Teaching college students today about the significance of the American principles of freedom, equality, and constitutionalism is an uphill battle against the rise of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at the expense of the humanities and social sciences, the bureaucratization of the classroom with its plethora of non-pedagogical mandates, and — perhaps most difficult […]
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Plato’s Legacy in Eighteenth-Century Western Politics
“. . . I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. while wading thro’ the […]
Durability and Duress: Inter-Tribal Kinship and Indian Gaming Capitalism
“I want . . . salt, and pepper, for the old people.”— Red Cloud Kinship is an Indigenous cultural tradition. It is also a political practice. Indigenous societies and nations withstood colonization for centuries by wielding the political power of kinship. Inter-Tribal kinship alliances prevented the total annihilation of Indigenous peoples during the colonial and […]
Tocqueville on the Road to Despotism
“Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too with peoples.” Thus mused Alexis de Tocqueville in the closing pages of his magnum opus, […]
Remapping Sovereignty
In recent years, “decolonization” has exploded onto the scene as a keyword of emancipatory social movements around the globe. Various mobilizations have drawn on and further popularized such an analysis, eliciting both celebration and significant backlash. In so doing, these movements have (re)animated and updated the meanings of the 20th century heritage of anticolonial independence […]