Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

Judy Cox - Lady Insurrectionists:Women, Reform and Revolution in Victorian Britain The freethinking women who helped ignite Chartism, the largest democratic movement of the nineteenth century. In this groundbreaking history, Judy Cox brings to life the radical voices of women who refused to be sidelined figures such as the ‘Red-Hot Radical’ poet Eliza Cook, Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Pease and the electrifying Chartist speaker Mary Ann Walker. Far from being passive auxiliaries, these women were insurrectionists in thought and action. They spoke from platforms and organised strikes, boycotts and petitions to demand political rights as workers, women and democrats. At a time when the vote was restricted to a privileged few, they demonstrated an irrepressible verve in demanding more. This is a bold and necessary rewriting of British radical history. Cox dismantles the myth that feminism began with middle-class suffragists to reveal how working-class women forged a radical politics that defied the gender and social conventions of their age. Lady Insurrectionists restores these women to their rightful place at the heart of the fight for mass democracy and the People’s Charter. It details a legacy that continues to shape struggles for justice today.

Rosemary H. T. O'Kane - Wanting Democracy   Representative democracy grew out of struggles by excluded groups demanding a voice in politics. In this book, renowned political theorist Rosemary H. T. O’Kane asks why democracy is so deeply desired, yet why it often falls short in practice. She explores how democratic systems can be strengthened against the pressures that threaten them, showing democracy as a living system shaped by institutions, society and collective action. Instead of rooting democracy in ancient Athens or engaging in abstract philosophical debates, O’Kane takes a fresh approach. She looks at real historical and contemporary cases (from the Chartists and Russia in 1905 to civil rights movements in Northern Ireland and the United States, and the UK’s anti EU campaign) while engaging with classic theories about bureaucracy, political parties, elites and power. These lessons, additionally informed by the cases of India, South Korea, Taiwan and Sweden, are then used to build a 'practical ideal' vision of representative democracy grounded in everyday realities. This practical ideal goes beyond elections and rights to include fair law, neutral bureaucracy and an active society marked by equality, civic participation and concerted action.

How Silicon Valley Hijacked Politics w/ Thomas Frank Thomas Frank (the author of books like What the Matter With Kansas and his latest The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America’s Biggest Racket) explains that his new book traces how “creativity” and “innovation” became powerful buzzwords used to justify class hierarchy, elite power, and the Democratic Party’s shift away from working-class politics. He argues that Barack Obama embodied this ideology by celebrating innovation, Google, and STEM education in a way that sounded progressive while also aligning with corporate and Silicon Valley interests and making politicians seem powerless. Frank connects this to the broader decline of the middle class, the rise of a “creative class” narrative that privileges white-collar work over blue-collar labor, and the long political realignment in places like Kansas, where suburban voters have drifted toward Democrats even as many Republicans have remained dominant elsewhere. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=godDSYqtO90&pp=ygUXdGhvbWFzIGZyYW5rIGNyZWF0aXZpdHk%3D&ra=m

Eduard Bernstein on Social Democracy and International Politics: Essays and Other Writings  This book presents three later works by the German social-democratic thinker and politician Eduard Bernstein, translated into English in full for the first time: Social Democracy and International Politics: Social Democracy and the European Question; League of Nations or League of States; and International Law and International Politics: The Nature, Questions, and Future of International Law. Written at the height of WW1, they address the abrupt collapse of international socialist cooperation after its outbreak, and outline a vision for peace in Europe and beyond. Bernstein argues for an ethical, democratic approach to international relations, governed by a corpus of international law, and safeguarded by an international union dedicated to preserving peoples’ right to self-determination. He is sceptical of the state-centrism of early-20th-century liberal proposals for developing strong international institutions, while also deeply critical of militarist and imperialist political leaders and thinkers for preventing even these limited proposals from being realised. Instead, in these works, Bernstein urges social democrats to campaign for a system of international economic, legal, and cultural relations that he calls the ‘republic of peoples’, and he explores themes of patriotism, class struggle, diplomacy, and free trade that still carry resonance today.

Aurelio Sainz Pezonaga - Is Materialist Philosophy Anti-Philosophy? Althusser on Philosophy’s Perpetual War and the Desire for Understanding This reflection is an attempt to address the question of whether materialist philosophy and more specifically, the materialism advocated by Althusser after his self-critical turn constitutes an anti-philosophy. The question was initially posed by Alain Badiou in the early 1990s, and his initial answer was negative: “Althusser was, unlike Lacan, Foucault, or Derrida, who were all anti-philosophers, indeed the philosopher. And not only did he argue that there was philosophy, but he also proclaimed that there always would be. In essence, he upheld the philosophia perennial”. But, about a year later, Badiou seems to contradict himself. In a 1994 article on Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy, he hesitates: “And it is very well possible that Althusser’s project, under the name of ‘materialist philosophy,’ came close to twentieth century antiphilosophy”. https://decalagesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/3.1-lof_h.pdf

Mel Farrell - Party Politics in a New Democracy: The Irish Free State, 1922-37 This book offers a timely, and fresh historical perspective on the politics of independent Ireland. Interwar Ireland’s politics have been caricatured as an anomaly, with the distinction between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael bewildering political commentators and scholars alike. It is common for Ireland’s politics to be presented as an anomaly that compare unfavourably to the neat left/right cleavages evident in Britain and much of Europe. By offering an historical re-appraisal of the Irish Free State’s politics, anchored in the wider context of inter-war Europe, Mel Farrell argues that the Irish party system is not unique in having two dominant parties capable of adapting to changing circumstances, and suggests that this has been a key strength of Irish democracy. Moreover, the book challenges the tired cliché of ‘Civil War Politics’ by demonstrating that events subsequent to Civil War led the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil cleavage dominant in the twentieth-century.

Jan Uelzmann - Staging West German Democracy. Governmental PR Films and the Democratic Imaginary, 1953-1963 Staging West German Democracy examines how political “founding discourses” of the nascent Federal Republic (FRG) were reflected, reinforced, and actively manufactured by the Federal government in conjunction with the West German, state-controlled newsreel system, the Deutsche Wochenschau. By looking at the institutional history of the Deutsche Wochenschau and its close relationship to the Federal Press Office, Jan Uelzmann traces the Adenauer administration's project of maintaining a “government channel” in an increasingly diverse, de-centralized, and democratic West German media landscape. Staging West German Democracyreconstructs the company's integral role in the planning, production, and dissemination of pro-government PR, and through detailed analyses reveals the films to celebrate the FRG as an economically successful and internationally connected democracy under Adenauer's leadership. Apart from providing election propaganda for Adenauer's CDU party, these films provided an important stabilizing factor for the FRG's project of explaining and promoting democracy to its citizens, and of defining its public image against the backdrops of the Third Reich past and a competing, contemporary incarnation of German nationhood, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In this regard, Staging West German Democracy adds in important ways to our understanding of the media's role in the West German nation building process.

Jeremy Murray - What Went Right for Beijing? Three new books reconsider China’s authoritarian resurgence. Three recent books, all published in late 2025, help illuminate recent political developments in China, a topic that is sometimes opaque or deliberately mischaracterized due to China’s highly disciplined media apparatus. In The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism, political scientist Minxin Pei directly ties the post-Mao era of economic reform and the resulting growth in national prosperity to the preservation and tightening of political authoritarianism. In Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny, Jennifer Lind, a specialist in the study of contemporary China and Japan, analyzes how a recent calibration of governance in Beijing has brought about a “smarter” authoritarianism that, she argues, can favor innovation, and she considers whether this will make it more durable. Finally, in China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read, Lee Moore, a journalist and scholar of Chinese literature, explores how Beijing’s new authoritarianism, shaped by a strident nationalism, has specifically affected Taiwan, the massive far-western region of Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/china-authoritarian-resilience-history-modernization-moore-lind-pei/

Бунт против революции Фрагмент книги Франсуа Досса «Сага о французских интеллектуалах» Взаимный интерес и даже дружба между Сартром и Камю в первые послевоенные годы, как известно, сменились отчуждением и враждебностью. Обычно их списывают на политические разногласия, но, как показывает Франсуа Досс, автор «Саги о французских интеллектуалах», первый том которой выходит на русском языке, за отказом Камю от верности сталинскому СССР и коммунистам стояла чисто философская апология индивидуального бунта. https://gorky.media/fragments/bunt-protiv-revolyutsii

Jacques Lacan - First Writings Before he became an analyst, Lacan was a psychiatrist. The articles in the present volume would not be being republished if they didn’t invite us to read them retroactively. What can they teach us about the formation of this future analyst? Lacan’s clinical approach is rooted in the uniqueness of each case, which is only ever chosen for its “singularity”. Each one must necessarily present an “original character” or be “atypical”. One might recognise from the outset an orientation towards the “one-by-one” required by the practice of psychoanalysis. The singularity of each case re-occurs at the level of the clinical details, studied with a concern for precision that extends down to the smallest detail, to the point where the observation may seem labyrinthine to the reader. Lacan will later declare his taste for “fidelity to the symptom’s formal envelope”. Three other features carry traces of the future. There is the use of the word “structure” to refer to the organisation of an entity that forms a whole, separate from other entities, and detached from the concept of development. There is the importance given to the analysis of the writings of patients. And then there is the related connection established between symptoms and literary creations.

Плебс: народная история Рима Кого римляне называли плебеями и звучало ли это слово тогда так же пренебрежительно, как сейчас? Насколько подвижными были границы между римскими сословиями? Как жили простые горожане и могли ли они влиять на политическую жизнь Рима? В новом выпуске подкаста «Укрощение повседневности» историки-антиковеды Андрей Сморчков и Никита Филянов рассказывают о повседневной жизни простых римлян, сословных различиях и борьбе плебеев за гражданские и политические права. Поводом для разговора стала книга Николя Трана «Плебс. Народная история Рима». 00:49 —Тема и гости выпуска 03:03 — Что значило слово «плебс» в древнем мире 08:18 — Римская аристократия — патриции? Насколько подвижны границы сословий в Риме 11:35 — Насмешки над нуворишами и статус богатых плебеев 14:55 — Плебс и гражданство 20:00 — Как получались гражданские права 23:10 — Условия жизни плебса 27:40 — Проблемы снабжения 31:02 — Как плебс влиял на политику 37:25 — Плебейские войны https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mkGjedZQZns&ra=m