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Populism and the New Oligarchy

Tracking the terms ‘populism’ and ‘the people’ from the 19th century, Marco D’Eramo offers a striking new interpretation of their current applications—the first levelled indiscriminately at any political force that steps outside the bounds of convention, the second banished from the scene.

A Triple Movement?

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.

Charting Radical Theory

Gregor McLennan on Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?. A balance-sheet of the legacies of radical social theory, and its prospects in the new century.

Empires at War

Adam Tooze on Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume III: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945. The world-spanning crises of the early 20th century seen through the lens of historical sociology.

Class in the 21st Century

From São Paulo to Beijing, a rising middle class has been hailed by liberal commentators as a bulwark for consumption and democracy in the decades ahead. Taking stock of these claims, Göran Therborn offers a magisterial overview of the global class landscape and the still prodigious numerical weight of manual workers within it.

The Critical Net Critic

Advances in information technology have generated both delirious boosterism and gloomy prognoses of computer-assisted decline. Rob Lucas engages with the sceptical current exemplified by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, tracing its conceptual underpinnings and identifying its lacunae—political, economic, historical.

Sino-Seismology

Joel Andreas on Martin King Whyte, Myth of the Social Volcano. Empirical survey of attitudes to inequality in the PRC, offering comfort for Beijing.

Citizens as Customers

Post-Fordist capitalism has transformed consumers’ expectations, offering limitless diversification of commodities. Wolfgang Streeck explores the implications for a public sphere which cannot hope to match the cornucopia of the market. The consumption of politics by the politics of consumption?

On Justice

Conceptions of justice drawn from Plato to Rawls, explored through analysis of a powerful novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Who counts as a subject, and what strategies could enable those debarred from the sphere of justice to overturn their status?

Academicians of Lagado?

Vast claims have been made for the application of Darwinian concepts—purged of biological determinism—to the study of societies. Kenta Tsuda offers a penetrating and original critique of selection theory, finding a paradigm with limited explanatory value and shaky conceptual foundations.

The Political Economy of Unhappiness

As the bill for mental health problems—iconically, depression—climbs, economists seek to quantify the efficiency costs of unhappiness. In such quests, capitalism is reverting to classical psychologies of well-being, the better to neutralize the meaning of the new forms of illness—and its authorship of them.

Crowd Politics, Or, ‘Here Comes Everybuddy’

From Joyce to Lefebvre, sign-posts to a morphology of the demonstration in the age of Twitter and Facebook. Is the city still the indispensable arena of any collective uprising, and what would it mean to claim a ‘right’ to it?

The Coming Contradiction

Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic and its engagement with questions of historicity, narrative and time. Categories and concepts from Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Ricoeur, used to interrogate the impasses of the present—and to envision what lies beyond.

Wageless Life

Origins of the figures of unemployment and the informal sector, and their inadequacy to contemporary forms of wagelessness. Michael Denning draws lessons from Marx, Fanon and the streets of Ahmedabad.

Calling Power to Reason?

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.

Family Resemblances

Michael Mann on Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences. Beneath the distinctions commonly perceived, do Europe and America fundamentally resemble one another?

Democracy on the Cross

Paolo Flores d’Arcais on Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion. The philosopher of communicative action attempts to reconcile democratic principles with faith-based reason.

Money As We Knew It?

As coins and banknotes are displaced by credit cards and virtual transactions, Joachim Kalka conjures twin visions of money’s sensuous effects—prompting mystical revulsion or cartoonish delight—from the disappearing world of cash.

Understanding Class

Conventionally seen as mutually opposed, could insights from the three principal paradigms of class analysis—Marxist, Weberian and stratification theories—be combined? Erik Olin Wright offers models for an integrated approach.

The Right to the City

Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.

Among the Unbelievers

Gregor McLennan on Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. A dialectical account of God’s role under conditions of modernity, with otherworldly intimations of ‘fullness’ compensating for materialism’s spiritual void.

Rattling the bars

Poulod Borojerdi on Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Magisterial summation of a lifetime’s engagement with Utopia as literary form and political programme.

Democracy’s Graveyards?

Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. A bold theoretical construction of causal relations between democratization and genocide, tested through detailed historical studies.

Socialism: A Life-Cycle

The ecosystem of socialism, seen through the material forms in which its principles were transmitted—books, newspapers, manifestos—and the parties, movements, schools and men who were its bearers. From Babeuf to Marx to Mao, the passage of printed ideas, and their inundation by images in the age of the spectacle.

Introduction to Special Issue on Globalization and Biopolitics

“A selection of the most pressing political questions of the moment might include the following: should women wear headscarves? May we buy and sell our bodily organs? How can we control the weather? The questions sound almost frivolous, and they are certainly not matters on which the canonical . . .” read more

Vectors of the Biopolitical

Taking coordinates from Aristotle, Malcolm Bull finds in Agamben’s biopolitics and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach the disconnected fragments of a lost vision of society, adumbrated by Marx, glimpsed and rejected by Arendt. Strange meetings as the trajectories of the disenfranchised and the empowered, human and non-human, converge.

After Dialectics

Göran Therborn offers a panoramic survey of left social theory since the fall of Communism. The vicissitudes of modernity as contested temporal narrative, and the divergent thematic paths—religion, Utopia, class, sexuality, networks, world-systems—that are emerging in the new landscape.

Ruling the Void

The hollowing of democracies, as ruling elites retreat and voters abstain from mass electoral politics. Peter Mair on the paradoxes of its ‘third wave’ triumph and emergence of a governing class bereft of legitimacy, as parties become appendages of the state.

Compass Points

Can emancipatory social science provide a framework for rethinking paths forward from capitalism? Erik Olin Wright on the navigational tools that might orient a route towards a non-statist socialism; and on the necessary preconditions for transformative theory.

Slumlands

Jan Breman on Mike Davis, Planet of Slums. Panorama of the epochal shift to a majority urban world, with the vast mass of the destitute driven to subsistence tactics in their villas miseria.

Imperial doxa from the Berlin Republic

Benno Teschke on Herfried Münkler, Imperien. Can an ideal-type for empire be deduced from a historical sociology of Han, Persian, Roman, Ottoman and US models? Prescriptions from Berlin for a second-tier European Empire.

Law and Labour

Behind the struggles over employment laws in France and Germany, Alain Supiot describes a deeper battle over legal systems. Are national legislative models—now benchmarked for investment efficiency by the international institutions—becoming rival products in a world market of norms?

The World Made Flesh

Perry Anderson on Hervé Juvin, L’avènement du corps. Premonitions of a new regime of individualism under the aegis of the human body, as life distends and capital mutates to meet it.

Of Procreation and Power

Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.

A Liberal Provoked?

Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.

Displaced Persons

Has exile been overstated, by Edward Said and others, as a characteristic condition of the modern artist? Darko Suvin suggests a more fine-grained typology of displacement, distinguishing between exiles, émigrés, expatriates and refugees, and proposes the category of ‘border intellectuals’ as a better understanding of figures like Said himself. Reflections on the inner phenomenology of each condition, and the historical forces that have produced them.

The River of Time

Perry Anderson responds to Fredric Jameson’s ‘Politics of Utopia’ in NLR 25. Lessons for the glacial political present from Bloch and Adorno, Fourier and Lao Tse—and conditions for the renewal of utopian energies.

A Practical Utopianism?

Michael Rustin on Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized. A Brazilian alternative to both free-market and social-democratic orthodoxies—experimentalism as transformative political practice.

Planet of Slums

Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.

Resituating the Postmodern?

Peter Dews on Peter Bürger, Ursprung des postmodernen Denkens. The origins of postmodern thought relocated from the era of late capitalism to the civilizational collapse of the First World War, and its crisis for modernity.

The Politics of Utopia

Between the dizzying technologies of the First World, and social disintegrations of the Third, does the concept of utopia still possess a meaning? Fredric Jameson on the resistant negations of fantasy-based systemic critique.

The Duckbilled Platypus

What animal species does contemporary Brazil most resemble? The strange forms of a society that no longer enjoys the options of under-development, without acquiring the dynamics of globalized development, in the liveliest exploration to date of the possible meaning of Lula’s government.

Codeword Modernity

Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s narratology of modernity, and current attempts to reinstate it as a master category of the time, requiring no suspect prefixes. The political dialectic behind such impulses of restoration, and the artistic practices which prepared them.

Preface with Questions

Portrait of one of Latin America’s most original sociologists, and the zoography of his native habitat. The calm iconoclasm of Francisco de Oliveira’s thought under military dictators and workers’ president alike.

A Myriad Byzantiums

After ethnic definitions of collective identity, is a new scenery—hybrid cultures intertwined with a universal genome—becoming visible? Could St John Perse’s cosmopolis on the Bosphorus furnish a template for a world beyond national and multicultural imaginings?

The Labyrinth of Human Rights

Dogmatic foundations as an invariant of all civilizations, and the religious origins of the contemporary doctrine of human rights in the West. Can, despite its undemonstrability, a particular creed become a common resource of humanity, appropriated in different ways across the planet?

The Social and Political Economy of Global Turbulence

In a landmark engagement with Robert Brenner’s account of the long downturn of the world economy since the 70s, Giovanni Arrighi lays out a social and political economy of the roles of labour unrest, national liberation and corporate financialization in the crisis of the post-war order, and the prospects for a militarized US hegemony today.

The Infancy of Tarzan

Should collective identity be considered an essential feature of the modern world, and if so is it a neutral marker of belonging? Lutz Niethammer takes a critical look at the fables, popular and political, that the concept of identity has generated since the aftermath of the First World War.

The Politics of Piety

Gopal Balakrishnan on Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. How radical is the new discourse of concern with race and religion?

Reinventing Geography

Interview with the leading practitioner of a materialism Marxists forgot. What happens when space, not time, becomes the axis of radical analysis? From post-war planning to the cities of European literature, the limits of over-accumulation to the flux of postmodernity, David Harvey talks about his work and what it has tracked.