Power and Crisis Archives - Page 5 of 6

Feature

Trump as Ubu Roi

On the charismatic appeal of vulgarity

June 6, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Many are the analogies for the current President of the United States. Such analogies always contain within them theoretical debates about the nature of Trump’s appeal, the prospects for his rule, and how the coterie around him will conduct themselves in relation to Trump, in relation to each other, and ...

Feature

The Whiskey Rebellion, Political Crisis, and the Sociology of Elite Interpretation

From the early modern to the contemporary USA, part 2

May 10, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Among the grievances that fueled the rebels we can include an early modern version of a bailout. Government issued bonds had been used to pay the soldiers in the Continental Army during the revolutionary war. During the economic depression of the 1780s, speculators had bought these up for pennies on ...

The Whiskey Rebellion, Political Crisis, and the Sociology of Elite Interpretation

Feature

Ordnance as Ordinance

The MOAB bomb and the Biblical Roots of Our Endless War

May 5, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

In this light, both the decision to name this weapon MOAB and the decision to deploy it in Afghanistan is tightly linked with what Judith Butler called a “new military convention” begun by Colin Powell when he described the deployment of “smart bombs” during the first Iraq War as “the ...

Feature

Anthony Wayne, Distributed Sovereignty, and the Bodies of the Republic

From the early modern to the contemporary USA, part 1

April 10, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

Is Wayne -- from his uncouthness to his ruthlessness to his success -- useful to think with today? There are certainly ways he haunts our present. Historians, for example, have often seen him as a forbearer of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies. And as such he connects, via a recent, ...

Anthony Wayne, Distributed Sovereignty, and the Bodies of the Republic

Democracy

Aristotelian Reflections on President Trump’s Unauthorized Missile Strikes in Syria

The opposite of cowardice is rashness, and courage the mean between

April 8, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

Earlier in the same work, while concluding his general discussion of virtue and vice, Aristotle refers to the famous story of Odysseus facing the original “rock and a hard place” dilemma. Odysseus knows that he has no choice but to pass through the middle of the whirlpool and a ferocious ...

Aristotelian Reflections on President Trump’s Unauthorized Missile Strikes in Syria

Feature

Prophets of Deceit

Post-Truth Politics and the Future of the Left

April 3, 2017 • by Nicholas Baer and Maggie Hennefeld

–Reinhart Koselleck Hindsight, much like the year we’re all now desperately looking forward to, is 20/20. –John Oliver The spectacular and traumatic failure of established news sources and polls to predict the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election has not only heightened a pervasive sense of uncertainty and anxiety, but also given rise ...

Feature

Misrepresentation and Misrecognition

Steve King’s American Exceptionalism and its Ties to the “Slaves were Immigrants, too” Thesis

March 30, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

I don’t want to spend much time on King’s comments themselves, but let’s note here the way that “American civilization” is equated with “Western civilization”. Let’s also note that other civilizations are inferior to this civilization, precisely because other civilizations “produce very little freedom,” while “our” superior civilization produces more. ...

Feature

(Not) Coming to Terms with the Past

Race, Injustice and Social Policy in “Postracial” America

March 15, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

A week later, on March 6th, Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), waded into similarly troubled waters when he claimed -- in an address to HUD employees -- “That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in ...

Education

Durkheim’s Enduring Relevance

Sociology offers a solution to the problems raised by Critical Theory

February 7, 2017 • by Nicola Marcucci

Émile Durkheim and the Durkheimian school also allow us to rethink the tension between the modern social sciences, and morality and politics. However, Durkheim’s analysis of this tension is, in some respects, divergent from the one put forward by Critical Theory. Sociology, according to Durkheim, is neither about supplementing the ...

Feature

Paris Terror Events and the Dramaturgies of the Aftermath

January 10, 2017 • by Public Seminar

Daniel Dayan is a fellow of the Marcel Mauss Institute (School of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences) and a professor at the Levinas European Institute. Dayan has been Research director at CNRS-Paris, and a visiting professor at Sciences-Po and the universities of Stanford, Geneva, Tel Aviv, and Oslo. He has also been an Annenberg scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and for many years a ...

Feature

The Armenian Violence Question

A Conversation on Means and Social Change

December 13, 2016 • by Tamar Shirinian and Nelli Sargsyan

How do we make sense of a general population's acceptance of militarization? We see the following conversation as an attempt to entangle and disentangle some of the complexities of this particular historical juncture in post-Soviet Armenia. In reflecting on the Armenian experience and on the larger process of postsocialism and ...

Education

How to Think through Cages

November 3, 2016 • by Santiago Zabala

What I liked so much about these suggestions was the subtle call to think without fear and without expectations. The cages will always be there, but I came to understand how important it is to create a philosophical cage that allows you to leave it. When would leaving become necessary? ...