Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

Александр Бикбов - Расколдовать эффект Фуко Александр Бикбов — к столетию французского мыслителя К столетию Мишеля Фуко социолог Александр Бикбов разбирает условия, в которых стало возможным невероятное сочетание интеллектуального стоицизма и социального эпикурейства, свойственное французскому философу, — и приходит к выводу, что посмертная демистификация этой фигуры не столько лишает ее магии «гениальности», сколько возвращает надежду на то, что критически мыслить могут не только обитатели парижских олимпов. https://gorky.media/context/raskoldovat-effekt-fuko

Frank W. Elwell - Technique and Control. Jacques Ellul's Sociology Jacques Ellul was a prolific writer and brilliant sociologist whose work on technological society and propaganda remains relevant today, despite coming from a distinctly French, postwar perspective. Technique and Control re-introduces Ellul’s main body of work to social scientists and readers curious about technology and social life. Frank W. Elwell has updated and supplemented Ellul’s examples of lifeworld domination through physical technology, organization, and an underlying mindset of technique that prioritizes efficient goal-oriented behaviors guided by experience, empiricism, calculability, predictability, and logic. Particular attention is given to the development of human techniques of control such as education, propaganda, and other modes of socialization. By re-invigorating these writings for contemporary readers, Elwell illuminates an important body of sociological work for a new generation of social scientists, students, and those interested in modern society and its continuing evolution.

J.S Tan - Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry  As tech bosses fall in line with the right, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement and the way it spawned an anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers and CEOs alike joining mass mobilizations against the new president’s anti-immigrant policies. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. In response, tens of thousands of tech workers protested against their own employers for betraying the progressive values that once defined the industry including organizing against military contracts, walking out to protest sexism, and even launching a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, these workers had sparked what observers were calling the tech worker movement, one that seemed capable of checking the industry’s reckless growth and reactionary drift. But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among tech's billionaire owners. Hell-bent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them and replacing the good tech jobs of the 2010s with incessant layoffs, grind culture, and a management style that treats workers as disposable. Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring workers' movement and the rise of the hostile labor politics that define Silicon Valley today.

Lorna Stefanick - Controlling Knowledge. Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection in a Networked World Digital communications technology has immeasurably enhanced our capacity to store, retrieve, and exchange information. But who controls our access to information, and who decides what others have a right to know about us? In Controlling Knowledge, author Lorna Stefanick offers a thought-provoking and user-friendly overview of the regulatory regime that currently governs freedom of information and the protection of privacy.Aiming to clarify rather than mystify, Stefanick outlines the history and application of FOIP legislation, with special focus on how these laws affect the individual. To illustrate the impact of FOIP, she examines the notion of informed consent, looks at concerns about surveillance in the digital age, and explores the sometimes insidious influence of Facebook. Specialists in public policy and public administration, information technology, communications, law, criminal justice, sociology, and health care will find much here that bears directly on their work, while students and general readers will welcome the book’s down-to-earth language and accessible style. Intended to serve as a “citizen’s guide,” Controlling Knowledge is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand how freedom of information and privacy protection are legally defined and how this legislation is shaping our individual rights as citizens of the information age.

Toril Moi - Fredric Jameson as Reader Fred’s own archive was extensive. It included history, theory, literature, film, philosophy, politics. He seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. Why focus on Fred as a reader? My sense is that his influential theorising about modernism and postmodernism, his insights into the dialectics of ideology and utopia and the nature of neoliberal global culture, may have obscured not just his originality as a theorist of interpretation and as a reader, but the way his work in that field allowed him to write all the books that came after. Fred made his way to cultural theory through a long engagement with literary works. Literature, and above all the novel, remained central to his thinking, from his first brilliant pages on Sartre’s Age of Reasonin 1961 to the novels discussed in Inventions of a Present in 2024. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/toril-moi/fredric-jameson-as-reader

Neil Davidson - How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?     Once of central importance to left historians and activists alike, the concept of the bourgeois revolution” has recently come in for sustained criticism from both Marxists and conservatives. In this comprehensive rejoinder, Neil Davidson seeks to answer the question, How revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions? by systematically examining the approach taken by a wide range of thinkers to explain their causes, outcomes, and content across the historical period from the sixteenth-century Reformation to twentieth-century decolonization. Through far-reaching research and comprehensive analysis, Davidson demonstrates that there is much at stake far from being a stale issue for the history books, understanding these struggles of the past can offer insightful lessons for today’s radicals.

Н. Пахсарьян - Мишель Фуко и литература К 100-летию со дня рождения французского философа На этой неделе исполняется 100 лет со дня рождения Мишеля Фуко (1926–1984), без работ которого невозможно представить современную мировую культуру. В преддверии этой даты «Горький» публикует статью Натальи Пахсарьян о том, как в работах французского философа отразились его литературные пристрастия и какое влияние на литературоведческую мысль оказал он сам. https://gorky.media/context/mishel-fuko-i-literatura

Wolfgang Streeck - System Fractures No need to get ahead of ourselves: it will still be a few years before the AfD takes power. In the five German state elections held this year, while they were the only party to increase their vote across the board, the AfD failed to secure an absolute majority anywhere. Across all five elections, the party averaged 27.3 percent. Its highest result – 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt was more than two and a half times its lowest, 16.3 percent in Berlin. Its biggest gains were in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern states with relatively small electorates (1.7 million and 1.3 million respectively, in a nation with 60.5 million eligible voters), and in which Chancellor Merz’s CDU performed particularly badly. It is hard to believe that so many CDU voters in these two eastern regions could have turned into neo-Nazis over the past five years. In any case, there were other trends at work in these elections, beyond the rise of the AfD. Regional factors played a role specifically, the relative position of incumbent state premiers (weak in Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin, strong in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania). The Greens stagnated, suffering losses in three of the five states; the CDU made gains albeit modest ones in the two western states (in Baden-Württemberg, with its 7.7 million eligible voters, they came within a hair’s breadth of winning, and in Rhineland-Palatinate, with 2.9 million eligible voters, they actually won); while Die Linke increased its vote in three of the five elections: in the two western states and, above all, in Berlin (2.5 million eligible voters), where it finished nearly ten percentage points ahead of the AfD. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/system-fractures

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee - Lacan’s Lenin In his discussion of this, Lacan associates knowledge with the jouissance involved in acquiring and exercising it. Such a brief juxtaposition does not constitute an endorsement of Leninism. But it does pose a question which I find more intriguing than an attempt at uncovering Lacan’s politics: What is it to inherit an idea whose implications the author has not exhausted? https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783559/lacan-s-lenin

Minxin Pei - China’s Crony Capitalism. The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016)   When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership. Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly. Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay.

Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About ‘The End of History Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History and the Last Man” is one of the most insightful books for understanding the strangeness and instability of this political moment. Fukuyama wrote his landmark book more than 30 years ago, and it’s typically remembered as a triumphalist argument, heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War. But that’s not quite right. Fukuyama also talked about the serious weaknesses he saw in liberal democracy how it may not fully satisfy the human soul and his warnings feel very prescient now. So I wanted to have Fukuyama on the show to talk through the ideas in his book and how he sees them today, at a time when liberal democracy seems increasingly imperiled around the world. Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University and the author of a number of other great books of political theory, as well as a new memoir, “In the Realm of the Last Man.” 00:00 Intro 02:16 What Is “The End of History”? 06:28 Politics of Recognition 14:12 Megalothymia and Trump 16:03 Nietzsche’s Last Man 18:11 Why Liberalism Feels Flat 22:44 Looking Back on 9/11 26:03 Why Fukuyama Broke Away From the Neoconservatives 39:16 Moderation vs. Bold Reform 44:24 Strong Leader Tradeoffs 46:41 Denmark 53:12 Social Media and Populism 55:42 China 01:00:11 Tech Horizons and Democracy 01:02:46 Agentic A.I. and Arms Race 01:07:50 Elections and Liberal Renewal 01:09:48 State Capacity and Abundance 01:11:50 Moral Energy for Liberalism 01:14:39 Book Recommendations https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KIn-1EuXx78&ra=m

Isabel Jacobs, Jacob Saliba - Finitude and Freedom When the political philosopher Stanley Rosen recalled his encounter with Kojève in Paris in the 1960s, he noticed that Kojève often evoked one figure that stood above the rest of his circle: the theologian and Jesuit priest Gaston Fessard, “one of Kojève’s closest friends, perhaps his closest friend in Paris.” Rosen, moreover, added that among everyone he met, including Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Levinas, Fessard remained “in my view, the greatest” with the exception of Kojève himself. Though little-known in English-speaking scholarship, Fessard was a giant on the French scene. He was known for his public debates with left-wing intellectuals, his resistance to Vichy in the 1940s, and pioneering contributions to the New Theology movement that led to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Throughout, Fessard maintained a close dialogue with Kojève, his friend, teacher, and philosophical sparring partner. This volume is the first systematic collection of the published and unpublished materials that document their exchanges and debates, including letters, essays, book reviews, and lectures. Standing at the intersection of secular political thought and theological discourse, Kojève and Fessard radically reshaped concepts of authority, right, sovereignty, and the end of history. This volume reveals how each thinker developed an original reading of Hegel, and how those readings and the debate that they spurred continue to shape political theology today. https://communispress.com/finitude-and-freedom/

Rick Tilman - Thorstein Veblen and the Enrichment of Evolutionary Naturalism   One of America s most influential social critics, Thorstein Veblen authored works deeply rooted in evolutionary biology and American philosophical naturalism. Now one of today s preeminent Veblen scholars ranges widely over the man s writings to show how evolutionary naturalism underlies his social theory and criticism, shapes his satire, and binds his work together. Veblen s evolutionary naturalism, with its unflattering evaluation of America s self-selected special place in the international arena, casts doubt on today s foreign interventions, and it also provides a much-needed antidote to the resurgence of creationist thought in American culture. Rick Tilman shows that Veblen s ideas are still valuable to contemporary social scientists indeed, that his method of analysis and values are sorely needed to help us avoid wasteful consumption, predation, and the persistence of religious superstition.