Quentin Crisp and Political Courage
We do not usually number Quentin Crisp, queer icon and media quipster, among the theorists of liberal democracy, or indeed among the serious thinkers of anything. Like his predecessor and […]
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Blake Smith
Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. He is a historian of modern France and a translator of contemporary francophone fiction. He writes for such popular media outlets as Tablet and Aeon.Democracy’s Future: Philosophy and Queerness as Ways of Death
The Covid-19 epidemic has me feeling stuck. I’m held in place by confinement, border closures and quarantines, and held in time by the deferral, or cancellation, of the future—a year’s […]
MoreFoucault on Liberal Democracy, Historicism and Philosophy
Liberal democracy is an oxymoron. Or rather, it’s a site of confrontation between contradictory discourses, between the universalist aspirations of philosophy and the partisanship of historiography. So insinuates Michel […]
MoreAn Existentialist Tocqueville? Beauvoir against America
Americans have made a kind of civic cult out of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Perhaps it was hoped that praising to the skies one Frenchman’s opinion of our […]
MorePierre Manent in Search of the Political
Pierre Manent is a philosopher who summons us to the pursuit of truth and the practice of politics. Since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, these two […]
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