Share the post "La Présidentielle 2022 – Revue de Presse: 23 April 2022"

The winner of the 2022 French presidential election will soon be known, with many commentators comparing its historic character to the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum.

From the small town of St. Rémy-sur-Avre, Roger Cohen highlights the reasons why many French citizens plan to vote for Le Pen, from protection of pensions, to their concerns over Islam and desire to defend laïcité, to distaste for a technocratic class which has “never changed a kid’s diaper.” In Foreign Policy, historian Robert Zaretsky suggests that Marine Le Pen should be understood as a Bonapartist because of her taste for referenda, a preference she has expressed strongly on the issue of immigration. (Her

Share the post "Equality, Federalism, and Tocqueville in Ukraine – Revue de Presse: 6 March 2022"

First off, an exciting conclusion to an exciting series: Samuel Moyn of Yale has been giving the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford on the theme of “The Cold War and the Canon of Liberalism”. It concluded this past week with a lecture on Lionel Trilling, after lectures featuring the thought of Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertude Himmelfarb, and Hannah Arendt. The whole series is available here.

Teresa Bejan recently reviewed Anne Phillips’s book Unconditional Equals, using Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” to get at the account of equality Phillips attempts to develop. Bejan herself concludes, in appraising Phillips’s work, that “It seems, then, that the most

Share the post "Revue de Presse: 24 October 2021"

To start off this week, two columns in The Week by Samuel Goldman.  First, Goldman urges those following developments in American higher education to reflect on the “institutional distinctives” of universities. He argues, “By embracing a narrow conception of research at the expense of both general education and institutional service, professors have unintentionally encouraged false friends on the left and critics on the right.”

This makes an interesting pairing with Teresa Bejan’s recent piece in The Atlantic on the uses and abuses of the word “problematic” in academic parlance.  The term, which has proliferated and spread beyond the academy, she proposes is both “highly efficient” and “disastrous for learning.” It