Paul Seabright | Other Writing

From 2008 to 2021 I wrote a column every month in Le Monde.

Here are some other articles in the English language press from before 2022 (more recent book reviews have a separate page here):

“One for the believers: the promise and slender evidentiary basis of democratic socialism”, Times Literary Supplement, 19th February 2021, review of Paul Adler’s The 99% Economy. Available here.
“The Goodness Paradox”, brief review of Richard Wrangham’s book of the same name in Common Knowledge, January 2021, text available here.
“Is Christianity Losing to Islam?” in Project Syndicate, 1st June 2019, text available here.
“Out of the box and into the boot camp”, Times Literary Supplement, 22nd January 2016, review of Gillian Tett’s The Silo Effect. Available here.

“Cheering Up”, Times Literary Supplement, 18th December 2015, review of Layard and Clark’s Thrive and William Davis’s The Happiness Industry. Available here.

“Desires of others”, Times Literary Supplement, 7th August 2015, review of David Brooks’s The Road to Character. Available here.

“Deadly as the Male”, Times Literary Supplement, 15th May 2015, review of Melvin Konner’s Women After All. Download the pdf here.

“The Future of Feminism”, Times Literary Supplement, 28th June 2013, review of books by Alison Wolf and Sheryl Sandberg. The review is here and you can download a pdf here.

“How to Defend Universities?”, review of Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For? in the Times Literary Supplement, March 2012. [ Full text | Download pdf ]

“Financial History’s False Lessons”, Project Syndicate: a world of ideas, August 2010.

[ Full Text ]

“Why we walk the dog”: Review in Times Literary Supplement of books by Geoffrey Miller, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Goleman, The Times, 13 November 2009. [ (Download PDF, 1 Mb) | Website ]

“Darwin and the terrible games of Homo Sapiens”, Financial Times, 2 January 2009. [ Full Text ]

Here is an unpublished political novel: President Lidia

Here are some interviews and articles in languages other than English or French:

“Donne et Uomini: Antropologia di un Conflitto”, Primo Piano Scala C, February 2012 (in Italian).

[ Full Text ] English version

Here are some older articles and reviews of which pdfs happen to be available and which have not lost all relevance:

“The Aestheticising Vice”, Review in The London Review of Books of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 27 May 1999. [ (Download PDF) | Website ]
“The Operatic Theory of History”, Review in The London Review of Books of John Lloyd’s Rebirth of a Nation: An Anatomy of Russia and David Remnick’s Resurrection: The Struggle for a new Russia, 26 November 1998. [ (Download PDF) | Website ]
“Down With Deflation!”, article about the sexual addiction theory of inflation, London Review of Books, 12 December 1996. [ (Download PDF) ]
“Shall We Tell the Children?”, Review in The London Review of Books of Phyllis Grosskurth’s Melanie Klein, 3 July 1986.; includes resulting correspondence [(Download PDF) | Website ]
“Character”, Review of Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London Review of Books, 5 September 1985. [ (Download PDF) ]