idealism | Wright's Writing

Oct 16, 202325 min read

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, 202326 min read

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, 202213 min read

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, 202120 min read

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, 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 27, 202021 min read

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, 20209 min read

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, 202025 min read

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, 202045 min read

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, 20207 min read

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, 20208 min read

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, 20181 min read

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, 20184 min read

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, 20186 min read

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, 20184 min read

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, 20165 min read

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, 20164 min read

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, 20166 min read

Fragments on bourgeois ideologists

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