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

Matthew Handelman - The Mirror of Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School in Conspiracy Theories

A conspiracy theory surrounding the Frankfurt School has entered the mainstream. Popular in conservative media and even the current White House, the theory holds that the thinkers of the Frankfurt School are to blame for the rise of political correctness and identity politics, political polarization, and the disintegration of the so-called American way of life. The longer history of the conspiracy theory has four distinct phases, which start in conspiracy theorizing on the American left in the 1970s and run up to the contemporary culture wars. However, the conspiracy theory often gets caught up in and refracts elements of critical theory, such as its concern with the effects of mass media and critique of the corporate appropriation of culture. In this curious mirroring, the conspiracy theory forces an examination of the relationship between mimesis and critique, which sheds light on not only how the conspiracy theory fits into the dynamics of antisemitism, but also the cultural politics of critique so poignantly formulated by the Frankfurt School.

Greg Grandin - Fordlandia. The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.

More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

‘If he can make money in a tyranny, that’s fine by him’: Francis Fukuyama on Trump, democracy - and changing his mind

The political thinker became famous for declaring the triumph of liberal democracy. Thirty-seven years on, he explains what he really meant and why he made the rare journey from right to left

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/02/francis-fukuyama-interview-memoir-book-end-history-last-man

Marco Briziarelli - Finding Closure: Epistemic Rent and the Exploitation of Interpretation

This paper examines how digital platforms reorganise the circulation of meaning. It argues that platform infrastructures systematically privilege interpretations that minimise cognitive effort and maximise transmissibility, thus transforming epistemic closure into a site of rent extraction and differential value appropriation. By introducing the concepts of interpretive friction and epistemic rent, the paper shows how platforms function as rentier capitalists: they privatise the gains of accelerated meaning-making while socialising the costs of contextualisation, verification, and sustained ambiguity. The paper points out how the resulting closure economy represents a structural deskilling of interpretive labour under platform capitalism.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/1867/1714