I enjoy writing essays for a general audience and interviewing scholars about their work. Examples are listed below, along with some occasional book reviews.
“Montesquieu’s Heirs? On Gianna Englert’s Democracy Tamed,” History of European Ideas, June 2025
“Why is the U.S. Paying Officers to Leave the Military?” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 2025, with John James
Review of Nicholas Dirks, City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (Cambridge, 2023), American Political Thought 14, no. 1, 2025
“American Political Economy,” Consider the Constitution podcast, James Madison’s Montpelier, March 2024
Review of Charles Bradford Bow, Dugald Stewart’s Empire of the Mind: Moral Education in the Late Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 2022), Journal of Scottish Philosophy 22, no. 1, 2024
“The Political Prophet Harvard Didn’t Want,” The Chronicle Review, Nov. 2022, with William Selinger (featured on Arts & Letters Daily)
Interview with Ryan Patrick Hanley on The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, Talking Intellectual History, May 2020
Interview with James Hankins on Virtue Politics, Talking Intellectual History, April 2020
“Ruins and Renewal: An Interview with Wendy Brown,” Toqueville21, March 2020, with Jacob Hamburger
“Property Damage: Thomas Piketty on Capital and Ideology,” The Point, March 2020, with Jacob Hamburger
“Caroline Robbins’ Underground Commonwealth,” Law and Liberty, Jan. 2020
“Across Borders: A Conversation with Ishion Hutchinson,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Jan. 2020, with Paul Cato
“Reasoning with the Greeks: An Interview with Josiah Ober,” Tocqueville21, Feb. 2019, with Robert Stone
“Democracy’s Midlife Crisis: A Conversation with David Runciman,” The Point, Feb. 2019, with Jacob Hamburger
“Cynical Satire and Civic Optimism Across the American Heartland,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 2018
“Teachable Moments,” review of Dana Villa’s Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill,” The Hedgehog Review 20, no. 2 (2018)
“On Speech, Don’t Silence Students,” The Chronicle Review, Sept. 2018
“Freedom and Pleasure,” The Point, March 2018
“Demagoguery and Poetry,” The Point, July 2016 (featured on Arts & Letters Daily)
Danielle Charette James 