Book Review: Critical Theories and the Budapest School
Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell (eds.), Critical Theories and the Budapest School: Politics, Culture, and Modernity (Routledge, 2018)
Reviewed by J.F. Dorahy
New Book: Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic
Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic examines the 2008 global economic crisis as a complex social phenomenonor “social hieroglyphic”, arguing that the crisis is not fundamentally economic, despite presenting itself as such.
Article: Johann Arnason’s unanswered question by Peter Wagner
Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy?
by Peter Wagner
This article is a special prepublication of an article forthcoming in Thesis Eleven Journal
New Book: History and the Present
History of the Present describes the emergence of this ‘contemporary’ historical consciousness across a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena ranging from historiography to heritage and museum studies, and from the globalization of the novel to the rise of science fiction.
Book Review: The Crisis Paradigm
Andrew Simon Gilbert
The Crisis Paradigm: Description and Prescription in Social and Political Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Reviewed by J.F. Dorahy
Between the acts: at home in uncertain times
by Timothy Andrews
In the current pandemic, we find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Virginia Woolf’s audience in Between the Acts. Forced into our homes as a result of lockdown measures, a mirror is held up to us so that we can see the intimacy of our lives under the stark light of history unfolding in the present. Like Woolf’s audience, we too are on the cusp of a new era.
COVID-19 remapping East Asian Modernity
by Mark Harrison
The political meaning of the virus is contending constantly with its biological realities. But as its transmission has slowed in Asia, it is leaving behind newly calcified traces of the long-standing enmities, political compromises and aspirations of different modernist visions set in place in the early 20th century history of modernisation in Asia.
Agnes Heller (1929-2019): A Personal-Philosophical Memoir
I remember it clearly, as if it was yesterday, the day I first met Ágnes Heller. It was early in 1980 on the ground floor of La Trobe University’s Social Sciences building. I had an appointment with her. I had come to ask her if she would supervise my PhD. I had read an article she had published in Telos journal on ethics, and I felt a strong affinity with it. I brought with me my Honours thesis on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As I got to her office she appeared—both of us characteristically on time. My first impression: a short woman with penetrating deeply intelligent eyes. My lasting impression: she appeared with slightly damp hair and a towel around her shoulders. She’d been swimming in the university pool, one of her life-long favourite activities.
Issue 152, June 2019 Total work of art: Nazi and Soviet revolutions
The scope of David Roberts’ book on the Total Work of Art is daunting. It stretches from the French Revolution through to the modernist avant-garde and its dissolution in totalitarianism.
Video: Agnes Heller on Globalisation and Modernity
Agnes Heller discusses modernity and globalisation at the ‘Workshop on Civilisation and Modernity’ hosted by Sichuan University and co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven. Heller argues that technology, science, popular culture and high culture are all globalised in modernity whereas political traditions and social relations retain particular cultural and regional articulations.
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