Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.
John Pring’s account reveals something of the character of austerity: it isn’t so much that the state withdraws from an involvement in people’s lives, but that its contact with them is degraded. Many of the people Pring writes about were in touch with an array of government agencies until they died. But these encounters were characterised by indifference, hostility and suspicion.
Disko bay was dotted with small icebergs as I left the cottage I was renting in a small town in western Greenland one grey Sunday morning in early March. I sank up to my knees, having failed to work . . .
Through the post arrives an artefact of a vanished civilisation, trailing that nimbus of mystery and sadness and forsaken possibility that belongs to reminders of a world we have lost. It comes in the . . .
Aquarter of the way through this century, regime change has become a canonical term. It signifies the overthrow, typically but not exclusively by the United States, of governments around the world disliked . . .
Italy is often thought of as a political laboratory, anticipating events in other countries: fascism in the 1920s; the showman-businessman turned politician in the 1990s; populism in the 2010s. Great . . .
By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.
Environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Edward Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation.
The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?
In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying...
In The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...
Our peoples are already too bound up with each other in conflict and a shared history of persecution for an American-style pow-wow to heal the wounds and open the way forward. There is still a victim and a victimiser. But there can be solidarity in struggling to end the inequities, and for Israelis in pressuring their government to end the occupation, the expropriation and the settlements. The Palestinians, after all, have very little left to give.
A lot of people throughout Europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the Maastricht Treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives....
In recent times in Ireland we have been reminded of a lot of anniversaries. Remembering the past is something of an obsession here. The future, discussing it or shaping it, doesn’t seem...
Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.
Writing about constitutional crises by Bernard Porter, Ferdinand Mount, Hilary Mantel, Alan Bennett, Blair Worden, Patricia Beer, Stephen Sedley and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott.
David Runciman reflects on Trump, Brexit and threats to democracy, with some help from Alexis de Tocqueville.
We hear David's thoughts on why so many people - including podcasts like this one! - keep calling elections wrong.
Worst-case scenarios for democracy - especially since Trump's victory - hark back to how democracy has failed in the past. So do we really risk a return to the 1930s?
We catch up with Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson about the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine.
Economist Ann Pettifor talks to Grace Blakeley about the origins of the Green New Deal, and why we need it.
David, Helen and other Talking Politics regulars gather the morning after the Tory triumph the night before to discuss how they did it and what it means.
Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...
Paul Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator...
Hamas had been able to take power in Gaza because Israel had failed to circumscribe Palestinian politics within the Oslo boundaries. But in the event, Hamas was useful to Israel's larger strategy of occupation.
The question Trump’s opponents want answered is whether he can get away with it. Will his coalition hold, will his policies backfire, will his party baulk, will his rivals circle, will his cheerleaders...
For several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity Reagan craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe...
Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick...
They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees. They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return...
The censuring of a few rogue trustees ought to reassure the public that other charities really are doing the good works they claim to be, though the recent flurry of revelations may also foster distrust...
The underlying theme for US foreign policy remains elite consensus. In his use of the machinery of American empire and the ideology of perpetual primacy, Trump shares much with his predecessors. Maximum...
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer’s platform requires them to inhabit a contradiction. They need to demonstrate what a bold, fiscally ambitious, ‘mission-driven’ government can achieve – yet their...
Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both...
At some point Americans are going to have to confront a painful truth: they can no longer rely on the constitutional machinery devised by the nation’s late 18th-century founders. Muddling through this...
In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence,...
All winning presidential candidates, regardless of ideology or policy, have been perceived – rightly or wrongly – as believing what they say. The losers were seen as repeating whatever they thought...
At the trial in March of Michael Sparks, the first rioter to enter the Capitol illegally, the defence attorney argued that his client had merely been following orders: ‘He was there to do what his president...
The Democratic Party is now the party of labour and of capital; the party of debtors and of bankers; the party of anti-monopolists and of Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security;...
The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to Labour. The party conference in Liverpool last October was swarming with lobbyists. ‘This is my first Labour conference in years,’...
The violent culture Trump promoted is now beatifying him as its most famous victim. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as –...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.