Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 909 )

• Atrocious and Evil -- Russian Aggressive War in Ukraine

  

  The moment has come, after months of insistent, indignant jabber from Vladimir Putin that he has no intention of invading Ukraine: Russian forces have invaded... Read more

  Posted on 24 February 2022 SOCIETY

• How to Think About Deliberate Social Change

  

  What is involved in trying to create a better world? That is: what is involved in being an activist, a reformer, a radical, a revolutionary, or – for that matte... Read more

  Posted on 24 February 2022 SOCIETY

• A Topology of Political Theories?

  

  We sometimes think of political philosophies as falling on a spectrum from left to right. Bernie Sanders is on the left and Greg Abbott is on the right. Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2022 SOCIETY

• Factions, Insurrections, and the Federalist Papers

  

  Sometimes political philosophers think of the The Federalist Papers as fairly minor contributions to the history of political theory -- time-bound, parochial,... Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2022 SOCIETY

• Alexander Herzen's Radical Liberalism

  

  image: Meissonier, Massacre during June Days, 1848, ParisAlexander Herzen's From the Other Shore (1850) is an exceptionally important example of an intelligent... Read more

  Posted on 04 February 2022 SOCIETY

• Thomas Carlyle on Government and England's Poor

  

  Thomas Carlyle was an acerbic conservative social thinker, given to assuming the fundamental legitimacy of social and political hierarchies and hostile to... Read more

  Posted on 30 January 2022 SOCIETY

• Silence About the Holocaust After 1945

  

  Image: Holocaust memorial at Camp Westerbork, The NetherlandsEach of the great evils of the twentieth century -- the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Gulag -- was... Read more

  Posted on 24 January 2022 SOCIETY

• Poetry in Remembrance of the Shoah

  

  Theodor Adorno wrote that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." But there are good reasons not to agree with Adorno. There is a body of powerful,... Read more

  Posted on 22 January 2022 SOCIETY

• Frankl and Shalamov on Existence in the Camps

  

  Image: Viktor FranklImage: Varlam Shalamov, NKVD photoViktor Frankl, born in Austria in 1905, had the tragic misfortune to be swept up into the maelstrom of... Read more

  Posted on 20 January 2022 SOCIETY

• Bandera, Shukhevych, and Memory Debates About the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement

  

  When in 2007 Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko designated Roman Shukhevych as a Hero of Ukraine, he brought new heat into the debate in Ukraine and in the... Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2022 SOCIETY

• Strange Defeat

  

  One of the consequential puzzles of the Second World War was the sudden, catastrophic collapse of the French army following German invasion in 1940. Read more

  Posted on 01 January 2022 SOCIETY

• Inclusivity as a Democratic Goal

  

  Many organizations express the goal of embracing diversity and inclusiveness. This is an admirable goal, but it is often only weakly pursued in practical terms. Read more

  Posted on 29 December 2021 SOCIETY

• De-mythologizing Ukraine Under Nazi Occupation

  Ukraine was quickly and violently occupied by the Nazi military in 1941 in the onset of Hitler's Barbarossa plan for defeat of the Soviet Union, and the most... Read more

  Posted on 27 December 2021 SOCIETY

• Greenblatt's New Historicism

  

  Stephen Greenblatt is a pathbreaking literary critic. But since the 1990s I've also looked at Greenblatt as a genuinely innovative and insightful contributor... Read more

  Posted on 22 December 2021 SOCIETY

• Online Mobilization Strategies by Right-wing Extremists

  

  graphic: White supremacist podcast network (SPLC link)The surge of right-wing extremism has been evident in the United States for the past five years,... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2021 SOCIETY

• China's Food-safety Governance System

  

  Food safety is a very high-level concern for ordinary consumers. This is true because the food we eat can poison us or ruin our health, and yet consumers have... Read more

  Posted on 10 December 2021 SOCIETY

• The Holodomor

  

  is one of the great evils of the twentieth century. The facts are grim and horrific. Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the... Read more

  Posted on 01 December 2021 SOCIETY

• Herder's Philosophy of History and Humanity

  

  An earlier post attempted to express the idea that "humanity" and human culture are self-creators: there is no fixed and prior system of meanings, values,... Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2021 SOCIETY

• Bauman on the Holocaust

  

  There sometimes seems to be an important intertwining between personal biography and a person's sociological and historical imagination. Read more

  Posted on 21 November 2021 SOCIETY

• Jedwabne as Memory and History

  

  In July 1941 a terrible massacre of Jews took place in Jedwabne, a town in eastern Poland. The town consisted of some 3,000 residents, about half of whom were... Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2021 SOCIETY