“Whatever its virtues, it appears clear that the minimal state is no utopia.”
—Robert Nozick
“The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us into deep historical pessimists.”
—Francis Fukuyama
Chicago Fog offers historical analysis, essays on politics and culture, and fiction set in speculative futures and alternative histories. The website aims to present entertaining writing across a wide array of topics while being level-headed, intellectually honest, and thought-provoking.
Named after an aspect of Chicago’s unpredictable and volatile weather, navigating through thick fog demands both heightened attention and extrapolation from limited information. Similarly, those of us who delve into history and intellectual ideas often find themselves in metaphorical fog, surrounded by a vast array of topics, the immense depth and breadth of history, and the overwhelming volume of primary and secondary sources. In that respect, the site’s bias is toward explicit premises, transparent sources, and arguments built to survive hostile readings.
As the website’s author, my goal is to make a positive impact on my readers as a historian, an essayist, and a storyteller. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have tried to set out my intellectual priors and my operating system—what I believe, and how I try to think and work.
My Operating System
I combine a pragmatic consequentialism with Hayekian and Burkean constraints: I care about outcomes, but I assume that knowledge is limited, that incentives and institutions matter, and that attempts at large-scale societal redesign routinely generate unintended and often negative consequences.
Epistemologically, I’m an anti-foundational fallibilist: I reject the fantasy of final, context-independent certainty. But I also reject relativism. I treat truth and objectivity as goals that we have to pursue through disciplined inquiry rather than metaphysical guarantees. To be clear, by “objectivity” I do not mean value-free detachment; I mean a professional achievement produced by explicitly cited evidence, transparent methods, and institutionalized criticism—procedures that make it easier to detect error and harder to insulate claims from challenge. This is why the institutionalized practices and standards of expert communities are important to protect.
In short, we can’t have absolute, certain, unquestionable foundations or final truths independent of context. But this does not mean we are only left with nihilism or reductivism that holds “everything is subjective/relative/power.” At the level of cognitive style, I suspect my INTP personality plays into my preference for conceptual analysis and clear-cut premises, and my belief that institutionalized criticism offers the closest thing we can get to epistemological certitude.
In moral philosophy, I endorse a thin pragmatic moral realism: moral claims are capable of being right or wrong and not merely expressions of taste, yet their authority does not depend on “spooky” moral facts; instead, we justify moral confidence by reference to historically tested rules—rights, due process, and rule of law constraints—that solve recurrent problems of the initiation of force, cruelty, domination, and coordination failure in plural societies. Moral claims earn their objectivity and authority through pragmatic success.
Religiously, I’m an atheist: I reject the truth of supernatural claims while recognizing that inherited religious traditions can still serve legitimate cultural and civil-society functions in a liberal order.
Politically, I’m a classical liberal who treats state legitimacy as a joint function of consent, performance, and constraint, while also holding an asymptotic, programmatic anarchism: the state is not sacred. Wherever durable voluntary institutions can replace coercive ones, they should do so in an incremental manner that ensures societal stability.
As an academic historian, I align with professional, evidentiary standards associated with scholars like Thomas Haskell and James Kloppenberg: history should be answerable to sources, mechanisms, and criticism, remain open to ongoing revision, but not to activism or unconstrained narrative play. The practical implication is that I try to separate assertion from inference, specify scope conditions, and prefer arguments that survive hostile readings, because the point is not to be rhetorically invulnerable but to be open to correction—credible precisely because the system is designed to catch my mistakes.
As a Historian…
My broad field of study is American political, diplomatic, and economic history from the late nineteenth century through the Cold War. In my graduate work, I’m planning to write two historiographies: one on the development of U.S. federal police powers from World War I through the Great Depression, and the other on how American state capacity was mobilized to build the nuclear industry, including how that industrial and administrative achievement was then leveraged in foreign policy. That second line of inquiry naturally leads into the diplomatic history of the twentieth century, especially the Cold War, where nuclear capability, alliance management, intelligence, and crisis decision-making sit at the center of the story. For my master’s essay, I still need to identify a research question that is narrow enough to execute well but consequential enough to matter—something that could plausibly become the foundation for doctoral work. Across these projects, the connective tissue is United States foreign policy and grand strategy: how American leaders sought to defend and build liberal international institutions, and how they constructed and sustained alliances with Western partners in pursuit of that order.
I looked for guidance from leading historians to develop a professional approach to the discipline. Joan Scott’s The Evidence of Experience posits that historians should strive to create historical understanding rather than merely reproducing historical knowledge. Historians contribute to a greater understanding of history by going beyond the “reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience” and, instead, offer an “analysis of the production of that knowledge itself.” To rise to the level of an intellectual contribution, Scott writes that a historian’s work has to “constitute a genuinely nonfoundational history, one that retains its explanatory power and its interest in change but does not stand on or reproduce naturalized categories.” Ultimately, Scott is pointing out the difference between the historiographic work done by historians and the uncritical recounting of historical events done by others. In studying history, I try to critically analyze how the knowledge of history is produced, examining the underlying assumptions and biases inherent in historical narratives.
However, Scott’s allusion to an “interest in change” raises concerns about a historian’s ideology and the dangers of activism masquerading as intellectual work. My concern is methodological: interpretive ambition should not become activism by other means, and professional standards must take precedence over desired outcomes. Nevertheless, the idea that there is only one way of understanding history is nonsense. Historians have struggled with the meaning of historical objectivity. However, there is no question in the profession that history is much more than recorded “factual” events. In that sense, anti-foundational critiques—especially the insistence that categories and narratives have histories of their own—significantly enriched historiographic analysis, so long as they do not collapse into relativism.
On the other hand, the study of history should not devolve into competing, ever-changing narratives. Building on this concern, Thomas L. Haskell addresses the issue of ideological bias in historical interpretation. He warns against “propaganda dressed up as history” but acknowledges that every historian is likely influenced by philosophical and ideological beliefs. But Haskell distinguishes objectivity from neutrality: true, no one can be “neutral,” but that should not license outright activism. Objectivity is about professionalism: a historian can express an ideological point of view so long as professional standards take precedence. According to Haskell, a professional historian puts ascetic, intellectual values (“respect for logical coherence, fidelity to evidence, detachment, candor, honesty”) ahead of any political commitments. In practice, that means transparency about sources, clarity about inference, and arguments designed to survive hostile readings—the closest thing we have to objectivity in a universe without metaphysical guarantees. Ultimately, upholding professional standards is how academics and scholarly institutions maintain credibility and influence within society. Haskell’s argument certainly resonates with me.
Similarly, James T. Kloppenberg counsels historians to tread in “the terrain of pragmatic truth” when writing historiographies. He is trying to find a middle ground between “old fashioned realism and new-fanged nihilism,” distinguishing positivist objectivity from postmodernist relativism. Kloppenberg advises historians to follow pragmatic hermeneutics: an approach to historical interpretation that emphasizes practical consequences and the potential impact of ideas on society. In other words, Kloppenberg recognizes the potential benefits of historiographies that shed new light on the past but also engage with contemporary, challenging social issues. However, the historical profession must be held to the highest professional standards. Hypotheses must be tested “against all available evidence and subjected to the most rigorous critical test the community of historians can devise.” Historians should strive to form “hypotheses, provisional syntheses, imaginative but warranted interpretations, which then provide the basis for continuing inquiry and experimentation.”
I believe that an emphasis on high professional standards is critical for maintaining credibility in academic and scholarly institutions. This is vital to the Western liberal tradition. For historians to contribute meaningfully to the discipline, they must prioritize professional standards over personal ideology, thereby upholding the integrity of their historical work. However, we must not lose sight of the high bar set by Scott. Historians should strive to produce historical knowledge that reflects the processes by which past histories came into being, ensuring historiographies are both rigorous and reflective of the complexities of the past. Taking an ideological viewpoint is permitted so long as professional standards are not compromised.
Reflecting on these insights, I recognize that I carry many biases shaped by naturalized categories. These biases influence my understanding of history and the way I engage in historiographical debates. Fortunately, I have another outlet for my ideological impulses.
As a Commentator…
I believe my time and energy are best spent crafting persuasive narratives and making compelling arguments. Ideological purity and group identity, in contrast, seem transient and unrewarding. With age and experience, I’ve come to regret the strident opinions I once expressed in classrooms and taverns, recognizing that open, honest, and thoughtful discourse often holds greater value than rigid adherence to the red meat of ideology.
I have very low tolerance for movies, TV series, novels, comics, and other forms of entertainment that violate the “show, don’t tell” rule. When it’s time for exposition, I tend to check out. Why? In thirty-five years of trying to write fiction, I often found myself producing drawn-out, boring explanations—perhaps due to the technical, legal writing employed in my day job. In any case, this is a long way of saying that I’m reluctant to profess ideological beliefs, primarily because I find this a bit tedious. (I’ll discuss my approach to fiction in the next section.)
Nevertheless, intellectual honesty requires that I name the priors that shape my questions and my interpretive instincts—not as a substitute for evidence, but as a way to make my assumptions explicit and therefore contestable.
First, I consider myself a liberal in the original sense of the term—these days often referred to as “classical liberal.” In short, I think John Locke, Isaiah Berlin, Adam Smith, David Hume, J.S. Mill, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, George Orwell, and Milton Friedman got many things right. In this sense, I’m a radical individualist.
Second, I’m an internationalist and oppose nationalism, which I view as a form of right-wing collectivism. By that I mean I reject nation-worship and ethnonational identity politics; civilizational inheritance and liberal institutions are not the same thing as nationalism. While I love the United States, I consider myself a citizen of the Western world and the post-war liberal democratic order.
Third—and this is where it gets strange—I consider myself a Burkean anarchist. I advocate for an orderly and peaceful transition to a stateless world. I’m a classical liberal when it comes to most policy issues. However, I fundamentally believe humankind will eventually thrive under minimalism and, eventually, stateless anarchy. No, it will not be a utopia, but it will be better than what we have today. I believe the U.S. shift toward an all-powerful federal government was a mistake, both for the country and the world. The massive state apparatus established in response to World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War continually seeks justification for its growth: a war on terror, financial crises, public health emergencies, environmental challenges, and new cold wars with Russia and China. However, today we live in a dangerous world. I think defense forces and policing agencies should be the very last things that Western states give up.
In sum, these are the ideological frameworks that shape most of the essays you will see.
As a Storyteller…
I write near-future science fiction and alternative history in an interconnected fictional universe, focusing on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people as they navigate forces larger than themselves, and aiming for implication over explanation—stand-alone episodes with recurring characters that invite the reader to infer the world rather than be lectured about it. I’ve been obsessed with near-future science fiction and what-if alternative histories for my entire adult life. There’s a lot of great fiction out there, and I always pushed myself to see if I could create something that could at least be viewed as a respectable contribution to the genre. In my opinion, the best fiction leaves you guessing and makes you eager to read more so you can decipher the author’s imagined world. I think I’ve always had a knack for world-building—thanks to Dungeons & Dragons—but I struggle with crafting authentic dialogue, and my stories sometimes feel too open-ended. While it’s easy to write poorly, I believe it’s never worth it to rush the process.
Submitted for your approval, Chicago Fog explores an alternative past and its speculative future through the lived experience of ordinary people. What happens when a major event from early twentieth-century history has a different outcome? Ripples build into great waves as the twenty-first century unfolds.
The stories range across multiple periods within the same universe, but each is meant to stand on its own: a glimpse of lived experience anchored in ordinary motives, ordinary compromises, and the way large systems press down on daily life. Connections and recurring characters exist, but they are connective tissue, not a required roadmap.
Summing Up
Looking over everything I’ve written and reflected upon, I realize my writing style balances an academic rigor born from years of study with a deep personal honesty that springs from years of diary entries and introspective essays. I rely on clear, direct language to craft arguments, yet I’m also unafraid to bring in philosophical and historical references—Hayek and Smith, Orwell and Berlin—to deepen the conversation. There’s a self-critical edge to my prose, a recognition that my biases and evolving worldview shape how I interpret and present ideas, whether I’m building a near-future science fiction setting or constructing a scholarly argument on diplomatic history. Above all, I favor thoughtful exploration over rigid dogma: I value open discussion, seek high standards of evidence, and work to “show, not tell,” maintaining a voice that is both personal and grounded in the Western liberal tradition. Ultimately, my goal is to unify these elements—academic insight, personal reflection, and creative imagination—into writing that spurs engagement, challenges assumptions, and remains honest about the complexities we face.