Susan Watkins: Casting Off?
How to assess the latest set-back for the European Union: the vote to leave by its second-largest state? Complex determinants of the Brexit protest—party-political contingencies played out against topographies of class and sub-national disaffection—met by single-minded condemnation of it by the global elite.
Malcolm Bull: Softening Up the State
What advice might Machiavelli offer critics of the contemporary market nation-state? In this striking reconstruction, lessons on corruption, inequality, immigration, mobilization—from Rome and Sparta, Florence and the Venetian Republic—yield proposals for open borders and universal basic income.
Tony Wood: Dark Mirrors
Fine-grained reading of the films of Andrei Zvyagintsev, from the abstract allegories of his earlier work to the unsparing portrayals of contemporary Russia in Elena and Leviathan, exemplary of a new social turn in post-Soviet cinema. Reflections of class polarization and fables of power, with Orthodoxy as its prop.
Perry Anderson: The Heirs of Gramsci
Transformations of the Prison Notebooks’ fertile problematic of hegemony by a quartet of thinkers—Hall, Laclau, Guha, Arrighi—from Jamaica, Buenos Aires, Bengal, Milan. Coercion and persuasion, ideology and economic interest, national and inter-state systems as means for thinking Thatcherism’s ascendancy, populist strategies, peasant rebellion, post-colonial rule and the geo-political logics of American power.
Nancy Fraser: Contradictions of Capital and Care
Nancy Fraser tracks the reconfiguration of the relations of social reproduction under successive regimes of accumulation—‘separate spheres’, male breadwinner, dual-income household. Are the exactions of financialized capitalism now serving to undermine its lifeworld?
Michel Aglietta: America's Slowdown
Robert Gordon’s panoramic Rise and Fall of American Growth foregrounds exogenous explanations for the fall-off in us economic dynamism since the seventies. Challenging his account, Michel Aglietta explores the role financial rents and shareholder agendas have played in sapping growth—and prospects for a new era of eco-tech innovations.
Rob Lucas: The Free Machine
Rob Lucas on Paul Mason, Postcapitalism. The present crisis interpreted as the stalled transition to a new mode of production, augured by info-tech’s ascent.
Emma Fajgenbaum: Audit Culture
Emma Fajgenbaum on David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules. Rather than rolling back the state, has neoliberalism diffused it, with workers now administrators of themselves?
David Owen: The Conformists?
David Owen on Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political. Rawlsian political philosophy as a depoliticized realm where dissent from liberal norms is silenced.