This is interesting--I didn't read this when it came out this past May, but it seems worth considering.  Am I guilty of this "left Straussianism"?  I wonder if sometimes I am. What do you think?   

 

This sets the mental mice going in multiple directions: “10 scholars from the Brookings Economic Studies program to share what they thought was the most important story in economics over the last 10 years.”

 

 

A good piece in memory of Johann Baptist Metz, an important post-World War II Roman Catholic political theologian, by which I mean an important post-World War II Roman Catholic theologian.  I like this especially, about his writing style:

“His chief contribution to theology is not so much a system, or even a set of positions, but a body of lapidary phrases that haunt and disturb theological discourse: “dangerous memory,” “interruption,” “bourgeois religion,” “the cult of the makeable.” These phrases raise more questions than answers, which is only fitting given that Metz believed that “theology is a culture of questions, not of answers.” Metz enacted in the very form of his theology his principled rejection of any theological impulse to adopt a totalizing view of history.”

 

Samuel Moyn on Cass Sunstein from the summer.  This is not entirely, I think, an accurate representation of what Sunstein is doing, because I think Sunstein is more worried about corporations than Moyn allows; but still, worth reading:

“One of the most striking features of On Freedom is, therefore, that Sunstein has written a book about liberty that ignores how, even without government interference, the most insidious threats to it transpire when people believe they are in pursuit of their own preferences.…

Sunstein would have to give up his Cold War estimate of government as the most probable threat to freedom, as if freedom did not depend on eradicating private coercion, too, both when people form their ends and when they try to live them out. He would also have to embrace Mill for real. This would mean dropping Hayek and extending his confidence in the government’s capacity to nudge to other forms of intervention. There is, in fact, no reason that centralized planning is inferior to decentralized activity, as Waze already shows in its way. Indeed, if society—including “the free market”—is the primary threat to liberty, then the state’s justifiable role is far greater than Hayek’s disciples have taught. From nudging, government would have to return to planning.

Sunstein would also have to confront the limits of technocratic nudges when they are allied to a system of oppression that they leave undisturbed."

 

Finally, an interersting piece on the Mormon church (the LDS Church, I should say) and money.  The LDS Church has been in the news lately because of the huge amount of money it has in reserve.  Perhaps, as this piece suggests, it is because of its anxiety about being attacked by its surrounding culture.  But what is the half-life of understandable paranoia?