thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The Patriot is a popular entertainment about the American war for independence that tells the story of Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina planter and widower, and his struggles on behalf of his large family and against the British. The film is a Hollywood entertainment, and as such … More ...
Long a major figure in cyber-culture, the executive editor of Wired, turns in this book to futurology. The wisdom of contemporary oracles, like that of their predecessors, emerges from dark sayings and plays on words. Although Kelly admits the future is unforeseeable, he … More ...
Shortly before dawn on April 19, 1993, FBI tanks equipped to dispense tear gas crashed through the walls of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Over the course of the next six hours the tanks repeatedly rammed the ramshackle frame building inside the compound occupied by members of the sect, pumping in tear gas … More ...
A slightly edited version of the preceding essay, originally entitled “Liberalism, the Transcendent, and Restoration,” appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of Modern Age. It is also available in German and Czech.
The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has reached its attainable goals. While no one … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Telos.
Why does liberalism—the tradition that makes equal freedom the political touchstone—combine such strength with such incoherence? The attempt to make freedom dominant leads to contradiction. Liberalism is triumphant almost everywhere, but its victory reverses the meaning of its … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in issue 20 of The Scorpion.
Political thinkers engage our attention by their presentation of the particular features of their own time and place as well as the permanent qualities of man in society. We can read Aristotle and Hobbes for general lessons, or for … More ...
The relation among individual, society and state is a confused one in our time. Is the individual everything and society nothing, or the other way around? Why should one care about the other? Can the state treat the whole social world as the theater for its meddling? If not, what are the limits? Such questions … More ...
The disappearance of politics in today’s world reflects the disappearance of resistance to rational hedonism. “Give ’em what they want” has become the grand principle of what passes for public life. To put it formally, only a few crazies now dispute that the final goal of … More ...
The following review of Paul Gottfried’s After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton 1999) appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Telos.
The title of this book refers to the practice and ideology of contemporary Western government, which, in Gottfried’s view, bears little resemblance to historical liberalism and in many ways is … More ...
James Kalb
Yale Law School
Independent Study—Charles Gray, supervisor
May 1, 1978
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and indeed until the break with Rome under Henry VIII, king and church agreed that each had a sphere of exclusive jurisdiction that the other could not infringe upon without usurpation. Naturally, problems arose in defining the … More ...