The authors of this essay are members of the “DeRadicalisation in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate” research project funded by the European Research Council.   Recent mass shootings in […]

These are difficult days for the political commentator. The normal political thrust and jab has been overshadowed by the universal preoccupation with the pandemic. Commentary on Covid is best left […]

Did American democracy survive the presidency of Donald Trump? The question seems sure to occupy historians, commentators and the public during the administration of Joe Biden and beyond. If nothing […]

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 […]

Danielle Charette and Atman Mehta interviewed Aaron Tugendhaft about his new book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Their conversation covered the […]

  “We just cannot get a break.” Surely that is the universal sentiment of the past year. Yet in trying to rationalize a catastrophic year, there is something we can […]

The latest issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville is out, featuring a special series on “How Neoliberalism Reinvented Democracy.” Below is series guest editor Daniel Zamora Vargas’s introduction, which outlines the […]

  On 6 January 2021, a mob of demonstrators broke into and ransacked the US Capitol. Five people, including one police officer, died during the violence. The demonstrators had gathered […]

Back in the fall of 2020, as the post-summer threats of Covid-19 were doing little to assuage the anxieties of the upcoming American presidential election, I received a message from […]

  Review The Puzzle of Prison Order by David Skarbek (Oxford University Press 2020)   The Puzzle of Prison Order is a book about prison governance but reads like a story […]

En France, encore une fois, l’on débat de la laïcité. Comme Patrick Weil nous rappelle, la laïcité c’est d’abord du droit, qui protège la liberté de conscience de chacun.e, et […]

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 […]

Represented in governments across Europe and at the vanguard of the founding of the European project, Christian Democracy was one of the most important postwar political ideologies. Yet surprisingly few […]

Alors que les manifestations et les révoltes se multiplient au niveau mondial depuis deux ans, notre stagiaire Justin Saint-Loubert-Bié a interviewé Alain Bertho, professeur d’anthropologie à l’Université de Paris 8 […]

  Is it still I that burns there all alone? Unrecognizable? memories denied? O life, o life: being outside. And I in flames—no one is left—unknown. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Komm […]

Justine Lacroix, Jean-Yves Pranchère et Anton Jäger ont eu l’amabilité de partager quelques-unes de leurs réflexions critiques à propos de mon livre Slow Démocratie, paru à l’automne 2019.   Le […]

  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 […]

This is the fourth post in our review forum of Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019).   Wendy Brown’s latest […]

William Selinger offers a response to his reviewers in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.    It is a pleasure to respond to Georgios Varouxakis and Lucia Rubinelli’s commentaries on Parliamentarism: […]

  This is the second review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.    Review of William Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber (Cambridge University Press, 2019).   Historians of 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 […]

  In a 1972 speech at the Chicago Public Library, the novelist Saul Bellow described the Westside branch where he borrowed books as a boy. The regulars at the Humbolt […]

Sur le film What is democracy ? d’Astra Taylor (Zeitgeist Films, 2018)   Les mots doivent garder leur sens, surtout lorsqu’ils portent les valeurs de toute une époque. « What is […]

Danielle Charette and Robert Stone sat down this week with Josiah Ober, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of classics and political science at Stanford University. They discussed Professor Ober’s latest book, Demopolis (Cambridge, […]

I review three excellent and thought-provoking new books on democracy for The American Prospect.   Photo Credit: Natalie Maynor, League of Women Voters, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.