Doors close, backs turn: Why complain?

Lorna Finlayson, 12 May 2022

The crisis facing higher education in the UK is not an excuse for delaying action on sexual violence. If we wait to save the university first, we may well wait for ever. For that reason, though, it’s...

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While orthodox Marxists had long argued that the purpose of racism was to divide workers, Black and white workers in South Africa already had different relations to capital. Apartheid racism was essential...

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Short Cuts: Destroying the Asylum System

Frances Webber, 7 April 2022

Refugees are rarely able to get visas: you aren’t classified as a refugee under the 1951 Geneva Convention until you are outside your country and unable or unwilling to return. And once outside it, you...

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With six conservatives on the nine-person court, Chief Justice John Roberts knows that another prudent defection on his part will not be enough to save Roe. But he might entice one of the conservative...

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A UK Bill of Rights?

Tom Hickman, 24 March 2022

There is nothing wrong in principle with a new bill of domestic rights. It has been the policy of each of the three main political parties at various times over the past two decades and can be done consistently...

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The EU claims it runs a ‘fully autonomous sanctions regime’ in the service of ‘safeguarding EU values’. But for the most part its sanctions, and those of the UK, are applied in conjunction with...

Read more about First Recourse for Rebels: Financial Weaponry

Thou Old Serpent!

James Butler, 10 March 2022

Almost no first-hand accounts of the experience of possession exist. The actions and utterances of possessed women – the most famous cases all involve women, though men and children suffer possession...

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Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students,...

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In the Shallow End

Conor Gearty, 27 January 2022

Boris Johnson’s Brexit administration is in many ways an exercise in nostalgia, a search for a lost England, and the Supreme Court under Lord Reed is similarly backward-looking. It has reverted to an...

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Does marmalade exist?

Terry Eagleton, 27 January 2022

Because the social world is constructed, Malcolm Bull’s sceptical stance can be transformative. You can ‘make less’ of society, in the sense of questioning its apparently inexorable laws; and if...

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Diary: Epistemic Injustice

Bernadette Wren, 2 December 2021

If a whistle-blowing report on the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic was needed, I wish I’d written it myself. It would have highlighted the isolation of a group of conscientious...

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Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Gradual changes have already started to act as counterforces to the follies of unbridled speculation, fears of uncontrolled immigration and contagions of civil war. For Stella Ghervas, balance of power...

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Cassirer saw the history of philosophy, like the history of science, as a series of intellectual excursions which at first threw up a lot of dust, but then settled down to form an intellectual acquis communautaire,...

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We must think! Hannah Arendt’s Islands

Jenny Turner, 4 November 2021

Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: ‘the two in one’, ‘the soundless dialogue ... between me and myself’. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking;...

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Short Cuts: Plainly Unconstitutional

Frederick Wilmot-Smith, 21 October 2021

The​ judiciary, Alexander Hamilton wrote in ‘Federalist No. 78’, was ‘beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power’. Today, in the United States, that...

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A Decent Death

Stephen Sedley, 21 October 2021

It has for many years been a crime in this country to cause an animal unnecessary suffering. Perhaps we need to turn our attention to the desire of human beings to be similarly spared, if that is their...

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Short Cuts: Raab’s British Rights

Francis FitzGibbon, 7 October 2021

Dominic​ Raab is the eighth lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice since the Conservative Party entered government in 2010. The average tenure has been nineteen months, with a...

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Systemite Pop: The Children of God

Tabitha Lasley, 23 September 2021

The Children of God called themselves several different things: the Family of Love, the Family, the Family International. These name changes suggest something of a branding problem. Indeed, by the time...

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