Issue 196, October 2026
Including special section: Canon, Critique and Cultural Sociology
Contributors: Maeve Cooke, Matt Dawson, Eduardo de la Fuente, Gary Alan Fine, David Inglis, Anna Lund, Howard Prosser, Gaston Souroujon, Lyn Spillman, Celso M. Villegas, Galen Watts, Brad West and Frederick F. Wherry
by Howard Prosser
A.J.A. Woods is an intellectual historian based in Brighton, UK, whose work spans social and political theory, British cultural studies and the history of conspiracy theories. The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West, published by Verso in 2026, provides the basis for the present interview.
This special issue is based on papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe: In Memory of Zygmunt Bauman, held at Sichuan University, China, in 2024. Many thanks to all contributors.
by Angus Nicholls
This essay offers a deep historicization of Jürgen Habermas’s career in postwar Germany, arguing that three untranslated texts written during the 1950s and early 1960s provide insight into his intellectual development and the contemporary relevance of his thought.
by Christopher G. Robbins and Eric Ferris
This book examines the intensification of fascist politics in contemporary America via an analysis of the fundamental shift in relationships between political fringes and institutions of power, situating the rise of contemporary fascist politics within a broader culture of pedagogy.
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, A Hopeful Political Imagination: Courage and Fantastic Critique in the Age of Meltdown (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Reviewed by Costas Douzinas
Michael Symonds, Why Should We Still Read Max Weber? (Routledge, 2027)
Reviewed by Harry Blatterer
Siniša Malešević, Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Reviewed by John A. Hall
Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory. Postwar French Thought to the Present (Verso 2024)
Reviewed by Peter Beilharz
Who was Fredric Jameson? What were the years of Theory? Jameson died last year, leaving behind a thick and rich legacy of, well, Theory. Already in advance, the title of this book of lectures seems to anticipate the possibility that Theory may also be terminal. Has the moment of Theory then passed?
Expressions of interest are invited for contributions to an edited collection on Friendship in Troubled Times: Social, Cultural and Political Perspectives, following an approach by a reputable academic press.
Donald Sassoon, Revolutions: A New History (Verso, 2025)
Reviewed by Archie Brown
Donald Sassoon, a skilled and erudite comparative historian, has turned his hand to the study of revolutions. The result is a stimulating and highly readable book, richly endowed with provocative judgements and witty asides.
This year Professor Craig Calhoun (Arizona State University and Princeton University) joins us to reflect on the future of liberal democracy amid the Western world’s crises, institutional decline, and the resurgence of authoritarianism in a dialogue with Peter Beilharz.
5:30-7:30pm, 25 August, 2026
At the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture
by Maya Papastergiadis
On the occasion of his recent visit to Melbourne, Maya Papastergiadis had the opportunity to be in conversation with Yanis Varoufakis who leads MeRA25 in Greece, is co-founder of the pan European movement DiEM25, and is on the council of the Progressive International. He is an academic economist who served as Greece’s Finance Minister in 2015, and the author of best-selling books
by Howard Prosser
Few thinkers have contributed more to this renewed engagement than Kohei Saito, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo, whose previous book Slow Down sold over half a million copies in Japan and carried ecosocialist ideas well beyond the academy. His Capital from Zero, now available in English, began as the companion text to a television series. It is at once a rigorous return to Marx’s core categories and an original intervention in debates on ecology, the commons, and digital capitalism. In the conversation that follows – conducted in May 2026 – Saito discusses Marx’s contemporary afterlives, the problem of growth, the intensification of reification under digital capitalism, and where critical thought might turn from here.
by Gina R. Gatarin
An interview with Kelly Louise Rexzy Agra editor of the Thesis Eleven Special Issue: The Philippine Condition.
