Category: Government
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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November 3, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The October Quarterly Discussion merged two chapters from The Prince by Machiavelli with a chapter from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Of prime interest was the focus on the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. Machiavelli presents him as a champion of …
March 12, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The Federal Artists’ Project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which started during the Depression. This program allowed artists, writers, musicians, and actors the ability to earn money at a time when jobs and money were scarce. Writers, for example, collected …
January 22, 2021 Thanks to Turkay Gasimova, a 2020 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. In his book, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell challenges traditional knowledge of the history of the Middle East, energy sources, and environmental politics. Mitchell who had previously written a remarkable book on the colonization …
BOOK REVIEW: Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell Read More »
November 6, 2020 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The Social Contract has been on my mind a lot lately. Of course, elections and coronavirus and all of the current stresses on society have been on my mind, and they often circle me back into what it means to exist in a …
July 24, 2020 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton defends the idea that the United States must have a strong federal government. In Federalist #6, he reminds readers that: “A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States …
July 17, 2020 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I would like to go back to July 11, 1804 and tell Hamilton not to engage, that Burr is not worth it. Of course, the famous duel between Burr and Hamilton is now a piece of America’s folklore. It is a story that …
July 3, 2020 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. The authors of the Federalist Papers often cite Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. I, too, am amazed in Plutarch’s broad, holistic analysis of ancient peoples and places. When I first read Plutarch’s works, their current applicability surprised me. I am no longer surprised by this. …
March 20, 2020 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Dr. Deborah Deacon, a former Dean of Harrison Middleton University, co-authored a book entitled A Century in Uniform; Military Women in American Films, published earlier this year. Stacy Fowler and Dr. Deacon’s book dedicates a chapter to each decade (or so) since the …
November 8, 2019 Thanks to Ned Boulberhane, a 2019 Harrison Middleton University Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. At the 2018 Left Forum at John Jay College in New York City, the economist Michael Hudson made a bold claim. He proposed that when Adam Smith wrote of free markets in the his literary classic, The …
October 25, 2019 Thanks to Ned Boulberhane, a 2019 Harrison Middleton University Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post. China: The far lands of the Orient, and perhaps the world’s oldest living civilization. However, the days of Huang He River Valley have evolved into something quite different than the previous centuries. 1949 saw the rise of …
Maoist Influence on Contemporary Chinese Thought Read More »
