idealism | Wright's Writing

Oct 16, 2023
25 min

Postliberalism: a dangerous “new” conservatism

[This article was published in The Philosophical Salon.] In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the...

Mar 11, 2023
26 min

Dusk in Vietnam

[This is a short story I wrote twenty years ago after visiting Vietnam for a couple of weeks. It starts with a dream and ends with...

Aug 9, 2022
13 min

The myth of the "moderate" American

[This article was published at Compact magazine.] In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a...

Jun 6, 2021
20 min

Reflecting on life at 40

…They accuse me -- Me -- the present writer of The present poem -- of -- I know not what -- A tendency to under-rate and scoff At human...

Aug 30, 2020
37 min

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 27, 2020
21 min

The remarkable perversity of idealism

Many years ago, when I was a simple boy who thought he ought to know a lot about Hegel, I took masses of notes on his philosophy. Below...

Aug 25, 2020
9 min

Thou shalt not worship intellectuals

When I read old books or articles that are totally forgotten despite being brilliant, it saddens me. Siblings of Donald Trump publish...

Aug 24, 2020
25 min

Why I am not a Leninist (nor an anarchist)

Years later, I still reproach myself for self-publishing my book on cooperatives, because that ensured it would have a limited...

Aug 23, 2020
45 min

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 1

I'm kind of a "vulgar Marxist." In this respect, I suppose I'm a lot like people in the American ruling class, except that their values...

Aug 17, 2020
7 min

Fragments on Marxism and anarchism

Grad student notes from 2010.— One of the advantages of Marx’s equation of progress with the expansion of productive capacity is that it...

Jun 9, 2020
8 min

Old syllabus and lecture notes

[Here are some notes from the first syllabus I wrote for the U.S. History After 1865 survey course. Below them are overly ambitious notes...

Dec 22, 2018
1 min

On realism and idealism

Over the years I've written a lot of reflections on the metaphysical issue of scientific realism vs. anti-realism or idealism. Idealism...

Jul 13, 2018
4 min

Critical thoughts on "The Alchemist"

[Notes from 2006.] Reading The Alchemist, the novel that has sold tens of millions of copies. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s...

May 28, 2018
6 min

Against idealism

[The following thoughts are from this book.] It’s funny that people often deprecate Marxian materialism as an explanation of society and...

Mar 21, 2018
4 min

Only Marxism can explain society

Marxism is right, and postmodernism is stupid. That's the thrust of a paper I've uploaded to academia.edu, which actually consists of...

Jul 5, 2016
5 min

The silliness of logical positivism

[Old jottings from my journal.] Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, from the selections I’ve read so far, is sensible. (That isn’t...

Jun 21, 2016
4 min

Notes on Theodor Adorno

[Old notes.] Reading Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Alex Thomson. I’m not very impressed with Adorno. Continental thinkers...

Jan 12, 2016
6 min

Fragments on bourgeois ideologists

On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...