William Ian Miller on Academic Aristocracy

(Or why graduate school may be counterproductive in preparing one for not entering the academy.) The story is an old one: the seller and his quest for money was believed to dissolve values, status, and ...

Jenny Diski on Erving Goffman

Rejecting any possibility of an essential identity, his notion is of the self as purely contingent, a shape-shifting construction of altering circumstances. The individual, Goffman says, arrives into an already established social world, and is ...

Words from a Capitalist

But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economic textbooks. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality ...

Albert O. Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Genealogically speaking, this book isn’t as captivating as Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, because it’s not a survey of past rationales, but an analysis of contemporary behaviors in response to this phenomenon: Firms and ...

Three Versions of Politics

Immanuel Wallerstein: Don’t Encourage Him By Proving Him Right