October 7, 2011 at 11:23 am
When any one, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have not appointed to do so, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey… [and] may constitute to themselves a new legislative, being in full liberty to resist the force of those, who without […]
September 26, 2011 at 11:57 am
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mind and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the […]
September 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the every moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity. – Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific, […]
March 22, 2011 at 4:04 pm
George Scialabba recently offered a review of Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life by Nicholas Phillipson in The American Conservative. The piece gives greater context to the life of Adam Smith, though not without acknowledging the inherent difficulty in so doing: He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving […]
December 2, 2010 at 7:34 am
In honor of CC203’s examination of the seminal ethnography by Bronislaw Malinowski: The time when we could tolerate accounts presenting us the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being are gone. This picture is false, and like many other falsehood, it has been killed by Science. – Argonauts of the Western Pacific
October 12, 2010 at 10:00 am
Andy Kroll, in doing an investigative report on the growing list of unemployed and underemployed Americans, takes the case study of Rick Rembold to give a face to the economic struggle of aging middle-class Americans (via TomDispatch): “Wouldn’t that be better than no job at all?” I ask. Rembold gnaws on the question. “I can’t […]
September 30, 2010 at 2:35 pm
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. – Niccolo Machiavelli, in Chapter XVII of The Prince. NB: A pundit writing at Politics Daily criticized President Obama by pointing out his failure to adhere to Machiavelli’s advice in being feared and loved. Conclusion: what Machiavelli wrote 500 years ago still […]
September 27, 2010 at 10:12 am
This Wednesday, Prof. Susanne Sreedhar — Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and frequent lecturer in CC203 — will be presenting a talk titled “Hobbes and Locke on Toleration” as part of the Fall 2010 lecture series organized by the Boston University Institute for Philosophy & Religion. From the event description: Prominent in common understandings of the […]
September 22, 2010 at 1:15 pm
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame. — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. “Few historians know of the heartwarming friendship between French Reformation theologian John Calvin and English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the latter of whom may or may not have been real, […]
