Should party whips be abolished?
The sound of the continued cracking of the whip is the cry of a failing party system trying desperately to reassert its authority. It isn’t working and it’s time to try something else.
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It’s the circle of life – starting September
Summer has ended, and with it the time of year when we most typically relax and try to enjoy ourselves. The shortening of the days seems to be a message to start getting serious again. So perhaps it’s no coincidence this is the traditional time to start a course of learning, formal or informal.
ReadIn Defence of Reason
Gottlieb avoids the “learned Gibberish” John Locke lambasted, written by scholars who “cover their Ignorance with a curious and unexplicable Web of perplexed Words”. Instead, he wears his learning lightly with an engaging and entirely comprehensible sequence of crystal-clear paragraphs.
ReadAnger—what is it good for?
When a philosopher writes a book with five abstract nouns in a six-word title, you might justly fear a laboured tome of desiccating logical analysis. When the author is Martha Nussbaum, however, you can be reassured. Nussbaum is one of the most productive and insightful thinkers of her generation, though strangely undervalued in the UK. She combines a philosopher’s demand for conceptual clarity and rigorous thinking with a novelist’s interest in narrative, art and literature.
ReadAristotle and the Palace of Westminster
Virtue is finding the balance between giving appropriate value to our inheritance and the need to move forward and change. In other words, both radicals and traditionalists see things that are of value, but go wrong when they give weight to only one of them and so end up pursuing it to excess.
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