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

Stuart Elden - Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and the Question of Fascism

In the early 1930s he wrote increasingly political texts, including “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”, which was published in La Critique sociale in two parts in late 1933 and early 1934 (included in Œuvres completes Vol I, 339-71, as a short book with Éditions Lignes in 2009, and translated in Visions of Excess, 137-60). A crucial moment for Bataille seems to have been the Veterans’ Riot of 6 February 1934, when the police and right-wing groups clashed in Paris, and the leftist protests which followed the next week. This context is usefully discussed by Susan Rubin Suleiman in “Bataille in the Street” and Chapter 1 of Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar’s Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture. Bataille’s editor Denis Hollier reports in the wake of these events that “Bataille planned to write a book titled Le fascisme en France”. This was never completed, but the surviving notes for this project were published in the posthumous Œuvres complètes (Vol II, 205-13, 214-21).

In the mid-1930s Bataille combined these different interests in at least three groups. One was the Collège de Sociologie. The Collège was a loose grouping of intellectuals, founded by Bataille with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. Walter Benjamin, by this time in exile in Paris, regularly attended the Collège’s meetings, but never spoke there. A session was planned, but the war ended the Collège’s work. Famously, Benjamin gave Bataille several manuscripts for safekeeping in the Bibliothèque nationale before he fled Paris in June 1940.

https://progressivegeographies.com/2026/05/31/georges-bataille-roger-caillois-and-the-question-of-fascism/

Fred L. Block - The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (1977)

The Origins of International Economic Disorder is a 1977 book by sociologist and political economist Fred L. Block. It explores the history of United States international monetary policy from the end of World War II through the early 1970s, offering a critical analysis of the forces shaping the global financial system

The Contradictions of Market Socialism: Labour, Capital and Welfare in Privatising China and Vietnam (2026)

Connecting labour and welfare transformations to broader political-economic processes including land restructuring and financialisation the book offers an unparalleled comparative perspective on two of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences. Positivism and Its Epistemological Others

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciencesprovides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the philosophy of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II.

Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures.

George Steinmetz - The Devil’s Handwriting. Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa

Germany’s overseas colonial empire was relatively short lived, lasting from 1884 to 1918. During this period, dramatically different policies were enacted in the colonies: in Southwest Africa, German troops carried out a brutal slaughter of the Herero people; in Samoa, authorities pursued a paternalistic defense of native culture; in Qingdao, China, policy veered between harsh racism and cultural exchange.

Why did the same colonizing power act in such differing ways? In The Devil’s Handwriting, George Steinmetz tackles this question through a brilliant cross-cultural analysis of German colonialism, leading to a new conceptualization of the colonial state and postcolonial theory. Steinmetz uncovers the roots of colonial behavior in precolonial European ethnographies, where the Hereros were portrayed as cruel and inhuman, the Samoans were idealized as “noble savages,” and depictions of Chinese culture were mixed. The effects of status competition among colonial officials, colonizers’ identification with their subjects, and the different strategies of cooperation and resistance offered by the colonized are also scrutinized in this deeply nuanced and ambitious comparative history.