New Books in Critical Theory

At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance. Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi. In Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (Zone Books, 2024) Dr. Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing, in particular, on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complementary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint and debt issuance without guilt, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth. Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Dr. Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: Is another politics of extravagance possible? This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and for 200 years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. Then, as the twentieth century wound down, economic and geographic stasis set in, producing deep social polarization. What happened? In Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity (Random House, 2025), Yoni Appelbaum introduces us to the reformers who destroyed American mobility with discriminatory zoning laws, federal policies, and community gatekeeping. From the first zoning laws enacted to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California, to the toxic blend of private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in mid-century Flint, Michigan, Appelbaum shows us how Americans lost the freedom to move. Even Jane Jacobs’s well-intentioned fight against development in Greenwich Village choked off opportunity for strivers—and started a trend that would put desirable neighborhoods out of reach for most of us. And yet he also offers glimmers of hope. Perhaps our problems as a nation aren’t as intractable as they seem. If we tear down the barriers to mobility and return to the social and economic dynamism Americans invented, we might be able to rediscover the tolerance and possibility that made us distinctive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, explores the intersection of fandom, in a variety of forms, and feminist discourses on social media. Using an in-depth case study of Tumblr, the book charts the creation of a community of feminist fans, showing how the sense of being a feminist and belonging to a digital community are created and maintained online. The analysis also reflects on how this community includes and excludes particular social groups, showing the potential and the limits of digital spaces for feminist ideas and activities. A vital intervention at a moment where social media spaces are being transformed in various ways, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary digital world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought to slay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless information is available on demand. But what about the knowledge lost over the centuries? Are we really any less ignorant than our ancestors? In Ignorance: A Global History (Yale UP, 2024), Peter Burke examines the long history of humanity’s ignorance across religion and science, war and politics, business and catastrophes. Burke reveals remarkable stories of the many forms of ignorance—genuine or feigned, conscious and unconscious—from the willful politicians who redrew Europe’s borders in 1919 to the politics of whistleblowing and climate change denial. The result is a lively exploration of human knowledge across the ages, and the importance of recognizing its limits Peter Burke is emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many distinguished books that have been translated into more than thirty languages, including The Polymath and What Is the History of Knowledge? Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. We talked about her important work on anticolonial resistance, about the importance of the literary in imagining liberation, and about the relationship between the Muslim and the decolonial – and also had the opportunity to hear about some of her upcoming work. This episode is the first in our series on ReOrienting History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

We are coming up on the centenary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, a text that radically reshaped the intellectual landscape. One of its most central themes, death, remains one of its most difficult to understand, puzzling readers and scholars with language that at times can feel obscure and ethereal. This has generated a plethora of opinions on the topic, although without much of a consensus. Stepping in to try and clarify the topic is Iain Thomson in his new book Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger (Cambridge UP, 2024). Unpacking dense passages, he shows the place death plays in Heidegger’s thinking, as well as the impact it would have on his later intellectual trajectory. After laying this all out, he turns to other readers of Heidegger and gives us a philosophical odyssey of various others who’ve thought along similar lines, but often developed his thinking in new directions. In showing how others have often tried to think with Heidegger, Thomson is able to tease out the subtlety of Heidegger’s own positions and what it might have to offer contemporary readers today. Iain Thomson is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is also the author of Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education and Heidegger, Art and Postmodernity. He is also the coeditor of The Cambridge History of Philosophy: 1945-2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental affirmation of identity despite efforts towards adherence to standards and norms. In this, he works with his predecessors in queer theory like Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Leo Barsani, Lee Edelman and others. In our conversation, Ian also gives us a glimpse of his readings of failed passing in widely varying texts such as the works of André Gide and Jean Genet and the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Todd Haynes, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, to the music and public persona of Shawn Mendes and Troye Sivan. Ian Fleishman is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing (Northwestern 2024). His previous books are An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern 2018) and Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Hupert (Edinburgh 2023), co-edited with Iggy Cortez. Image: From the cover of Flamboyant Fictions, by Monograph / Matt Avery Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray. Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal. Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and ecological catastrophe and that everything needs to change, and fast. Thankfully, radical environmental movements have forced the question of “system change” to the centre of the political agenda to make way for a just and livable world. Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations takes readers on an inspiring journey across key sites of ecological crisis and contestation, showing how revolutionary politics can emerge from the convergences between place-based, often disconnected struggles. These engaging essays speak to longstanding debates in political ecology around how to advance transformations in, against and beyond capitalism. The collection starts from the belief that the environmental struggles taking place across the Global South and North are a necessary component of such transformations. The book presents unique stories of the visions and strategies of struggles organized around sovereignty, land, climate, feminisms and labour, written by scholar-activists rooted in territories around the globe, offering locally grounded yet global perspectives. Each story reflects on how to build solidarity and comradeship across diverse struggles and how new political subjects and transformative collective projects for social-ecological justice are created. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today I talked to Chris Voparil about What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics (Princeton UP, 2023), a book of Richard Rorty's writings he co-edited with W. P. Malecki. Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics (Princeton University Press, 2023) gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces. In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties. Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mainstream stories about Asian American success have come to serve harmful ideas about progress. At the turn of the century, Asian Americans have come to embody meritocracy and heteronormative family values, and more recently, some Asian Americans have become the face of law and order. These ideas become solidified in a variety of narratives, from blockbuster movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, to (supposedly) myth-busting documentaries such as Seeking Asian Female, to legal arguments against Affirmative Action. But these stories—usually stories about American citizens of East Asian descent—erase the diverse lived experience of Asian America. In this conversation, Corine Sugino also explains how we can draw on Black Studies, including scholarship by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, to develop a more capacious understanding of “the human” and antiracism. This provides a foundation for imagining solidarity across racial lines. About Corinne Sugino: Corinne Sugino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies. Their research focus lies at the intersections of Asian American studies, cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and media studies. Corinne's first book project, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers University Press, November 2024) explores how cultural and media narratives about Asian American racial and gendered difference naturalizes a limited understanding of what it means to be human. Beyond this project, her research interests also include discourses of false inclusion, Asian American grassroots media during the Asian American movement, and transnational racialization in Japan. About Weishun Lu: Weishun Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanitities & Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Her research focus is contemporary poetry, avant-garde writing, the history of multiculturalism, and critical ethnic studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the ‘soft-ethical’ inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their ‘hard-ethical’ symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical ‘abjection’ and ethical ‘agency.’ In this frame, Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema (Oxford UP, 2023) explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues––including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia––through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology. Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University who researches and teaches in film and media theory. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016) and ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2023). He is the co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019) and editor of the Handbook for Violence in Film and Media (2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury 2024) argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalloua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment – private and public use – by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to universalize their grievances, to see their antagonism as cutting across societies, and to turn personal trauma into a common cause. A public use of ressentiment rails against the ideology of identity and victimhood and insists on ressentiment's generative negativity, its own rationality, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Reframing ressentiment as a tool to oppose the evils of capitalism, anti-Blackness, and neocolonialism, it both alarms the liberal gatekeepers of the status quo and promises to energize the anti-racist Left in its ongoing struggles for universal justice and emancipation. Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti- Racist Future (2020), Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project. Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all. Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life. Mentioned in the Episode: 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. The Beinart Notebook podcast Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Critical Management Studies and Librarianship: Critical Perspectives on Library Management Education and Practice (Library Juice Press, November 2024) introduces key concepts in the field of critical management studies (CMS) and critiques dominant theories and concepts in the management field. The aim of CMS is to denaturalize dominant theories in the management field by introducing works and research from other fields (e.g., queer feminist theories, postcolonial studies, critical race theory). In this edited volume, Silvia Vong brings together contributions that offer critical perspectives on dominant CMS issues contextualized in LIS management education and practice such as strategic planning, consumer and assessment culture, and management institutes to name a few. In addition, the book includes discussions around approaches to leading using research and literature outside of the business and management literature to redress epistemic injustice in management education and provide inclusive and diverse perspectives on leadership. Silvia Vong is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at University of Toronto’s iSchool. She was a professional librarian for 15 years in various roles at different Canadian universities ranging from liaison librarian to head of public services to associate dean of scholarly, research, and creative activities. Her experience in teaching, collections, scholarly communications, and management contributed to her research as a professional in critical management studies in librarianship as well as addressing anti-racism in the profession. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What can archives tell us about the film industry? In Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (Liverpool UP, 2024), James Fenwick, a senior lecturer in cultural and creative industries at the University of Manchester examines the range of possibilities offered by The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of London. The book draws on the experience of being an archival researcher to situate the archive in relation to time and place, specifically London and the early 2020s. It connects the diversity of material held in the archive, much of it the everyday record of film industry lives, to key issues of work, sustainability, and technological change shaping media production today. A rich, fascinating and personal narrative, the book will be essential reading for film scholars, as well as the wider arts and humanities community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector. Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need. Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Dr. Mirca Madianou examines a range of practices: from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Resistance to feminist, queer, and antiracist pedagogies can take many forms in the composition class: silence during class discussion; tepid, bland writing that fails to engage with course content; refusal to engage with feminist and queer ideas; open and direct challenges to professors’ authority. According to Wilton Wright, Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies (Lexington Books, 2024) argues that composition studies has not adequately addressed the complex and deeply local contexts and causes of resistance. Therefore, the author argues that resistance research must first understand the origins and purpose for a student’s resistance, interrogating the language used to name and describe students who resist. Composition instructors must then give students the tools to uncover and investigate their reasons for resistance themselves, challenging students to continually interrogate their resistances. This book utilizes feminist composition pedagogies, masculinity studies, and queer pedagogies to engage student resistance in the writing classroom. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of Orwell's corpus, including his fiction, journalism, essays, book reviews, diaries, and correspondence, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While Orwell is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and the philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. Barry illuminates Orwell's philosophical sympathies and contributions that have either gone unnoticed or been underappreciated. Philosophers interested in Orwell now have a text that explores many of the philosophical themes in his work and Orwell's readers now have a text that makes the case for regarding him as a worthy philosopher as well as one of the greatest Anglophone writers of the 20th century. Peter Brian Barry is Professor of Philosophy and the Finkbeiner Endowed Professor in Ethics at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the author of Evil and Moral Psychology and The Fiction of Evil as well as several papers in ethics, applied ethics, and social and political philosophy. He has contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell, and George Orwell Studies. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism informs their socio-economic policy preferences. However, diverse welfare state contexts mediate their socio-economic policy impacts along regime-specific lines, leading to variations of trade protectionism, economic nationalism, traditional familialism, labour market dualism, and welfare chauvinism. The radical right has used the diverse policy instruments available within their political-economic arrangements to protect threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners from decline, while creating a racialized and gendered precariat at the same time. This socio-economic agenda of selective status protection restores horizontal inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity, without addressing vertical inequalities between the rich and the poor. Combining insights from comparative politics, party politics, comparative political economy, and welfare state research, the book provides novel insights into how the radical right manufactures consent for authoritarian rule by taming the socially corrosive effects of globalised capitalism for key electoral groups, while aiming to exclude the rest from democratic participation. Philip Rathgeb is an associate professor in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Philip holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) and held visiting positions at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Southern Denmark, and the EUI. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. His first book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press in 2018. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by Immanuel Kant, about what is involved in comparing individual human lives to the whole of human history. How can we compare them, or understand the results of the comparison? Kant’s question injected a new, future-oriented dimension into existing discussions of prevailing norms, challenging their orientation toward the past. This reversal made Kant’s question a bridge between three successive sets of arguments: between the supporters of the ancients and moderns, the classics and romantics, and the Romans and the Germans. Sonenscher argues that the genealogy of modern political ideologies—from liberalism to nationalism to communism—can be connected to the resulting discussions of time, history, and values, mainly in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain, in the period straddling the French and Industrial revolutions. What is the genuinely human content of human history? Everything begins somewhere—democracy with the Greeks, or the idea of a res publica with the Romans—but these local arrangements have become vectors of values that are, apparently, universal. The intellectual upheaval that Sonenscher describes involved a struggle to close the gap, highlighted by Kant, between individual lives and human history. After Kant is an examination of that struggle’s enduring impact on the history and the historiography of political thought. Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Before the Deluge (Princeton), Sans-Culottes (Princeton), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

G.W.F. Hegel was widely seen as the greatest philosopher of his age. Ever since, his work has shaped debates about issues as varied as religion, aesthetics and metaphysics. His most lasting contribution was his vision of history and politics. In Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton UP, 2023), Richard Bourke returns to Hegel’s original arguments, clarifying their true import and illuminating their relevance to contemporary society. Bourke shows that central to Hegel’s thought was his anatomy of the modern world. On the one hand he claimed that modernity was a deliverance from subjection, but on the other he saw it as having unleashed the spirit of critical reflection. Bourke explores this predicament in terms of a series of world revolutions that Hegel believed had ushered in the rise of civil society and the emergence of the constitutional state. Bourke interprets Hegel’s thought, with particular reference to his philosophy of history, placing it in the context of his own time. He then recounts the reception of Hegel’s political ideas, largely over the course of the twentieth century. Countering the postwar revolt against Hegel, Bourke argues that his disparagement by major philosophers has impoverished our approach to history and politics alike. Challenging the condescension of leading thinkers—from Heidegger and Popper to Lévi-Strauss and Foucault—the book revises prevailing views of the relationship between historical ideas and present circumstances Richard Bourke is professor of the history of political thought and a fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of a number of books, including Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmillan). Drawing upon discussions with working class readers of poetry, and interviews with unpublished poets, Smith draws our attention to the ways in which poetry has been enclosed, or fenced off, from working class readers. Influenced by, though offering some criticisms, of, Bourdieu’s approach to the sociology of culture, he shows us how readers become aware of this enclosure but nevertheless engage in collective understanding of the poems they are presented with. In doing do, Smith reminds us of the need to emphasise the aesthetic elements of poetry, and culture more generally, including its creative and expressive affordances. A reader of his book realises that a critical sociology of poetry needs to attest not just to the symbolic capital in who is seen as ‘legitimate’ readers and producers of poetry but also how those shut off from it lose out on the uses of poetry. Our discussion covers what led Smith to pursue this work, how sociology has, and might in future confront poetry, his experiences of running these reading groups and suggests why, perhaps, we should also perhaps reject the ‘society of the segue way’ and savour some of the finitude which poetry might offer. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the road, the euphoria of flight, and the metamorphic allure of everything from vinyl records to celluloid film and synthetic clothing. In Oil (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Michael Tondre shows how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power. How did oil come to structure selfhood and social relations? And to what extent is oil not only a commercial product but a cultural one-something shaped by widely imagined dreams and desires? Amid a warming world unleashed by fossil fuels, oil appears as a rich resource for thinking about histories of globalization and technology no less than the energetic underpinnings of literature, film, and art. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ryan Tan Wander provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures of the American West. Current scholarly understandings often equate turn-of-the-century representations of the US frontier with hypermasculinity and heteronormativity. Simultaneously, scholars tend to view queer inclusion—that is, the civil and political inclusion of those who make up the “-Q+” of the initialism LGBTQ+—as a phenomenon of post–Civil Rights era activism. Settler Tenses provides a deeper history of queerness in US history by showing that literature created frontier masculinities that representationally yoked a range of queer bodies and subjectivities to national identity as the US consolidated its sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reframing and explaining anew the provenance and significance of the links between queerness and US nationalism and settler colonialism, Settler Tenses will appeal to an audience of advanced undergraduates as well as researchers and scholars in American literary studies, gender, queer, and sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest and urgency to questions of racial oppression and emancipation. We’ve now had about a decade of activists fighting for the idea that Black Lives Matter which eventually culminated in the summer of 2020 with millions taking to the streets. The actual concrete victories have been more of a mixed bag, which leads us to the question: what sort of politics are needed to achieve real emancipation? This led Kyle Edwards and August Nimtz back to the American Civil War, and more specifically to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass. Both wrote quite prolifically on the events that were happening and were enthusiastic about its possibilities for the advancement of human freedom, but both brought some very different political values and ideas to their analysis. In studying these two figures together, Edwards and Nimtz are able to show how both a fight for Communism rooted in class struggle and a revolutionary liberalism rose to this profound historical moment. The result is The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Brill, 2024), a study with a concrete answer to the question of what sort of politics will be needed going forward. Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series by Brill and Haymarket. Kyle Edwards is a Curriculum Administrator at the University of Minnesota, and a member of AFSCME 3800. August Nimtz is a professor in the political science department at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books, including Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-Time Political Analysis and The Ballot, the Streets―or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Housing is more than bricks and mortar. The home is where our hopes and dreams play out, and it lies at the heart of our lives. This is where we rest, eat, and relax. The home we enjoy can determine our health, life expectancy, and day-to-day well-being. In contrast, the lack of a stable residence can lead to mental and physical illness and often premature death. This is central to how we conceive of a good and dignified life. In Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing (Verso, 2025), Alva Gotby grapples with the practical and emotional questions of housing – domestic labour, privacy, security, ownership, and health. Is it possible to imagine success without home ownership? Gotby makes clear that solving the housing crisis is about much more than housing stock. It is about revolutionising our everyday lives and labours. Louisa Hann has a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Her recent book, HIV/AIDS and the Stage, is out with Liverpool University Press Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia University Press, 2024) explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Author Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power—its forms, dramas, and iconography—and examines sovereignty’s modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet. Arthur Bradley is professor of comparative literature at Lancaster University. His most recent book is Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine (MIT Press, 2024) takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author's depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously “closed” case studies (such as the engine's entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America's Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not “built into” software but emerges through human practices with code. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality. Dr. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures―women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. In each succeeding generation, sex hormones and male and female brains are thought to continue to reinforce these unbreachable distinctions, making for entrenched inequalities in modern society. In Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (Norton, 2018), psychologist Cordelia Fine wittily explains why past and present sex roles are only serving suggestions for the future, revealing a much more dynamic situation through an entertaining and well-documented exploration of the latest research that draws on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy. She uses stories from daily life, scientific research, and common sense to break through the din of cultural assumptions. Testosterone, for instance, is not the potent hormonal essence of masculinity; the presumed, built-in preferences of each sex, from toys to financial risk taking, are turned on their heads. Moving beyond the old “nature versus nurture” debates, Testosterone Rex disproves ingrained myths and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes’ full, human potential. Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism (Routledge, 2024), McManus presents a comprehensive guide to the liberal socialist tradition, stretching from Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine through John Stuart Mill to Irving Howe, John Rawls, and Charles Mills. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of liberal socialism from a sympathetic but critical standpoint, McManus traces its core to the Revolutionary period that catalyzed major divisions in liberal political theory to the French Revolution that saw the emergence of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine who argued that liberal principles could only be inadequately instantiated in a society with high levels of material and social inequality to John Stuart Mill, the first major thinker who declared himself a liberal and a socialist and who made major contributions to both traditions through his efforts to synthesize and conciliate them. McManus argues for liberal socialism as a political theory which could truly secure equality and liberty for all. An essential book on the tradition of liberal socialism for students, researchers, and scholars of political science and humanities. Matthew McManus is a lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality (Routledge) and A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights among other books. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic values? This question has become particularly pressing after the recent successes of right-wing populist leaders and parties across Europe, in the US, and beyond. Politicizing Political Liberalism: On the Containment of Illiberal and Antidemocratic Views (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Alasia Nuti and Gabriele Badano develops a normative account of liberal democratic self-defence that denounces the failures of real-world societies without excusing those supporting illiberal and antidemocratic political actors. This account is innovative in focusing not only on the role of the state but also on the duties of nonstate actors including citizens, partisans, and municipalities. Consequently, it also addresses cases where the central government has at least been partly captured by illiberal and antidemocratic agents. Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti's approach builds on John Rawls's treatment of political liberalism and his awareness of the need to 'contain' unreasonable views, that is, views denying that society should treat every person as free and equal through a mutually acceptable system of social cooperation where pluralism is to be expected. The authors offer original solutions to vexed problems within political liberalism by putting forward a new account of the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory, explaining why it is justifiable to exclude unreasonable persons from the constituency of public reason, and showing that the strictures of public reason do not apply to those suffering from severe injustice. In doing so, the book further politicizes political liberalism and turns it into a framework that can insightfully respond to the challenges of real politics. Alasia Nuti is senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York. Her work is situated at the intersection of analytical political theory, critical theory, gender studies and critical race theory Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, Uzma Jamil is speaking to Stephen Sheehi on epistemology, critical race theory and critical Muslim studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay talk about negative life, which names the misalignment of individual and species survival, as a condition of thought and film. In developing this concept, they shed light on the gaps within the rhetoric of entanglement, and push against ethics and politics that insist on the values of human and nonhuman relations. Negative life already inheres in existing social relationships because the world is already broken. Steven and Jean-Thomas critique much of ecocriticism’s romantic attachment to contingencies and solutions that would have us ignore this truth. Steven Swarbrick is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of two books: The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and The Earth Is Evil (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, “Provocations” series, 2025). He is a coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). He has been a guest at High Theory in the past, and his previous episode on ‘The Environmental Unconscious’ can be found here. Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Steven Swarbrick, a coauthor of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Excerpts from a book-in-progress on climate action, liberal sensemaking, and the "world" concept have appeared in Critical Inquiry and are forthcoming in Representations. Image: © 2025 Saronik Bosu. The silhouette of a forest and that of a cow floating above it, against an orange sky, and a general atmosphere of smoke and haze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence. Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation. Black Resistance to British Policing is a must read for all those who are interested in the history of the British Empire, its enduring legacies, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. Adam Elliot-Cooper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence. Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

If the United States has been so hostile to Marxism, what accounts for Marxism's recurrent attractiveness to certain Americans? Marxism and America: New Appraisals (Manchester University Press, 2021) sheds new light on that question in essays engaging sexuality, gender, race, nationalism, class, memory, and much more, from the Civil War era through to 21st century cultures of activism. This book is an invaluable resource for historians and theorists of US political struggle. I was joined for this interview by editors Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome (both University of Nottingham), and contributors Mara Keire (Oxford University) and Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University). We discussed the impetus behind the book and its broader scholarly context, before turning to Mara's chapter ("Class, commodity, consumption: theorizing sexual violence during the feminist sex wars of the 1980s") and finally Andrew's chapter ("Rethinking Karl Marx: American liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War"). We hope you enjoy our conversation as much as we enjoyed recording it! Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

We interview Dr. Joel Whitebook, philosopher and psychoanalyst about his book Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2017). Dr. Whitebook works in Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing that tradition with his clinical and philosophical knowledge of recent advances in psychoanalytic theory. The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, charts the history of schools, colleges, and universities. The book charts the tension between demands for democracy and the defence of meritocracy within both elite and public discourses, showing how this tension plays out in Britain’s complex and fragmented education system. Offering an alternative vision to the popular memory and perception of education, a note of caution about the power of education to cure social inequalities, and a celebration of public demand for high quality education for all, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in understanding education in contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politics.” Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe. This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one—and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia UP, 2020) offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle. Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. He is also cohost of the Why Theory podcast, which brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What were the key ideas and influences on Michel Foucault’s early career? In The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, charts Foucault’s formative intellectual years leading up to the publication of the ground-breaking The History of Madness. The book uses a range of new archival material, much of which has been only recently accessible, to show the influence of teachers, mentors, and colleagues, as well as Foucault’s practice as an academic and writer during the 1950s and early 1960s. Telling the story of the possible intellectual trajectories, in psychology and philosophy, Foucault might have followed, along with a clear examination of the roots of his later work, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultural legacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavia E. Butler, and Kendrick Lamar to show how black cultural practices and aesthetics abstract and reveal the lost mother through performance. Whether attributing Douglass’s intellect to his matrilineage, reading Gaye’s falsetto singing voice as a move to interpolate black female vocality, or examining the women in Ellison’s life who encouraged his aesthetic interests, Durham demonstrates that melancholy becomes the catalyst for genius and genius in turn is a signifier of the maternal. Using psychoanalysis to develop a theory of racial melancholy while “playing” with affect theory to investigate racial aesthetics, Durham theorizes the role of the feminine, especially the black maternal, in the production of black masculinist genius. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, S. Sayyid talks with Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University) on the Antimonies of Afropessimism. Professor Barnor Hesse teaches in the department of African American Studies, at Northwestern University, he is the author of Raceocracy: White Sovereignty and Black Life Politics (forthcoming); co-editor of After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought; editor of ‘Unsettled Multiculturalisms & co-author of ‘Beneath the Surface: Racial Harassment’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man. How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s going in for the kill shot. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Loneliness is what results when a person is cut off from the living world. Ecological loneliness, in particular, is reciprocal - what we mete out always comes back to trouble us. However, as Laura Marris demonstrates, loneliness can entail the shadow work for understanding how a society based on capital and on growth, can create profound isolation. She suggests that this work can look like ground truthing a place that has changed over time, that was once familiar to us, either as individuals or as collectives, but now appears alien. Laura Marris is an essayist, poet, and translator. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The Yale Review, Words Without Borders and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, was published by Graywolf in August, 2024. She lives in Buffalo. Image: “The Monk by the Sea” by Caspar David Friedrich, now housed at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The image is in the public domain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (Basic Books, 2024) is the first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth century thought. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson became the most famous philosopher on earth. Where prior thinkers sketched out a predictable universe, he asserted the transformative power of consciousness and creativity. An international celebrity, he made headlines around the world debating luminaries like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein about free will and time. The vision of creative evolution and freedom he presented was so disruptive that the New York Times branded him "the most dangerous man in the world." In the first English-language biography of Bergson, Emily Herring traces how his celebration of the time-bending uniqueness of individual experience struck a chord with those shaken by modern technological and social change. Bergson captivated a society in flux like no other. Long after he faded from public view, his insights into memory, time, joy and creativity continue to shape our perceptions to this day. Herald of a Restless World is an electrifying portrait of a singular intellect. Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in the TLS and Aeon. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on the English Revolution; Eric Hobsbawm on workers, peasants and world history; and E.P. Thompson on the making of the English working class. Kaye compares their perspective on history with other approaches, such as that of the French Annales school, and concludes with a discussion of the British Marxist historians' contribution to the formation of a democratic historical consciousness. The British Marxist Historians is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the late twentieth century. Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, an award-winning author of numerous books, including Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and a repeat guest on radio and television programs such as To the Best of Our Knowledge, the Thom Hartmann Show, and Bill Moyers' Journal. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory