By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition Few ideas distinguish the United States from the rest of the world more clearly than its extraordinary confidence in self-interest. Americans have long believed that society functions best when individuals are free to pursue their own ambitions, their own happiness, and their own […]
Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition Modern moral philosophy often begins with a deceptively simple question: What is the right thing to do? Aristotle answered that morality consists in cultivating the virtues necessary for human flourishing. John Stuart Mill argued that moral action is that which maximizes happiness. Immanuel Kant […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition Few nations differ more profoundly in their understanding of the relationship between the individual and the state than the United States and Russia. Although both are vast continental powers with multicultural populations and rich intellectual traditions, they have historically developed contrasting answers to […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition Among the most ambitious interpretations of the development of the Americas is the thesis advanced by Claudio Véliz in The New World of the Gothic Fox. Véliz argued that the English-speaking and Iberian civilizations transplanted fundamentally different cultural traditions to the New World. […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831, he expected to find a young republic. What he did not expect to find was a society unlike any he had encountered in Europe. Again and again, he observed Americans forming associations. […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition More than two centuries after the founding of the United States, an unexpected question has emerged from the age of artificial intelligence: Who better understood the future—Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson? At first glance, the question seems absurd. Neither man knew anything about […]
Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition The United States and Argentina occupy a unique place in modern history. Both were New World societies built through mass immigration, vast territorial expansion, and the promise of economic opportunity. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they stood among the most attractive destinations […]
Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition One of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, John Rawls, asked readers to imagine a thought experiment known as the “veil of ignorance.” In his book A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued that a just society should be designed as though […]
Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition The tradition with which I most closely identify is neither the imperial tradition of the Habsburgs nor the revolutionary tradition of the Jacobins. It is the dissident tradition: the tradition of the intellectual outsider who stands apart from power and insists that truth matters […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition Few books in the social sciences have enjoyed the longevity of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. More than a century after its publication, Weber’s argument continues to shape how intellectuals think about economic development, culture, and the origins […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses a series of psychological experiments demonstrating that simply priming people with thoughts of money changes their behavior. Individuals who were subconsciously reminded of money became more self-reliant, less likely to ask for help, less willing […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Professor Davidoor and the Best of All Possible Campuses Professor Nathaniel Stone—known, by his own gentle insistence, as Professor Davidoor—entered the seminar room with a confidence that suggested the universe had recently been audited and found satisfactory. Professor Stone firmly believed not only that […]
By Aleksey Bastavenko Professor Davidor had drawn the map again. It was not a map in the conventional sense—no scale, no legend, no cities—but a moral topography: a small circle labeled DAVID and, looming beside it, a larger shape labeled GOLIATH. The coastline was suspiciously tidy. The arrows, […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Professor Davidor stood before his class with the solemn intensity of a man who believed history had placed him exactly where he belonged—center stage, chalk in hand, civilization on the line. On the board, he had written: DAVID vs. GOLIATH — AGAIN He underlined again […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Professor Nathaniel Stone, Ph.D., adjusted his tie—navy, discreet, but resolute—and stepped into the classroom with the quiet confidence of a man who believed himself to be both embattled and indispensable. On the board behind him, in neat chalk, were the words: DAVID vs. GOLIATH (Modern […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition From the colonial era onward, the Puritan spirit has shaped the American tendency to mark outsiders as deviant. Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans showed that in seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay, trials of witches, heretics, and dissenters were not simply about eliminating wrongdoers but about drawing […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition From the earliest colonial settlements in New England, the Puritan spirit has cast a long shadow over American life. Rooted in the ideals of moral discipline, community surveillance, and religious posturing, this ethos has shaped not only the institutions of the United States […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition In the Republic of Ambaria, where train stations arrived hours before the trains themselves and the rivers sometimes flowed backward for sport, the people elected a man named Joseph Finnigan. Nobody remembered exactly when he first appeared in politics, though everyone swore they […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko, Academic Composition When I first arrived in America in 1998, three images on television etched themselves into my memory: the chaos of The Jerry Springer Show, the impeachment of Bill Clinton with its infamous parsing of “the meaning of is,” and the bizarre arithmetic of […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Academic Composition In Average Is Over, economist Tyler Cowen makes an optimistic claim: Latino immigration to the United States not only strengthens the American economy, but also transmits liberal and democratic values back to Latin America. The idea is compelling. As immigrants live and work […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Academic Composition https://www.youtube.com/@Alekseybashtavenko Michel Foucault, a towering figure in twentieth-century thought, is often cited—sometimes worshipped—by postmodernist and leftist academics who seek to dismantle traditional power structures. His writings on discourse, power, and social institutions underpin much of contemporary critical theory, from queer studies to postcolonialism. […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Academic Composition https://www.youtube.com/@Alekseybashtavenko Santa Cruz del Islote is not just an island — it’s a living metaphor. Floating off Colombia’s Caribbean coast, it is often described as the most densely populated island on Earth, home to some 1,200 people packed into just one hectare of […]
By Aleksey Bashtavenko Academic Composition Nikita Khrushchev, born in the humble village of Kalinovka in Southern Russia, embodies a largely forgotten Slavic identity—a confluence of Russian and Ukrainian heritage that has long been overshadowed by more dominant historical narratives. His upbringing in the Donetsk Basin, an industrial heartland […]
Todd Lewis is joined by Keith Preston to interview Aleksey Bashtavenko, a Russian expatriate about his thoughts on Russia and global politics. A great critique of American culture and politics is contained in this, along with an examination of the retrograde character of Bolshevism and a debunking of […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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