'Germany' tag archive

Raphaël Fèvre, A Political Economy of Power: Ordoliberalism in Context, 1932-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 280pp., £64.00 hb., 978 0 19760 780 0 George Monbiot’s statement in a 2016 Guardian article that neoliberalism is the ‘ideology at the root of all our problems’ still resonates today. A huge body of literature has been dedicated […]

Alexander Kluge, Russia Container, trans. Alexander Booth (Chicago: Seagull Books, 2022). 392pp., £27.50 hb., 978 1 80309 065 8 Russia Container is not a book about Russia. It’s about the images and stories that East Germans had of Soviet Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and after. Alexander Kluge wrote it […]

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. […]

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 […]

Scholars of European history and critical theory observing American politics in recent years have often found themselves experiencing déjà vu. History, the truism goes, does not repeat itself, but last summer, with calls for ‘law and order’ and armed right-wing militias clashing with anti-racist protestors across America, many asked, what more are you waiting for? […]

Critical Theory in Germany Today 1 r An Interview with Axel Honneth if’ Axel Honneth is Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Political Science at the Free University, Berlin. He is the author of The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1985; English translation, MIT Press, 1991) and Struggle for […]

Documenta 11 was one of the most radically conceived events in the history of postcolonial art practice. It is exemplary of the influence of postcolonial discourses on critical art practice over the last twenty years in breaking profoundly with the colonial presuppositions of the nineteenth-century tradition of ethnographic or anthropological exhibitions of non-Western art as […]

Commentary Many enemies, much honour The founding of The Left Party in Germany Albrecht von lucke The foundation of The Left Party in June this year produced a forceful reaction in the German media. In the main, the leading journalistic organs of the Republic dismissed it as an insolent populist gesture. In the words of […]