Sublime

Where Balibar, as a consequence, sees our inconvertible cruelty as always about to undermine our politics, and our confidence in politics, Wendy Brown sees neoliberalism – which she defines in Undoing the Demos as ‘a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms’ – as ‘quietly undoing basic elements of democracy

Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.

Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o

The question was what, if anything, undergraduates at the country’s colleges and universities should learn about Western civilization—about ancient Rome and Greece, through the emergence of the modern form of the nation-state in Europe, and onto our own experiment in the new republic of America. More fundamentally, the issue was whether the concept