Jack Z. Bratich, On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death (Philadelphia: Common Notions, 2022). 240pp., $20 pb., 978 1 94217 349 6 Unacquainted readers may think that ‘microfascism’ is perhaps analogous to contemporary terms such as ‘microaggression’: the prefix ‘micro’ implying a simple reduction in scale and scope for actions representing larger systems. But microfascism is […]

In an August 1890 letter to Conrad Schmidt, Engels ‘Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French “Marxist” of the late [18]70s:“All I know is that I am not a Marxist”.’ Even during his lifetime there was a tension between what Marx himself wrote and thought and what his followers made of it. […]

Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 232pp., £85.00 hb., £28.99 pb., 978 1 35012 920 7 hb., 978 1 35012 9 221 pb. These notes are from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C Minor, written between 1804 and 1808. Even listeners who do not read music can easily recognise the melody. […]

Paul K. Jones, Critical Theory and Demagogic Populism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 288pp., £85.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 1 52612 343 5 hb., 978 1 52616 373 8 pb. Jeremiah Morelock, ed, How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the Frankfurt School (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022). 502pp., £25.99 pb., 978 1 64259 767 7 […]

Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). 140pp., £9.99 pb., 978 1 50954 965 8 Since Antiquity, the sun has been tied up with earthly and divine authority. The solar god Sūrya, a Hindu deity, was worshipped in sun temples across India. In the fourth century, under Roman Emperor Julian’s rule, the ancient Helios, […]

Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2019). 306pp., £112.00 hb., £32.00 pb., 978 1 50173 099 3 hb., 978 1 50173 100 6 pb. Willem Styfhals’ new book offers a conceptual history of Gnosticism within a deceptively narrow discursive field. Though Gnosticism re-emerged and become […]

Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 296pp., £76.00 hb., £20.00 pb., 978 0 22610 050 0 hb., 978 0 22673 286 2 pb. The bright red time ball atop Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich rises halfway up its mast each day at […]

Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). 416pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 26204 487 5 Philosophers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel imagined their projects as universal in reach and scale. Whether these philosophers were writing about the social contract, the foundations of moral law or the […]

Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (London: Verso, 2022). 320pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78873 388 5 The US Congress passed its largest ever investment in clean energy in August – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – and yet it remains impossible to shake the feeling that, […]

Tom Holert, Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). 278 pp., €22.00 pb., 978 3 94336 597 9 Tom Holert remarks near the beginning of Knowledge Beside Itself that art has traditionally been defined in contradistinction to knowledge, at least scientific or systematic knowledge. How then to understand the proliferation of […]

On September 9, 1971, detainees in the Attica prison in New York organised a collective uprising, seizing control of the building and taking hostage 42 prison staff until September 13 when the collective revolt was repressed by police and 33 prisoners were killed. A few weeks later, in the prison of Clairvaux in France, two […]

‘It will keep your secrets. Operate it yourself.’ A. B. Dick Mimeograph Company advertisement in Life magazine, circa 1940. How can we decolonise technics today within, against and beyond Eurocentric teleologies that separate rational humans from savage or inert nature and technological infrastructure assumed to be a ‘standing reserve’? 1 The provocative exhibition ‘Crafting Subversion: […]

Rare is the book that provokes in me both frequent agreement and teeth-clenching, head-shaking, wincing frustration. But such is Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix. 1 Chibber is his generation’s foremost advocate of analytical Marxism, a program of articulating and defending socialist politics using the tools of contemporary social science. The journal he helms, Catalyst, has […]

Der Mensch kann nur Mensch werden durch Erziehung. — Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy, 1803. 1 Few topics have in recent years caused more controversy in studies in the history of philosophy than the issue of Immanuel Kant’s conception of race and its significance for the universalism of his moral and political philosophy. In this […]

On 24th June 2022, anti-abortion activists across the US celebrated as the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, among them some self-described ‘feminists’. For a long time now, the anti-abortion movement has been declaring itself ‘pro-woman’ as much as pro-foetus, presenting abortion as a harm to women that they are coerced into or ultimately […]

Peter Osborne is the longest serving editor in Radical Philosophy’s history. He joined the editorial collective in 1983 and was involved in the publication of 168 issues until he stood down as an editor in 2016. Over these four decades he undoubtedly did more than any other member of RP to define the journal’s direction […]

It’s 50 years since the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in 1972. To mark the occasion, we asked a selection of former editors to share their recollections and reflections on their time on the job. We wanted to hear from those involved in the early years, without neglecting those who had participated in […]