Richard King

Richard King is a freelance writer based in Fremantle, Western Australia. He is the author of On Offence: The Politics of Indignation (2013). His website is The Bloody Crossroads

Works By Richard King

Morally Naked
What we missed told us something about what we are: not the calculating units of neoliberal legend, but social beings first and foremost, whose sociality – whose embodied sociality – is the precondition of our individuality. We missed each other,
21 Mar. 2021
Peak Bullshit?
The point is that we have now reached the stage where post-truth and fake news are so central to the political conversation that groupthink is almost bound to occur and assumptions that may indeed contain some kernel of truth become mere platitude...
16 Apr. 2018
Bad Hombres
Why did people vote for Trump? That is the question we should be asking ourselves, and it’s one that’s given extra urgency by the fact that his ascendency is not an isolated case, but the most spectacular instance of a more general phenomenon. In
23 Mar. 2017
Crying Freedom
‘So where might the new configurations of conservative and libertarian lie? Well, one product on offer in the marketplace of ideas that has grown in popularity recently is the tendency of certain conservatives to take the kind of classical ideas e...
20 Sept. 2016
Disciplined Hope: A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe
If Howe’s primary target in ‘This Age of Conformity’ was the incipient neoconservative milieu, by the mid 1960s he had turned his attention to, and trained his guns on, the embryonic New Left. In his 1965 essay ‘New Styles in “Leftism”’, he isolat...
8 May. 2015
Comrade Tressell’s Problem Novel
After reading The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, George Orwell was left ‘with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive’. True enough, though I would add that this lo...
19 Sept. 2014
Bad Faith: Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin
This short but ambitious book is more revealing of its author’s shortcomings than anything I have read by him. Notwithstanding its posthumous publication and the fact that, had he lived a bit longer, Dworkin may have sharpened up his arguments, I
17 June. 2014
A dangerous cynicism: The Confidence Trap & The Last Vote
Electorates are not enamoured of the idea that the nation state now has such limited power over its destiny. Democracies dependent on foreign creditors; massive multinational companies subject to few democratic controls; an international financial...
3 Feb. 2014
Prophet of gloom: The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Notwithstanding the occasional gnomic aside to the effect that no science is untouched by magic, Gray has hitherto upheld the distinction between scientific progress, which is a fact of history, and human progress, which is a modern myth. But in h...
6 Aug. 2013

Works Featuring Richard King

The last shot in the war: On Offence by Richard King
It cannot escape notice that, by King’s telling, things really start to go screwy when a much wider range of people get access not merely to politics, but to the political self-expression that was hitherto the preserve of the author... his sometim...
18 Mar. 2014