When I visited Victor Hugo’s house at Place des Vosges in Paris , for the first time in 1996, I expected to feel the dense atmosphere of French literary grandeur, something between Voltairean satire and Napoleonic ambition. After all, Hugo was once an admirer of Napoleon I and a Republican in the lineage of Enlightenment humanism. Yet the room that welcomed me was not overtly French. It was filled with Chinese objects. I was surprised. When I visited the house again in 2023,

Modern politics does not favor technology by accident, nor primarily because of lobbying power or ideological alignment. The preferential treatment of technology firms reflects a deeper structural  compatibility between contemporary governance  and a specific form of capital: intangible, scalable, mobile, and politically legible. The consequences of this alignment are not limited to innovation outcomes or market concentration . They extend directly to the distribution of inco

The seizure of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro by the United States marks a profound rupture with the legal and normative constraints that have structured international order since 1945. Whatever the moral judgment of Maduro’s regime, the episode raises a far more consequential question: on what grounds can a sovereign head of state be forcibly removed by another country, and what follows when law is replaced by power? The Stated Grounds and the Evidentiary Problem The T

For centuries, women have lived under restrictive social, political, economic, and psychological conditions shaped by male-dominated institutions. While these conditions have varied across time and geography, their structural features have remained strikingly persistent. The 2026 New Year’s Concert at the Musikverein in Vienna  brought this long historical trajectory into sharp focus. A significant part of the program was dedicated to women, not through explicit political sta

This article completes a three-part series on Daoism, Stoicism, and the ethics of power. It should be read together with the previous essays on Daoism as restraint and Stoicism as endurance. The previous two   articles  examined Daoism and Stoicism separately as civilizational responses to systemic crisis. Daoism was analyzed as an ethics of restraint emerging against the bureaucratic and militarized state of Warring States China. Stoicism was examined as an ethics of enduran