Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 -1900)

Nietzsche spoke of “the death of God,” and foresaw the dissolution of traditional religion and metaphysics. Some interpreters of Nietzsche believe he embraced nihilism, rejected philosophical reasoning, and promoted a literary exploration of the human condition, while not being concerned with gaining truth and knowledge in the traditional sense of those terms. However, other interpreters of …

Read More

What Lies Beneath Government

We live in Canberra and Washington, DC, two stately capital cities that embody all the trappings and the ethos of the bureaucratic state. With their monuments, statues and symmetrical lines, the architects of both cities dreamt them as manifestations of the rational administrations that would work there. Imposing government buildings are the dominant architectural feature …

Read More

Democracy Entails Conflict

A cursory online search will provide you with nearly 100 million web pages concerning ‘the Left’s circular firing squad’. The idea of a circular firing squad is meant to evoke people so torn by their minor differences that they eliminate any possibility for solidarity or collective work. Rather than aiming our weapons at our enemies, we somehow …

Read More

In Praise of Possibility

Like most disciplines, the field of development economics came into being not because of disinterested intellectual curiosity but rather due to pressing contemporary events. In the late 1960s, one prominent international civil servant and development economist reflected that: Read more

Democracy is Sentimental

Something is amiss with democracy. Ask people from any or no political persuasion and they’re likely to give a similar story: contemporary politics has gone haywire because one side (or both) has lost touch with reality. We are living in a ‘post-truth’ partisan news hellscape that priorities ‘feelings over facts’ and disregards the natural authority …

Read More

The Science of Wisdom

Wisdom is full of paradoxes. It is one of the oldest topics in the intellectual history of humanity, and yet talking about wisdom can feel odd and disingenuous. People seem to have intuitions about who is and isn’t wise, but if you press them to define wisdom, they will hesitate. Wisdom, with its mystical qualities, …

Read More

Democracy or Apocalypse

In the 1930s, many European academics sought refuge in the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation in their home countries. Jewish scholars were ‘cleansed’ from the academy in Germany with the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service and could sense that they were likely to lose more than their jobs …

Read More

Equal Justice They Said

What once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.” The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court—an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept—what the …

Read More

A Stable Constitution for Unstable Times

One of the most fundamental questions of political theory is deceptively simple: why have a constitution at all? The answer to this question should be easy, given the widespread adoption of written constitutions in recent years, even if their substantive provisions vary widely from country to country. Read more

16 Facts About Ethiopia

Ethiopia is a country which has its own distinct alphabet, located in Eastern Africa. It borders Kenya, South Sudan, Somali, Djibouti and Sudan. Here are interesting facts about this African nation: Read more