The extraordinary rise and fall of Iceland’s financial-casino economy. Wade and Sigurgeirsdóttir describe the island’s neoliberal turn under a quasi-feudal elite turned banking oligopoly, and its prospects amidst the triple crisis—currency, banking, sovereign debt—now bestriding it.
Record of 1956 conversations between the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ranging across themes of work and time, utopianism and change, and the relation between radical theory and practice in the absence of a party.
Assessment of Huang Yasheng’s iconoclastic account of the PRC’s economic reforms, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Did the 1990s witness a turn away from rural entrepreneurialism towards a state-led model favouring coastal elites?
Responding to Andreas, Huang Yasheng offers a different chronology for the rural economy’s decline, and stresses the direct impact of political choices made in Beijing on the pace and direction of capitalist development.
Julian Stallabrass surveys the work of Jeff Wall, its critical reception and incorporation into the circuits of institutional art. Mutual accommodations of museum and photographic medium, under the light-box’s commodified glow.
Tom Mertes on Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance. Bestselling portrait of the interwar world’s central bankers as originators of the Great Depression—with edifying comparisons to their modern counterparts.
Tor Krever on Alain Supiot, Homo Juridicus. Leading French jurist presents an anthropologically grounded case against the subordination of law to the logic of the market.
Kevan Harris on Mehran Kamrava, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. Partial mapping of the Islamic Republic’s ferment of ideas, from theocratic jurisprudence to liberal anxieties over ‘modernization’.
