Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.

Rousseau thought that it was polite society that made people evil and that a sufficiently enlightened social order could bring out people’s inherent virtues.

How this 18th century philosopher’s ideas came to dominate modern political thought.

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like.

The idiot [however] does not exist as a subject – he is more like a flower: an existence simply open to light.

We do have something that is very unique about us as animals. And that’s that we can build alliances with any other species […] to build loving, supportive, safe relationships to save us from the difficulties of life

On how advances in science are undermining the dualities we have long assumed separate us from the “lower” animals, and a proposed alternative narrative for what makes humans so special.

Everything is always at once a subject and object

A close reading of the medieval story of a boy raised by wolves and a wider meditation on man’s place in the world.

90 percent of Canadians [say they] will tell the truth in court. Whereas in other places, it would be crazy to tell the truth. Aren’t you a good friend? How you trade those virtues off has a big effect

On parochialism versus universalism in human societies and how Western culture became so WEIRD.

It’s an anthropological fact that masculinity is a bit fragile in that it has to be constructed. Every society has worked on constructing roles and rites-of-passage for men that attach them to their communities. [But] this [nurturing, pro-social] behavior—being learned—is rather fragile, and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively.

A tour de force on the state of men and boys today along with its political—and personal—ramifications.

Ideas are what make you a person, a human. And that’s what Humanism must be. It has to be political and self-critical.

On the long history of “the Humanities” in European education and thought.

Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work as cheaply as possible.