Ran Heilbrunn
Writer and political theorist
Ran Heilbrunn writes on politics, culture, and the history of ideas — nationalism and the nation-state, Israel and Zionism, the ideology of technology, and the theory that has come to govern sexual life. What connects them is one question: what happens to a system of ideas when it meets political and human reality. He lives in Munich.
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Essays and conversations on politics, culture, and the history of ideas. New writing by email.
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Latest from Ran
A new essay
Hannah Arendt and the Nation State
Today’s hostility to the nation is read back into Arendt as though she had licensed it. She had not: she distinguished the nation-state from totalitarianism, and understood the second as what arrives when the first is destroyed.
Abolish Queer Theory!
A long argument that the academic theory of sexuality has lost contact with the lives it claims to describe — and what gay male life looks like once the theory is set aside.
The IDF’s Cult of Technology
How a military came to believe that sensors and algorithms could substitute for judgement, and what that faith cost on 7 October 2023.
Follow Ran’s work
Essays and conversations on politics, culture, and the history of ideas. New writing by email.
Thank you — check your inbox. There’s an email waiting that asks you to confirm; nothing is sent until you do.
You’ll get an email asking you to confirm. A few sends a month at most, and you can unsubscribe from any of them. Privacy.
New here?
Start Here is four pieces that between them cover most of what Ran works on — one on political theory, one on technology and war, one on sex and culture, and one conversation. It is the fastest way in.
Conversations collects podcast appearances, interviews, and discussions — including, shortly, a long conversation with the Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira.