Can what remains of the status quo survive? Does it deserve to? These are always pertinent questions, of course, and recently the brooding dynamics of change were posed in a thoughtful way by Jacob ...

From “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment,” an essay from the collection Splinters in Your Eye, which will be published this month by Verso. On July 22, 2011, a neofascist Norwegian terrorist named ...

The last days of Jenny and Karl Marx were marked by sickness and enfeeblement. On December 2, 1881 Jenny died, breaking Marx’s already creaking heart. Too sick to attend the funeral himself, his ...

A reader who comments under the name “candles” writes in the comments box of the Moralistic Therapeutic Journalism thread: There is a powerful strain in the academy in the humanities these days that ...

The churches relationship to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment is an entangled history. Margaret Jacobs (“The Enlightenment critique of Christianity,” in The Cambridge History of ...

The Enlightenment was supposed to banish ignorance and superstition from the Western world. But when it came to the Jews, the old hatreds were often simply replaced with a new spin. Usually, it is ...

On this week’s episode of my podcast, I Have to Ask, I spoke to Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism ...

Few people know the power of evil ideas more intimately than Zeev Sternhell, the eminent Israeli political scientist. As a child, Sternhell, who was born in Poland in 1935, saw his mother killed in ...

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes a striking observation about the difference between fascism and communism. In fascism — think of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini — when the supreme leader ...

It's been said that there's a Simpsons reference for everything. So why shouldn't there be one for Steven Pinker, the Canadian-American psychologist and pop-science author? Consider the episode in ...