To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.

TV has a lot of problems, but I think the Internet and social media have a lot more. Under the cover of anonymity people say the most vicious things.

Singapore and China, which don't want to encourage democratic citizenship, are expanding their humanities curricula. These reforms are all about developing a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Greek tragedies and comedies are like a roadmap to all the ways in which trying to live this rich, full life can go wrong. You could get into a war. You could find that you have members of your family on the wrong side of a political crisis. You could be raped. You could find that your child has gone crazy because of some horrible experience she's had.

But the life that no longer trust another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer.

There was a time, before I was in graduate school, when political philosophy pretty much ceased to exist. The positivists thought there were only two things you could do: conceptual analysis or empirical investigation. Any kind of political theory or even ethical theory was nonsense.

Economists get impatient with philosophy. They are often trained as skilled mathematicians. They don't like going back to ordinary language and first principles.