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23Post-Truth and the Epistemological CrisisCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 35 (1): 1-21. 2023.The polarization and charges of “post-truth” that mark contemporary politics may have its source, ultimately, in a crisis of epistemology, which is characterized by a tension between different forms of naïve realism—the view that reality appears to us directly, unmediated by interpretation. Perhaps too schematically, those on the right tend to be first-person naïve realists in treating economic and social realities as accessible to the ordinary political participant by simple common sense, while…Read more
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37Pluralism or relativism?Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 11 (4): 469-479. 1997.
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47The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment (edited book)De Gruyter. 2015.This volume brings Cassirer s work into the arena of contemporary debates both within and outside of philosophy. All articles offer a fresh and contemporary look at one of the most prolific and important philosophers of the 20th century. The papers are authored by a wide array of scholars working in different areas, such as epistemology, philosophy of culture, sociology, psychopathology, philosophy of science and aesthetics."
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38The bias issueCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 17 (3-4): 221-236. 2005.No abstract
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19System effects and the problem of predictionCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 24 (3): 291-312. 2012.Robert Jervis's System Effects (1997) shares a great deal with game theory, complex-systems theory, and systems theory in international relations, yet it transcends them all by taking account of the role of ideas in human behavior. The ideational element inserts unpredictability into Jervis's understanding of system effects. Each member of a ?system? of interrelated actors interprets her situation to require certain actions based on the effects these will cause among other members of the system,…Read more
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21Roundtable 5: Normative implicationsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 20 (4): 499-525. 2008.
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20Politics or scholarship?Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 6 (2-3): 429-445. 1992.Environmental issues imperil the libertarian utopia of a society in which the individual is completely sovereign over his or her private domain. Taken seriously, this aspiration would lead to an environmentalism so extreme that it would preclude human life, since most human activity entails incursions against the sovereign realms of other human beings. The fallback position many libertarians have adopted?free?market environmentalism?retreats from libertarian ideals by permitting some of the phys…Read more
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24Preferences or happiness? Tibor Scitovsky's psychology of human needsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 10 (4): 471-480. 1996.No abstract
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23Public opinion: Bringing the media back inCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 15 (3-4): 239-260. 2003.No abstract
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19Nationalism in theory and realityCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 10 (2): 155-167. 1996.No abstract
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5Nature and cultureCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 11 (2): 165-167. 1997.No abstract
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29Motivated Skepticism or Inevitable Conviction? Dogmatism and the Study of PoliticsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 24 (2): 131-155. 2012.Taber and Lodge's 2006 paper provides powerful evidence that one's prior beliefs shape one's reception of new evidence in a manner that can best be described as “inadvertently dogmatic.” This is especially true for people who are well informed, which dovetails with findings going back to Converse (1964) showing political beliefs to be ideologically constrained (rigid) among the relatively well informed. What may explain the coincidence of dogmatism and knowledgeability is the very process of lea…Read more
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20J.G. Merquior 1941–1991Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 5 (3): 447-452. 1991.No abstract
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31Hayek's political philosophy and his economicsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 11 (1): 1-10. 1997.No abstract
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24F. A. Hayek's sociologyCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 3 (2): 165-168. 1989.No abstract
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13Cassirer’s Critique of Culture and the Several Tasks of the CriticIn Sebastian Luft & J. Tyler Friedman (eds.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment, De Gruyter. pp. 361-380. 2015.
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15Introduction: Intolerance, Power, and EpistemologyCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 34 (1): 1-15. 2022.
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12The Longing for Total Revolution as Critical But Ideational GenealogyCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 33 (2): 145-156. 2021.ABSTRACT Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution is not just an important study of an extremely influential strain of post-Kantian philosophy, which according to Yack culminated in both Marx and Nietzsche. It also exemplifies an unusual approach to the history of thought: a form of critical genealogy that, unlike the Nietzschean and Foucauldian variants, seeks intellectual charity by ascribing mistaken ideas not to non-ideational psychological or social sources, but to a web of beliefs t…Read more
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26Political Epistemology, Technocracy, and Political Anthropology: Reply to a Symposium on Power Without KnowledgeCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 32 (1): 242-367. 2020.A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, deter…Read more
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28Populists as TechnocratsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 31 (3-4): 315-376. 2019.ABSTRACT An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features of our ambient culture, then, could expla…Read more
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56Hayek's Two Epistemologies and the Paradoxes of His ThoughtCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 25 (3-4): 277-304. 2013.Hayek developed two contradictory epistemologies. The epistemology for which he is famous attributed dispersed knowledge to economic actors and credited the price system for aggregating and communicating this knowledge. The other epistemology attributed to human and non-human organisms alike the error-prone interpretation of stimuli, which could never truly be said to be “knowledge.” Several of the paradoxes of Hayek's economic and political thought that are explored in this symposium can be exp…Read more
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32Freedom has no intrinsic value: Liberalism and voluntarismCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 25 (1): 38-85. 2013.Deontological (as opposed to consequentialist) liberals treat freedom of action as an end in itself, not a means to other ends. Yet logically, when one makes a deliberate choice, one treats freedom of action as if it were not an end in itself, for one uses this freedom as a means to the ends one hopes to achieve through one's action. The tension between deontology and the logic of choice is reflected in the paradoxical nature of the ?right to do wrong?; and in Rawls's unsuccessful attempts to ju…Read more
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16Capitalism and the Jewish IntellectualsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 23 (1-2): 169-194. 2011.In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western th…Read more
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29After libertarianism: Rejoinder to Narveson, McCloskey, Flew, and MachanCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 6 (1): 113-152. 1992.Postlibertarianism means abandoning defenses of the intrinsic justice of laissez?faire capitalism, the better to investigate whether the systemic consequences of interfering with capitalism are severe enough to justify laissez?faire. Any sound case for laissez?faire is likely to build on postlibertarian research, for the conviction that laissez?faire is intrinsically just rests upon unsound philosophical assumptions. Conversely, these assumptions, if sound, would make empirical studies of capita…Read more
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12A “weapon in the hands of the people”: The rhetorical presidency in historical and conceptual contextCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 19 (2-3): 197-240. 2007.The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is put in its Progressive‐Era context. The public had long demanded social reforms designed to curb or replace laissez‐faire capitalism, which was seen as antithetical to the interests of ordinary working people. But popular demands for social reform went largely unmet until the 1910s. Democratizing political reforms, such as the rhetorical presidency, were designed to facilitate “change” by finally givin…Read more
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54The politics of communitarianismCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 8 (2): 297-340. 1994.Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, and MacIntyre waver between granting the community authority over the individual and limiting this authority so severely that communitarianism becomes a dead letter. The reason for this vacillation can be found in the aspiration of each theorist to base liberal values‐equality and liberty—on particularism. Communitarians compound liberal formalism by adding to the liberal goal, individual autonomy, the equally abstract aim of grounding autonomy in a communally shared iden…Read more
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25The Problem of Epistocratic Identification and the (Possibly) Dysfunctional Division of Epistemic LaborCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 29 (3): 293-327. 2017.ABSTRACTHow can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by politics were usually simple ones, in the…Read more
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17The libertarian straddle: Rejoinder to Palmer and SciabarraCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 12 (3): 359-388. 1998.Palmer's defense of libertarianism as consequentialist runs afoul of his own failure to provide any consequentialist reasons for libertarian conclusions, and of his own defense of nonconsequentialist arguments for the intrinsic value of capitalism‐cum‐negative freedom. As suck, Palmer's article exemplifies the parasitic codependency of consequentialist and nonconsequentialist reasoning in libertarian thought. Sciabarra's defense of Ayn Rand's libertarianism is even more problematic, because in a…Read more