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The Straussian Moment
gwern.netRussell was for twenty-six years either Chairman or dominant member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversaw the battle readiness of the nation’s far-flung legions and armadas. As senators of Rome had insisted that, regardless of the cost, the legions must be kept at full complement because the peace and stability of the known world—th
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”
Alan Jacobs • How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
Adorno and Horkheimer claim that the industrialized and bureaucratized modern world is formed by a process of rationalization. The 20th-century social world is the result of the actions of human beings, whose faculty of reason has atrophied to a mere calculus of the most efficient means to a given end.
James Gordon Finlayson • Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
As Burke said in describing his early years in Albany, “Murphy delegates to the point of anarchy.”7
William Thorndike • The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
“Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, “Why the Americans Are Often So Restless in the Midst of their Prosperity” (1835)
“When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone …an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no co
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