What do we talk about when we talk about the frontier? For more than a century, Americans haven’t been able to avoid using that term to describe our society’s past, present, and future. It may be time to find a better one. A new concep­tual frame is needed to examine the political, social, and economic logic of the periodic upheavals in American life that result from these dynam­ics. We might call this process filibusterism, after its protagonists…

It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Roth­bard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we…

Today, many self-described liberals in the professions—including in my world of academic political philosophy—inhabit what the histo­rian Darrin M. Mc­Mahon calls “a kind of egalitarian plateau,” convinced that the orienting value of their lives is equality. Yet liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace…

In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” This approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world. Yet the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed…

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…

As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll…

Early in my teaching career, I sat in a meeting at my public school district; projected up front was a colorful graphic with the word “equity” placed at the very center. It was the conceptual cornerstone and guide star of this governmental entity—justifying and affecting every one of its policies, practices, curricular decisions, even down to the organization of classroom desks (rows were said to create a hegemonic power struc­ture wherein the teacher is oppressor and the student is oppressed). In the past decades, American education has undergone a fundamental shift in its telos, replacing achievement, equality, and merit as foun­dational ideals with this notion of equity, and, until very recently, few have stopped to question the goodness or rightness of this transformation…

Eskom’s recent history can teach us many things. It illustrates what happens when the power sector fails—not in one heaping collapse, but gradually through diminished reliability, with a resulting social stratification between those able to privately do something about it and those who cannot. It is a warning about a politics of energy that debates attachments to particular technologies and fuels…