Benjamin Books
122 Osgoode St K1N6S2 Ottawa, ON, Canada

These books do what Alexander Pope said wit can do: it gives us back the image of our mind.

A recent interview with Mladen Dolar that touches on the intellectual vs. the academic and the Master's Discourse vs. the University Discourse.

"I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader." These days, it's all too easy to dismiss ...writers with outraged attitudes, but Brian Morton argues that we should use old books as windows into the past. What do you think? See more

Blisteringly ironic review of a pile of nonsense! There’s a rich irony at the heart of the old radical campus cliché. During the postwar period, conservatives feared that higher education was fomenting leftist revolution. In reality, elite institutions like Berkeley and Yale were enshrining meritocracy as the official rule of American life, while more quietly preserving the advantages that come with money. Higher education prepares students to succeed within a competitive, s...tratified American society, not change it. The fear is always that today’s radicals will implement their ideas tomorrow. Or, in Mac Donald’s words, a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media. But will those who attain the highest reaches of government and media really be interested in tearing the heights down? It didn’t happen in the 1960s. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. Don’t count on it this time, either. So why does Mac Donald insist otherwise? Why are conservatives still so afraid of higher education after all these years? Most obviously, demagoging higher education works political wonders. It’s not only Buckley and Mac Donald who sell books against higher education; politicians from Nixon and Reagan to Scott Walker and Donald Trump have sold their campaigns that way, too. While lambasting egg-headed professors, they can both pose as populists and promise tax cuts for the rich. See more