Brian Brown: Learn the lessons of Facebook and Twitter: people don’t make friends, buy products, or vote because it’s good for humanity.

Bryan Wandel Hannah Arendt’s ideal political constitution was as follows: each town or small community elects representatives for local assemblies. Local assemblies elect representatives for regional assemblies. Regional assemblies elect representatives for a national assembly. Only this kind of polity could be authentically representative, and authentically legitimate. The original self-arranging, self-generating assemblies are the core, […]

Edward Kennedy or Billy Graham? Margaret Sanger or Phyllis Schlafly? Who is more important? In the war over education content, the facts of 6th grade Social Studies can take on more meaning than we remember, when we had to memorize the 50 states and their capitals. Max Weber tells us that there is an utter […]

From Achilles to Obama, men have yearned to achieve immortality through great deeds that would outlive them. The former sought to do deeds on a human level and is remembered thousands of years later. The latter seeks to achieve permanent political and social change, and perhaps posterity will nod to him as well. Yet both […]

Something interesting I read today, in “Between Past and Future” by Hannah Arendt: “The testament, telling the heir what will rightfully be his, wills past possessions for a future.  Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition…there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only […]