Blame Theory

Ashley and Geoff discuss “The Concept of Enlightenment,” the first section of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment . This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...

Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberger discuss Geoff’s article “ The Frankfurt School Myth ,” A.J.A. Woods’s book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy , and Ashley’s own gripes with the School. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this wit...

Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss her essay, “ Jeffrey Epstein’s Necrophilia—and Ours, ” and the significance of Epstein’s interests in transhumanism, eugenics, and related subjects. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to disc...

Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley discuss the career and thought of the philosopher Nick Land, accelerationist, neoreactionary, and advocate of “paleo-liberalism.” Read Geoff’s recent profile of Land here . This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd l...

Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberger discuss the long afterlife of eugenics, from sociobiology and The Bell Curve to today's online right. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episo...

In conversation with Geoff Shullenberger, Ashley Frawley explains how eugenic thinking and practices emerge out of the crisis of liberalism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe

Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley discuss Andrew Doyle’s new book The End of Woke , which Ashley reviewed in Compact . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe

Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss her Compact column, " How Society Got a Sex Change ," and its relevance to the evolution of liberalism. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe

Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley continue to explore the crisis of liberalism. They begin by discussing recent reversals around free-speech debates in the United States and the odd fact that ostensible post- and anti-liberals have often positioned themselves as defenders of a central liberal value: free speech. They then begin to explore the postliberal critique and other blame narratives th...

Liberalism is in crisis. Its parties and institutions are suffering one setback after another across the West, and forces described as “illiberal” are on the rise globally. But when did this crisis begin? Was liberalism ever not in crisis? Is liberalism itself a kind of crisis? In the first episode of a longer series on the meanings and legacies of liberalism, Ashley Frawley and Geoff Shullenberge...

Geoff and Ashley discuss the online war of the sexes prompted by a recent mass shooting, which Ashley wrote about last month. They then explore the deeper roots of the gendered blame game that often defines our online culture wars. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe

Ashley Frawley, Compact’s new senior editor as well as a new co-host of Blame Theory, joins Geoff Shullenberger to explore how collective social and political problems have been blamed on individual psychic and emotional defects. We discuss her two books on this subject, examine the history of therapeutic culture, and explore to what extent particular thinkers—Pareto? Freud?—bear some of the blame...

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss his new book We Have Never Been Woke . A great deal of discussion of wokeness attempts to trace it to the influence of certain thinkers and ideas: Foucault, Critical Race Theory, and so on. Al-Gharbi offers a different approach, focusing on the social stratum in which woke ideas became salient—that of "symbolic capitalists"—and how id...

Compact 's Sohrab Ahmari joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss one of the most widely blamed thinkers of all time: Karl Marx. We consider why Republicans, all the way up to Donald Trump, are reviving anti-communist rhetoric during the 2024 presidential campaign, to what extent Marx can be blamed for the crimes of regimes inspired by his theories, why Marxism is so appealing to intellectuals, what w...

Writer David Shields joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss his new book and documentary How We Got Here . We ask whether postmodernists are to blame for our post-truth predicament and explore Trump's instinctive postmodernism, the propaganda techniques of Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov, and David's own theories on reality and (non-)fiction. Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcas...

David Dudrick, professor of philosophy at Colgate University, joins Geoff to discuss his recent Compact essay " Why Foucault Couldn't Kill Sexuality. " They discuss the misunderstandings around Foucault's History of Sexuality and the persistence of what he called the "repressive hypothesis," even among those who might claim to be his followers.  Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred...

Compact founding editor Sohrab Ahmari joins Geoff and Nina in this episode to examine Michel Foucault’s later work on biopolitics, governmentality, and economics. Did Foucault predict or even contribute to the dominance of neoliberalism? To what extent was Foucault ever left-wing? Can we reconcile the brilliance of his thought with the moral and ontological absence at the core of his work? Listen...

This episode examines Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, vol. 1 and asks to what extent Foucault is to blame for contemporary progressive dogmas about sex, gender, and power. Listen either here on Substack or on your preferred podcast app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit compactmag.substack.com/subscribe

Anchored by our own Nina Power and Geoff Shullenberger,  Blame Theory  takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame? Plato? Hegel? Marx? Nominalism? Gnosticism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Critical theory? This episode takes a page out of Nietzsche’s writings and asks whether we should blame the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit compactmag.substack.com Anchored by our own Nina Power and Geoff Shullenberger,  Blame Theory  takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame? Plato? Hegel? Marx? Nominalism? Gnosticism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Critical theory? This...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit compactmag.substack.com Anchored by our own Nina Power and Geoff Shullenberger,  Blame Theory  takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame? Plato? Hegel? Marx? Nominalism? Gnosticism? Feminism? Postmodernism? Critical theory? The d...