“Prime Minister Starmer’s father wanted his children to lead ‘useful lives’ and Starmer undoubtedly succeeded in that—two, three, four times over. Yet it is unclear, as yet, just how useful he will be as Labour Prime Minister.”
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Author: Seamus Flaherty
This is England? Thoughts on Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer
J.S. Mill: Equiliberal
“For [Patrick] Deneen, the most nefarious influence in the history of liberal political thought is John Stuart Mill, son of Enlightenment radical James Mill, godson of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the author of the canonical 1859 liberal text, On Liberty.”
Review: “The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs” by David Runciman
“The Handover is, at bottom, a plea for liberal democratic states to discipline, if not disempower, the sociopaths and psychopaths who currently have control of the technologies and resources which are changing us and our environment and promise to change both ourselves and the planet we inhabit more radically still.”
Grappling with Liberalism
“Modern liberalism, equally, cannot go on as it is at the moment, veering toward destruction, becoming ever more decrepit and ineffectual, incapable of meeting the challenges—domestic, geopolitical, planetary—of the 21st century.”
Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer
“Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.”
Review: Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good”
“For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.'”
Review: Slavoj Žižek’s “Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed”
“Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.'”
Review: China Miéville’s “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto”
“Sentimental and sycophantic in turns, it may be hard to dispel the impression that Miéville is merely a hysteric. All the same, A Spectre, Haunting is a post-Nietzschean book, which leans into the charge of ressentiment. Spurning subterfuge, Miéville quite openly asserts that justice and revenge amount, more or less, to the same thing.”
Review: “Obedience is Freedom” by Jacob Phillips
“Denial, as Jacob Phillips deftly shows in his fascinating and staggeringly original new book Obedience is Freedom, is precisely what the liberal-left excels in, substituting for a world of limits and constraints a schizoid universe where subjectivity is all that counts.”
