aliases:
– “Review: Disaster nationalism Untitled 1”
Note: this is neither a review (critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses) of the author’s book…
…nor one of my “Digested Reads” (in which I attempt to give both myself and the reader as complete an experience of the author’s arguments as I can manage in as short a space as……
Note: This is a “Midrash”, gloss, or “digested read” of Albert O. Hirschman’s book, The Passions and the Interests. It is decidedly not a critical analysis or a review of his work. As such it presents the author’s arguments as he makes them, and does not attempt an evaluation. It is presented here in the spirit of an apprentice student attempting to come to terms with the work of the master, and if it helps you with your own researches (or gives you any intellectual pleasure!), please consider reading it in its entirety—it’s not……
Note: This is a “Midrash”, gloss, or “digested read” of Varoufakis’s book, not a critical analysis or a review. As such it presents the author’s arguments as he makes them, and does not attempt an evaluation. I do provide a review of the book over on my blog, however.
*
Also, as ever, no AIwas employed at any point in the reading or writing of this or any other work that I have attached my name to…
1 Why So Much Inequality?
The book begins……
This post functions more as a midrash or a gloss upon the second edition of Corey Robin’s book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. As such, this probably won’t work for you if you are looking for a critical analysis or a review ( my much shorter review of the book can be read here. This article, by contrast, will attempt to restate in some detail Robin’s understanding of how we got to Trump from Burke, of what has changed over time in conservative thought, and what has stayed the same.
Part of what has changed is that the conservatives have largely won: throughout the industrialized west/north there is no longer any viable left to oppose them. This, as……
The late Ellen Meiksins Wood had a long and illustrious career teaching the history of political thought at Toronto’s York University. In light of her death earlier this year, it is fitting to recount just how much she taught us about the specificity of capitalism. Her sizable body of work not only spans the entire history of western political thought, it also thereby clairifies for us just what makes capitalism so different from the economic systems of other eras, and in doing so provides an understanding of the contemporary politico-economic reality that is a useful alternative to the perhaps more influential ‘post-Fordist’ or ‘commercialization model’ theorists such as David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein and others.
Wood teaches us how, in order to more fully appreciate the present moment of capitalist history, it will be necessary to distinguish ‘essence’ from ‘accident’ in capitalism…
I have written on the intersection of capitalism and literature in the past, and I’m intrigued about Benjamin Kunkel’s project in Utopia or Bust of giving a number of leftist thinkers (some of whom are more relatively unknown than others, especially to North Americans) a public hearing. I find his style to be engaging, personable, and forthright. Note:I will be adding reflections on each chapter of the book as I get to them — as of right now Chapters 1 and 2 are complete and can be found below.
