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

Michael Clifford - Political Genealogy After Foucault

Combining the most powerful elements of Foucault's theories, Clifford produces a methodology for cultural and political critique called "political genealogy" to explore the genesis of modern political identity. At the core of American identity, Clifford argues, is the ideal of the "Savage Noble," a hybrid that married the Native American "savage" with the "civilized" European male. This complex icon animates modern politics, and has shaped our understandings of rights, freedom, and power.

James Hellings - Adorno and Art. Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory

A comprehensive, critical and accessible account of Theodor W. Adorno's materialist-dialectical aesthetic theory of art from a contemporary perspective, this volume shows how Adorno's critical theory is awash with images crystallising thoughts to such a degree that it has every reason to be described as aesthetic.

Advait Arun - The SpaceX Sham

The chief scandal of the AI boom is not the secretive financial machinations of tech oligarchs, but how much money they have raised on the open promise of an automated, transhumanist future.

https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/spacex-ipo-elon-musk-trillionaire/

David Joravsky - The Lysenko Affair

The Lysenko affair was perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. For thirty years, until 1965, Soviet genetics was dominated by a fanatical agronomist who achieved dictatorial power over genetics and plant science as well as agronomy.

Jake Orbison - Adorno’s Marx and philosophical terminology

The students of Adorno and Horkheimer, by contrast,
read Capital as a critique of political economy, rather
than a prescription for alterative systems of social relations. Peter Hudis usefully describes the German New Reading as a kind of ‘objectivist Marxism … best understood as an analysis of objective forms that assume complete self-determination and automaticity’, in opposition to the ‘subjectivist Marxisms’ coming out of
France and Italy. The New German Reading, in short,
centred Marx’s theory of value and its determination of social forms. All European New Left readings of Marx reapproach Capital through the Grundrisse, but as Moishe Postone and Helmut Reinecke note in their introduction to the Grundrisse’s first English edition, ‘Marx repeatedly points out in the Grundriss[e] that the origins
and grounds of class relationships are to be searched for in the germ-form of the commodity’. This reading uniquely insists on the unity of all political and economic forms, as proceeding from the commodity form. In that way, as Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva
note in their guide to the Neue Marx-Lektüre in the pages of this journal, NML can also be seen as ‘a long footnote’ to Adorno’s aphorism, its own inversion of Hegel, ‘The whole is the false’. The critique of political economy finds ideology everywhere and its self-image ‘nowhere’.

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/rp221_orbison.pdf

Ethan Pollock - Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars

Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy.