This book is both an anomaly and a monumental achievement. It represents the inaugural volume in a new science—ponerology, or the science of evil. It explains the emergence and development of macrosocial evil thoroughly and with scientific precision…Łobaczewski made the bold claim that he’d uncovered “the general laws of the origin of evil.” If true, the book was on par with Newton’s Principia in the physical sciences, while being of greater practical importance. (Originally published on the Mises Institute Wire. March 26, 2022.)
The First is an intervention into the present-day free speech controversies that begs for our attention. Unfortunately, Fish’s new book does little to clarify the issues and in fact only compounds them by introducing a parade of specious homologies and straw man arguments. With his characteristic slipperiness, Fish is a sophisticated postmodern leftist who contrives convoluted arguments for proscribing expression that he doesn’t like. Academic Questions. July 24, 2020.
“Big Digital” consists of an array of business, political, and social interests, an ensemble of technology companies and Internet services, including but not limited to the Big Four: Alphabet (Google, YouTube, etc.) Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. Big Digital wields enormous economic and political power, presiding over Big Data, and serving as the chief arbiter of expression, with the power to effect the digital deletion of “dangerous” persons from its various platforms, as the gulag was the means to physically disappear dissidents and other thought criminals from “normal” life in the Soviet Union.
Some major corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies, partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly “woke” corporations support activist groups and social movements, while adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, contemporary feminism, LGBTQ rights, and immigration activism, among other leftist causes… (The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed, was delivered at the Mises Institute on March 22, 2019. The video of the talk can be found here. (Published in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Volume 22, No. 2 pp. 122–138, Summer 2019. Click here or on title.)
In the early 1850s, a new philosophical, social, and political movement evolved from the Freethought tradition of Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, Robert Owen, and the radical periodical press. The movement was called “Secularism.”1 Its founder was George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906) (Grugel 1976, 2–3).2 Holyoake was a former apprentice whitesmith turned Owenite social missionary, “moral force” Chartist, and radical editor and publisher. Given his early exposure to Owenism and Chartism,3 Holyoake had become a Freethinker. With his involvement in Freethought publishing, he became a moral convert to atheism. However, his experiences with virulent proponents of atheism or infidelity and the hostile reactions to them on the part of the state, church, and press induced him to develop in 1851–1852 the new creed and movement he called Secularism. Published in Ryan T. Cragun, Lori Fazzino, Christel Manning, eds. Organized Secularism in the United States. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter (November 2017): 31-56. Click here or on title.
Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in the nineteenth century. It addresses the crisis in the secularization thesis by foregrounding a nineteenth-century development called ‘Secularism’ – the particular movement and creed founded by George Jacob Holyoake from 1851 to 1852. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism rethinks and reevaluates the significance of Holyoake’s Secularism, regarding it as a historic moment of modernity and granting it centrality as both a herald and exemplar for a new understanding of modern secularity. In addition to Secularism proper, the book treats several other moments of secular emergence in the first half of the nineteenth century, including Thomas Carlyle’s ‘natural supernaturalism’, Richard Carlile’s anti-theist science advocacy, Charles Lyell’s uniformity principle in geology, the mid-century emergence of scientific naturalism, Francis Newman’s naturalized religion or ‘primitive Christianity’, and George Eliot’s secular and post-secular fiction. (Palgrave MacMillan 2016.) Click here or on title.
By now, it is nearly a commonplace observation to note that secularism – until quite recently simply assumed to be the basis of modern nation states and the public sphere – is a contested and even “beleaguered” cultural, social, and political formation. Once regarded as the sine qua non of public democratic life and the requisite integument of international relations, the secular was taken to be unmarked ideologically, as the mere absence or negation of obsolescing “religion.” Linked to this regard for secularism as an unmarked, neutral category was the standard secularization thesis, according to which modernity itself was characterized by, if not understood as predicated upon, the progressive decline of religion – its relegation to the private sphere, its diminishing hold on individual belief, and its loss of authority in separate and increasingly differentiated spheres of discourse and activity. Published in Michael Rectenwald, Rochelle Almeida and George Levine, eds. Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter (2015): 1-24. Click here or on title.
In the late 1840s, a new philosophical, social, and political movement evolved from the freethought tradition of Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, Robert Owen, and the radical periodical press. The movement was called “Secularism.”1 Its founder was George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906).2 Holyoake was a former apprentice whitesmith turned Owenite social missionary, “moral force” Chartist, and leading radical editor and publisher. Given his early exposure to Owenism and Chartism, Holyoake had become a freethinker. With his involvement in free-thought publishing, he became a moral convert to atheism. But his experiences with virulent proponents of atheism or infidelity and the hostile reactions to infidelity on the part of the state, church, and press induced him to develop in 1851–52 the new creed and movement he called Secularism. Published in Michael Rectenwald, Rochelle Almeida and George Levine, eds. Global Secularisms in a Post- Secular Age. Boston: De Gruyter (2015): 43-64. Click here or on title.
Academic Writing, Real World Topics fills a void in the writing-across-the-curriculum textbook market. It draws together articles and essays of actual academic prose as opposed to journalism; it arranges material topically as opposed to by discipline or academic division; and it approaches topics from multiple disciplinary and critical perspectives. With extensive introductions, rhetorical instruction, and suggested additional resources accompanying each chapter, Academic Writing, Real World Topics introduces students to the kinds of research and writing that they will be expected to undertake throughout their college careers and beyond. Readings are drawn from various disciplines across the major divisions of the university and focus on issues of real import to students today, including such topics as living in a digital culture, learning from games, learning in a digital age, living in a global culture, our post-human future, surviving economic crisis, and assessing armed global conflict. The book provides students with an introduction to the diversity, complexity and connectedness of writing in higher education today. (Broadview Press, 2015).
Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content. Click here or on title.
Review of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity. G. Dawson, B. Lightman (Eds.). University of Chicago, 2014. This anthology adds to a recent spate of publications devoted to ‘‘scientific naturalism,’’ including two other books published in 2014. This particular volume enhances our understanding of the creed and its advocates. But it also challenges its conceptual and historical coherence, despite the editors’ claims that the term should be accepted as a valid actors’ category and guide for historiography. A few of the most impressive essays in this volume challenge at least the first assertion, although this reviewer believes that the editors are correct in both claims. Published in Endeavour Vol. 39, No. 1. March 2015. Click here or on title.
Review of The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries. Bernard Lightman, Michael S. Reidy (editors). Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Published in Endeavour Vol. 38, No. 3–4 . September 6, 2014. Click here or on title.
