The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe.

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavio…

By definition, the conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself. Rebelling agai…

The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a 'drug-free workplace' - a euphemism for 'drug-free workforce,' since urine …

Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is …

I came into the room which was half-dark and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience, and realised that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speec…

When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.