Brainiacs Nikolas Rose and Joel e M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2013. 352 pp., £48.95 hb., £16.95 pb., 978 0 69114 960 8 hb., 978 0 69114 961 5 pb. The title of Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached’s new book on […]

REVIEWS Capitalocene Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Verso, London and New York, 2015. 316 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 1 78168 901 1 hb., 978 1 78168 902 8 pb. Jason Moore is a key figure in the World-Ecology Research Network, an international grouping […]

COMMENTARY europe’s ‘hungarian solution’ prem kumar rajaram In a speech at a European Union heads-of-state summit on migration in February 2016, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, declared that the ‘Hungarian solution’ to the migration ‘crisis’ facing Europe had now become ‘common sense’, adopted by other European countries after a summer in which Hungary’s ‘illiberal’ treatment […]

A neo-Horthyist restoration Tamás Krausz Since winning the Hungarian general elections in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, Viktor Orbán’s nationalist-populist party Fidesz has introduced an authoritarian administration that is reminiscent of Hungary’s interwar regime, when Miklós Horthy ruled as an ally of Hitler. When state socialism collapsed in 1989, liberal ideologists propagated the idea that […]

Common senses Deleuze and Lyotard between ground and form Frédéric fruteau de laclos ‘One day, perhaps, this century will be known as Deleuzian.’ This is how Michel Foucault famously opened his admiring review of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. [1] Responding to the praise, Deleuze merely called attention to the hint of humour underlying Foucault’s […]

The crisis of the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state is being posed today with an urgency and acuity not seen since the debates over the legitimacy of Weimar parliamentary democracy. Its constitutive claim to be able to satisfy both the values of justice and pluralism appears to be coming apart at the seams. Far […]

Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses. Peter Weiss In Memoirs of a Revolutionary Victor Serge describes the first decade of Soviet rule as displaying ‘the obscure early stages of a psychosis’, the symptoms of which became increasingly pronounced as time wore on and the defeats and corpses piled ever higher. The experience of living through […]

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital Kate Soper J.M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury Alastair Morgan Kenneth Goldsmith, Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century John Millar Boris Groys, In the Flow Hammam Aldouri Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How […]

I have a vivid memory – too vivid to be an accident – of the first time I read something written by Ellen Meiksins Wood. It was an article in New Left Review on the separation of the economic from the political; it was, of course, polemical. I didn’t know the context of the polemic […]

Open form Pierre Boulez, 1927–2016The death of Pierre Boulez came as a gentle shock to those for whom he is a figure of colossal importance in the postwar musical world. Pierre Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma, the title of Joan Peyser’s 1976 book, does only partial justice to a musician whose contribution was truly much, much […]