We liberals identify ourselves as such because we hold liberty to be the highest political principle—a privilege that has been afforded to us on the basis of our having had the fortune to have been born after that greatest flowering of human thought, the Enlightenment.
Ah, NIMBYs. The middling middle-class campaigners we all love to hate. For those who are blissfully unaware, the acronym stands for “Not In My Back Yard”, referring to those implacable objectors to any development that could provide jobs…
Shirley was incapable of preconceptions. It was perhaps her only incapability. Whether you were a learned professor of political theory, a longstanding cabinet minister, or an eager, awestruck undergraduate, she wanted to talk politics without assumptions or prejudices.
Everyone likes to think that they see a dystopia coming. Everyone claims to have read Nineteen Eighty-Four, that apparently sacred document that will grant us to detect and combat authoritarianism. Of course it doesn’t actually have that utility…
The last in-person CULA event I attended was our 2020 AGM, in which I was elected as Comms Officer and became editor of this blog. The international situation began to worsen almost immediately after this, and before long…
Politicians who are bereft of ideas can always rely on criminal justice policy to fill their time. In 1994, John Major’s enervated, post-Thatcherite government penned the now infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. The act is infamous…
The year is 1968. London’s swinging; Prague is springing; the war in Vietnam rages on. Sexual intercourse, if Philip Larkin is to be believed, was invented only five years ago, so its novelty has not yet worn off.
This October, dozens of HSPS and HisPol students will arrive in Cambridge excited to be challenged academically and intellectually by new ideas and bold ways of thinking. Few of them know of the dangers: the cult that has…
I’m sure anyone that reads this will agree that the climate crisis is real, global, and an existential threat to humans and the Earth. I don’t need to run through a list of panic-inducing statistics: the average global…
The purpose of the first version of this essay, written in April of last year, was to examine some of the prominent liberal theories over the last few centuries, and suggest a liberal model of violence between…