Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Totalitarianism

  • A Time to Keep Silent and a Time to Speak

    by Andrew Gleeson ____ There is a great difference between doing what one does not approve and feigning to approve what one does. The one is the weakness of a feeble person, the other befits the temper of a lackey.                  –Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America On 6 July 1535, Sir Thomas More, the…

  • Thought Control and Cultural Decline

    by Mark English ___ Late last year I wrote a piece about censorship and humor, alluding to the fact that in times of oppression and excessive censorship, humor tends to bubble up and create a space for the expression of dissenting thoughts and feelings. The self-expression involved here may be controlled and deliberate (as in…

  • Citizen Solidarity and Liberal Society

    by Daniel A. Kaufman In his essay, “See Something?  Don’t Say Anything,” Dan Tippens has broached an essential subject.  For a liberal society to survive, a healthy space must be maintained between the state and the citizenry.  That space is filled with the elements of civil society, by which I mean the voluntary associations and…

  • Reason and the Post-Human

    by Daniel A. Kaufman In “Excessive Reason,” an essay I published in these pages last year, I argued that mainline philosophy is characterized by a pervasive and systematic rationalism, the main characteristics of which I summarized as follows: The acceptability of a belief, activity, practice, institution, etc., rests entirely on whether or not it can…

  • This Week’s Special: George Orwell’s, “Politics and the English Language”

    by Daniel A. Kaufman Orwell’s influential essay, published in 1946, when considered alongside his “The Prevention of Literature” (1946) and the Appendix to 1984, “The Principles of Newspeak” (1949), offers a powerful picture of language and its abuse, especially in the arena of politics.  It is one of those essays that seems more prescient with…