The significant danger now is that Putin will agree, conditionally, to some sort of Trump-endorsed “peace plan,” putting unbearable diplomatic pressure on Kyiv to accept it. Among other effects, this will fracture Ukrainian politics, fracture the NATO alliance, rescue Russia’s economy, strengthen pro-Russian voices in European politics and give Russia time to recover its military strength. In exchange, Ukraine will get the kind of paper promises it got back in 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons for nonbinding security guarantees — another reminder that disarmament is as often a road to war as it is to peace.
A question for Marco Rubio: How good will U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv be in 2029, when he’s a private citizen, JD Vance is president and Putin is hungry again for another choice cut of Ukraine?
There’s always the chance that Putin will overplay his hand, once again giving Trump the feeling that the Russian is “tapping us along,” as he put it in May, and reviving the administration’s appetite to defend Ukraine. Besides being the right thing to do, it would signal to China that the administration will not bargain away the independence of Taiwan for the sake of lucrative business opportunities for the Trump family and its friends.
Zelensky and his remaining supporters in Europe shouldn’t count on it. They may soon have to make a terrible choice between grasping for a temporary peace or continuing to suffer through a punishing war. Far be it for a columnist writing from the safety of New York to offer his advice, but another line from Churchill is worth recalling: “Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”
The larger warning here is for free nations everywhere, particularly in Europe. The era of Pax Americana may soon be drawing to a close. From then on it will be every region, or country, for itself, against emboldened and avaricious adversaries. For a sense of how to fight, look no further than the Ukrainians whom we abandon at our peril and to our shame.
While Bret Stephens continues his War Mongering from the comfort of his office! At the least The Reader can look to the bellicose Joe Alsop, who was in Asia and Korea during these Wars/Conflicts, as a role model for Stephens?
Zanny Minton Beddoes, Edward Carr, Nicolas Pelham & Adam Roberts discuss: ‘Dispatch from Tehran: how dangerous is the Iranian regime today?’
Editor: What is not supplied to the reader is an actual redable transcript of this conversation, that might lead the reader to look upon this conversation, as an exercise in political propaganda!
Neo-Con Zanny Minton Beddoes and her cadre of men explore such questions: ‘After 46 years of theocracy and a brief but bruising war, where does power now lie? What are the regime’s nuclear ambitions? And with the prospects of a succession crisis, has Iran been permanently weakened—or is it storing up trouble?’
This Reader observes that there is no actual trascript, with which to follow the arguments as each of Beddoes employees, as they make their argumanments/ contrbutions?
Episode summary
Nicolas Pelham, our Middle East correspondent, and Adam Roberts, our digital editor, are just back from a rare reporting trip to Tehran. They join our top editors in the studio to discuss what they learnt from an interview with Iran’s foreign minister and consider the future of the Islamic Republic. After 46 years of theocracy and a brief but bruising war, where does power now lie? What are the regime’s nuclear ambitions? And with the prospects of a succession crisis, has Iran been permanently weakened—or is it storing up trouble?
StephenKMackSD.
Just to establish my credentials a long time reader of The Economist, I hold in my hand a Book Review of A.W. Alschuler’s ‘Law Without Values: The Life ,Work, And Legacy Of Justice Holmes’ from page 86 dated Febuary 24, 2001.
StephenKMackSD
Added 11/22/2025 !
Editor: Hear is one of Beddoes’ Oxbridgers, Adam Roberts, chattering about Ukraine, like a reliable employee and Fellow Traveler !
Hello from London,
How vulnerable is Volodymyr Zelensky? It’s not only winter that is closing in. The closest aide to Ukraine’s president was compelled to resign on Friday, as anti-corruption investigators continue to expose a scandal in the energy sector said to involve kickbacks worth $100m or more. The loss of Andriy Yermak as chief of staff is undoubtedly a painful blow. Mr Yermak had been in charge of handling diplomatic pressure from America and Russia—countries trying to impose a grim-sounding peace deal on weary Ukraine. Read our story on the fall of Mr Yermak.
Add fears that Russia, bit by bit, is gaining the upper hand on the battlefield. In a war of attrition Russia’s economic and manpower advantages are starting to tell. Its more recent advantage in drone firepower looks worrying, too. None of that means any sort of decisive military breakthrough is likely. It’s still not clear to me even whether all of Pokrovsk, a symbolically important town in the Donbas that Russia has been on the cusp of seizing for 14 months, has actually fallen, for example. But it adds to a sense of gloom.
Some Ukrainians would like to see Mr Zelensky go. It’s widely assumed that Valery Zaluzhny, who was sacked as commander of Ukraine’s armed forces early in 2024, is eager to become president himself. I assume that Donald Trump would like Mr Zelensky gone if that would make it easier for him to declare the war over (whatever the consequences for Ukrainians and for Europe as a whole). Undoubtedly, Vladimir Putin hopes to see his foe gone. Mr Zelensky has played a big part in humiliating the Russian autocrat. Mr Putin’s supposed three-day invasion of Ukraine, back in 2022, has become a bloodbath that has now lasted more than 1,370 days and cost over 1m Russian dead and injured.
Editor: Adam Roberts whistling in the dark!
Despite the recent pressure on Mr Zelensky I don’t see him as powerless. Europeans, who actually provide Ukraine with weapons (bought from America) and economic aid, are sticking by him, as they should. They know that it’s crucial both to fend off American efforts to impose a dreadful sort of peace deal on Ukraine, and to make sure that Mr Zelensky’s forces can inflict military and other pain on Russia. Maritime drone attacks on shadowy oil tankers in the Black Sea over the weekend suggest a new effort to block Russian exports. The regular signs of Russian threats in other parts of Europe—such as drones over Moldova this weekend—are reminders that Mr Putin’s real goal is to make Europe much weaker. Every effort to help Ukraine continue to resist, in other words, is entirely in Europe’s own interest.
I recently asked for your views on Ukraine and the consequences if Russia seizes Pokrovsk. Rui Manuel Marques Rodrigues suggests it would not lead to any ceasefire, but only to more Russian aggression. Margaretha Jud has the same view, and she is sure that none of the proposals for a ceasefire deal would lessen Mr Putin’s appetite to take over Ukraine. Richard W. Murphy, meanwhile, emphasises the “miracle” of the long Ukrainian defence of Pokrovsk, at huge cost to the Russian attackers. I entirely agree. Finally, many of you also wrote in with observations about Iran, after my recent visit there with a colleague. I’d still welcome your thoughts on that country, and on whether any change is possible there. Please write to me at economisttoday@economist.com.
Editor: Alan Wolfe provides a canny evaluation of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge!
What Gave Us the Right
By Alan Wolfe
Nov. 28, 2004
THE RIGHT NATION Conservative Power in America. By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 450 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
LEO STRAUSS AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN EMPIRE By Anne Norton. 235 pp. Yale University Press. $25.
Is George W. Bush not only the most conservative president we’ve ever had, but an entirely new kind of conservative whose ideas will dominate American politics for the foreseeable future? Or is he — along with the neoconservative “Straussians” who advised him to go to war in Iraq+- not really a conservative at all, but a daring crusader who’d make a real conservative like Leo Strauss turn over in his grave? Oddly, the better-written and more politically astute of two recent books, “The Right Nation,” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, offers the wrong answer to these questions, while the often incoherent one, Anne Norton’s “Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,” gets them right.
Micklethwait, the United States editor for The Economist, and Wooldridge, its Washington correspondent, are the authors of a wonderful book on business advice manuals, “The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus.” In “The Right Nation,” they show how the conservative movement that brought Bush to power is not recognizable as conservative from a European perspective. Ours is not a Tory conservatism respectful of the landed gentry, deferential to the privileges of an established church, fearful of class division — and, at least in modern times, incompetent in politics.
Rather, the authors argue, American conservatism is exceptional because America is. Fueled by free-market enthusiasts, gun-toting libertarians, Bible-believing Christians and welfare-hating exurbanites, the conservatism of a Grover Norquist or Tom DeLay knows what it stands for, has the confidence that gloomy liberals lack and best represents the places in America that are growing most rapidly, like Colorado Springs, Texas, the South. So powerful is its appeal that liberals must alter their ideas to counter it (one reason John Kerry posed with a shotgun during the campaign). Americans love business, freedom and the military, and on these key issues, the liberal disadvantage is palpable. “The stage is set,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge believe, “for a possible realignment of American politics, to make the Republicans the natural party of government in the same way that the Democrats once were.” Their analysis, presented well before the 2004 election, now seems more prescient than talk of an emerging Democratic majority — or, if a mea culpa is permissible, of one nation, after all.
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Micklethwait and Wooldridge are not cheerleaders for the right; they keep their politics to themselves and balance their respect for conservatism’s success with numerous examples of its limits and failures. Ideological tilt is not the flaw of their otherwise engaging book; superficial analysis is. The most obvious defect in their treatment is that Bush has not run as a hard-right conservative. In 2000, he displayed his compassion for all to see. In 2004, he attacked Kerry as a liberal and didn’t endorse the hard-right position on gay rights or abortion. His victory was as strategically brilliant as it was ideologically imprecise. Micklethwait and Wooldridge know he is a conservative, and Bush himself knows he is a conservative, but there are not a few voters out there, including many who voted for him, who have not been let in on the secret.
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Micklethwait and Wooldridge fail to appreciate the conservative appropriation of liberal ideas because their book pays little attention to ideas of any sort. Conservatism, they write, is new and different, but they never say whether it makes sense. Yes, conservatives thought out of the box in denouncing Europe and pursuing a unilateralist policy in Iraq, but if the ideas behind their foreign policy are disastrous, as they evidently are, perhaps one should be more guarded about conservatism’s triumph. The same could, and should, be said about the right’s domestic policies. It is adventurous to spend money the government does not have. But if the result is as unwise as it is irresponsible, those who promote such a program will pay a significant political price in the future.
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Editor: My comment from May 16, 2024 : Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait were mere bit players, but they did provide ballist to Seabright’s essay.
Political Cynic takes the measure of Mises/Hayek/Friedman’s successor?
I’ve been a reader of The Economist from the early 1990’s and on and off since then. The stogey old white men, represented by those once stalwarts Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, Oxbridgers both, and their best sellers like The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America compendiums of their various essay subjected to studious re-writes. When the comments section was closed, that was marked my canceling of my subscription, though I later returned. Beddoes was not a member of that club, so that high-flown rhetoric must patiently wait for paragraphs like these? In this essay Amazon is the arbiter of Popular Taste, with Mr Seabright’s off and on appearances, aided by some ‘Big Names’. This is propaganda!
God gets mixed reviews on Amazon. This is perhaps surprising. His marketing campaign (now in its third millennium) has been strong. His slogans (“God is Great!”) are positive. And indeed many shoppers effuse. “Wonderful!” reads one five-star review beneath His best-known work, the Bible. “Beautiful,” says another. “Amen,” adds another satisfied customer.
Other reviewers are critical. One, after giving the Bible just a single star, observes bluntly, if rather blasphemously, that it is a “boring read”. Another review complains: “the plot is not cohesive”. A third disgruntled reader argues that there are “Too many characters” and that the main protagonist is a bit full of himself.
The patient reader need just wait as Mr Seabright describes himself:
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My research lies in the areas of microeonomic theory, industrial and competition policy, intellectual property and the digital society, development economics, economics and human evolution, the economics of gender, the economics of religion. A common theme to these apparently chaotically diverse topics is the foundations of human cooperation and social trust: I examine the way in which our prehistorically evolved psychology interacts with modern institutions to make social cooperation possible.
The Reader might just wonder, indeed ponder the reach of ‘Economic Science’, in the thought of Mr Seabright! He seems to bypass the Neo-Liberal Chatter of that Toxic Trio of Mises/Hayek/Friedman!
The Reader might wonder at what Economist might offer the The Believer, The Atheist , and or the completely disinterested?
If it feels surprising that God is reviewed on Amazon, it should not. God may have made heaven and earth, but he also makes an awful lot of money, as Paul Seabright, a British economist and professor at the University of Toulouse in France, points out in a new book.
The utter boredom of God Talk: The Economist.
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Secularists may smirk at religion as silly, but it deserves proper analysis. “The Divine Economy” looks at how religions attract followers, money and power and argues that they are businesses—and should be analysed as such. Professor Seabright calls religions “platforms”, businesses that “facilitate relationships”. (Other economists refer to religions as “clubs” or “glue”.) He then takes a quick canter through the history, sociology and economics of religions to illustrate this. The best parts of this book deal with economics, which the general reader will find enlightening.
Economists were slow to study religion. Some 250 years ago Adam Smith observed in “The Wealth of Nations” that the wealth of churches was considerable.He used secular language to describe how such wealth arose, observing that churches’ “revenue” (donations) flowed in and benefited priests, who he argued were sometimes animated less by love of God than by “the powerful motive of self-interest”. He also argued that if there were a better functioning market in religious providers, this would lead to increased religious harmony. According to Laurence Iannaccone, a professor of economics at Chapman University in California, Smith’s analysis was “brilliant”—and for a long time largely ignored.
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The Religious Hucksters, what ever their guise, trade in Sacred Texts like the Bible, the Koran, The Talmud. Mr. Sebright uses Economics as the ‘Key’ . It’s like the etiolated Neo-Liberal Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman in a new key! Economics is the central driver in human existence: The Wisdom of the Market is the singular imperative of human striving?
Some selective quotation: The Economist: Two descriptors apply: ‘Potted History’ or ‘History Made To Measure’!
Divinity departments are staffed by theologians rather than economists; the idea of mixing the dismal science with the divine strikes many people at the very least “as odd and at worst strikes them as blasphemous”, says Mr Iannaccone. People associate God with angels, not with Excel.
Yet religions lend themselves to economic analysis nicely. They offer a product (such as salvation); have networks of providers (priests, imams and so on) and benefit from good distribution networks. It is not just trade that travels on trade routes: ideas, diseases and religions do, too. Roman roads allowed the plague of Justinian to spread across Europe with a rapidity never seen before. They also allowed Christianity to.
Starting in the 1970s, some economists have been approaching religion with more academic devotion, analysing, for example, the economics of extremism and obtaining a place in the afterlife. This mode of thinking can help to clarify complicated religious history. When historians talk about the Reformation they tend to do so using thorny theological terms such as “transubstantiation”. Economists would describe it more simply as the moment when a monopoly provider (the Catholic church) was broken up, leading to an increase in consumer choice (Protestantism) and the price of services declining (indulgences were out).
A greater variety of suppliers started to offer road-maps to heaven. Henry VIII swapped his old service provider, Catholicism, for the new one—which was not only cheaper, but also allowed him to divorce a troublesome wife. There were, admittedly, some bumps: the pope was not pleased, and the habit of burning picky customers at the stake dented consumer confidence. But overall, the Reformation enabled people and their rulers to “get a better bargain”, says Davide Cantoni, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Seabright returns briefly, then some Brand Names, Nations, then it becomes a muddle of Economist chatter!
(Christianity and Islam), Walmart, Lidl and Tesco, the Catholic church, like McDonald’s, Vatican or Venezuela, Baal , the Bible, Tom Lehrer, Catholics, The Vatican Rag, “The Divine Economy”, ‘ a rational Bayesian framework, God, as Friedrich Nietzsche stated, Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic.
The final salvo: The Economist
God might wish he were dead when He hears such things. He is not.
( Call this the profession of Faith of ‘The Economist’?)
Headline: Your Party’s spectacular own-goal squanders a golden opportunity
Sud-headline: A chunk of Keir Starmer’s core vote were there for the taking, but Jeremy Corbyn’s party has instead succumbed to the hard-left’s self-destructive tendencies
Patrick Maguire is chief political commentator for The Times. He is the co-author of Left Out, the definitive history of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, and Get In, the Sunday Times bestselling account of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power.
Despite appearances, it really didn’t have to be like this. Jeremy Corbyn’s friends and advisers despair that the traumatic birth and chaotic infancy of Your Party — which struggled to come of age at its ill-tempered inaugural conference in Liverpool this weekend — has legitimised the tired but irresistible clichés they have spent a lifetime trying to escape.
Dave Spart, the People’s Front of Judea, Corbyn present but not involved: usually the hard left feels affronted by this vein of mockery. But speak to them in private and they admit, by turns angry and despondent, that for once their detractors might have a point.
By and large, Westminster struggles to suppress its collective impulse to laugh at Corbyn in particular and the organised left in general. Like all addictions, it is a self-destructive habit. More than once the Labour establishment has learnt that to its cost, and last year’s election suggested that their assumptions and entitlement would again end up shattered by a political force they prefer to ignore.
Corbyn and four other independent MPs who won seats Labour ought to have won at a canter had created a historic opportunity. For decades movements to the left of the Labour Party have comprehensively failed to prove the existence of an electoral coalition large enough to put their candidates in parliament.
Editor: Reader imagine this brodacast on a 21 inch black & white television screen in 1952! Patrick Maguire script writing lacks verve!
It is an impenetrable row but not an entirely pointless one, for it clarifies exactly whether Your Party will ever speak to anyone but a few thousand activists. Worryingly for Team Corbyn, there are signs Sultana might be winning it. On Sunday morning delegates narrowly voted to endorse the model of collective leadership she had championed: activists will now run and speak for the party in public, and not an individual MP. Neither Corbyn nor Sultana will be able to run for the leadership until the rules are reviewed in 2027, by which point, judging by the rancorous scenes on the conference floor, Your Party may no longer exist.
One senior party official, aligned with Corbyn, privately derides Sultana’s approach as the “0.7 per cent strategy”, a reference to the share of the vote they believe Your Party will win if it chooses the dogma of Trotskyist groupuscules over the populist politics that won the Gaza independents their seats. “She wants to be queen of the ashes,” the official complained. After this weekend, there is unlikely to be much more than that left.
Editor: The final paragraphs of Sarah Richmond’s review/essay:
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This is rich historical material, but ill suited to Schuringa’s accusatory purposes. Whatever funding Quine and Davidson may have received as young men, the work with which they later made their names, in logic and the philosophy of language, had nothing to do with “Cold War rationality”. Arguably, it had no political dimension whatsoever. As for Davis, it was not her philosopher colleagues who evicted her; they defended her against the UCLA administration. Furthermore, although Davis’s work may not have received particular attention, much of the recent philosophical literature on academic freedom and, more widely, free speech problematizes it as a liberal ideal.
Schuringa’s account is presented as an exercise in ideological critique. It aims to be “in line with a Marxist tradition” while avoiding crude or reductive approaches. But this potentially valuable project imposes demands that Schuringa does not meet. We need to be shown how analytic philosophy is ideological; how, for example, it bolsters the status quo. I’m not sure if the information that Schuringa provides about the social background of the philosophers he discusses – Quine was “the son of a businessman who would go on to found a tyre mould company” – is meant to be relevant here, but it surely isn’t. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels both came from bourgeois families.
As if to make his task even harder, Schuringa decides not to focus – as one might expect – on political and moral philosophy, but instead on logic, metaphysics and epistemology. Quine’s vehement dispute with Ruth Barcan Marcus about modal logic is a case in point. Their dispute turned on whether formal logic (which translates into symbolic language the structure of propositions and arguments) should or could incorporate modal concepts such as necessity and possibility. If this arcane disagreement has an ideological aspect, which is hard to believe, it needs to be exposed to the clear light of day. Schuringa appears to believe, as his subtitle hints, that apolitical philosophy is impossible. He views any apparent neutrality with suspicion, as if that necessarily amounts to reactionary political quietism. (Qui ne dit mot consent.) As for epistemology and metaphysics, which have historically steered clear of politics, recent work – much of it written by women – has introduced social and political elements into these areas. This forms part of a wider “social turn” in analytic philosophy which Schuringa notes, but nonetheless slights on the grounds that it is insufficiently radical.
In the same vein, Schuringa downplays the criticisms made by insiders. For instance, Bernard Williams, whose training was analytic, has ridiculed the approach on several occasions for its nit-picking, scientistic tendencies and neglect of history. Like Schuringa, he also roundly rejects utilitarian ethics. One might have expected all this to be music to Schuringa’s ears but he damns it with faint praise, presumably because Williams (a hero of mine) is not inspired by Marxism.
In general, Schuringa’s verdict on analytic philosophy is that it leads to a dead end. But where does he want it to lead? Many philosophical questions in the western tradition were first formulated in ancient Greece. If they remain unanswered, it may be because, since they do not seek matters of fact, they are not definitively answerable.
Analytic philosophy has attracted some fine minds, who have contributed to various areas of the discipline. Examples include John Rawls (political philosophy), Christine Korsgaard (moral philosophy), John McDowell (philosophy of mind), Dorothy Edgington (logic) and David Lewis (metaphysics). New topics, some of which were historically impossible in Plato’s time, have also emerged. This list would include the ethics of abortion and disability, posthumanism, feminist philosophy and the philosophy of AI. Writings such as these may not have solved the problems they address, but they have expanded our understanding and introduced new perspectives on them. Hardly a waste of time.
Editor: Jonathan Ree’s review of Schuringa book is more cosmopolitan in it’s outlook and approach, even when he is critical of Schuringa.
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For Schuringa, analytic philosophy ‘comes into its own’ in the United States in the Cold War era, slowly developing into the ‘monolith that we now know’. The analytic philosophers were, it seems, willing to do as much as they could to make America a ‘bulwark against totalitarianism’, especially after several leftist colleagues lost their jobs following appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Analytic philosophy as a whole began to show ‘close affinities’ with two better-established academic enterprises—‘marginalism in economics’ and ‘behaviourism in psychology’—emulating their project of replacing the amateurish value-driven inquiries of the past with dispassionate, specialized professional research. The government-funded rand Corporation sponsored several prominent analytic philosophers—W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson for instance—to conduct research into game theory and the mathematics of rational choice, with a view to buttressing the intellectual defences of American free-market capitalism.
This is a brave and original book, but Schuringa’s claim that it is an exercise in ‘social history’ is a little misleading. His narrative is constructed not from data about social classes, social trends or social movements, but from profiles of individual analytic philosophers—more than a hundred of them, by my count. He also speaks at one point of practising ‘psycho-social history’, but instead of exploring the inner compulsions of analytic philosophers he provides compressed summaries of their principal publications, accompanied by sketches of their public careers, focused on top jobs at elite universities. He tells us, for example, that Ruth Barcan Marcus ‘genuinely established a quantified modal logic’, for which, after suffering institutionalized misogyny for many years, she was eventually rewarded with a named chair at Yale; but that this displeased the imperious Quine of Harvard, who stuck to his dictum that ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’. Those who care about such things will protest that Quine was really referring to ‘bound variables’ or ‘variables of quantification’, rather than variables in general; but readers unfamiliar with logical quantifiers, predicate logic and modality are likely to end up feeling browbeaten and rather confused.
Schuringa builds on this foundation to argue that analytic philosophy as a whole—or at least ‘analytic philosophy proper’—is a suitable case for what he calls ‘ideology critique, in line with a Marxist tradition’. He is well versed in Marxism—he has just published Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (2025)—and this could have been the prelude to some high-wire Marxist hermeneutics; at the beginning of the book he suggests that ‘the mechanisms by which liberalism drives liberalism are less far to seek than, say, the mechanisms by which liberalism drives the development of modal logic’. In practice, however, he finds that ‘the underlying ideologies are not difficult to read off’. John Rawls, for instance, in his celebrated Theory of Justice (1971), set out to revive ‘social contract theory’—the basic template for individualistic bourgeois liberalism—and gave it such allure that even radical critics were, according to Schuringa, ‘led back into the ideology of liberalism’.
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Schuringa recognizes, however, that most analytic philosophers take very little interest in political philosophy; on the other hand, nearly all of them profess admiration for the eighteenth-century Scots philosopher David Hume, from whom, according to Schuringa, they have imbibed the idea of the individual self as an ‘autonomous subject’ confronting ‘a world of inert “matters of fact”’. That interpretation is not incontestable: Hume famously described the self as a ‘fiction’ imposed on ‘a collection of different perceptions’. But Schuringa is convinced that the dichotomy between individual subjectivity and external facts is part of a ‘Humean tradition’ whose incorrigible individualism ensures that ‘the ideology of analytic philosophy is that of liberalism’. Analytic philosophy ‘wears its social function on its sleeve’, he says, and ‘its practitioners speak with one voice to feed their own ideology back to themselves’.
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This system suffered severe shocks in the course of the nineteenth century, as university systems expanded to cater for the sons of the bourgeoisie, who sought exam-based qualifications in the hope of entering as quickly as possible into a modern professional career. The old curriculum was dismantled and levelled down, and philosophy ceased to be the keystone of the entire arts course, becoming simply one academic discipline alongside many others.
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Several luminaries of the new dispensation—Edmund Husserl in Germany, for instance, and Bertrand Russell in Britain—believed they were inaugurating a new era in which philosophy could free itself from the drudgery of teaching and textual interpretation, and become a field of pure intellectual research, comparable to advanced physics or mathematics.
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And even where philosophical education took an analytical turn, it continued to be bound up with the study of Plato and Aristotle, often in the original Greek. Oxford University, for example, now had a complement of almost fifty philosophical tutors, but Gilbert Ryle, leader of the analytic modernizers, noted that there was still no place for a ‘Greek-less philosophy don’. The young Iris Murdoch took delight in teaching philosophy at Oxford, and like many of her colleagues she attached special importance to Plato and Aristotle, seeing them as an antidote to the ‘dryness’, as she put it, of life in ‘a scientific and anti-metaphysical age’.
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Schuringa passes over these moments in educational history in order to present ‘analytic ideology’ as a ‘hegemon’ in the field of ‘politics’. Analytic philosophy, for him, is not only ‘the hegemonic form of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world’, but also a ‘hegemonic form of philosophy in the service of liberal-colonial capital’.
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We are also invited—on the authority of F. R. Leavis and D. H. Lawrence—to deride the ‘modernist’ aspirations of the Bloomsbury group. In the end analytic philosophy is deemed to have sunk into ‘methodological decrepitude’, which means that it now functions, as Schuringa alleges more than once, as ‘the antithesis of philosophy’.
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He might perhaps have referred to the campaigns of mass philosophical education conducted by Communist parties and some of their socialist rivals in the 1920s and 1930s: they certainly involved a concerted philosophical onslaught on liberalism, even if, as I argued in Proletarian Philosophers (1984), the outcomes were rather disappointing. But all he comes up with is a suggestion that genuine philosophy ought to give expression to ‘the fundamental human impulse to expand the imagination’, which seems a little vague, not to say somewhat bourgeois.
Editor: Jonathan Ree’s final paragraphs offer to the reader what she is after !
A Social History of Analytic Philosophy is full of ingenious argument and unusual information, but it fails to deliver the political knock-out that it promises. Schuringa is surely right to think that ‘no one is exempt from having class interests speak through them’, but in that case it should not come as a surprise that analytic philosophers employed by bourgeois universities tend to be bearers of liberal ideology. (On the other hand the continued salience of Plato and Aristotle—two great fountains of anti-liberalism—might seem rather anomalous.) Moreover he offers no evidence that students of analytic philosophy are exposed to larger doses of bourgeois liberalism than students of other subjects, or that they are especially susceptible to it: my own experience would suggest, in fact, that lots of them end up thoroughly disgruntled, and wishing they had studied something else.
Schuringa seems to think that analytic philosophy deserves a special scolding, on account of ‘the powerful critical forces that its hegemony helps to keep suppressed’. But even if he is right about the ‘powerful critical forces’ challenging modern capitalist societies, he is surely mistaken in supposing that analytic philosophy plays a significant part in keeping them in check. Back in 1957, Perry Anderson described it as a ‘peripheral phenomenon’, and its proportional presence in educational institutions has dwindled drastically since that time. Analytic philosophy has always been a minority pursuit, rather like fly-fishing or musical serialism but considerably smaller. It barely exists outside colleges and universities in the English-speaking world, and even there it accounts for little more than three thousand instructors out of a total of more than one and a half million—in other words, around 0.2%.
Schuringa’s argument made me think of the famous butterfly effect, but in reverse: a massive global cause—‘liberal-colonial capital’—invoked to explain a minuscule effect. And while his vehemence is impressive, it is a little overdone. There is surely something to be said in favour of philosophical teachers with a knack for turning the tables on their students: for persuading them to talk and to explain, if they can, exactly what they mean. The technique is obviously individualistic—it aims, after all, to get individuals to think for themselves—and it may also be biased, for better or for worse, towards liberal ideology. But if analytic philosophy is a hegemon, it is a diminutive one: a superstructure of a superstructure of a superstructure, and unlikely to make much difference to the rest of the world.
Political Observer offers the last three paragraphs of Brook’s self-congratulatory chatter, & his genuflection to Ronald Reagan, that I have highlighted, and his swipe against Gavin Newsom!
A survey this year sponsored by the Reagan Institute found that 83 percent of Americans believe America should stand up for human rights and democracy around the world. A large majority believe that America should take the lead in international events, including 69 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans.
A study done by Seamus A. Power, Richard A. Schweder and others and published this year in the journal Ethos, found that Americans still love diversity. Two-thirds of them want a more ethnically and racially diverse nation than exists even now. A majority of white Christians have a multicultural conception of America. Only a tiny percentage believe in the “great replacement: theory. Only 1.1 percent believe that America should be ethnically and racially homogenous.
Some Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California seem to think they can win the White House by behaving more like Trump, by thinking more like Trump, by adopting that dark American carnage vibe. This strikes me as political lunacy. Look at history. Americans lost faith in themselves in the 1970s, after the failures of the Great Society, the retreat from Vietnam, the corruption of Watergate, the impotent presidency of Jimmy Carter, the rising crime and divorce rates, the awful stagflation, the decay of our largest cities. But was this loss of faith permanent? No, Americans elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980. They elected optimism, patriotism and hope. There is still, deep inside the nation’s core, a little engine that knows no rest.
Who can forget the utterly bumptious Antonin Scalia ?
Stephen K. Mack
There is no doubt that the author of this obituary is schooled in the Scalia patois, in fact she/he is adept at sounding the notes of witless bulling insult that is the hallmark of that Scalia style! But was Scalia an ‘Originalist’ Or as Scalia described himself as a ‘faint-hearted originalist’? Here is a partial answer provided by Bruce Allen Murphy,the Fred Morgan Kirby Professor of Civil Rights at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.
‘When I teach about the First Amendment Free Exercise of Religion at Lafayette College, which used to occupy a routine pair of classes, I now wheel into the classroom a large white board that will occupy us for weeks, filled with all of the exceptions that the Court has created here restoring, in piecemeal fashion, the pre-Scalia, 1990 decision, world. I explain what has become the “Swiss Cheesing” of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, allowing, among others, for claims to be considered for exceptions for federal prisoners and others being held in government institutions, for a religious group in Hialeah, Florida seeking to sacrifice animals in religious ceremonies, and for a small religious group seeking to drink ceremonial hallucinogenic tea from the Amazon. The string of exceptions to Scalia’s Smith rule has created so many holes that there is almost no cheese left. After the Hobby Lobby decision, I will have to make one more change to the top of my board, one which risks doubling the number of exceptions, adding next to the words “person’s Free Exercise of Religion rights,” the phrase “and closely-held corporations’ religious rights” Even though the majority in Hobby Lobby has further limited Scalia’s Smith case holding, since that result comports with his pro-religious accommodation, pro-corporation constitutional rights, viewpoint, he silently votes with them. While Scalia likes to say in his public speeches that his version of the Constitution is “Dead. Dead. Dead,” once more his reading of Founding era history to construct his originalist interpretation of the Constitution is very much an evolving work in progress.’- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/156300#sthash.BWyZ4mgK.dpuf
The idea of ‘Originalism’ and or its renaissance is connected to Brown v. Board I &II as made plain in John Dean’s book The Rehnquest Choice:
Here is a report from Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen on Justice Scalia’s final Supreme Court rant, which is nothing less that reprehensible:
‘Critics of affirmative action, (including the court’s only black justice, Clarence Thomas,) have long argued that the policy backfires on black students, claiming that placing unprepared students in elite academic settings is setting them up for failure. Still, Scalia drew “muted gasps in the courtroom” for his indelicate comments at the end of oral argument, according to The New York Times. From the transcript:
There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.
I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer.
Bloggier outlets like the Hill reported that Scalia “surprised” the court, while Mother Jones tersely remarked that they would “really be looking forward to his opinion in the case.”
One could defend Scalia by pointing out that justices often float devil’s advocate–type statements during an oral argument in order to test the lawyer’s arguments, and that the only opinion that matters is the one they eventually write down. But even Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog, an elite law reporter who knows a thing or two about not jumping the gun when analyzing the court, found Scalia’s statement “quite clumsy.”
Is this encomium to the Originalist Eminence a surprise? Which doesn’t quite eschew substance, but relies on the argot of Scalia, which had its origin, or at least paid homage to the Hollywood Gangster films of the 1930’s.
In Abigail Green’s review of Mark Mazower’s ‘On Antisemitism A word in history’ of November 28, 2025 not one mention of The Gaza Genocide, should not surprise the reagular reader of the ‘Times Newspaper’ in its various iterations: Reader recall the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, andThe Economiststhat engaged in in like-mimded pictorial defamation:
Jeremy Corbyn is leading Britain’s left into a political timewarp. Some old ideological battles must be re-fought
Sep 19th 2015|5 min read
Editor: Reader note the use of the IHRA as the cudgel of choice, while the Genocide In Gaza continues unabated!
…
Inevitably, Mazower’s account of this situation is not neutral. It was, he writes, increasingly clear to him “that the constant invocation of antisemitism [against those protesting for Palestinian rights] needed to be understood as a refusal to acknowledge other things … that is to say, the existence of a suffering Palestinian people and their desire for freedom”. I want to let that stand; it may well be true, just as it may be true that those concerned with the “weaponization” of antisemitism refuse to acknowledge the ways in which the Palestinian movement is acting as a conduit for antisemitism into “our” society, however just its core aspirations. After all, the IHRA and the Jerusalem Declaration both agree that anti-Zionism is sometimes a form of antisemitism.
To publish such a book at this particular juncture is inevitably to intervene in a highly charged political debate. On Antisemitism is, the back cover tells us, “a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn”. Unlike Mark Mazower, whose scholarship I admire, I have not chosen to intervene in that debate, preferring instead to review his book as a work of history, which is what it purports to be. Nevertheless, I want to conclude by querying the implicit “we” that runs through its entire enterprise. “What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism?”, it asks. To answer that question in today’s global world, “we” need to consider a broad range of agents and publics. The narrative provided here does centre Jewish voices, but it consistently privileges European, American and (in Israel) Ashkenazi players and perspectives over those of others.
Obviously, we all know it’s a conspiracy theory that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent running a honeypot to blackmail our politicians, but weirdly, it turns out Epstein was behaving exactly like a Mossad agent. Personally, I can’t work out why that might be…
We now know that Epstein brokered deals for Israeli intelligence, such as “security agreements” with Côte d’Ivoire and Mongolia to turn them into mass surveillance states. The goal was to build a “cyber weapons empire” for Israel with the help of the Rothschild Group.
You would hope that similar could not possibly happen in the UK, but consider how the government is attacking civil liberties to protect Israel, how peaceful protesters are treated as terrorists, how we are losing the right to trial by jury, how we need ID to access websites, and how digital ID is coming, thanks to a push from Zionists such as Larry Ellison.
Obviously, Epstein is not behind any of this (unless he’s still alive somewhere), but that doesn’t mean the same dark forces are not at play. The intelligence agency behind a paedophile ring is still pulling the strings…
It seems not a day goes by when we are not learning more about Epstein’s connections to Israel. For example, the outstanding Drop Site News has revealed that Epstein worked with lawyer Alan Dershowitz back in the 2000s to attack academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The pair had co-authored a paper that was published by Harvard Kennedy School that was titled: “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
As you all know, we are supposed to pretend the Israel lobby doesn’t exist, even while AIPAC hosts events, bragging about how it shapes US policy. However, Mearsheimer and Walt somehow got an academic paper published that breaks down exactly how the Israel lobby influences US policy towards the Middle East. Honestly, I’m surprised they weren’t jailed or suicided for this.
Drop Site News describes the paper as follows:
The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.
While the paper was entirely factual, the details were largely ignored by the media, and Mearsheimer and Walt were smeared as antisemites for writing it. The Atlantic commissioned the piece then paid Mearsheimer and Walt a $10,000 “kill fee” when the publication backed out due to “sensitivity concerns”. Note how it’s always insensitive to tell the truth about Israel…
The Anti-Defamation League called the paper an “anti-Jewish screed”, which is interesting because when evidence emerges of other countries, such as Russia or China, meddling in western politics, no one is accused of racism. It’s almost like we have a massive double-standard…
The evidence has revealed that Epstein used his extensive social networks to push talking points, smearing Mearsheimer and Walt. That evidence comes in the form of a trove of emails obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets. The email cache has been authenticated by Bloomberg via cryptographic verification.
The emails show that Epstein was the recipient of drafts of an attack piece written by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, titled: “Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy.” The email chain confirms that Epstein distributed the piece for Dershowitz. Yes, it looks like the Israel lobby conspired to… debunk the conspiracy theory of the Israel lobby. What do you even say?
Dershowitz’s ties to Epstein run much deeper than the attack piece, as he represented Epstein as a lawyer. In 2005, a 14-year-old girl reported to police that she had been sexually assaulted at Epstein’s mansion. Epstein hired a private investigator to look into the girl and sent information to Dershowitz to undermine her testimony.
In the correspondence, Epstein accused the girl of being sexually active and using drugs, and he attacked the character of her family members. Epstein later pleaded guilty to watered down charges and served 13 months in prison where he was bizarrely allowed out for 12 hours per day, six days per week.
Consider that a man, who later became a convicted sex offender, was conspiring to ruin the careers of two academics for being critical of Israel. In doing so, he inadvertently proved the claims of Mearsheimer and Walt to be correct.
Now consider how the powerful people, who line up to discredit figures like Mearsheimer and Walt, have been so determined to protect Epstein’s clients. Seems strange that they would choose that hill to die on, doesn’t it?
If you’ve ever wondered what Epstein was up to, I’m gonna use my psychic powers to suggest that his contacts in the media and political circles were so willing to push Zionist propaganda, precisely because most of them visited his rape mansions.
Of course, Epstein’s influence also came from his considerable wealth so let’s not discount the possibility of bribery. For example, Epstein was considered an influential figure at Harvard, despite holding no official role, because he donated $9 million over a ten-year period. Why should anyone have influence over a university, simply because they have deep pockets? Can you see how western governments and institutions can be so easily captured by foreign state actors?
Epstein had strong ties to Israeli politicians such as former prime minister Ehud Barak, which was proven through hacked emails released by Palestinian group Handela. Epstein met with CIA Director William Burns and Barack Obama’s top lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler dozens of times. An Israeli spy lived for weeks in one of his mansions in Manhattan.
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