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

Alexandre Koyré and the Beginning of the End of History

Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève was the first to equate the idea of the end of history with the end of political contestation. He saw Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as driving history forward through bloody revolutions and wars. Political struggle thus played a paradoxical role in Kojève’s system, rendering history meaningful while promising to redeem the historical dialectic by eventually bringing politics as such to an end and making possible the realization of truthful knowledge.

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/07/27/alexandre-koyre-and-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-history/?utm_id=97757_v0_s00_e0_tv2_a1demo0e3fe53r

Conor McCarthy - The Said Phenomenon

Two new books on Edward Said read his criticism alongside the work of Jonathan Swift and Lionel Trilling.

Daniel Rosenberg Nutters’s The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said and Helen Deutsch’s The Last Amateur: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said, and the Profession of Literature (both 2026) are remarkable, interesting, and valuable works. Their projects are quite different, yet both discuss Said in unusual ways and, for this reason alone, are books of note.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/edward-said-jonathan-swift-lionel-trilling-cultural-criticism/

Alan Kirman - Complex Economics: Individual and Collective Rationality

The economic crisis is also a crisis for economic theory. Most analyses of the evolution of the crisis invoke three themes, contagion, networks and trust, yet none of these play a major role in standard macroeconomic models. What is needed is a theory in which these aspects are central. The direct interaction between individuals, firms and banks does not simply produce imperfections in the functioning of the economy but is the very basis of the functioning of a modern economy. This book suggests a way of analysing the economy which takes this point of view. The economy should be considered as a complex adaptive system in which the agents constantly react to, influence and are influenced by, the other individuals in the economy. In such systems which are familiar from statistical physics and biology for example, the behaviour of the aggregate cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the average, or "representative" individual. Just as the organised activity of an ants’ nest cannot be understood from the behaviour of a "representative ant" so macroeconomic phenomena should not be assimilated to those associated with the "representative agent". This book provides examples where this can clearly be seen. The examples range from Schelling’s model of segregation, to contributions to public goods, the evolution of buyer seller relations in fish markets, to financial models based on the foraging behaviour of ants. The message of the book is that coordination rather than efficiency is the central problem in economics. How do the myriads of individual choices and decisions come to be coordinated? How does the economy or a market, "self organise" and how does this sometimes result in major upheavals, or to use the phrase from physics, "phase transitions"? The sort of system described in this book is not in equilibrium in the standard sense, it is constantly changing and moving from state to state and its very structure is always being modified. The economy is not a ship sailing on a well-defined trajectory which occasionally gets knocked off course. It is more like the slime described in the book "emergence", constantly reorganising itself so as to slide collectively in directions which are neither understood nor necessarily desired by its components.

Suddhabrata Deb Roy - India Comes Onboard: 'Cockroaches and the Global Gen Z Revolts pt. II

Part II of our coverage of India's 'Cockroach' protests.

Dictatorial regimes globally have attempted to crush the Gen Z revolts by a combination of paternalistic care, mansplaining, and abject force everything that satisfies the superego of the establishment. The diversity of measures used by governments to address the Gen Z revolts avoids the institutionalisation of any structural reform in the system. The Modi government  used a similar playbook in their response. An attempt to exhaust the protesters by intentionally distracting them from their cause was the first response, followed by a brutal and inhuman repression exhibited by the police brutalities from the July 20 until July 25. Finally, when those measures failed, the regime made an appeal of affection to emotionally manipulate the protesters. Ironically, one can find equivalences of these strategies scattered among various Gen Z protests globally. The 2025 protests against the Marcos government, accused of being corrupt and authoritarian in the Philippines, largely remained peaceful, with the Marcos government eventually engaging with the protest demands peacefully. In Kenya the first country in Africa to experience Gen Z revolts in June 2024triggered by a Finance Bill that sought to put higher taxes on basic commodities the protesters who demanded the resignation of William Ruto, the Kenyan President, have been repeatedly hounded by the authorities and with many still seeking justice. In Morocco, over 2,000 cases have been filed against young protesters, mostly from the ‘Gen Z 212’-backed mobilisation against the government. In Mozambique, however, Gen Z protests against electoral irregularities and internet blackouts were met with an amnesty deal signed between the protestors and the government, which ended the protests but did not affect the results.

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/india-comes-onboard-cockroaches-and-the-global-gen-z-revolts-pt-ii

How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson

Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi wrote recently in the LRB, he was a great reader, too. Moi, who was recruited by Jameson to Duke University in the mid-1980s and remained his colleague there until his death in 2024, joins Thomas Jones on this episode to look back at Jameson’s earlier work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) to The Political Unconscious (1981), and to retrace the intellectual path he took to arrive at that milestone.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/how-fredric-jameson-became-fredric-jameson