Corey Robin's Blog

I spent yesterday tearing my hair out over the Democrats’ response to Trump’s State of the Union Address. I could say a lot about their choice of respondent and the substance of the response. But I want to focus only on style, rhetoric. Long story, short: I was appalled. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered, outside academia, people with such a bottomless appetite for mountainous piles of meaningless, unnecessary, empty words and phrases, each genetically engineered, in whole or in part, to make any sentient being stop paying attention. Reading this speech, that is the only conclusion I can come to: that the sole purpose of this speech is to make people stop paying attention. Again, forget substance, forget ideology, […]

The literary critic George Steiner often mused, almost perversely, on the fact that some of the most wondrous works of twentieth-century literature were produced under conditions of extreme censorship. He especially liked to remark upon the Soviet experience and the literature that came out of it, suggesting that great literature emerged not from societies of freedom but from those of domination. Reading the below list of topics that cannot be discussed in Florida classrooms, I wonder if we might not be in for some decades of intense intellectual ferment and creativity. Imagine all the possibilities for scholars and writers and teachers and students, as they struggle to work their way around the censor. Remember the old theory about the Bukharin […]

In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]

It’s interesting how many commentators on Marx’s relationship to Judaism focus on his father’s conversion to Christianity. Marx’s mother also converted to Christianity, and from what we know, hers was a more bitter and forced conversion than his father’s. Marx’s father converted entirely for professional reasons: he would no longer be able to practice as a lawyer if he hadn’t). But Marx’s father wasn’t that bothered by any residual attachment to Judaism or Jewishness, despite the fact that his father and then his brother were the chief rabbis of Trier. Marx’s mother, however, resisted conversion for as long as possible. She insisted on waiting till her father died (she, like her husband, came from a long line of rabbis), and […]

Many have heard of Hitler’s ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch. It took place in Munich in 1923 and landed Hitler in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf. Three years before the Beer Hall Putsch there was a much more serious challenge to the Weimar Republic from the right. It was called the Kapp Putsch. Centered in Berlin, led by high-ranking officers of the military, joined by monarchist and conservative elements, speaking for the Freikorps and beyond, it posed a far more immediate threat to the national government than the failed putsch of three years later. It was stopped by a general strike. That general strike was called by the President of the Weimar Republic—the fairly moderate and plodding leader of the […]

However crazy you think the Germans are about the Jews, they run at best a distant second to how German-speaking Jews think of the Jews. I’m reading two amazing books on this topic: one is S.S. Prawer’s book on Heine, the other is Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus. These are old-style intellectual histories, the kind where a single author and their texts give you the largest possible window on the larger culture and society of which they are a part. No one writes intellectual history like this anymore, which is a shame. (Prawer, by the way, you might know as the author of that excellent book on Marx’s literary references and culture. His Heine book, if you can believe […]

Four ICE agents walk into a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, are served a meal, and return hours later to arrest three of its workers, walking home, in front of a Lutheran church. I can’t remember where it was that I read this, but it was less than 24 hours ago, in one of those big classic histories of the ancient world, about how hospitality cultures arise in opposition to predatory and piratical practices. (One of the genuine advantages and most welcome reforms of Athens’s Delian League was the suppression of piracy.) In seafaring communities, in particular, hospitality becomes the marker of those who are potential friends as against those who are definitive enemies. With ICE, we seem to have pioneered […]

I’m not a subscriber to Liberties, the journal, so I can read only a bit of this article by Susie Linfield, “The Politics of the Hardened Left: The Left Since October 7.” I’m not complaining. Having read a fair amount of Linfield’s work over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what she thinks. And what she’s going to think. Never many surprises there. Which is why I want to comment on this opening statement of her article: Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to […]

Under the headline, “There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro,” Bret Stephens writes: Whether failing to remove the regime is a possibly disastrous oversight or part of a yet-to-be-revealed plan, the administration will have to figure out how to get rid of it for good in favor of a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government. Now Stephens is someone who’s on record as claiming that Trump and/or his regime are fascist, authoritarian, and autocratic. Just this past year, he has compared both to North Korea, Nero’s Rome, and much else. Yet here he is, writing as if it’s a real question as to whether this very same leader and this very same regime can create “a legitimate, stable and democratically […]

If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer. Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him. Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule: No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and […]