I have a short essay today in Project Syndicate called “Trumpism and the Philosophy of World Order.”
This piece follows a commentary that I wrote for Project Syndicate some time back about Trumpism and the philosophy of history, as well as an essay for the Niskanen Center and a talk for the most recent annual conference of Telos about Trumpism, historical consciousness, and climate change denial.
This video includes my reflections on Trumpism and historical consciousness at the 2018 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference. The talk was part of a panel about U.S. political movements, with fellow panelists Tim Luke, David Pan, and Russell Berman. My remarks begin at about 13:50.
At the end of the talk, I had a bit of a slip of the tongue and referred to Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader, as Prof. Carl Schmitt—which he most definitely is not!
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I am very pleased to share the good news that in 2018-19, I will be the Fulbright Uppsala University Distinguished Chair in American Studies. I’m looking forward to getting to know my new colleagues and students in Sweden!
My latest post for the Niskanen Center, about President Trump’s encouraging fans to boycott the NFL, is here.
My friends at the libertarian Niskanen Center kindly gave me a forum to meditate on the President’s recent executive order about immigration. The post is here. The think tank has been publishing terrific critiques of the administration from a libertarian and center-right perspective, though it’s contributors are wonderfully hard to classify, forging a new political and ideological space—do keep an eye on these folks!
The latest video in my series about Austrian concepts of law and the Austrian experience of landscape is called “Preservation Waltz.” Rare books, forests, and domestic architecture. Sustainability is the key principle:
I discuss the video in this guest post on Environment, Law and History.
I’m pleased to share the latest video from my developing film about law and landscape in Austria. This segment is called “Florian & Friends Talk about Purity”:
The video is about water, water law, Austrian identity, legal philosophy, concepts of the state, ideas of the public, approaches to time and tradition, metaphor, and some great old books. Plus, there’s a cameo appearance by a sweet Alpine cow.
Why is a basic doctrine of Austrian constitutional law named after one of the central features of the Austrian landscape? A conversation with two far-flung Austrian legal scholars:
This video will be incorporated into my film “Wood, Water, Stone, Sky, Milk,” which grew out of the semester I spent in Salzburg as a Fulbright scholar.
Greetings from Austria, where I’m spending the semester as a Fulbright scholar at the law school of the University of Salzburg. My wife and I have had a grand time getting to know this beautiful city and the mountains and valleys of the nearby Salzkammergut. If you’d like to find us, we’re living in a little baroque garret right about here:
Just behind that blue dot, up a sheer cliff, is the house where the author Stefan Zweig used to live, so we’ve been thinking a lot about The World Before Yesterday—and, in an American spirit, about the director Wes Anderson, too. Across the river is the Salzburg old town, with its winding cobblestone streets, and our favorite bakery, and our favorite butcher, with its staff who wave to us warmly on the street when they see us walk by. Read the rest of this entry »
When I was in Europe last November, I asked a group of legal professionals some unusual questions. The results are in my new video.
Worlds of Law 