When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the act looked irrational, even mad. Not to neorealists. The invasion was not only rational but also predictable. So argue political scientists John Mearsheimer and Sabastian Rosato in a new book, How States Think.
In the latest Hub book review, Patrick Luciani revisits Orientalism by Edward W. Said (Pantheon Books, 1978) and highlights how his influential book and his activism helped lay the framework, intellectual and otherwise, for the unrest of our current moment.
In their new book, Lukianoff and Schlott trace the rise of cancel culture from 2014, when canceling appeared uncontrolled in academia, the media, and the sciences. But something has changed since October 7, and the backlash has already started for those in higher education who are explicitly supporting Hamas.
Western diplomats, journalists, and B-level scholars got their wish. They helped to defeat a flawed and perhaps hapless leader in the Shah of Iran, and they inadvertently aided a greater evil.
To leap from learning more about how Rome fell to pushing for a range of progressive policies to save the West—policies mainly aimed at the U.S.—is stretching the fall of Rome analogy.
D.J. Taylor’s new biography delves deeply into George Orwell’s personal life and highlights how, like all of us, he was a complex man who had his fair share of failings and contradictions.
You can argue with whether or not we are living in a true modern tyranny, but regardless, many of the problems raised in Sohrab Amari’s new book are resolvable without reimposing industrial regulatory measures.
Capitalism may not be the best moral ideal, but it’s the best workaround given our natural but limited capacity for compassion and evolutionary instincts. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson every generation enamoured of socialism has to learn.
Humanists may want to push religion and Christianity into the background of life, but Christianity has made the world safe for humanism, and, indeed, the Enlightenment itself.
The genius of prosperity is found not in government stimulus programs but in the ethic of work and discovery in average citizens who take pride in their labour. Prosperity and economic growth driven by ideas is a process initiated from the bottom up, not the top down.
