Corey Robin's Blog, page 12

Harvard, or A Study in Total Depravity

Harvard has hired Ballard Partners, one of the top lobbying firms in DC, to defend its interests against Trump. Ballard former lobbyists include Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief-of-staff, and Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General. When the great American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen was casting about for a subtitle for his study of the American academy, one of the ones he came up with was: “A Study in Total Depravity.”

In Santa Barbara this week

I’m going to be speaking in Santa Barbara on Thursday and Friday of this week (January 24 and 25). On Thursday, at 12:30, on the UC Santa Barbara campus, I’ll be delivering the Phi Beta Kappa Public Lecture, on “Why do—or did—economists read the ancient Greeks?” On Friday, at 10 am, I’ll be doing a workshop on my book-in-progress “King Capital.” You can get all the details for either of these events here. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello. An excerpt from the talk: Through a close reading of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, I’ll show how two economists used the ancient Greeks to identify a different turn and possibility in the modern world. Not a […]

Why have we stopped comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson and started comparing him to William McKinley?

Democracy in America is not well, but what ails it? According to one diagnosis, the country is suffering from multiple strains of one-man rule—tyranny, fascism, authoritarianism. Variants of the virus originate in the people and their passions. Citizens vote the tyrant into power. Racism, misogyny, or some other affliction of cruelty and fear, fuels their votes. Democracy is not just threatened by disease. It is the disease. This idea, of despotism from the demos, has a distinguished pedigree. Plato and Aristotle thought that all, or nearly all, forms of tyranny arise from the people. The vulgar many oppose the virtuous few, whose ethos of remove is an irritant to the many. Stirred by a demagogue, the people and their leader […]

Finding my mother in me—and in my classroom

The older I get, the more I love teaching. When I was starting out as a professor, teaching wasn’t my main concern. I was a good teacher, I’d like to think. I always put a lot of time into it. I spent hours prepping for lecture. I spent even more hours reading rough drafts of student papers and then grading them. I supervised dissertations. I was dedicated to the job and wanted to do it well. But these were secondary to my main ambition, which was to make my mark as a scholar and a writer. When I turned 50—that was seven years ago—things began to change. I became more careful about my time and relationship to academia as a […]

Israel came late to American Jews

My mom died last month. Going through some of the personal items she left for me, I found this book. The Jews of America was the textbook that virtually all of my sisters and I used in religious school, or Sunday School as it was called in Reform synagogues of the time, as we made our way toward our bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s how we learned about Jewish history and heritage, not just in America, despite the title, but across time and space. Ours was a typical Reform temple in the suburbs, so I assume this was a pretty standard text. The book came out in 1969, with a new edition in 1973. My sisters and I would have […]

A month before Election Day, I predicted…

A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook: As the last three days’ events around the failure of the Republicans and Trump to shape Congress’s most recent spending bill reveal, I got this prediction pretty much right. I should confess right off the bat that I do get a fair number of predictions wrong. Most painfully, I was sure Clinton would win in 2016, a prediction that my critics, understandably, have never let me or my readers forget. But one thing I did get completely right about Trump’s first term, before it even began, was that he would be a spectacularly weak president; failure, rather than success, would be his lot. The reason for that failure and that […]

The Jewish Question, but in reverse.

One of Marx’s most persistent points, from On the Jewish Question forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state—the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion—we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and […]

House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

I’ve just finished reading Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann. The title is a little misleading. Though the book focuses on Heinrich (Thomas’s brother) and Nelly, it’s really a group portrait of a range of European writers and intellectuals from the Weimar era to World War II. And though it’s titled House of Exile, it opens with the back story to several of the writers and their relationships, prior to their exile from Nazi Europe. It also intersperses their story with that of other writers who never went into exile, like Virginia and Leonard Woolf. It’s not clear, throughout, whether it’s meant to be a group biography or a combination of […]

Why do—or did—economists read the ancient Greeks?

Three items that might be of interest. First, over at Balkinization, I participated in a symposium on Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s book America’s New Racial Battle Lines, which came out earlier this year. Rogers was my adviser in graduate school who taught me a lot of what I know about the American right. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this discussion, even if I disagree with some of his and King’s claims about where things stand with the right and racial politics in the US. From the conclusion to my post: While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, […]

The Phony War

This blog has been offline for a while, mostly due to technical issues that I think have now been fixed; much thanks to Pea Lutz, whose work on the blog has been excellent and which I highly recommend. My apologies for the extended silence. I had been posting a lot on Facebook, so much of my commentary on politics and other matters is there. But I’m going to try to return to being more active here. One fascinating phenomenon that I’ve been noticing in the last couple of weeks is how, despite Trump’s winning the election, a fair amount of both reporting and commentary in the media has not only fallen silent on the question of his authoritarianism and/or fascism […]