Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Н. Проценко - Посткоммунизм, который мы заслужили

Памяти исторического социолога Ивана Селеньи (1938–2026)

Выдающийся венгерский ученый Иван Селеньи, скончавшийся в начале августа в Будапеште, войдет в историю социальных наук как исследователь, который предельно точно диагностировал природу сначала коммунистических, а затем и посткоммунистических режимов. Однако его жизнь заслуживает не только академической биографии: Селеньи был свидетелем всех ключевых событий истории Венгрии последних восьми десятилетий, и этот опыт, во многом уникальный для ученых из Восточной Европы, стал неотъемлемой частью его книг, статей и интервью. В этом смысле жизненный и карьерный путь Ивана Селеньи был идеальным для исторического макросоциолога, который по определению должен жить долго и повидать многое.

https://gorky.media/context/postkommunizm-kotoryi-my-zasluzhili

Michael Sonenscher - Capitalism: The Story behind the Word

What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what's at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism, Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it.

"Capitalism" was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labor. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for maneuver. The division of labor is still the division of labor and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for.

Jonathan Weber - City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco

The definitive and “captivating” story of San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. It was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Lome Prieta earthquake, its economy stuck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later the beating heart of the global counterculture, the mythic, fog-shrouded city at the edge of the continent faced an uncertain future.

But in that very moment, a band of free-thinking technologists, immersed in the creative zeitgeist of the city, were inventing the contemporary internet. San Francisco would undergo an epic political, social, and economic transformation as it claimed the title of tech capital of the world. Local politicians, including Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, advanced to the national stage. An unlikely marriage of underground culture and technological optimism gave rise to the annual reverie known as Burning Man.

This should have been a happy story for San Francisco. But as the city’s tech economy roared, a host of urban ills lurked in the shadows: homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and a crippling lack of new housing. The city’s famous left-wing political establishment struggled to get its arms around the problems, becoming a punching bag for President Trump and the new right. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, it created new crises and laid old ones bare, shattering a “City Family” that had ruled politically for more than thirty years and prompting a sharp rightward turn by the once-liberal tech industry.

Jonathan Weber saw it all up close as a reporter and newsroom leader. He offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights, only to be undone by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on 200 interviews with mayors, CEOs, political leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, and artists, City on the Edge is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco one that anticipated the culture wars raging around the world. Its outcome would have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates.

E. Fentress, A. Rabinowitz - Slaving States: From West Africa to the Ancient Mediterranean

A pathbreaking new perspective on the ways ancient societies were shaped and transformed by slave trading

The growing economies of ancient Greece and Rome created an ever-increasing demand for enslaved labor, which was supplied by states on the peripheries of their empires. In Slaving States, archaeologists Elizabeth Fentress and Adam Rabinowitz examine how violent bands of warriors in the outlying regions of Gaul, Scythia, and the Fezzan (part of modern-day Libya) gradually became states that specialized in selling humans to the slave economies of Greece and Rome. They trace a series of transformations of people into objects that could be bought and sold, of warrior bands into state-level societies, and of opportunistic captive-taking into slaving economies.

Fentress and Rabinowitz use as a model the West African state of Dahomey, whose development into a slaving state between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is, unlike that of their ancient counterparts, well documented. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, they show that the slaving zones of early modern West Africa and of antiquity have much in common, rooted in the structure of slaving itself. The evolution of the ancient warriors of Gaul, Scythia, and the Fezzan from head-takers to slave merchants may have taken different paths, but it is clearly written in their histories. With Slaving States, Fentress and Rabinowitz offer an entirely new perspective on ancient slavery. By exploring the supply side of the market for enslaved people, they show that that slavery transforms the society that supplies enslaved people as much as it transforms the society that uses them.