Author: James Livingston

Conservative columnists are deeply concerned because some big corporations have distanced themselves from the NRA in the aftermath of the latest massacre by means of an AR-15. How can these joint-stock companies serve political causes, they ask, blinking innocently, as if corporations hadn’t been legal persons since 1886, with plenty of electoral weight—and as if Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision of 2010, hadn’t given them new standing as individuals with First Amendment protections? I’m here to explain their concerns and turn them to left-wing purposes. But you might as well know going in that, in these times—in my...

Hayden White has died, and it feels personal. I didn’t know him—I met him just once at a conference—but he had, and has, a huge effect on my thinking about history, about method, about writing as such. Last semester I taught both the big book, Metahistory (1973), and the essay collection, The Content of the Form (1987), in a course called—wait for it—Historiography, the History of History. I matched White up against Karl Lowith, the Heidegger student who, like Erich Auerbach, wrote a great book while on the run from the Nazis.Meaning in History (1949), it’s called, and in it Lowith insists that our...