Corey Robin

The erotic aspects obscure the fundamental issue: power.

Money and the murky boundary of teaching and sex.

They offer arguments that produce and galvanize new audiences.

All that is necessary for misquotes to triumph is for good scholars to do nothing.

Corey Robin on the eminent sociologist and his run-in with McCarthyism at Harvard University. The scholar died this week at age 86.

It is most active when reactive, political history suggests.

From Edmund Burke through Francis Fukuyama, conservative thinkers have been drawn to the idea, if not the actuality, of combat.

It was the French essayist Michel de Montaigne who first declared, sometime between 1572 and 1574, “The thing I fear most is fear.” Since then, philosophers have taken his lead, deeming fear the enemy of enlightenment and the most lethal impediment to freedom. Though intellectuals often fret over…