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.
by Andreas Reckwitz
Contemporary inheritance society isn’t exhausted by questions of wealth alone. It speaks much more to the fact that in late modernity, at multiple levels, the general societal appreciation of being confronted by an inheritance from past generations has also sharpened. One views oneself and others from the perspectives of: individuals, as social groups, as a national society, and even as the species Homo sapiens, who inherit in the present from the past or, in the future, will inherit something.
This special issue on ‘The Philippine Condition’ brings together articles by Filipino women critical theorists, that reflect on the social condition of contemporary Philippines through the lenses of critical social theory, that are intersectionally decolonial and feminist in their critical and emancipatory orientations.
Australian National University School of Sociology presents Thesis Eleven founding editor Prof. Peter Beilharz (Sichuan University) as a part of the ongoing ANU Sociology Seminar Series.
Date: Wednesday 19 August, 2026
Time: 12 – 1pm (AEST)
by John Lechte
Edgar Morin was born Edgar Nahoum, of Sephardic Jewish parents, in Salonica (now Thessaloniki), Greece, on 8 July 1921. He died, at the very grand age of 104, at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 29 May 2026.
by Alonso Casanueva Baptista
Each rug is crafted by a single artisan who works on the loom for weeks or months, eight hours a day, every day. Dalila seemed particularly happy about this fact, underscoring how her sense of autonomy and creativity in composing the theme, motifs, colour scheme… would make up the final creation, one that cannot be replicated. Whether the design follows traditional rule or adapts to a recent trend, it is the artisan who will pour their personal inspiration onto the loom.
by Howard Prosser
Raymond Geuss’ latest book, Tracks in Chaos: Philosophical Orientation and Political Reflection, published by Polity in 2026, provides the basis for the present interview. Bringing together a set of essays on philosophy, politics and social theory, the book returns to problems that have long animated Geuss’s work: orientation, critique, authority, morality and political judgement.
by Peter Murphy
Malouf grew up in Brisbane and identified deeply with the city. In his collection of essays, The First Place (2014), Malouf paints a remarkable picture of Australia … He points to the distinct differences in topography between Australian cities, and he makes the interesting claim that the hilly features of Brisbane and its meandering river shape, in some elemental way, a distinctive manner of thinking about the world.
Contributors: Dan Tout, Lorenzo Veracini, Brad West, Darren Jorgensen, Eduardo de la Fuente, Loïc Wacquant, Felix Kämper, Anna Schubertová, Giannis Ninos, Nicolás Rudas, Lachlan Ross, James William Santos, Simon Schaupp, Mathew Abbott, Marcello Spanò, Adrian Jones and Daniel Sullivan
by Darren Jorgensen and Tami Xiang
Wang Qingsong’s monumental photography unveils the deep structures of Chinese history and society. The title of the first survey of Wang’s work in Australia, exhibited at the Cullity Gallery in the School of Design at the University of Western Australia, is Everlasting Inscription. It attempts to describe Wang’s resistance to the forgetting of Chinese history, while illuminating the structural legacies by which life in China assumes its collective shape.
The International Conference on Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe will be held during November, 2026 in Chengdu, China. This will be an opportunity for the presentation of new work and research results across a wide variety of Eastern Europe Marxist Critical Theory Studies, to enhance the world-wide field of Marxist critical theories, to share studies of critical theory of Eastern Europe, and to promote the construction of Chinese Marxism and its aesthetics.
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