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

Marcel Mariën - Theory of Immediate World Revolution: A Handbook for the Avant-Garde

In 1958, Belgian surrealist Marcel Mariën drafted a plan to topple capitalism on a global scale achievable in a single year, in any place, at any time. The catch? It required three hundred accomplices, and it was destined to fail. Mariën’s text dares to imagine the unimaginable, offering a blueprint as much for play as for politics. By fusing the spirit of surrealism with the urgency of the atomic age, Mariën exposes the thin line between theory and performance, reality and fiction. This book captures one of his boldest gestures: a proposal not to succeed, but to alter the very way we think about revolution.

Duncan Foley - An Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital and Land in the New Economy

Many of the central results of Classical and Marxian political economy are examples of the self-organization of the capitalist economy as a complex, adaptive system far from equilibrium. An Unholy Trinity explores the relations between contemporary complex systems theory and classical political economy, and applies the methods it develops to the problems of induced technical change and income distribution in capitalist economies, the control of environmental externalities such as global warming and the stabilization of the world population.The arguments and methods of this important book address central problems both of economic science and economic policy and provide fresh paths for theoretical exploration.

Brian Charles - A Genealogy of Populism: The Transmission of a Transatlantic Concept

This book traces the lineage and descent of ideas about populism within academic literature. Contemporary conceptions and definitions of populism are mostly, if not exclusively, pejorative, and used as an epithet for fascism, authoritarianisms of all stripes, and troubling forms of mass mobilizations. Adopting a genealogical approach, that investigates how the present arose out of the contingencies of the past, this book examines the consequential role played by American scholars of the 1950s in redefining the term away from its origins as a self-designation for a fledgling nineteenth century third party in the United States to a catch-all epithet for the very worst kinds of politics. It argues that the transmission of this pejorative definition to the European academy of the 1970s and beyond has bequeathed contemporary populism scholarship a troubling legacy that has largely gone unexamined and unquestioned. By demonstrating the lineage of contemporary ideas about populism, the book suggests that they rest on far flimsier intellectual foundations than is often assumed and that the concept of populism as a dangerous form of mass-based politics is more problematic and contestable than it appears.

Alan P. Kirman - Whom or What Does the Representative Individual Represent?

A modern economy presents a picture of millions of people, either as individuals or organized into groups and firms, each pursuing their own disparate interests in a rather limited part of the environment. Somehow, these varied individual activities are more or less coordinated and some relative order emerges. Economists commonly explain that this is due to Adam Smith's "invisible hand," and that despite the conflicting interests of individuals, the result of the pursuit of their selfish ends is socially satisfactory. The market provides the mechanism which links and coordinates all the activities being pursued by individuals.

Paradoxically, the sort of macroeconomic models which claim to give a picture of economic reality (albeit a simplified picture) have almost no activity which needs such coordination. This is because typically they assume that the choices of all the diverse agents in one sector consumers for example can be considered as the choices of one "representative" standard utility maximizing individual whose choices coincide with the aggregate choices of the heterogeneous individuals.