No Time for Utopia
Most political thought is βideal theoryβ: its arguments are based on an idealized world in which important aspects of reality are abstracted away. Abstraction isnβt necessarily a bad thing β in the contrary, it is often necessary in science β but it isnβt self-evident that the results of abstractions and idealizations are (always) applicable to the real world, and if theory doesnβt descend from the ideal world to reality it turns into an intellectual game without practical relevance; or worse, as the case of neoclassical economics illustrates. In that case abstraction and idealization resulted in a βtheoryβ that explains nothing,...
The Hegemony of Psychopathy (Excerpt)
This is an edited collection of excerpts from my book/pamphlet The Hegemony of Psychopathy that was just published. (It can be purchased in paperback or downloaded for free in PDF format at the publisher’s website.) * * * The Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention from social and political philosophers. This is surprising because the scale and extent of the atrocities involved in the Holocaust should be impossible to ignore. If we humans can do that, then that makes a difference β or should make a difference β for our beliefs about the ideal society, for example. At the very...