New Future

A view from China of the battle for America’s ideological soul, pitting Trump, home-grown nemesis of Western liberal democracy, against Francis Fukuyama, subtlest philosopher of its world-historical triumph. Are these contrasted figures two manifestations of the same hegemonic principle?

Interview with the Brazilian critic and theorist on the literary and political ideas informing his epic play, Queen Lira. A volatile cacophony of voices disputing his country’s path, from Dilma’s impeachment to Bolsonaro’s rise and Lula’s unexpected return.

How might we reimagine freedom on an increasingly turbulent and resource-constrained planet? Charting a course between rival left accounts, Alyssa Battistoni offers a conception inspired by de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity: a ‘situated’ freedom, which recognizes natural contingency and centres human agency.

In the first instalment of a major contribution to the reconceptualization of a post-capitalist social order, Aaron Benanav marshals insights from a long century of socialist thought and practice—Cabet, Marx, Preobrazhensky, Neurath, Keynes—to lay the theoretical foundations for his own multi-criterial model.

The well-travelled life and consistently lucid, radical thought of global labour’s great comparative ethnographer—and social theorist.

In a draft text sent to NLR before his tragically early death, the sociologist reflects on the reasons for the starkly different outcomes of Afrikaner and Zionist settler colonialisms: in South Africa, a unified democratic republic, with all its problems; in Israel, ongoing war.

Intellectual reconstruction of the work of Michael Burawoy, from globe-spanning analysis of production regimes—post-colonial, advanced capitalist, state socialist—to theoretical dialogues with Polanyi, Bourdieu and Du Bois.

Nick Burns quizzes the New York Times columnist on the contradictory ideological forces and factions driving the second Trump Administration, the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism and the state of the country that he’s described as sinking into economic and cultural stagnation.

Jiwei Xiao on Margaret Hillenbrand, On the Edge. Analysis of working-class precarity as a structure of feeling, manifest in Chinese literary and visual culture.

A high-turnout election, sharply polarized around immigration, has brought another centrist coalition to power in Berlin. Wolfgang Streeck offers an unsparing analysis of Germany’s political situation as its hardline incoming Chancellor rams through an expansive fiscal revolution and the far-right AfD doubles its seats.

Lessons from the history of Chinese thought on the tension between the liberal-democratic internal order of great powers and the imperial ‘law of the jungle’ to which they subject weaker countries. How to resist their barbarity—how to civilize oneself—without barbarizing others?

Replying to Malcolm Bull’s hypotheses in NLR 151 on the balance of trust in the artworld and cryptocurrency, Lola Seaton asks what distinguishes readymade works, like Cattelan’s banana, from everyday commodities—and what exactly buyers of conceptual art get to own.

David Harvey recalls a lifetime of encounters, actual and intellectual, with the enigmatic Piero Sraffa. Interlocutor of Wittgenstein, Keynes and Robinson; devastating critic of neoclassical economics; helpmeet of Gramsci and rescuer of his Prison Notebooks. Reflections on an éminence grise of twentieth-century intellectual life.

If punishment was central to colonial statecraft—police, courts and prisons forming a ‘penal triad’—how has this logic mutated since? A comparative survey of the forms of official violence that upheld empires past sheds light on techniques for domesticating today’s hyperghettos and banlieues.