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.
Follow Ran’s work
Essays and conversations on politics, culture, and the history of ideas. New writing by email.
The mailing list opens shortly — write and you’ll be on it from the first send. A few emails a month at most, and you can unsubscribe from any of them. Privacy.
Latest from Ran
Failing Like a State
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.
The mailing list opens shortly — write and you’ll be on it from the first send. A few emails 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.