The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule—ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma—operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.
The debates of the English New Left in the summer of 1961 as backdrop to the memorable essay by Raymond Williams, printed below—and possible explanation for its first appearance in an obscure, formerly CIA-funded literary journal. Perry Anderson asks how knowledge of it would revise Edward Thompson’s critical assessment of The Long Revolution in NLR.
Published at last in NLR, a remarkable, long-buried intervention by one of the leading thinkers of the early New Left. Characteristically original and independent-minded considerations of the relation of Marxism to the actually existing Communist regimes and the correspondences of socialist theory and practice across the ‘three worlds’, written just after The Long Revolution.
Myths and realities of Greek statehood writ large in its distended capital. From post-Ottoman neo-Hellenism to Cold War urbanization and the culture-sapping rule of the Troika, the delimitation of a new-fangled city of Pericles from the catch-all conurbation for Balkan migrations.
A forerunner to contemporary listification in eighteenth-century tabulations of painters, playwrights, poets and composers. Rise and fall of Enlightenment metrics of aesthetic evaluation, squeezed between the dyadic arrangements of classical comparatio and Romantic conceits of off-the-scale artistic genius.
Opposed to ‘lean in’ liberal iterations, three activist-scholars premise a militant feminism for the many, inspired by La huelga feminista of 8 March. The politics of social reproduction and the imperative of wider solidarities: the women’s struggle retooled for the multiple crises of late capitalism.
Catherine Samary on Darko Suvin, Splendour, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia. Bloch’s utopian horizon as measure for the achievements and inversions of the SFRY.
Tony Wood on John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland. Historic struggles of central Mexico’s campesinos postulated as relay-switch for capitalism’s expansion in Latin America and beyond.
