Understanding Love and Marriage with Rousseau
The Visit to the Nursery, by Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1775. Don’t Make Anti-Opioid Laws the Villain Here
In response to: What the Opioid Crisis Can Teach Us about the War on Drugs
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Psychoactive drugs collectively nonetheless belong to a small class of products that merit a carve-out from libertarian principles.
Prohibition makes opioids more dangerous because it forces the market underground, which inhibits normal quality control.
The problems, then, go much deeper than the use and abuse of this particular class of drug.
Being mugged by reality is never fun, especially regarding so grave a topic as drug addiction.
America’s Delayed Adolescence in the Digital Economy
A Rehearing for Rousseau
Canonical authors, it seems, are always on trial. Not only do they face a jury of contemporary readers disinclined to recognize their greatness, but they must re-argue their case with every succeeding generation that charges them with irrelevance. As the arbiters in this tribunal are biased and the prosecutors zealous and unprincipled, a skilled and tenacious advocate can be an extraordinary asset. It is convenient, then, that Nelson Lund, who has published a new defense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy, is a lawyer. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that, because the author is a…
Rousseau’s Contrarian View of the Marketplace of Ideas
Jean-Jacques RousseauThe idea of the “marketplace of ideas” in which truth wins out through competition with error has a strong tradition in the U.S. Suggested in nascent form by Milton and Mill, US Supreme Court decisions appeal to it in free speech decisions, and it frequently appears in commentary and everyday conversations. It continues to hold axiomatic status in the U.S., at least outside of a set of college campuses.
Rousseau Contra Smith Revisited
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith have long been powerful symbols of two very different approaches to the 18th century Enlightenment: the one liberal, the other democratic; the one for individual rights, the other collective sovereignty; the one focused on the economic, the other on the political; at bottom, the one for Enlightenment, the other mainly against it. In some versions of this story, such as the one articulated by F.A. Hayek, the two authors represent not just two different paths to modernity but two different national styles: Smith is not just the emblematic liberal, but the archetypal Anglo-Scot, with Rousseau…
The Donald, the Impartial Spectator, and the Command of the Passions
Adam Smith statue in Edinburgh's High Street.I spend the better part of my professional life teaching “Great Books.” This semester’s lineup so far has included Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse (1775), Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), and Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). I’m committed to the proposition that these old books continue to speak to us, if only we have ears to hear.
My students don’t always agree, but they really perked up when I speculated about how Adam Smith would approach the phenomenon—the yuuge phenomenon—of Donald Trump.
Marilynne Robinson and the Mystery of Progressive Democracy
My favorite novelist is also Barack Obama’s. That shouldn’t be a problem, you might say—two people of widely different political opinions can love the same beautiful things. As Paul Seaton has observed on this site, studying Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction, marked as it is by her very conventional academic-liberal political opinions, is not very conducive to appreciating the exquisite subtlety of her fiction.[1]
The New York Review of Books late last year published an extensive conversation between the President and the novelist (which Joe Knippenberg commented on here). Obama and the author of Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008) come to an immediate meeting of minds, or rather hearts, on their faith in “democracy,” which, the ostensibly Calvinist Robinson posits, is based on “the willingness to assume well about other people.”
Asked by the President to explain the convergence between her Christianity and her “concerns about democracy,” Robinson offers the simplest possible explanation: she believes “people are images of God” and that “democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level.” To the President’s and the novelist’s joint chagrin, though, the “loudest voices” for Christianity in American politics don’t really take their Christianity seriously; supposedly they fail to follow Christ’s injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Robinson has gone so far as to describe Christian America as “associating the precious Lord with ignorance, intolerance, and belligerent nationalism.”
Uncovering the Meaning of Covering Meanings
The most important book published in political philosophy in years is Arthur M. Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. It first of all establishes, beyond all reasonable doubt, that philosophers (and poets, and other writers) routinely deployed “a double doctrine.” One was “exoteric” or “external” and “public.” The other was “esoteric” or “internal” and “secret.” The intention of the French philosophes—or enlightening, publicizing philosophers— was that the truth about these two contradictory doctrines become public knowledge. They turned esotericism into an exoteric or public doctrine. And Melzer, a professor of political science at Michigan State University,…
