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

Joe P. L. Davidson - Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times

How utopian stories have preserved the vision of a better world in a cultural climate dominated by dystopia. Saving Utopia is about an endangered species: utopian fiction. “Utopia is dead” has become a common refrain in recent decades, now that the dominant strand of science fiction is decisively dystopian. Visions of violent, oppressive, and authoritarian futures cloud our horizons of expectation. In Saving Utopia, Joe Davidson tackles the relative absence of utopia in the contemporary cultural landscape. He focuses on the challenges to writing utopias, explicating the societal conditions that have endangered bold visions of new and better worlds, while also examining the final holdouts of the genre. Utopian stories are a vital but imperiled means of sustaining hope, a vehicle for gathering the flickering sparks of another world into a cohesive vision of liberation. By unearthing and analyzing the rare examples of hopeful visions published in the last decade, this book considers the survival strategies of the literary utopia—that is, the tactics deployed by utopian writers to keep the desire for a better world alive when everything tends toward dystopia. Ranging across Black, feminist, and green traditions of imagining the future, Saving Utopia shows how to make dreams of utopian societies convincing in a moment of pervasive pessimism.

Lindsay Owens - Gouged. The End of a Fair Price and What That Means for Your Wallet

Everywhere you turn, Americans are getting ripped off: Landlords use software to band together and organize artificial rent hikes. Ride-sharing apps spike the price of trips when your phone is about to die. Online ticket sellers hide behind exorbitant processing fees. And car companies install software that reports your driving behavior to insurance companies so that they can raise your premiums. Price gouging is the latest frontier in corporate profiteering and it’s gutting the American economy and your wallet.

In Gouged, economist and veteran consumer advocate Lindsay Owens takes us inside the corporate boardrooms where pricing decisions are made, uncovering the tricks, traps, and outright fraud corporations use to jack up the price you pay at checkout. From data collection to drone surveillance, modern technology provides companies a staggering arsenal of sophisticated tools to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible, bringing in record profits as a result. Drawing on original reporting, shareholder meeting transcripts, and rigorous economic analysis, Owens takes aim at big-tech behemoths, airlines, health insurance companies, and more to pull back the curtain on how price gougers are coming for almost every line item in your household budget, from doctors’ visits to rent, groceries, and even your summer vacation.

Gouged arms us with the essential knowledge we need to first recognize, then sidestep the traps that corporations try to conceal from us. In a world where price gouging has become ubiquitous, Gouged is necessary reading for anyone looking to stay an informed consumer, save money rather than surrender it to greedy CEOs, and stand up for fair prices in America.

Regime of Obstruction. How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy

Rapidly rising carbon emissions from the intense development of Western Canada’s fossil fuels continue to aggravate the global climate emergency and destabilize democratic structures. The urgency of the situation demands not only scholarly understanding, but effective action.

Regime of Obstruction aims to make visible the complex connections between corporate power and the extraction and use of carbon energy. Edited by William Carroll, this rigorous collection presents research findings from the first three years of the seven-year, SSHRC-funded partnership, the Corporate Mapping Project. Anchored in sociological and political theory, this comprehensive volume provides hard data and empirical research that traces the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry through economics, politics, media, and higher education. Contributors demonstrate how corporations secure popular consent, and coopt, disorganize, or marginalize dissenting perspectives to position the fossil fuel industry as a national public good. They also investigate the difficult position of Indigenous communities who, while suffering the worst environmental and health impacts from carbon extraction, must fight for their land or participate in fossil capitalism to secure income and jobs. The volume concludes with a look at emergent forms of activism and resistance, spurred by the fact that a just energy transition is still feasible. This book provides essential context to the climate crisis and will transform discussions of energy democracy.

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