Political reality is multivariate, although you would never know it based on news reporting, political commentary and the rhetoric of politicians and activists alike. This is because we all, consciously or unconsciously, refract the multivariate political reality we live, or more often observe, through political filters. These filters perform the…
The Angel Of History And The Ruins Of Paris – Walter Benjamin In France, Part 2 (Emma Fiedler)
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here. A previous version of this article provided an incorrect name and bio for the author. We apologize for the error. The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic…
Radical Politics And “The Myth Of The State” (Carl Raschke)
Approximately 75 years ago, as Soviet and Allied armies were converging from opposite directions to crush the demonic dominion of Nazi Germany across Europe, two books were published that would anticipate in remarkable ways the predicament we encounter at the start of the third decade of the third millennium. The…
The Sociological Deficit Of Contemporary Critical Theory – Axel Honneth’s Theory Of Recognition, Part 2 (Piet Strydom)
The following is the second installment of a four-part series. The first can be found here. Honneth’s Theoretical Solution to the Deficit Parameters of the Reconstruction For the task of reconstructing Honneth’s project of eliminating the sociological deficit of critical theory and eventually arriving at a critical assessment of it,…
The Political Enigma Of Jordan Peterson (Jonathan Cole)
The political narrative regarding Jordan Peterson now appears set in stone – he is an ideological warrior of the right. Fans and detractors alike seem to agree on this much. The only residual dispute, still capable of generating enough friction to power a small town, is whether this political identity…
Leszek Kolakowski And The Neo-Platonic Pre-History Of Marxism (Daniel Tutt)
With increasing interest in new forms of Marxism today, from the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Hardt and Negri, to the value-form analysis of Marxism in the German Neue Marx-Lektüre movement led by the scholar Michael Heinrich, to post-structuralist readings of Marx in philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, the…
One Divides Into Two – The French Connection Of Mao, May, And Today (Jonathan Fardy)
“One divides into two.” This enigmatic phrase once functioned as the ideological lynchpin of the Cultural Revolution. Maoism redrew the profile of Marxist theory. The dialectic, understood as an ideological and historical process of contradiction and resolution, was central to Maoism as it had been to Marxism and Leninism. But…
Is Political History Fundamentally About the State? Part 2 (Keir Martland)
The following is the second installment of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here. The New Political History In the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of history from below via the popular politics of trades unions and political parties challenged the validity and authority of traditional narratives…
Is Political History Fundamentally About the State? Part 1 (Keir Martland)
The following is the first installment of a two-part series. According to Erika Cudworth and John McGovern in The Modern State: Theories and Ideologies, in politics the state is defined as a political community living under a single system of government in the most basic terms. Additionally, the state is…
The Missed Encounter Between Critical Theory And American Pragmatism (Daniel Tutt)
The German Frankfurt School theorist and philosopher Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (1947) presents one of the most thorough and far-ranging critiques of American philosophy and of American thought ever written. But within months of the publication of this book its scathing critique would effectively terminate the spread of the…