Leonard Benardo
@lbenardo.bsky.social
Senior VP at Open Society Foundations; publisher of theideasletter.org; opinions my own (but offered for free)
Dismantling USAID, defunding VOA, closing the Wilson Center, and hollowing out the State Department's career diplomatic service together represent a strategic effort to decapitate the organizational and intellectual infrastructure of the liberal international order within the American state itself
"We are witnessing the advent of a new multipolar world order that will be defined by a pyramidal structure." At its top are two superpowers (U.S./China) with three great powers beneath them (India, Russia, the EU), with middle powers occupying the base. www.theideasletter.org/essay/power-...
Power without Ideology - The Ideas Letter
The US’s global hegemony has ended. The post–Cold War unipolar moment is giving way to a multipolar order that, Bessner argues, will now be pyramidal in structure: dominated by the…
theideasletter.org
In his address upon being awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize at the University of Tübingen in 1983, Léopold Sédar Senghor quoted Friedrich Hölderlin's simile: "Like springtime, genius emigrates from country to country."
In 1995 Martin Scorsese & Francis Ford Coppola collaborated on restoring Mikhail Kalatozov's masterpiece "I Am Cuba," a 1964 film whose technical advisors included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Stopped in Chicago on my way out west and back east on a Greyhound Ameripass trip in 1975 #2.
David Rieff: “Philip Roth told me that I come from an intellectual somewhere, but a geographic and ethnic nowhere... But I do come from an ethnic somewhere, and that’s lesbian America. I grew up surrounded largely by gay people in my childhood in New York.” www.theideasletter.org/essay/woke-o...
Woke Obsessions - The Ideas Letter
Klion traces the intellectual and moral trajectory of David Rieff, from a childhood spent in the forbidding shadow of his mother, Susan Sontag, to a successful journalistic career of his…
theideasletter.org
RIP Frederick Wiseman and thank you for your films. Great filmmaker and a giant of an example of what it means to maintain full control over your creative work. Bought these from his distribution company Zipporah Films that he created to distribute his own documentaries. Love and respect.
Fascinating, great interview! @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-pure...
A Pure Act in a Dirty World - The Ideas Letter
The great and ferociously original jazz pianist Matthew Shipp riffs with Benardo on what it means for a musician to find a truly personal sound—something deeper than virtuosity, rooted in…
theideasletter.org
For @open-society.bsky.social's Ideas Letter, I've written a profile of David Rieff, the son of Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff and a globetrotting humanitarian intellectual who in recent years has taken a striking anti-woke and anti-trans turn.
Woke Obsessions - The Ideas Letter
Klion traces the intellectual and moral trajectory of David Rieff, from a childhood spent in the forbidding shadow of his mother, Susan Sontag, to a successful journalistic career of his…
theideasletter.org
Barrington Moore taught that the intellectual's commitment to truth, as best they can reckon it, carries with it the obligation to point out the illusions, ambiguities, and hypocrisies "of those who raise the banner of freedom in order to perpetuate brutality."
We must not succumb to the ideological illusion that, since subjects are declared fair and equal under the law, and since the law assumes freedom and equality, magistrates and jurists are the servants of freedom and equality, not of capitalist relations. -- Louis Althusser
My new essay on the New Right and its relationship to historical fascism has been published at the Ideas Letter @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-ge...
Misunderstood Radicals - The Ideas Letter
Adam Knowles maps how the Swiss philosopher Armin Mohler—a post-WWII apologist of fascism and self-styled theorist of the “Conservative Revolution”—helped launder fascist-adjacent thinkers into respec...
theideasletter.org
Some think of tradition as a static set of values that end up tilting the scales in favor of their cultural preferences. The late Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) rightly defined tradition as "an argument extended through time, socially embodying continuities of conflict.."
God they were great, this is such an underrated record
From cancel culture to Maga’s assault on campuses, defending my enemy has become decimating my enemy. @lbenardo.bsky.social asks: can our ideals of free speech survive, and should we want them to?
Freedom of speech isn't a divine right, even in America
Insisting we can say anything is a political idea that may not suit our violent, polarised times
prospectmagazine.co.uk
I am astonished again and again when I find out how little it has penetrated into people's consciousness that the right of resistance, namely civil disobedience, is a right higher than positive law and as old as civilization itself. -- Herbert Marcuse
The choice of photo is absolutely brilliant, Russell and Vanessa Redgrave. Thanks @lbenardo.bsky.social
I wrote something about analytic Philospphy, and Christoph Schuringa’s book for the Ideas Letter @stefanschubert.bsky.social @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/bloodl...
“Bloodless Pedantry” - The Ideas Letter
The academic study of philosophy tends to inspire contempt, from within and from without. Stephen Hawking’s pompous pronouncement in 2010 that “philosophy is dead” is just one version of a…
theideasletter.org
From cancel culture to Maga’s assault on campuses, defending my enemy has become decimating my enemy. @lbenardo.bsky.social asks: can our ideals of free speech survive, and should we want them to?
Freedom of speech isn't a divine right, even in America
Insisting we can say anything is a political idea that may not suit our violent, polarised times
prospectmagazine.co.uk
I published two pieces on women in China this week! First, a review essay @chinabooksreview.com on two Fang Fang novels, Soft Burial & The Running Flame (tr. Michael Berry). Gendered oppression has persisted during the socialist period and capitalist reforms, despite the CCP's promise of liberation.
No Country for a Woman | China Books Review
Women in China have suffered abuse, silencing and erasure — despite the Communist Party’s slogans about women’s liberation. Two novels by the Wuhan writer Fang Fang show how gendered oppression persis...
chinabooksreview.com
The absolutist position on free speech—I might hate your words, but I shall defend to the death your right to say them—may not be right for an age of raw and extreme polarisation, writes @lbenardo.bsky.social.
Freedom of speech isn't a divine right, even in America
Insisting we can say anything is a political idea that may not suit our violent, polarised times
prospectmagazine.co.uk
Insisting on absolute free speech is a political idea that may not suit our violent, polarised times, writes @lbenardo.bsky.social. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/fre...
Freedom of speech isn't a divine right, even in America
Insisting we can say anything is a political idea that may not suit our violent, polarised times
prospectmagazine.co.uk
Compared, say, to most African, Asian, Middle Eastern universities, the American university constitutes a relatively utopian space where we can actually talk, rather than being part of the political system with academic appointments being outright political ones. -- Edward Said (2000)
