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

Zachary T. Irwin - The Tito-Stalin Split of 1948: Regional Implications and International Consequences

This book explores Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Soviet Cominform and its broader impact on international politics. Although being acknowledged as a crucial turning point during the Cold War, the split between Josip Broz Tito and Joseph Stalin in 1948 has not been widely investigated in historical research. Drawing on archival sources, the authors demonstrate the continuing historical relevance of this event to Europe’s contemporary diplomatic landscape. Providing different lenses through which to understand the impact of the Split on international affairs, the significance of Tito and Stalin’s conflict in the post-war years is emphasised. The collection is divided into two parts, the first covering the regional dynamics of the Split in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and the second discussing the consequences for international relations.

Kojo Koram - The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs

From America’s plantation-turned-prison known as Angola in Louisiana to the psychedelic boom of Silicon Valley, The Next Fix tracks a seismic shift in global drug policy. Kojo Koram legal scholar and acclaimed author of Uncommon Wealth travels across five continents to examine how criminalized substances are being rebranded as commodities in a new billion-dollar industry. Legal cannabis dispen­saries now trade in what once led to life sentences. Psychedelics have become fertile ground for biotech. But for all these developments, prisons still swell with underprivileged users and addicts, and enforcement falls hardest along lines of race and class.

This is not a polemic for or against legalization. It is a powerful, clear-eyed reckoning with how we got here and what kind of future is taking shape in a world addicted to economic “fixes” every bit as much as it is troubled by drugs. Combining report­age, political analysis and vivid personal testimony, The Next Fix tells the untold story of drugs, capital­ism and inequality in the twenty-first century.

Simon Mussell - Critical Theory and Feeling: The affective politics of the early Frankfurt School

This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. It revisits some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose varied engagements with the subject of melancholia prove to be far more mobile and complex than traditional accounts. It also looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory's engagement with the world of objects, exploring the affective politics of hope. Situating the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the 'post-critical', it explains how critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. The book presents an analysis of Theodor Adorno's form of social critique and 'conscious unhappiness', that is, a wilful rejection of any privatized or individualized notion of happiness in favour of a militant and political discontent. A note on the timely reconstruction of early critical theory's own engagements with the object world via aesthetics and mimesis follows. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the 'end of history', created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. The book notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions.