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Liberalism’s Echoes

Hobsbawm’s contradictory relations with liberalism—and with liberals—from his rescue of the legacy of the French Revolution in Echoes of the Marseillaise to the impasses of Age of Extremes.

Gaza and New York

America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?

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.