Deadlocks of American politics viewed within a longer optic, as outcomes of interlocking determinants—regime of accumulation, sociological shifts, cultural mutations, catalytic minorities—within an all-capitalist ideological universe.
articles
Dysfunctions and divisions of Israel’s largest city. Yonatan Mendel diagnoses the incoherent urbanism produced by its history of occupation and segregation, and by the vast, settlement-driven distension of its boundaries after 1967.
Why did a bourgeoisie commended by Marx for its ruthless rationalism surround itself with clouds of mystification? Franco Moretti traces recurrent refusals of precision through Victorian culture, from Carlyle to Millais, Tennyson to Conrad.
Once pillars of the peace movement, Die Grünen are now cheerleaders for Western military intervention. Joachim Jachnow’s cursus vitae of the movement—diverse origins, ideological rifts, shifting social bases—explains the transformation.
Why has the global economic crisis yet to produce programmatic alternatives for social transformation? Nancy Fraser argues that present struggles fall within an ambiguous triangle formed by the forces of commodification, social protection and emancipation.
reviews
Francis Mulhern on Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times. Considerations on the fates of bourgeois high culture, avant-gardes and mass art, in the ‘age of extremes’ and beyond.
Jacob Collins on Frédéric Gros, Le principe sécurité. Taxonomy of successive forms taken by Western concepts of security, from ancient Rome to GPS.
Hung Ho-fung on Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing. A Wall Street insider’s sceptical look at prospects for an orderly recalibration of the world economy.
