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What should the action be?

Greg Afinogenov: Anarchism’s Failure, 4 May 2023

Russian Populism: A History 
by Christopher Ely.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £24.99, February 2022, 978 1 350 09553 3
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Mutual Aid 
by Peter Kropotkin.
Penguin, 320 pp., £9.99, November 2022, 978 0 241 35533 6
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... of executed Communards a sign of what awaited unsuccessful revolutionaries. Conflict over Marx and Engels’s alleged overcentralisation of the International led to a permanent schism between the Marxists and the Bakuninists. Kropotkin returned to the Jura just as the Bakuninists had begun to cohere around a platform of ‘anarchist ...

Dancing in the Service of Thought

Jonathan Rée: Kierkegaard, 4 August 2005

Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography 
by Joakim Garff, translated by Bruce Kirmmse.
Princeton, 867 pp., £22.95, January 2005, 9780691091655
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... into a 12-volume edition that appeared at the turn of the 20th century. It was read by the young Karl Jaspers during the First World War, and made him into Kierkegaard’s first philosophical disciple. Jaspers coined the notion of Existenzphilosophie, meaning a systematic philosophy of ‘choice’ and ‘authenticity’, of which Kierkegaard was supposed to ...

Radical Mismatch

Stephen Holmes: Cold War Liberalism, 4 April 2024

Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times 
by Samuel Moyn.
Yale, 229 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 0 300 26621 4
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... four of the people he classifies as Cold War liberals are discussed at any length: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar. It is a small sample from which to distil generalisations about the moral failings of an age, but that is what Moyn sets out to do.His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge being that they provided ...

What would socialism be like?

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 March 1984

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 112 pp., £4.95, November 1983, 0 86091 776 2
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The Dialectics of Disaster 
by Ronald Aronson.
Verso, 329 pp., £5.95, February 1984, 9780860910756
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Rethinking Socialism 
by Gavin Kitching.
Methuen, 178 pp., £3.95, October 1983, 0 416 35840 3
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The Economics of Feasible Socialism 
by Alec Nove.
Allen and Unwin, 244 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 04 335048 8
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The Labour Party in Crisis 
by Paul Whiteley.
Methuen, 253 pp., £12.50, November 1983, 0 416 33860 7
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... of the idea of exploitation, for example; or Jon Elster’s assessment of the extent to which Marx’s models of rationality match his own; or G. A. Cohen’s schematic reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, for many, as for Anderson, ‘the landmark of the decade’; or indeed Anderson’s own synoptic ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... absent from both Hämäläinen and Blackhawk’s narratives. Our History Is the Future begins with Marx’s metaphor of the mole. ‘The mole is easily defeated on the surface by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety,’ Estes writes, ‘even when pushed back underground, the ...

Schumpeter the Superior

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 27 February 1992

Joseph Schumpeter: His Life and Work 
by Richard Swedberg.
Polity, 293 pp., £35, November 1991, 0 7456 0792 6
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Joseph Schumpeter: Scholar, Teacher and Politician 
by Eduard März.
Yale, 204 pp., £22.50, November 1991, 0 300 03876 3
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... in 1911 and made his name, irritated the marginalists, who had taught him, with its enthusiasm for Marx. The most technical, Business Cycles, which he worked on at Harvard, was later described by Paul Samuelson, whom Schumpeter had thought the cleverest of the students there, as ‘Pythagorean moonshine’. Yet in 1940, Schumpeter succeeded to the presidency ...

Because He’s Worth It

David Simpson: Young Werther, 13 September 2012

The Sufferings of Young Werther 
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Stanley Corngold.
Norton, 151 pp., £16.99, January 2012, 978 0 393 07938 8
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... celebrity when the book became a bestseller. The suicide motif he took from someone he had known, Karl Jerusalem, whose family similarly found themselves in the limelight. Goethe himself lived a long and successful life and died apparently as happy as any of us can expect to be. Another of the novel’s legacies was said to be a fashion for suicide among the ...

Kings Grew Pale

Neal Ascherson: Rethinking 1848, 1 June 2023

Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-49 
by Christopher Clark.
Allen Lane, 873 pp., £35, April, 978 0 241 34766 9
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... with overwhelming strength and firepower. Another cliché, still common on the left, is that Marx and Engels dismissed 1848 in France in class terms as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ whose inevitable failure at least lit the road towards a final proletarian conquest of power. Marx was dismissive, but not because ...

We look at it and see ourselves

Bruce Cumings: Fantasies of Korea, 15 December 2005

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty 
by Bradley Martin.
Dunne, 868 pp., $29.95, October 2004, 0 312 32221 6
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Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea 
by Jasper Becker.
Oxford, 300 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 9780195170443
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... goes all the way back to Herodotus and Aristotle. Trotsky, however, made specific reference to Marx’s theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production, which appraised Asia by reference to what it lacked when set against the European model of development: feudalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, capitalism. A brutal satrap presided over a semi-arid ...

He speaks too loud

David Blackbourn: Brecht, 3 July 2014

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life 
by Stephen Parker.
Bloomsbury, 704 pp., £30, February 2014, 978 1 4081 5562 2
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... of the Social Democrats’ timidity and sympathetic to the Communist cause. He began to read Marx and Lenin seriously in 1926 and later said: ‘when I read Marx’s Das Kapital I understood my plays.’ The point of what became known as ‘epic theatre’ was to break with naturalist drama, which encouraged ...

Social Poetry

Anthony Pagden, 15 October 1987

Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times 
by Krishan Kumar.
Blackwell, 506 pp., £24.50, January 1987, 0 631 14873 6
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Lectures on Ideology and Utopia 
by Paul Ricoeur, edited by George Taylor.
Columbia, 353 pp., £21.90, December 1986, 0 231 06048 3
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Visions of Harmony: A Study in 19th-Century Millenarianism 
by Anne Taylor.
Oxford, 285 pp., £25, February 1987, 0 19 211793 9
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... are organised differently, sometimes radically so. I would then have created a utopia. It will, as Karl Mannheim, the author of the first Ideology and Utopia, said, be ‘non-congruent’ with the world as it is, for it will depend upon the counter-factual claim that although it does not exist, and perhaps never will, if certain things were other than they are ...

Baffled Traveller

Jonathan Rée: Hegel, 30 November 2000

Hegel: An Intellectual Biography 
by Horst Althaus, translated by Michael Tarsh.
Polity, 292 pp., £45, May 2000, 0 7456 1781 6
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Hegel: Biographie 
by Jacques D'Hondt.
Calmann-Lévy, 424 pp., frs 150, October 1998, 2 7021 2919 6
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... it is tempting to think, should help us pin the great wriggler down. The first life of Hegel, by Karl Rosenkranz, was published in 1844. Hegel had been dead for 13 years and his intellectual legacy was a matter of dispute between ‘Right’ and ‘Left’, or, as Rosenkranz put it, between romantisch and hypermodern – between ‘aristocratic English ...

A Singular Entity

Peter C. Perdue: Classical China, 20 May 2021

What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History 
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019, 978 0 674 73714 3
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... access to Soviet culture, which invoked classical learning from the Greeks through to Hegel and Marx, but they knew little or nothing of non-Marxist developments since the late 19th century. As Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and many others became available, this ‘culture fever’, which reoriented intellectuals in China towards the ...

Braudel’s Long Term

Peter Burke, 10 January 1983

Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: Vol. I. The Structures of Everyday Life 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Siân Reynolds.
Collins, 623 pp., £15, October 1981, 0 00 216303 9
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Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: Vol. II. The Wheels of Commerce 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Siân Reynolds.
Collins, 670 pp., £17.50, November 1982, 9780002161329
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Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle: Vol. III. Le temps du monde 
by Fernand Braudel.
Armand Colin, 607 pp., frs 250, May 1979, 2 253 06457 2
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... economists, such as J.A. Schumpeter and Simon Kuznets, not to mention the unclassifiable polymath Karl Polanyi, debates with whom have a central place in the volume. Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market economy had emerged only recently in world history, in the course of the ‘Great Transformation’, as he called it, of the 19th ...

Return of the real

A.D. Nuttall, 23 April 1992

Uncritical Theory: Post-Modernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War 
by Christopher Norris.
Lawrence and Wishart, 218 pp., £9.99, February 1992, 0 85315 752 9
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... from a metaphysic to a particular political consequence (much as people used to worry about Karl Popper’s deduction of a piecemeal liberalism from his metaphysic of provisional knowledge). The trouble with metaphysical theories is that they are utterly general, and so designed in advance to accommodate my particular cultural adaptation. Norris grants ...

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