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

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.

Ali Ahmad - A History of Economic Thought at the Frankfurt Institute: Beyond the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, 1923-1945

The Frankfurt Institute continues to command the interest of a wide range of scholars working in history, philosophy, sociology, and political science. Yet, the prevailing narrative about the Institute overlooks a crucial component of its history: the economic theories developed by its lesser-known members. This book presents the first comprehensive study of these overlooked contributions, providing a transformative account that repositions the Institute as a site of original and influential economic thought. Most research on the Frankfurt Institute remains narrowly focused on a select few members whose work developed methods of critiquing capitalism that were more philosophically oriented than empirically grounded in economic reality. Drawing on new archival research, this book brings to the forefront the sidelined and long-neglected economic ideas of Franz L. Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Carl Grünberg, Henryk Grossmann, Arkadij Gurland, Gerhard Meyer, Kurt Mandelbaum, and Karl A. Wittfogel. Viewing the work of the Institute through these figures highlights the fact that material, historical and empirical approaches to economic theory were central to its work. Being primarily a work of intellectual history, the book contextualises the Institute's economic theories within the historical settings of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.