Extract from Against Hate by Carolin Emcke
“Sometimes I wonder whether I should envy them. Sometimes I wonder how they do it: how they hate the way they do. How they can be so sure of themselves. Because the haters have to be at least that: sure. Otherwise they would … Read More
By Richard Sakwa, author of Russia’s Futures.
While it is impossible to predict the future, we can nevertheless anticipate certain outcomes. Writing the book Russia’s Futures, I was aware that professionals in the field of what used to be called Soviet studies were heavily criticised for failing to … Read More
by Svend Brinkmann , author of The Joy of Missing Out
We live in a world full of choice and temptation, where we are constantly bombarded with invitations, in the broadest sense of the word, via everything from street advertising to social media. We are constantly invited to do something, … Read More
Terrible predictions…
In 1879, the magnificently named Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff MP met with a little known German journalist called Karl Marx.
According to Francis Wheen’s biography, Sir Mountstuart, in a letter he wrote shortly after the meeting, was of the opinion that, although Marx was a nice chap:… Read More
by Pascal Porcheron
It’s September 2006 and the author of this piece is sitting in their first Literature class. The professor begins the class by asking us, ‘why are you here? What’s the point of studying Literature?’ Chaos ensues, as we soon discover that we have never interrogated the ‘why’—we … Read More
By Richard Howells
Visual culture is one of those things that seems to get only more relevant in an increasingly visual age. It also helps explain why my and Joachim Negreiros’s Visual Culture has now gone into its third edition with Polity.
When the first edition came out in 2003, … Read More
By Thomas Kemple
Georg Simmel’s writings are comparable in importance to those of Marx, Weber and Durkheim. And yet, with the recent completion of the 24 volumes of his collected works we are only just beginning to understand the vastness and variety of his ideas. With an emphasis on the … Read More
By George Klosko
Whether we should obey the law is a question that affects everyone’s day-to-day life, from traffic laws to criminal laws to requirements to pay our taxes. Even if most people obey unreflectively or out of habit, the question remains: why we are morally required to do so. … Read More
By Emanuela Ceva and Michele Bocchiola
Whistleblowing has become a largely discussed topic mainly as a consequence of such headline cases as those of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. However, the grounds for its justification within political theory and public ethics remain underexplored. Although it is intuitively clear what a … Read More
By Ronald L. Mize
In the lead up to the 2018 US midterm elections, echoes of the 2016 vitriol that swept self-avowed ‘nationalist’ Donald Trump into the presidency are now focused on the ‘migrant caravan’. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric has culminated in a new commercial aired on national television on the … Read More
