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Gradualism’s Prophet

Alexander Zevin on Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist. Does the author of On Liberty offer a way forward for the left?

A Proudhon For Postmoderns?

The politics of inequality in Thomas Piketty’s monumental Capital and Ideology. Enthusiasms and blind spots of ‘participatory socialism’, consensus and counter-movement, read as a 21st-century iteration of the tradition that descends from Proudhon and Polanyi, against the background hum of r > g.

A Critical Conformist

Alexander Zevin on Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Indictment—and illustration—of liberal complacencies.

De Te Fabula Narratur

The electoral appeal of protectionism to exploited subjects of a superannuated empire, pinched by overseas competition: for Trump, read Joseph Chamberlain, monocled rabble-rouser of 1905 and scandalizer of liberal England’s free-trade consensus?

The Snuffer of Lamps

Alexander Zevin on Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days. Exploding the myth of Britain’s restraint during the countdown to war in 1914.

Critique of Neo-Colonial Reason

Alexander Zevin on Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects. Restoring Sartre’s engagements with decolonization and anti-imperialism to their rightful place within his oeuvre.

Revolution to Go: Reordering 68

Alexander Zevin on Serge Audier, La Pensée anti-68. Recasting of Aron, Sartre and Debray in an attempt to make the May événements safe for liberalism.