Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

Oliver Kozlarek - The Critical Humanism of the Frankfurt School as Social Critique This book aims to extract a kind of Critical Humanism from the works of prominent members of the Frankfurt School. Oliver Kozlarek argues that what is compelling about this kind of restitution of humanism is the fact that it sought to be understood not as a conceptual-theoretical construction, but as a practice of critical social and cultural research. This means that it does not orient itself to an ideal image of the human being, but to making inhuman conditions of our current societies visible. It is above all in this sense that humanism is no longer understood in a Humboldtian, educational sense. Rather, it is about using critical social research as a political practice.

Губернаторская вольница Фрагмент книги Александра Кынева «Кто и как управляет регионами России» Вы не поверите, но были в России времена, когда должность руководителя региона являлась выборной, а политический вес губернаторов и глав республик рос не по дням, а по часам. О том, что происходило тогда на уровне региональной политики и к каким эксцессам порой приводили подобные практики, читайте в отрывке из книги Александра Кынева «Кто и как управляет регионами России». https://gorky.media/fragments/gubernatorskaya-volnitsa/

James C. Scott - Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics James C. Scott has researched and written on subaltern groups, and, in particular, peasants, rebellion, resistance, and agriculture, for over 35 years. Yet much of Scott’s most interesting work on the peasantry and the state, both conceptually and empirically, has never been published in book form. For the first time Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics, brings together some of his most important work in one volume. The book covers three distinct yet interlinked bodies of work. The first lays out a framework for understanding peasant politics and rebellion, much of which is applicable to rural areas of the contemporary global south. Scott then goes on to develop his arguments regarding everyday forms of peasant resistance using the comparative example of the religious tithe in France and Malaysia, and tracing the forms of resistance that cover their own tracks and avoid direct clashes with authorities. For much of the world’s population, and for most of its history, this sort of politics was far more common than the violent clashes that dominate the history books, and in this book one can examine the anatomy of such resistance in rich comparative detail. Finally, Scott explores how the state’s increasing grip on its population: its identity, land-holding, income, and movements, is a precondition for political hegemony. Crucially, in examining the invention of state-mandated legal identities, especially, the permanent patronym and the vagaries of its imposition on vernacular life, Scott lays bare the micro-processes of state-formation and resistance.

James C. Scott - The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia James C. Scott places the critical problem of the peasant household subsistence at the center of this study. The fear of food shortages, he argues persuasively, explains many otherwise puzzling technical, social, and moral arrangements in peasant society, such as resistance to innovation, the desire to own land even at some cost in terms of income, relationships with other people, and relationships with institutions, including the state. Once the centrality of the subsistence problem is recognized, its effects on notions of economic and political justice can also be seen. Scott draws from the history of agrarian society in lower Burma and Vietnam to show how the transformations of the colonial era systematically violated the peasants’ “moral economy” and created a situation of potential rebellion and revolution. “The book is extraordinarily original and valuable and will have a very broad appeal. I think the central thesis is correct and compelling” (Clifford Geertz)

James Scott - Autonomy, Vernaculars and the Invisible Committee 06.13 - Non Institutional Politics 28.07 - Civil War 30.23 - Poaching 35.20 - Land Invasion 49.06 - The Opposition to Vietnam War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti_q8Xcq8TU

Margaret Hillenbrand - On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism.

Thomas Chen - The Lie of the Land: June Fourth, Censorship, and “On the Edge” How censorship works, and doesn’t, can be further illustrated by turning to a book that, on the surface, would seem to have nothing to do with June Fourth: Margaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (2023). This new work by a literary and visual studies scholar at Oxford is a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship. Hillenbrand’s thesis is that precarity and expulsion, rather than inequality, are the master concepts for the Chinese present. The notion of a set of people known as the precariat members of society in a state of persistent insecurity is associated in the West with experiences of increasing economic risk in the post-Fordist age of the shrinking welfare state. Hillenbrand, however, argues for the aptness of thinking about precarity in a different way in the Chinese context. The reform era, especially since the 1990s, has raised a “bonfire of certainties” not only for the tens of millions of urban workers jettisoned from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) “when their value to China’s modernity had expired” but also for the hundreds of millions of “peasant workers” in the city “both wanted and unwanted, essential and supernumerary, useful because of their vast numbers yet for that same reason individually nugatory within the grand calculus of worth.” Expulsion, furthermore, is to be understood beyond the territorial sense. Demolition-relocation (chaiqian) that “state-endorsed process of aggressive gentrification” in which longtime residents are dispatched from prime real estate forces a segment of the population into internal exile, but banishment also occurs, metaphorically and literally, when wage arrears, workplace injuries that are “accidentally-on-purpose,” and carceral regimes of employment and habitation estrange migrant workers from family, friends, and the belonging of citizenship. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-lie-of-the-land-june-fourth-censorship-and-on-the-edge