Corey Robin

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer: “The book’s [Harry Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity] thesis…is that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from ‘a grave psychiatric disorder,’ whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind ‘the mask of sanity’ there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one…. “Cleckley’s ‘grave psychiatric disorder’ is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations. The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the […]

Janet Malcolm has died. I, along with three other writers, wrote something about her for The New Republic. Like Orwell, who thought Homage to Catalonia would have been a good book had he not turned it into journalism, Malcolm described her writing as a failure of art. Only writers who invent, she said, can write autobiographies. Journalists like her could not. They lacked the ability to make themselves interesting. The light of their work was powered, almost entirely, by the self-invention of their subjects. You can read the rest of it here. On Tuesday, at 7:30 pm (EST), I’ll be interviewing Joshua Cohen about his amazing new novel, The Netanyahus. You can sign up for the online event here. I can’t say […]

Philip Roth has been in the news, as has Palestine. By sheerest coincidence, a piece I’ve been mulling over for some time—on the uncanny convergence between the lives and concerns of Roth and Hannah Arendt, particularly when it came to Jewish questions such as Zionism—came out in The New York Review of Books last week. The piece starts with the Blake Bailey controversy, but goes on to explore what the surprising parallels between Roth and Arendt, who knew and respected each other, has to say about the left, Jewish identity politics, and American political culture today. In 2014, the mystery writer Lisa Scottoline wrote an instructive essay for The New York Times about two undergraduate seminars she took with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania […]

I have a new piece up at The New Yorker. I take stock of the debate over whether Trumpism is an authoritarian/fascist/tyrannical formation. Throughout the Trump years, I consistently argued that that what I call the strongman thesis (just as a catch-all way of describing the various terms that were used for Trumpism) was not the most helpful way of thinking about what was going on with Trump or on the right. In this piece, I try to step back from that debate and examine what was really driving it. Long story short: where liberals and leftists saw power on the right, I saw, and continue to see, paralysis. Not just on the right, in fact, but across the political […]

Throughout his life, John Maynard Keynes was plagued by the thought that he was ugly. In his diary, Keynes’s father notes that his six-year-old son “thinks no one ever was quite so ugly.” When he was 23, Keynes complained to Lytton Strachey that “I have always suffered and I suppose always will from a most unalterable obsession that I am so physically repulsive….The idea is so fixed and constant that I don’t think anything—certainly no argument—could ever shake it.” Keynes didn’t lack for sexual partners. He kept a detailed list of his sexual experiences, and it’s long. Nor was he an unhappy person, prone to self-doubt. He was just convinced that he was ugly. Interestingly, his lack of confidence in […]

I have some doubts about what a Biden administration will or can do, but I’d be grateful if Biden delivers on this: He relishes freewheeling discussion, interrupting aides and chiding them for what he deems overly academic or elitist language. “Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me,” he likes to say, according to aides. “If she understands, we can keep talking.” Aides made a point of editing out all abbreviations other than U.N. and NATO. Politicians have their own jargon, but one of the irritating features of the Obama administration (Professor in Chief?) was the proliferation of academic tropes in everyday political conversation, among leaders, their staffers, organizers, and journalists. Go to the […]

Over the last four years, I’ve argued that this is a potential moment of realignment, where the Reagan regime we’ve been living under could be shattered and repudiated, and replaced by a new political regime. One of the reasons I’ve pressed so hard on the Trump/Carter comparison is to point out that the Reagan regime, like the New Deal regime in the 1970s, is more vulnerable than we realize. I continue to maintain that Trump’s inability to rule—most spectacularly put on display this past week—reflects the crumbling power of that regime. That doesn’t mean the regime can’t do damage on its way out—the last sentence of The Reactionary Mind makes a point of saying “how much it [the Reagan regime] […]

In my New Yorker piece on Max Weber, which came out yesterday, I alluded to Weber’s many, often failed, forays into political life. Several folks on social media have expressed surprise about these expeditions. The facts of Weber’s political involvement don’t seem to fit with the aura of political detachment that surrounds his writing. Indeed, some of Weber’s writing can make him seem almost hermetically sealed off from the barest of political obligations, which is to communicate clearly. But Weber was intensely involved in the political life of his day. In fact, I had an entire section of my piece devoted to these involvements, and was originally going to open the essay with that as a kind of set piece. […]

Max Weber died at the tail end of a pandemic, amid a growing street battle between the right and the left. What could he possibly have to say to us today? I try to answer this, and some other questions, in my review this morning, in The New Yorker, of an excellent new translation, by Damion Searls, of Weber’s Vocation Lectures. I have to confess, a little guiltily, that I get in a few shots against older leftists, of the ex-SDS type, who like to use (or misuse) Weber’s “ethics of responsibility” against the putative transgressions of younger leftists who are allegedly in thrall to an “ethics of conviction.” It’s one of those tropes in contemporary argument that I really […]

I’m in the New York Review of Books this morning, offering my thoughts on the election as part of the magazine’s series on November 2020. I make three points: The right used to be thought of as a “three-legged stool” made up of economic libertarians, statist Cold Warriors, and cultural traditionalists. Whether that characterization was true, it expressed an understanding of the right as a political entity capable of creating hegemony throughout society. That is no longer the case. Today, the right’s three-legged stool is an artifact, a relic, of counter-majoritarian state institutions: the Electoral College, the Senate, and the courts. However undemocratic these three institutions may be, they are are eminently constitutional. The most potent source of the right’s […]

The coronavirus has hit CUNY, where I teach, hard: more than 20 deaths of students, faculty, and staff, and counting. Yet the impact of the virus on CUNY has received almost no press coverage at all. At the same time, the media continues to focus its higher education coverage, during the coronavirus, where it always has: on elite schools. The combination of these elements—the unremarked devastation at CUNY, the outsized attention to wealthy colleges and universities—led me to write this piece for The New Yorker online: It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has suffered as many deaths as CUNY. Yet, aside from an op-ed by Yarbrough in the Daily News, there has been little coverage of this […]

I hope this post finds all of you healthy and safe. It’s been a terrible month, more than a month, for so many people. The New York Review of Books asked me to write something about pandemics and politics. How, they asked me to consider, is it possible to do democracy under quarantine? I decided to flip the question. Much of what is called democracy, after all, presumes the quarantine of vast parts of the citizenry, that they be kept isolated, politically if not physically. So the real question, it seems to me, is how have isolated and separated men and women, often under great duress, nevertheless managed to create democracy over the ages? That’s what I wrote about here, […]

I did a lot of writing this year. This is a brief list of some of my favorites. My book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, came out. It got some pretty great reviews. You should buy it. I began writing for The New Yorker Online, which has been a joy. My first piece was on political converts, men and women who make the journey from one ideology to another, and why the move from left to right has mattered more, over the course of the last century, than the move from right to left. My second piece was on Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist and a historian, and how his failure at the first made possible his success at the second. […]

If you missed my conversation with Jamelle Bouie at the New York Public Library about The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, not to worry: it will be aired tomorrow night, Saturday, October 12, at 9 pm (East Coast time) on C-SPAN. Also, if you want to see a conversation in person, I’ll be talking with Rebecca Traister about the book at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, on Thursday, October 24, at 7 pm. Really looking forward to that event. Doug Henwood interviewed me about the book on his show Behind the News. We talked about how Thomas’s views echo some of the arguments set out by Max Horkheimer in his famous 1936 essay “Authority and the Family,” and why it’s the […]

  The Enigma of Clarence Thomas goes on sale today, with the help of a rave review in this morning’s New York Times. In the Times, Jennifer Szalai writes: It’s a provocative thesis, but one of the marvels of Robin’s razor-sharp book is how carefully he marshals his evidence. He doesn’t have to resort to elaborate speculation or armchair psychologizing, relying instead on Thomas’s speeches, interviews and Supreme Court opinions. Just as jurists make ample use of the written record, Robin does the same. … The result is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive. … It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has […]

Last night, my wife Laura organized a terrific debate watch party for Bernie Sanders supporters at a local bar. About 40 to 50 people showed up. The best part of it was that while most people were firm Bernie supporters, a fair number were not. They were Bernie-curious, but undecided. They came because of friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and so on, who brought them there. So it felt like a base-expanding moment. Even better, I had an interesting conversation with one woman, who is a definite Bernie supporter, and her boyfriend, who is less certain about Bernie. They’re both nurses. Her parents immigrated from China about 30 years ago. She lives in Sheepshead Bay. So she told me she identifies with […]

The historian Josh Freeman has an excellent review of Michael Walzer’s Political Action, which came out in 1971 but has been reissued by NYRB Books. Freeman compares Walzer’s short pamphlet to the Manual of Practical Political Action, another how-to political guide, prepared in 1946 by the labor movement’s National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), one of the first modern PACs. Both texts were written at moments of political deceleration, when the velocities of change were about to alter dramatically or already had. But here’s what Josh says about that earlier moment that’s relevant for today: For NCPAC…organizing requires strategies that are not inherently progressive. Somewhat apologetically, the Manual suggests borrowing techniques from commercial advertising, presenting detailed guidance, much of it derived from standard business practices, […]

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, at the New York Public Library. I’ll be in conversation with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. The launch will be on Monday, September 23, at 7 pm. It’ll be in the Berger Forum, on the second floor of the main branch of the library, at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. Tickets are free, but they’re on a first come, first serve basis, so reserve them now. You can do so here. Hope to see all of you who can make it!

About six weeks ago I got a call from a number in DC I didn’t recognize. I answered the phone warily, saying hello more as a question than a greeting. At the other end, I heard, “Professor Robin?” “Who’s this?” I asked. “It’s Nina Totenberg from NPR.” I started cracking up, almost uncontrollably, and finally said, hi, hi, of course, Nina Totenberg. She noted that I sounded “furtive.” I noted that I didn’t recognize the number. Anyway, we wound up having a lovely chat about Clarence Thomas. Totenberg is as warm and friendly and personable on the phone as she is on air. On Friday, a small bit of our conversation made it into the segment she did on Thomas in […]

I often get requests for advice from academics who are writing a book for a university press but who want the book to reach a broader non-academic audience. Despite getting useful scholarly critiques from anonymous reader reports, these academics want someone to help them with the style and structure of the book. They want to write a book that will crossover, that will speak not only to their peers in the field but also to readers outside their field, ideally outside the academy. They just don’t know how to do it; they need help figuring out how. While most academic presses don’t have such editors, there is something called a development editor who can do exactly that kind of work for […]