Kenneth D. Johnson’s Rhetoric Weblog

Our graduate program has two 1-credit classes for grad students--one in pedagogy, and one in professional development. I'm doing the 1-hour pedagogy course next semester; I've taught it before, but want to tinker with it a bit more (perhaps turning it into an online book or wiki of some sort). So, I'm soliciting suggestions for topics. Here […]

Michael Walzer's case.

An exemplary academic life. A commenter on Crooked Timber writes, --Stephen Resnick tells the story of going in to Samuelson’s office when he was a grad student at MIT (this would be the early ‘60s) and asking him if there was anything important in Marxism that you couldn’t talk about using conventional economics. Samuelson’s answer: “Class struggle.” […]

A thoughtful article by Dahlia Lithwick on the fact that we now have 6 Catholics on the Court. Missing, I think, is the cynicism of the Bush Administration in appointing 2 Catholics for no other reason than partisan politics. I hadn't been aware of the fact that Scalia is boycotting the U of Chicago law school because of Geoffrey Stone's (to me, ac […]

A libertarian's critique (with useful summary of other accounts of modernization) of the Eurocentric character of our speculations on the origin of modernity.