Santa Claus is Coming to Substack

Reflection on 2024 and a Gift

This year, my traditional Christmas Eve post will be short. It’s not that nothing happened in 2024, on this Substack, or at the academic and personal levels. I’ve been quite productive this year on this blog/newsletter, with more than 60 publications (not counting the 5 reposts in the middle of the summer). It’s sensibly more than last year and, as I explain below, some additional posts are coming before the end of the year. The number of subscribers has more than doubled, though it’s far from the numbers of the most successful “academic” Substacks that cover similar ground to mine. I’m happy to see however that there are regular readers who seem to appreciate my intellectual efforts. If you’re one of them, thank you very much!

I’m an experienced blogger (I started more than 15 years ago!) but I’m still pleased to see that on some occasions, this strictly speaking “unacademic” activity opens academic opportunities. I still have a book in progress and, hopefully, I may eventually be able to make some exciting announcements about it in 2025. So, stay tuned! In the meantime, I’ve several other ideas for two or three future book projects. I will obviously not be able to start all of them in 2025 but count on me to use this blog/newsletter to start (and actually, continue) experimenting with arguments and claims that will form their core. Though it will be anecdotic for most of my non-French readers here, the academic achievement I’m the proudest of this year is to have had an article published in the prestigious French philosophy journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Unsurprisingly, it talks about public reason and the work of Gerald Gaus, a topic that comes again and again here.[1] At a more personal level, though I didn’t get married this time, 2024 has been a great year made of fantastic travels with my not-less fantastic wife, who I thank for her patience with her slightly nerdy husband always writing about stuff!

Now comes the most interesting part. As the title of this post strongly suggests, I have this year a gift for my readers. I’ve always been frustrated by the ephemerality of the kind of writing that is published on a blog/newsletter. Posts (or essays, as I prefer to call them) come and go, and most of the time are forgotten. Of course, they don’t disappear materially speaking as they can still be found online. However, even for authors themselves, it’s not always easy to remember what we have written. We keep the big picture, but we forget the details. Readers who are not necessarily familiar with the writings of an author may also be frustrated, since it is unavoidable that, as time passes by, a writer relies on explicit or implicit self-reference. Finally, though recurrent themes naturally emerge as one writes regularly, these themes may not always be explicit even for the writers themselves. All in all, I think it’s worth spending, on some occasions, some time to take a look back at what one has published and, eventually, to make a collection of a selected number of writings and to put them not in chronological order of their publication, but rather according to their dominant themes. I find it very helpful to identify recurring ideas and to articulate them in a format that is friendlier than a blog/newsletter.

I had already done this exercise in the past and I repeat it to celebrate the end of the year. You will therefore be able to download below (for free) a collection of essays that I’ve published here between December 2023 and November 2024. On top of the 25 selected essays, this “ebook” also figures a fully new essay that I’ve (somewhat dramatically) titled “The Winter of Liberal Democracy.” As the title suggests, it reflects on what happened this year in liberal democracies and develops some perspectives both for the future of liberal democracy and liberal political philosophy. This “lead essay” develops an original argument but makes extensive use of many ideas and theses I’ve been putting forward in my writings here. For this reason, it gives also the title to the collection. As you’ll notice if you download the ebook, the essay is significantly longer than the usual one, as it is more than 5,000 words long (against 1500 words on average). For this reason, I’ll also publish it in three parts here between Christmas and the 1^st of January. So, you don’t have to download the ebook if you want to read it, you just have to be a bit more patient!

Also, for ease of reading, the ebook is available in two formats, both as a PDF and an EPUB. You can download it simply by clicking on one of the two links just below:

The Winter of Liberal Democracy and Other Essays (PDF)

The Winter of Liberal Democracy and Other Essays (EPUB)

If you find it interesting and worth reading, don’t hesitate to circulate, use, and quote it. Thank you for your interest and the time you dedicate to reading what I write. See you in 2025 for even more exciting adventures!

Greetings from Hurbanovo, Slovakia.

Merry Christmas, veselé Vianoce, joyeux Noël!

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[1] At the time I’m writing these lines, the article is not yet accessible online. Check however on the website of the journal, the issue that figures it should be soon published.