A high-turnout election, sharply polarized around immigration, has brought another centrist coalition to power in Berlin. Wolfgang Streeck offers an unsparing analysis of Germany’s political situation as its hardline incoming Chancellor rams through an expansive fiscal revolution and the far-right AfD doubles its seats.

Lessons from the history of Chinese thought on the tension between the liberal-democratic internal order of great powers and the imperial ‘law of the jungle’ to which they subject weaker countries. How to resist their barbarity—how to civilize oneself—without barbarizing others?

Replying to Malcolm Bull’s hypotheses in NLR 151 on the balance of trust in the artworld and cryptocurrency, Lola Seaton asks what distinguishes readymade works, like Cattelan’s banana, from everyday commodities—and what exactly buyers of conceptual art get to own.

David Harvey recalls a lifetime of encounters, actual and intellectual, with the enigmatic Piero Sraffa. Interlocutor of Wittgenstein, Keynes and Robinson; devastating critic of neoclassical economics; helpmeet of Gramsci and rescuer of his Prison Notebooks. Reflections on an éminence grise of twentieth-century intellectual life.

If punishment was central to colonial statecraft—police, courts and prisons forming a ‘penal triad’—how has this logic mutated since? A comparative survey of the forms of official violence that upheld empires past sheds light on techniques for domesticating today’s hyperghettos and banlieues.