Tag: Politics
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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September 8, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. If it’s been awhile since you have read Machiavelli’s The Prince, you might consider reading an excerpt with us this fall. We will examine two chapters of it in the October Quarterly Discussion. (Reach out to Alissa at as****@hm*.edu for more information). I …
April 9, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Today’s post is a brief look at translation and word choice in Thucydides. Both small sections from The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV, Chapter XII, furnish a glimpse of the author’s opinion. Though Thucydides set out to write a history of …
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 »
July 5, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. What happened the day after independence? Or the next day, or the day after that? How does one go about constructing a cohesive, yet flexible, democratic society? What is it like to transition from a single goal – defeat the British – to …
January 25, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Most humans are inundated with political speech, the current pace of which seems unsustainable (or at least unhealthy to me). I think this has often been the case in other civilizations too. Shakespeare gives us a great example of political speech among chaos …
November 2, 2018 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For the October Quarterly Discussion, we read four chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As usual, I distributed some questions beforehand intended to help start the conversation. Each discussion lasts 1.5 hours in which I (mostly) lead. I enjoy the responsibility …
July 20, 2018 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville warns that abstract language is like “a box with a false bottom; you may put in what ideas you please and take them out again unobserved” (258). Since I often study poetry and think about how metaphor affects …
August 26, 2016 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog. For the past few weeks, I have been reading presidential speeches. If you want inspiration at a time when – as many claim – spirit regarding politics is at a low point, I encourage you to read presidential speeches. Many of these addresses …
