Marx’s already creaking heart. Too sick to attend the funeral himself, his ...

A reader who comments under the name “candles” writes in the comments box of the Moralistic Therapeutic Journalism thread: There is a powerful strain in the academy in the humanities these days that ...

On this week’s episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke to Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism ...

The many anti-globalist politicians, parties, and movements roiling the politics of Western liberal democracies can be understood in many ways. But the most fruitful may be to view them as the latest ...

Not long ago, one might have concluded that, at least in Europe, there were no taboos left. A process that had begun with the Enlightenment had now reached the point at which "anything goes".

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes a striking observation about the difference between fascism and communism. In fascism — think of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini — when the supreme leader ...