Marx
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No more Marx or Spinoza in the secondary school philosophy curriculum in Italy…
…but students will read Gentile, the philosopher of fascism.
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The historian Sven Beckert appears to be confused about “capitalism”
That’s the upshot of this long and interesting review of Beckert’s most recent book by the political theorist Corey Robin. I’ve not read Beckert’s book, but welcome comments from those who know more about this topic. Please do not comment unless you have read Beckert’s book or read Robin’s review.
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The problem for parents in America is that “America hates people”
Yes, indeed, a nice takedown of a bit of sociological idealism in the NYT: The article mentioned that policymakers need to focus on supporting parents, but in equal weight, if not more so, was the argument that America’s culture of parenting was the problem. Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and…
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Social science papers may lean “liberal”…
…but they do not lean “left,” and it would be nice if journalists were a little more careful about this. One entire social science discipline leans anti-left (i.e., pro-capitalist), while others may, at best, tend to be liberal in the parochial American sense. If only the social sciences really leaned left, we’d learn a lot…
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Economists (i.e., adherents of the failed empirical science of neoclassical economics) “once dismissed the AI job threat”…
…but now they don’t. As ideologists for capitalism, they, of course, had to resist the idea that AI would expose how little interest capitalist modes of production have in wage laborers–blue collar workers learned this decades ago, but now white collar workers are being lined up at the firing line. As I said in a…
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Most cited Anglophone philosophical books on Marx since WWII (according to Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)
I focus on English-language books mainly by philosophers, or that are obviously philosophically-minded. Totals are rounded to the nearest 100, and only books with at least 500 citations are listed. I could not find on Google Scholar Allen Wood’s Karl Marx in the Routledge “Arguments of the Philosophers” series, which would surely have made the…
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Edwards & Leiter, Marx book, redux
I learned from Routledge that in a little over a year, the book has now sold about 1,900 copies, including over 1,700 in paperback. The latter number is especially gratifying, since hardly any reviews have yet appeared (the most visible one was Choice), which suggests word-of-mouth has been favorable. Thank you to all readers!
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More on “left” moralizing
A propos last week’s post, this remark from Jake McNulty’s very good book on Marcuse (in my Routledge Philosophers series) is also apt: A final observation: Marcuse’s profound investment in psychoanalytic thought appears to have no parallel among the analytic critical theorists [e.g., Haslanger, Manne, Stanley]. In leftist thought and practice, psychoanalysis has often served…
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“The finance industry is a grift”
(MOVING TO FRONT, THIS MAY NOT HAVE PUBLISHED PROPERLY THE FIRST TIME) It’s not every day that the NYT publishes an article by an economist arguing that one of the main industries in NYC is a “grift.” Since many law professors study this “grift,” I’m curious to hear why the author is wrong or right.…
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“Grumpy Chinese Guy”
Somehow I fell upon this guy on FB (the link is to his YouTube page). He does sensible class-based analysis of various topics in the news, and he’s pretty good! Some readers may enjoy this.
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Xi Jinping and “Marxist theory”
I was in Hong Kong last week for a very informative conference on “Academic Freedom in Asia” (about which I’ll have more to say soon), as well as a talk to the philosophy department at the University of Hong Kong, which was exceptionally hospitable and welcoming. At the hotel one morning, the fellow seating folks…
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“Businesses have a moral responsibility to stand up to autocracy”
So argues philosopher David Silver (UBC). My sense, alas, is that Marx and Milton Friedman were right: business under capitalism only recognizes “moral” responsibilities that are profitable. I would love to be wrong!
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Philosopher Jaime Edwards talks about Marx on ideology and class…
…at Brain in a Vat. (I talked about other parts of our Marx book last month.)
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On dreading the AI future
Philosopher Harvey Lederman comments; a long, but far from exhaustive, excerpt: For the last two and a half years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii