Spinoza and the Unrest of Capitalism
“To succumb to pressure to suppress or disguise his true beliefs would have been, for Spinoza, a concession equivalent to defeatist self-abnegation.”
Jonathan Church
Jimmy Carter: A Man Ahead of His Time
“It should be noted, however, that President Carter was not only the Great Humanitarian. He was also the Great Deregulator.”
Editor’s Choice: Notable Articles in 2024
Merion West contributing editor Jonathan Church reflects on the most important essays the magazine published in 2024.
The Discontents of Capitalism
“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?’”
The Paradox of Capitalism
“For example, how many retirees can relate to Jack Nicholson’s professional exile in About Schmidt, a film about a man trying to find purpose after a career as an actuary, when the title character returns to the office one day in a pathetic last-ditch effort to show he is still relevant?”
The End of Capitalism
“For Herbert Marcuse, German philosopher and notorious member of the Frankfurt School, Marx did us a service in trying to expose capitalism as a historically-contingent mode of production based on reified social relations that do not facilitate—in fact, impede—the harvesting of reason as the path to
The Sophistry of the New Right Activism
“Rufo’s ‘New Right Activism’ is not the prescription of one who, following Socrates, seeks to be virtuous, but rather one who, following Faust, sacrifices his soul to achieve victory.”
Mihai Nadin: Disrupter of Science
“[My book seeks to] disrupt science in the sense that it gets us away from the myth that doing more physics and chemistry will be the answer to understanding the living and, in particular, the human being.”
“Neoliberalism” Is a Delusion of Marxists
“I have written previously that much of this ‘neoliberal’ nightmare is a myth, not because the world is without problems, but because the problems of the world are much too multifaceted, internally complex, and situationally unique for each problem to regarded as just another mutation of an invincib
Yes, January 6th Was an Insurrection
“The attempted insurrection by President Trump and his supporters had failed. But make no mistake: The violent events of January 6th were the direct result of a deliberate months-long campaign by President Trump to overturn illegally an election that he did not win.”
Richard Kemp: Israel’s Existential Campaign to Destroy Hamas
“Hamas wants to maximize the death of its civilian population. The purpose is to get the international community, the United Nations, the United States, other governments around the world, to condemn Israel, to vilify Israel, to delegitimize Israel, and undermine the Jewish state in that way.”
Phyllis Chesler: Modern Feminism’s Failure to Condemn Hamas
“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”
How Scholars and Activists Have Reinvented Our Understanding of Racism
“In short, we have dogma, and from dogma, cognitive errors in reasoning inevitably ensue.”
The Problems with Diversity Training
“This is an admirable aim, but there is just one big problem: Diversity training is not working.”
Harvard Needs to Be Consistent on the Virtue of Free Speech
“As my co-author Kai Whiting and I argue in an upcoming book…free speech debates have become not simply a matter of whether or to what extent certain ideas should be banished from the public domain, but why, how, and for whom they should be restricted.”
Would Socrates Be Anti-Woke? A Stoic Critique of Identity Politics
“For the Stoic, however, personal identity is not a fragmented life of intersecting cultural identities but rather a holistic and unified embodiment of rationality endowed by nature.”
The Greatness of Ronald Reagan
“With bloated bureaucracies and top marginal tax rates at 70% when he entered office, President Reagan also carried in his mind a basic script about overreach of the federal government that resonated with Americans after a decade of stagflation and presidential scandals.”
Karl Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation Is Wrong
“It is a win-win situation—not the zero-sum world of Marx’s gloomy dystopia. Institutions that reduce transaction costs and enforce well-defined property rights provide an environment in which incentives to economic initiative can thrive.”
The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States (Part Two)
“The analyses attempting to quantify reparations, cited above, will likely encounter strong and ongoing resistance, if only based on the price tag alone.”
The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States
“What accounts for the gap between scholars and activists who advocate reparations and broad public resistance to the idea?”
The Failed Attempt to Rescue Marx’s Labor Theory of Value
“Without the notion of socially necessary labor time, nothing in Marx’s value form or overall theory of exploitation makes sense.”
What Karl Marx Got Wrong About Value
“As a matter of economics, scarcity is the source of all value, even if it is a combination of ‘manufactured’ scarcity via monopoly control and relative scarcity due to the costliness of extraction and the preferences of consumers.”
When John F. Kennedy Saved the World (Part II)
“Kennedy no doubt considered his relations with Khrushchev in making his decision. He had been groomed by his father to be a ruthless competitor.”
When John F. Kennedy Saved the World
“Kennedy proved his mettle in response to a Soviet breach of the Monroe Doctrine, defusing a crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.”
Forgiving All Debt Is a Step in the Wrong Direction
“In financial markets, the basic unit of cost is risk.”
The Trump Putsch
“While I am happy to endorse some of President Trump’s policies, I am not willing to endorse his self-serving legal maneuvering simply for the sake of these policies I support.”
Ibram Kendi’s Thesis Could Use a Lot More Rigor (Part II)
“In short, Kendi’s consequentialist view of racism as rooted in policy (which, however unpredictably and unintentionally, results in racial disparities) does not explain everything.”
Ibram Kendi’s Thesis Could Use a Lot More Rigor
“For Kendi, it is policy first and racism second. Debatable? That is a racist question. Maybe a presentist interpretation of history? Also racist.”
The False Dichotomy in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectionality
“Why is this important? Because grammar shows that Crenshaw’s distinction between identity politics and liberal universalism is artificial.”
The Dangers of Campus Speech Codes: Revisiting the Water Buffalo Affair
“The history which preceded the magazine’s shutdown and resurgence involved a controversy sufficient for the Red and Blue to be ‘expelled from the Student Activities Council (SAC)’ and to have ‘archives…trashed by the University.’”
Colin Kaepernick and a False Dichotomy
“It probably also guarantees he will not be standing anytime soon, given that these are highly charged social issues which are deeply complex and are probably not going to be ‘fixed’ in the foreseeable future.”
As the Word “Racism” Loses Its Meaning
“Ambiguity, however, is the name of the game when it comes to defining racism, while Whiteness Studies is similarly plagued with ‘critical’ obfuscation.”
What Søren Kierkegaard Can Teach the Left About Ayn Rand
“The view of Rand as a self-absorbed, even solipsistic, apologist for the greed of nefarious capitalists…was always a myopic misreading of Rand, at least if one pays close attention to her novels.”
There Is No Free Lunch: Landlords Are Not Leeches
We should support rent moratoriums—but not because landlords are ruthlessly exploiting a pandemic.
In Reply to Ben Burgis: Capitalism, Socialism, and Marx
“…one can go into business with the long-term goal of instituting a worker co-op. But the first and most fundamental aim is to supply the market with something consumers want, in as profitable a way as possible.”
Robin DiAngelo Is Correct about the Psychic Weight of Race
“Although one empirical study indicates that whiteness may not be as invisible to white people as is assumed, DiAngelo is not widely off the mark about the psychological advantages of being white.”
Shakespeare and Social Justice Ideology: Othello Is Not About Racism
“Unfortunately, I don’t think it simply comes down to the location of a portrait. In recent years, social justice ideology has infiltrated many of our institutions, especially the universities and, particularly, in the humanities.”
Why Karl Marx Is Wrong
“Running a profitable enterprise is not the same thing as Smaug guarding a pile of gold.”
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility Theory Falls Prey to Logical Fallacies
“Unfortunately, in so blithely dismissing individualism, DiAngelo hinges her theory so heavily on collective, rather than individual, identity and experience that it dies on the sword of a logical fallacy.”