Activity

Like that of Vico, Jewish history-telling is cyclically tragic. From Biblical Egypt to Weimar Germany, in our own narratives times of comfort and joy for Jews were always the augurs of misery to come – the higher the summit, the further the fall. In most of the world, we live now in good times. Ant…

The arcades, and the culture of consumerism these ushered in, is identified here as prerequisite of fascism, which cannot be understood without reference to capitalism, both in terms of its economic basis and in the way in which people are encouraged to conceive themselves, against all reality, as …

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the v…

The Syriza example points us particularly to two decisive features of law-sterity. Firstly, by posing the situation as essentially 'radical break' or 'progressive austerity', it operates as a wedge with which to split the radical and moderate components of any political coalition, generally leaving…

Thatcher's neoliberal project was not simply to limit public spending [...] in the case of local government, the aim was not just to force them into making spending cuts, but rather to create the environment in which they would be forced to choose to do so themselves. In that way, local governments…