Bloc Thinking

by Chris Horner Not long ago there was an article circulating on Facebook about ‘Hating the English’, originally published in a large circulation newspaper. The Irish author says something to the effect that once she thought it was just a few bad ones etc., but now she hates the lot of them. It’s been stimulated, I…

The Promise of Happiness

by Chris Horner Beauty is nothing more than the promise of happiness —Stendhal How can beauty promise happiness? And what kind of beauty would this be? What sort of happiness? Happiness and Beauty have been central issues for thinkers since antiquity, and the question of what they really are, and whether we should even prize…

Moral Relativism and the Concrete Universal

by Chris Horner There are some notions, ideas and arguments, that no matter how often they are exposed as fallacious, are rebutted and refuted, seem to recur again and again. Moral relativism is one of them.[1] Put simply, this is the view that one’s moral judgments are delimited by the culture or period in which…

A Shift In The Ethical Ground

by Chris Horner There are times when customary evils become outlandish and intolerable. Then there is a call for irreversible ethical change, a transformation of more than the way we judge this or that, times in which which old laws are struck down and new ones framed. I want to suggest that a change in…

Politics and the Beautiful Soul

by Christopher Horner If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner. —Jean-Paul Sartre We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for…

Morbid Symptoms: COVID-19 and Pathologies in the Body Politic

by Chris Horner The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —Gramsci Does a crisis show us what we are ‘really like’? Whether it does or not, it has already been instructive to experience this one,…

Liberalism and our Present Discontents

by Chris Horner The political philosophy, and more importantly, political practice that took root in the wake of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ (say 1775-1848) was liberalism of various kinds: a commitment to certain principles and practices that eventually came to seem, like any successful ideology, a kind of common sense. With this, however, came a…

Hannah Arendt and the Lost Treasure of the American Revolution

by Chris Horner In May 1919 the remains of a woman were fished from the Landwehr canal in Berlin. The three doctors available must have suspected the identity of the corpse, as they refused to perform a post mortem on it. Identification was in any case made by examination of the clothes on the body.…