Wolfgang Streeck: Why the Euro Divides Europe
A landmark critique of Smithian notions of money as neutral medium of exchange, naturalized in social theory from Parsons to Habermas. Arguing instead for Weber’s concept of money as weapon in the market struggle, Wolfgang Streeck reveals how the single currency has transformed Europe’s qualitative horizontal diversity into quantitative vertical inequality.
Georgi Derluguian, Zhanna Andreasyan: Armenia’s Fuel Protests
Political life in post-Soviet Armenia has been forged on the anvil of militarized national defence against its larger neighbour, Azerbaijan. Can a new generation of activists succeed in bringing social questions to the fore? Examination of recent struggles against transport and electricity price rises.
Daniel Finn: Ireland's Water Wars
Ireland’s status as poster-child for Eurozone austerity has been shaken by mass protests against privatized water charges, as the discredited Labour–Fine Gael government heads into elections. Daniel Finn investigates the rise of the movement and its political prospects, with local activists pushing beyond a cautious trade-union leadership.
Paik Nak-chung: The Double Project of Modernity
Ambivalences of national statehood in divided Korea. Is a ‘normal’ modern state desirable or achievable, or is modernity here necessarily a project of both adaptation and overcoming? And might the Korean case offer insights into the problematic of modernity elsewhere?
Fredric Jameson: On Re-reading Life and Fate
Against conventional comparisons with War and Peace, Fredric Jameson offers a path-breaking formal reading of Vassily Grossman’s great fiction of the Battle of Stalingrad. The war against Hitler as crucible for a new collectivity, in which freedom finds itself, or as grounds of social—and thus narrative—totality.
Claudio Magris: The Novel as Cryptogram
Prose of the world, or literary genre of an age of guilt? Claudio Magris reflects on the novel’s course, and its Mitteleuropa exceptions. Why did the Austrian Empire produce no significant examples in the nineteenth century, and masterpieces of the most advanced kind in the twentieth?
Dylan Riley: Property Leading the People?
Dylan Riley on Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Genealogy and idiosyncratic extension of the Marxian concept.
Emilie Bickerton: Just Remember This
Emilie Bickerton on Inez Hedges, World Cinema and Cultural Memory. Political film from Buñuel to Guzmán and Khleifi, through the lens of ‘memory studies’.
Tony Wood: Lives of Jughashvili
Tony Wood on Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume I and Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. Contrasting portrayals of the ‘man of steel’.
Robin Blackburn: White Gold, Black Labour
Robin Blackburn on Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton. Can the history of a commodity supply a new perspective on the emergence of global capitalism?