Linda Colley doesn’t think that the United Kingdom can remain united. In Acts of Union and Disunion, she following Benedict Anderson’s lead in claiming that nations are Imagined Communities, formed from myths and, as Colley says, “an attractive idea of what they are.”As . . . . Continue Reading »
In his TLS review of Andrew Sanders’s In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past, AN Wilson suggests that Dickens was representative of his age in his “open hatred of the post, and his perky lower-middle-class joy in nowadays.”Not all Victorians shared Dickens’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other) was shocked when a Scientific American reporter accused her of standing in the way of same-sex marriage. She doesn’t oppose gay marriage, but the reporter was unhappy that Turkle objected to “mating and . . . . Continue Reading »
Turkle (Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other) recounts a visit to a museum where she and her daughter Rebecca viewed some Galapagos tortoises. Some of the kids would have preferred a robot: “A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot . . . . Continue Reading »
Two high tech developments symbolize the disquieting trends that Sherry Turkle identifies in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other(xiv): “These days, parents wait in line to buy their childreninteractive Zhu Zhu robotic pet hamsters, advertised as . . . . Continue Reading »
For Jia Tolentino, marriages “holds about as much interest for me as a bag of playground rocks (some! Not much, though).”So she can’t understand why “18 women, 18 brides. 18 capable, wonderful, educated, privileged, professional, socially aware female humans” would go . . . . Continue Reading »
Megan Garber interviews Sherry Turkle, author ofAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Otherand of the forthcoming Reclaiming Conversation.In both books, Turkle argues that despite our constant connectedness we are more and more deprived of real conversation. She tells . . . . Continue Reading »
Tocqueville ( The Ancien Rgime and the French Revolution , 16) describes the “fury” of the philosophes attack on the church: “They attacked its clergy, its hierarchy, its institutions,and its dogma, and, the better to demolish all these things, they soughtto undermine the very . . . . Continue Reading »
Diderot explains the difference between a priest and a philosophe in his “Observations sur le Nakaz” ( Political Writings , 85): “The philosophe says much against the priest; the priest says muchagainst the philosophe . But the philosophe has never killed priests, andthe priest . . . . Continue Reading »
O’Donovan and O’Donovan offer an insightful summary of the contribution of northern European Humanists (More, Erasmus) to early modern political theory ( From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought , 554-5). Their principles sound proto-Hauerwasian: . . . . Continue Reading »
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