“At the heart of law is not justice but the will to punish. And it is when this will to punish becomes a pervasive political impulse, a mass phenomenon, that we leave democracy and enter what we call neodemocracy: the idea that the law is here not to protect the vulnerable, or be responsible to those who are outnumbered. When punishment becomes the guiding force in and of law, we have left the realm of human freedom. We have entered into what liberals call the rule of law.”
What, Mutant asks, does the law yield? What does the law make of us — and what does the law break in us?
Watching the scale, speed, and lawless ease with which some of the most storied postwar American institutions have been attacked and dismantled in the...
If freedom is the most molecular of human desires and hope the most fragile of human capacities, then fear is an all too human...
No idea in our political lexicon is as deeply mired in paradox as freedom. One is wholly alive, wholly human, we are often told,...
