Western democracy is built around a tripartite trust: trust in the people to hold government to account and to set the general direction of policy, but also trust in politicians to make specific decisions, and in institutions to provide safeguards against rash or tyrannical actions. What we are seeing all over the western world are the last two pillars being torn down, leaving all trust resting on the people.
ReadThe 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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“Julian Baggini has written a masterpiece, and what a timely masterpiece it is. The toxic gloating of ‘gut feelings’, hateful[…]
ReadGottlieb 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.
ReadWhen 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.
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