Jedediah Purdy

The food movement is young and growing. Like any growing movement, it needs more ideas -- small, medium, and large. These are (1) more concrete reforms, (2) sharper ways of framing its keys issues, and (3) a picture of how its values fit into the big problems and themes...

The Occupy encampment nearest me (Chapel Hill, NC) voluntarily disbanded a few weeks ago, and for months people have been saying "Occupy Everywhere" to describe the (non)program after the Manhattan eviction. What could that look like?

The answer has to come from a sense of what it means to...

A democracy must be able to engage its own economy -- even a democracy as money-bloated and doubt-ridden as ours has become. To do that, we need a way of talking about the (im)morality of capitalism that lets us get hold of the issue and grapple with it.

My...

Nicholas Kristof steps up in yesterday's New York Times to answer a Swarthmore student's question that "startled" him: is it immoral to become a banker?

Kristof's answer: No, because banking is a core part of the capitalism that makes us rich. But, he goes on to say,...

The two most visible environmental issues today, climate change and agriculture, are about as different as they could be. Taken together, though, they give some reminders. Environmental consciousness is very young. Its challenge to some of the ways we live is deep. And it can be a great source of...

Ron Paul's anti-war stance makes me angry, but not at Ron Paul. What's frustrating is that, after four years under a Democratic president who campaigned against "dumb" foreign intervention, there is exactly one presidential candidate who speaks to anti-war voters. This, of course, is Paul, whose objection to getting entangled...

HuffPo readers hear a lot about the Supreme Court's money-is-speech doctrine and its protection of corporate spending. Why do these decisions happen? Much more than any other branch of government, the federal courts are powered by ideas, and it's essential to grasp those ideas if you want to understand harmful...

When I argued last week that treating "socialism" as a slur shuts us off from some important and humane ideas, the posting drew a long string of comments (nearly 1k at last count). Naturally, lots of people want to know what it would mean to take socialism seriously,...

Is socialism's value as a meaningless scare-word played out yet? If so, maybe we can give it a second chance as a real idea. By treating the word as an all-purpose insult, we've lost touch with essential strands of American political thinking.

These ideas were vital to Abraham Lincoln,...

Yesterday, Barack Obama sounded a little like Theodore Roosevelt: scourge of wealthy special interests, champion of a middle class society, defender of government's necessary role in the economy. So it was a fine stroke to deliver the president's most populist speech yet in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Roosevelt went...