Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional burnout, dating apps, and social media. His work mostly announces the disappearance, decline, or death of some previously cherished aspect of human existence…

Since the mid-2010s, “wokeness,” an evolving but recognizable set of progressive-coded formal norms and patterns of speech and affect, has swept through American institutions with an intensity, sweep, and speed far outpacing that of an earlier generation’s “political correctness.” This cultural shift has had significant effects on the day-to-day operations, on both the public-facing and…

Against what he sees as the pallid abstractions of Anglo-American political philosophy, Geuss presents himself as a champion of a more skeptical, historically informed way of thinking about politics. In his new book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, Geuss gives an account of the autobiographical origins of this mode of thought and, more ambitiously, though also more vaguely, gestures toward an alternative to liberalism. Not Thinking Like a Liberal traces Geuss’s education, first at an unusual Catholic boarding…