Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'karl marx'

March 25, 2026

Harvey Mansfield’s Rational Control

It’s difficult to avoid terms such as “legendary” and “distinguished” when referring to Harvey Mansfield’s long career at Harvard University. Of course, his reputation is based on more than his famous resistance to grade inflation or his barbed criticisms of Harvard. Continue Reading...
February 19, 2026

Do You Have to Go Rural for a Good Life?

Dana Milbank was once one of the most insufferable of The Washington Post’s reporters and columnists. For decades, Milbank gained a reputation for serial exaggeration and distortion, such as misrepresenting his interview subjects. Continue Reading...
June 05, 2025

The Curious Task of ‘Abundance’

In their new and highly anticipated book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, both journalists and bestselling authors who align ideologically with the political left and American liberalism, refreshingly advocate for growth and abundance. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2025

Thinking Critically about Critical Theory

Hope College required all seniors to take a “senior seminar,” the ostensible purpose of which was to help each student refine his or her “worldview.” Not liking, for a variety of reasons, the word worldview with its implicit relativism, I could nonetheless use the course to get students to struggle through competing “worldviews.” Continue Reading...
August 25, 2020

Karl Marx’s greatest lesson

Karl Marx famously concluded in his 1845 Theses On Feuerbach with his eleventh thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” How this change from analysis to activism can be justified in light of Marx’s own materialist conception of history is an enduring puzzle. Continue Reading...
August 28, 2019

Ignoring the invisible

I have been thinking a lot about all of the invisible things around us, important foundational things that we take for granted.  Because they don’t immediately manifest themselves to our attention we can forget about them if we are not careful. Continue Reading...