A view from China of the battle for America’s ideological soul, pitting Trump, home-grown nemesis of Western liberal democracy, against Francis Fukuyama, subtlest philosopher of its world-historical triumph. Are these contrasted figures two manifestations of the same hegemonic principle?
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article
interview
Interview with the Brazilian critic and theorist on the literary and political ideas informing his epic play, Queen Lira. A volatile cacophony of voices disputing his country’s path, from Dilma’s impeachment to Bolsonaro’s rise and Lula’s unexpected return.
articles
How might we reimagine freedom on an increasingly turbulent and resource-constrained planet? Charting a course between rival left accounts, Alyssa Battistoni offers a conception inspired by de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity: a ‘situated’ freedom, which recognizes natural contingency and centres human agency.
In the first instalment of a major contribution to the reconceptualization of a post-capitalist social order, Aaron Benanav marshals insights from a long century of socialist thought and practice—Cabet, Marx, Preobrazhensky, Neurath, Keynes—to lay the theoretical foundations for his own multi-criterial model.
obituary
The well-travelled life and consistently lucid, radical thought of global labour’s great comparative ethnographer—and social theorist.
articles
In a draft text sent to NLR before his tragically early death, the sociologist reflects on the reasons for the starkly different outcomes of Afrikaner and Zionist settler colonialisms: in South Africa, a unified democratic republic, with all its problems; in Israel, ongoing war.
Intellectual reconstruction of the work of Michael Burawoy, from globe-spanning analysis of production regimes—post-colonial, advanced capitalist, state socialist—to theoretical dialogues with Polanyi, Bourdieu and Du Bois.
