bureaucracy | Wright's Writing

Jun 13, 202230 min read

Origins of the European state system

Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...

Jun 4, 202212 min read

America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan

A long time ago I posted some thoughts on America's use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. I happen to be reading parts of...

Sep 5, 20205 min read

The commodification of education

David Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...

Aug 30, 202037 min read

Critical remarks on academia and philosophy

I was recently skimming old notes of mine and came across the following thoughts from a two-volume book on "humanism" I wanted to write...

Aug 21, 202053 min read

Homeless men in the Great Depression

Here's another over-long blog post. It's a chapter from my dissertation, on homeless men during the Great Depression. I'm not sure it's...

Mar 25, 20187 min read

Excerpts on moral pathologies

[From Notes of an Underground Humanist.] How is mass inhumanity possible?— When I ask myself how it’s possible that so many white...

Mar 11, 20189 min read

Collectivism

[Excerpts from this book.] Collectivism comes in both noble and evil forms. In the former, the principle of the individual is paramount;...

Jul 27, 201610 min read

Climate change, capitalism, and state violence

In an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...

May 31, 20161 min read

Random notes on Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, economics, and traditional China

Years ago I read and took some notes on various works by Hannah Arendt. In particular her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. It's a...

Jan 13, 20164 min read

Dropping the atomic bomb

[Excerpt from this book.] A celebrated bureaucrat.— In the library today I happened to pass Harry Truman’s memoirs. Picked the book up...

Aug 14, 20153 min read

On late-19th-century decadence and its aftermath

What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...

Aug 10, 20154 min read

The making of the working class

I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...

Aug 5, 20152 min read

Bureaucratic fanaticism

It might seem wrong to maintain, as I have in many writings, that the modern predominance of bureaucratic social structures and their...

Apr 15, 20152 min read

Götzendämmerung

Albert Camus: “We [moderns] read more than we meditate. We have no philosophies but merely commentaries. This is what Étienne Gilson...

Apr 8, 20157 min read

To see the Holocaust in a grain of sand

Part 2 of "Thoughts on the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust." Part 1 is here.— While the industrialized murder of six million...

Sep 15, 20143 min read

Homo ludens vs. homo institutorum

[Excerpt from a book.] The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said it simply—one of those simple but profound truths worth remembering: “It is...

Sep 10, 20145 min read

Our modern holocaust of individuality

[Note to my first blog post: Much of this blog will consist of excerpts from books and other writings. Here's one of them--a rather grim...