Tag Archives: Essays

Books, Economics, Essays, History

The Unholy Offspring of Economic Theory: The Far Right’s Neoliberal Roots

The following essay is AI -generated, edited by Intellicurean, as part of our “The Cynic & The Dandy” series, of an interview article published on July 6, 2025 on the Toynbee Prize Foundation website titled Hayek’s Bastards and the Global Origins of the Far Right: An Interview with Quinn Slobodian.

One finds oneself, much like a seasoned playgoer observing a particularly convoluted modern drama, grappling with the profound complexities of our age. The curtain, it seems, has risen on “Trump 2.0,” a performance so bewildering in its contradictions that even the most astute critics of human folly might pause for breath. This curious administration simultaneously seeks to disentangle itself from global commitments while igniting fresh international disputes; it endeavours to depreciate the dollar to boost exports whilst clinging to its status as the world’s reserve currency; and it champions a reduction in global economic reliance while striving to unilaterally dictate global economic terms. The American colossus, one might observe, appears caught in a most perplexing dance with its own identity, and the global audience watches, utterly transfixed.

It is into this very contemporary conundrum that Quinn Slobodian, a historian of capitalism whose intellectual acuity is as sharp as a well-honed epigram, strides with his latest volume: Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2025). This title, one must concede, possesses a certain Wildean flourish, hinting at the delightful audacity within its pages. Slobodian, with the keen eye of a diagnostician, posits that the apparent contradiction of the Far Right simultaneously embracing pro-market liberalism and social hierarchies – facilitating the free movement of capital but not of people – is, in fact, no contradiction at all. He argues that neoliberalism has always possessed the intellectual elasticity to accommodate such a narrative.

The Unruly Offspring of Thought: “Bastards” and “Volk Capital”

Slobodian’s current work builds upon his earlier seminal analyses in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan, 2023). However, Hayek’s Bastards shifts its chronological focus decisively to the 1990s, illuminating this pivotal decade through the lens of figures not previously central to his explorations. If Globalists dissected the intellectual elite of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and Crack-Up Capitalism examined market radicals within the broader globalisation context, this new work turns its penetrating gaze to paleo-libertarianism. This intriguing ideological fusion, combining libertarian disdain for global governance with paleo-conservative traditionalism and isolationism (a distinct contrast to the more recent neoconservative branch of the Republican Party), forms the crux of Slobodian’s argument.

At the heart of Slobodian’s contention lies a startling conclusion: the rise of the Far Right is an acceleration, not a rejection of capitalism; a frontlash, not a backlash. He meticulously demonstrates how right-wing libertarians of the 1990s, through their convergence with paleoconservatives and their burgeoning interest in biology, IQ, and gold, inadvertently laid the intellectual foundations for our present reality.

In a recent conversation with Asensio Robles of Comillas Pontifical University, Slobodian elucidated the two primary concepts underpinning his book. The notion of “bastards,” he explains, serves as a vivid metaphor for the generations of intellectual influence, where adherents, though inspired by mentors, may diverge significantly from the original spirit and content of their masters’ work. In the case of Friedrich Hayek, Slobodian points to those who, in their pursuit of his scientific and complexity-focused ideas, veered into domains such as scientific racism or the belief in human nature as an absolute organizing principle. These, Slobodian asserts, represent the “illegitimate” heirs who strayed far enough to betray Hayek’s fundamental principles.

Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel laureate in Economics (1974) and a leading figure of the Austrian School of economics, is perhaps best known for his fervent defense of free-market capitalism and his critiques of central planning, notably articulated in his seminal 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that economic coordination arises not from central design, but from a “spontaneous order” – the result of millions of individuals making decisions based on dispersed, localized knowledge communicated primarily through the price system. He believed that any attempt by the state to centrally plan the economy would inevitably lead to a loss of individual liberty and, ultimately, totalitarianism, because such planners could never possess the vast, tacit knowledge embedded within a decentralized market.

The second crucial concept is “Volk capital.” Slobodian critiques the common, overly generalized understanding of neoliberalism as simply advocating for the commodification of all things and the reduction of all humans to an interchangeable substance. By adopting a narrower, more historically precise definition, focusing on a discrete group of thinkers (including those within the Mont Pèlerin Society, which Hayek co-founded in 1947), he reveals a significant inflection point in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw a shift in neoliberal thought towards an emphasis on human difference, rather than equality.

Slobodian argues that the universalizing concept of human capital became “re-grounded” in specific genetic populations or cultural groups. He observes the re-emergence of 19th-century notions of the “Volk”—the idea of an essential character of a kinship group—fused with economic categories. This, he contends, transforms “human capital” into “Volk capital,” demonstrating how an ideology often associated with abstract market principles could regress to antiquated distinctions. For instance, by the 1980s, Hayek himself, often considered a progenitor of neoliberalism, suggested a unique quality of the Western world in producing an “optimal economic actor.”

A “Frontlash” Unveiled: Beyond the “Left-Behinds” Narrative

Slobodian further clarifies the genesis of these two books, revealing they were initially conceived as a single grand volume. The political shocks of 2016-2017 – the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit “Leave” vote, and the rise of parties like Alternative for Germany – prompted his inquiry. He expresses dissatisfaction with mainstream interpretations that viewed these developments as a revolt against neoliberal capitalism by those “left behind” by globalisation. This narrative, he argues, incorrectly positioned figures like Trump and Boris Johnson as unexpected challengers to the neoliberal consensus.

To counter this, Slobodian first introduced the concept of the “zone” in Crack-up Capitalism. This refers to more fluid spaces for investor capital within nations, such as freeports in the United Kingdom or the proliferation of Special Economic Zones in countries like China and India. He notes that in 2017-2018, much of the apparent economic nationalism was, in fact, about creating these spaces for capital mobility. For example, as of 2023, there were over 7,000 Special Economic Zones globally, employing tens of millions of people and contributing significantly to trade and investment, illustrating this practical application of “zones.”

He then sought to integrate the observation that many within the alt-right in 2016 originated from the paleo-libertarian camp. These individuals, skeptical of both global and national governments, sought a fracturing of the state system. The “grand narrative” of bundling these ideas proved “quixotic,” leading to the separate publication of Crack-up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards, the latter focusing on the paleo-alliance between dissident right-wing figures and the neoliberal movement.

The Unseen Hand of Difference: Chronology and Community

The chronological alignment between the two books is evident. In Hayek’s Bastards, the post-Cold War period is presented as a moment of reckoning for neoliberals, who questioned whether they had truly “won” or if “state spending and socialism” persisted in new guises, such as environmentalism or feminism. Similarly, in Crack-up Capitalism, the 1990s marked a breakthrough for zones, representing a form of globalisation that fostered “diversities across territory” rather than uniform regulatory spaces. The fundamental thread uniting both narratives, Slobodian suggests, is the “use of difference, politically or economically.” This challenges the widely held assumption that the 1990s and 2000s were periods of increasing uniformity, arguing instead that they were also times when “irreconcilable differences” were intensified and leveraged for new political agendas.

Slobodian also tackles the pervasive assumption that neoliberalism is solely a celebration of individualism. He argues that while individualism is indeed a focus, neoliberals are intensely concerned with the conditions under which it can be realized. When the traditional “republican tradition” – based on an impartial state providing space for individual expression – is discarded, a new framework for community must be forged. This is particularly true for the “subgenre of neoliberal thought” that advocates for the dissolution of the state.

In this context, the necessity arises to constitute communities that can function and allow for individual expression without uniform regulations from a representative state. This leads to an interest in factors like the role of ethnic homogeneity in decreasing transaction costs and fostering trust, thereby allowing communities to self-perpetuate. It also involves examining the importance of the “social contract” as a literal set of terms for participation in smaller communities, and questions of social reproduction – specifically, the necessary gender orders to ensure sufficient population in a “closed-border model of political organization.” This, he notes, is where anarcho-capitalists and conservatives find common ground, the former seeking abstract individual freedom but recognizing the need for parameters, and the latter striving to preserve existing moral and cultural orders.

A striking observation from Slobodian’s research is the neoliberal fear that the Cold War might have been “lost” despite the Soviet Union’s collapse, due to persistent high state spending. The end of the Cold War, Slobodian reveals, raised the possibility of completely dismantling the social state, which in turn brought forth new questions about how a post-redistributive order could be anchored. This, he asserts, directly relates to the current moment in the United States, where campaigns to significantly cut the federal budget, such as proposals to reduce it by one-third (as seen in certain fiscal proposals from conservative groups, often citing a need to return to pre-expansion levels of spending), would necessitate the dismantling of the existing social state. This scenario, he suggests, brings to mind the ominous question posed by Charles Murray regarding the aftermath of the welfare state’s disappearance – whether it would lead to anarchy, organic self-organization, or a segment of the population perishing. The “vexed triumphalism” following the Cold War, Slobodian concludes, thus set the stage for the “apocalyptic forms of politics” now all too familiar.

The Historical Lens: Unveiling Hidden Cleavages

Slobodian highlights the remarkable absence of significant sectarian splits within neoliberalism between the 1940s and 1980s. The clear ideological battle lines drawn between the “free, liberal, capitalist” world and the “planned command economies” of the communist bloc maintained a cohesive front. However, with the abrupt erasure of this divide in the 1990s, two paths emerged: either assume inevitable global convergence and the end of meaningful political divisions, or contend that divisions persisted, merely migrating to previously overlooked domains. The global Right, he observes, opted for the latter.

The 1990s became a period of “restless search for a new enemy” for the Right. This sometimes involved resurrecting older tropes, such as the anti-Semitic portrayal of George Soros as a conspiratorial figure, a narrative prominently used by figures like Viktor Orbán. Neoliberals, too, participated in this search, ultimately identifying their new adversary in the Left’s “march through the institutions” – specifically, movements advocating for gender and racial equality and a “politically correct” discourse. Slobodian emphasizes that this framing of issues like affirmative action and state-led efforts to redress inequality began remarkably early – some 35 years ago. He argues that the Left, too focused on internal critiques of a more mainstream neoliberalism (like that associated with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama), was often “caught off guard” by the “disruptive politics of the last decade,” failing to recognize the emerging “villain” that would ultimately manifest in today’s culture wars.

Slobodian’s methodological approach, as noted by Robles, is characterized by his commitment to “reading against the grain.” He consistently challenges conventional wisdom: if neoliberalism is thought to strive for state dissolution, Globalists shows its reliance on state intervention; if it promotes a borderless society, Crack-up Capitalism highlights its attention to “human separation”; and if the alt-right is seen as a backlash, Hayek’s Bastards frames it as a “frontlash,” an acceleration of the ideology. This “counterintuitive position” is, for Slobodian, a means to explore the profound revelations found within such contradictions. His advice to students – to begin a paper with “We think it’s like this, but it’s actually like that, and I’m going to show you why” – underscores his dedication to empirical evidence and intellectual revision.

He also draws a strong correlation between the 1990s and the 1960s, suggesting that understanding paleo-libertarian interests in hard borders, IQ, and gold necessitates examining earlier debates surrounding the 1965 Immigration Act, 1960s evolutionary psychology, or monetary reform post-Bretton Woods. These two decades, both periods of relative prosperity, represented moments where attempts were made to reconfigure societal settlements. Slobodian contends that the Left’s focus on criticizing a “progressive neoliberalism” (e.g., of the Clinton or Obama era) that paid “lip service” to 1960s social movements while blunting their critical edge meant they were “caught off guard” in 2016. He suggests that identifying what neoliberals “worried about” in a given decade, such as environmental demands disrupting growth models in the 1970s and 1990s, could reveal “vulnerability in the economic system” and “soft spots” for counter-movements to exploit.

Future Horizons: AI, Animals, and the Unseen Hand of Technology

Regarding future inquiries, Robles points to the absence of cryptocurrencies and AI in Hayek’s Bastards. Slobodian confirms these will be explored in his forthcoming book, Muskism, co-authored with Ben Tarnoff, which will delve into AI, effective altruism, and superintelligence. This work is slated for release next year.

However, Slobodian maintains a critical stance on cryptocurrencies, viewing them as “parasitical on a functioning traditional monetary system” and primarily “a hedge-speculative asset” or “plaything for a small number of libertarians and more recently large investors.” He believes his skepticism has been “a wise bet,” as the number of “true believers” in blockchain as a political template remains small, with most investors using crypto like any other growth sector.

Intriguingly, Slobodian’s other new research direction looks not to the digital future, but to a historical “backward” step: the changes in the human sciences in the postwar decades, specifically “How humans became animals at Harvard.” This project will explore the world of figures like Richard Herrnstein (a student of B. F. Skinner) and E. O. Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s, examining how humans were increasingly “analogized to animals.”

In Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian has, with surgical precision, woven a compelling and unsettling thread through the tapestry of intellectual history. He compels us to confront the uncomfortable truths about the origins of our present predicament, reminding us that the seemingly spontaneous outbursts of populism are, in fact, the meticulously cultivated fruits of a long and complex intellectual lineage. One leaves his analysis with a renewed sense of vigilance, a heightened awareness of the subtle, often insidious, ways in which ideas, like the most potent of poisons, can mutate and proliferate, shaping our world in ways we are only now beginning to comprehend. Indeed, the stage is set for future acts in this ongoing drama, and one eagerly awaits Slobodian’s next intellectual curtain call.

“The Cynic & The Dandy” is an AI-generated essay series based on a hypothetical collaboration between Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Arts & Literature, Books, Essays, Literature, Reviews

Literary Essay: “Infinite Interiors – On the Twenty Best Novels of All Time”

The following essay was written by ChatGPT and edited by Intellicurean from an article titled “The 20 best novels of all time” written by Claire Allfree and published in The Telegraph book section on July 6, 2025.

When a culture attempts to consecrate a definitive list of its greatest novels, it risks both an admirable arrogance and a kind of elegiac futility. The recent selection of The 20 Best Novels of All Time, published by The Telegraph, seems at once a celebration of the novel’s inexhaustible possibility and an implicit acknowledgment of our own waning capacity for reading with genuine urgency. It is as though we assemble these canons less to instruct our descendants than to reassure ourselves that we have not entirely forgotten how literature once moved the soul.

One cannot help but admire the breadth and seriousness of this catalogue. It stretches from the dreamlike elegance of The Tale of Genji—a work whose thousand-year distance intensifies its immediacy—to the compulsive self-dissection of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a testament to our age’s faith that self-disclosure can substitute for narrative shape. What holds these disparate texts together is not merely their historical significance but their shared aspiration to render life in all its unmastered perplexity.

If Harold Bloom were to begin here, he might call attention to The Tale of Genji as an early demonstration of what he once termed the “internalization of romance.” It is a book that transcends its courtly gossip to become an inexhaustible study in desire’s transformations, a mirror to the reader’s own fluctuations of attachment and estrangement. We encounter Genji’s erotic restlessness as both scandalous and poignantly familiar, for the novel’s true subject is the incommensurability between longing and fulfillment—an incommensurability that modern fiction has inherited as its principal obsession.

James Wood, by contrast, might focus on Middlemarch as the novelistic apogee of moral realism. Eliot’s genius lay in her refusal to reduce her characters to mere emblems of ideology or historical process. Instead, she endowed them with what Wood has called “free indirect style’s psychic oscillation,” a prose capable of inhabiting and exposing consciousness in the same instant. It is a book that dares to be both panoramic and exquisitely local, to weigh the ambitions of a nation against the disappointments of a single marriage bed. If there is a single argument to be made for the continued relevance of the realist novel, it is that Middlemarch remains more acute about our interiority than any contemporary memoir.

And yet one cannot ignore how this list gestures toward the novel’s capacity for formal subversion. Ulysses, with its irreverent transformations of the Homeric epic into the trivial routines of Dublin, still feels scandalous in its abundance. Joyce’s genius is not only in his linguistic pyrotechnics but in his suspicion that consciousness itself can never be adequately represented. His prose, that shifting mosaic of styles and registers, offers no comfort to the reader who seeks transparency. Instead, it confronts us with the knowledge that the novel’s greatest power may reside in its refusal to cohere.

This refusal—to simplify, to console, to moralize—animates many of the twenty selections. Invisible Man is less a conventional narrative than a hallucinatory initiation into the American underworld of racial invisibility. Ellison’s rhetorical bravado, his blending of surrealism and jeremiad, still outpaces the efforts of more contemporary chroniclers of identity. To read Invisible Man today is to recognize how easily literary radicalism becomes cultural commonplace, but also to remember how singular its achievement remains.

Nor does the list shy from novels that embrace the uncanny. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita may be the most exuberant refutation of realist pieties ever composed. Its supernatural comedy is both a rebuke to Stalinist orthodoxy and a reminder that the imagination is an inherently seditious faculty. If much of the 20th-century novel sought to dismantle the illusions of bourgeois life, Bulgakov’s masterpiece demonstrates that irony and enchantment can be revolutionary forces.

Yet if Bloom were to caution us, he would do so against the temptation to read these novels exclusively as instruments of social critique. Literature endures precisely because it exceeds its momentary political applications. War and Peace is indeed an anatomy of the Napoleonic Wars, but it is more crucially a demonstration of how historical consciousness itself can become an object of artistic inquiry. Tolstoy’s genius was to discover that the novelist’s truest fidelity is not to facts but to the felt perplexity of lived experience.

It is striking how Robinson Crusoe stands at the inception of the English novel, bearing within it the seeds of many later contradictions. Defoe’s narrative is, on the surface, a hymn to industry and resourcefulness. But the same story—of a man claiming dominion over an island—also encodes the imperial impulse, the confidence that the world exists to be measured, catalogued, and possessed. What once seemed the purest adventure has become, to modern readers, an uneasy parable of conquest.

One also encounters here the severe naturalism of Thérèse Raquin, a work whose lurid determinism feels almost an affront to Victorian piety. Zola’s lovers are not tragic in any redemptive sense; they are specimens trapped in an experiment of their own appetites. And yet there is a perverse grandeur in the novel’s refusal to pretend that desire leads anywhere but into the pit.

New Grub Street too is a novel about entrapment—this time not by passion but by commerce. Gissing’s weary chronicling of literary London feels uncannily prophetic, as if he anticipated the rise of every ghostwritten bestseller and every writer forced to commodify a persona. What is most unsettling is that he offers no counterexample: no heroic idealist who transcends the marketplace, no unspoiled domain of “pure” art. In this sense, the book remains an indispensable autopsy of cultural production.

If Zola and Gissing reveal the suffocating material conditions of life, Moby-Dick reveals the existential abyss. No novel is more saturated with the terror of cosmic indifference. Melville’s prose—sometimes biblical, sometimes madcap—collapses the distance between metaphysics and anatomy, making the whale not merely an animal but an emblem of the universe’s mute resistance to comprehension. In Bloom’s phrase, it is the American epic that devours all interpretations, a text that renders the critic humble before its incommensurate ambition.

One finds a different kind of ambition in Party Going, where Henry Green distills modernist unease into something almost glacial. Its stranded revellers, imprisoned in their own frivolity while fog swallows the city below, seem to embody an entire civilization’s failure to apprehend its own decline. The novel is both slight in incident and inexhaustible in implication—a reminder that the modernist fascination with stasis can be as provocative as any narrative pyrotechnics.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time remains the most exhaustive testimony to literature’s faith in consciousness as a world unto itself. No novel before or since has so patiently mapped the minute inflections of memory, the subtle humiliations and triumphs of social life. It is a book that tests the limits of our attention but also rewards it with an intimacy that becomes, paradoxically, universal.

The Great Gatsby, meanwhile, retains its status as a parable of aspiration’s inevitable corrosion. Fitzgerald’s sentences are so lapidary that their loveliness can almost distract from the novel’s acrid judgment. Gatsby’s dream—at once romantic and predatory—has become the template for American self-mythology. That the dream collapses under the weight of its illusions is precisely what grants it the force of prophecy.

It is striking, too, how many of these novels seek to articulate the experience of cultures in collision. Things Fall Apart is the most lucid demonstration of Achebe’s conviction that narrative authority must be reclaimed by those whom empire has consigned to silence. Okonkwo’s tragedy is not only that he fails to adapt but that his story has been written over by the conqueror’s language. Achebe’s triumph is to create a form that both inhabits and transforms that language.

Closer to our own era, The Country Girls quietly ignited a literary insurrection. O’Brien’s candid portrayal of female desire and disillusionment, so scandalous in 1960s Ireland, now seems almost decorous in its gentleness. Yet its influence remains incalculable. It taught a generation of writers that the domestic could be radical, that the most private confessions might unsettle entire cultures.

No less ambitious, though in a different register, is The Golden Notebook. Lessing’s formal fragmentation enacts the very psychic disintegration it describes. Anna Wulf’s notebooks—political, personal, artistic—refuse to reconcile into any coherent identity. In this refusal, Lessing anticipates the confessional experiments of Knausgaard and the autofiction that now dominates so much literary discourse.

The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, is a late testament to literature’s capacity to hover between genres—memoir, travelogue, essay—and to become, in that ambiguity, something more resonant than any of them alone. Sebald’s melancholy is not performative but almost geological: the sorrow of civilizations grinding into dust, of memory dissolving into rumor.

If Sebald writes out of mourning, Knausgaard writes out of a hunger so relentless it often seems pathological. My Struggle is both monument and provocation: an assertion that the granular details of ordinary life deserve the same attention Proust once gave to aristocratic salons. Whether this is a triumph of honesty or a capitulation to narcissism is a question the reader must answer alone.

And then there is Conversations with Friends, whose subdued prose and emotional diffidence reflect an era uneasy with grandeur. Rooney’s novel is not so much plotted as observed: a record of glancing attachments, tentative betrayals, and the provisional negotiations of millennial intimacy. Some will dismiss it as slight, but its cool detachment has a disquieting relevance. It suggests that the novel no longer needs epic ambition to be significant; it need only be exact.

A Closing Reflection

Surveying these twenty novels, we see not a single tradition but a plurality of experiments—each one extending the novel’s reach. To read them is to join a conversation that has never ended, in which each new book answers its predecessors with admiration, dissent, or surpassing ambition. Perhaps that is the most heartening lesson: that literature, in all its contradictions, remains the most durable form we possess for contemplating the inexhaustible strangeness of being alive.

A LIST OF THE BOOKS FROM THE ESSAY AND REVIEW IS BELOW:

  1. The Tale of Genji (1021) – Murasaki Shikibu
    Often called the first novel ever written, this thousand-year-old Japanese masterpiece recounts the romantic adventures of Prince Genji and the inner lives of the women he pursues, offering an exquisite portrayal of courtly love and social intrigue.
  2. The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) – John Bunyan
    A religious allegory composed in prison, telling the story of Christian’s perilous journey to the Celestial City. Simultaneously quest narrative, moral parable, and spiritual confession, it became one of English literature’s most influential texts.
  3. Robinson Crusoe (1719) – Daniel Defoe
    A castaway narrative presented as a true account, blending adventure and colonial ideology. Crusoe’s survival on an island and mastery over his domain has sparked both admiration and fierce debates over its imperialist assumptions.
  4. Moby-Dick (1851) – Herman Melville
    Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of the white whale becomes an existential epic exploring obsession, fate, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Famous for its lyrical prose and encyclopedic digressions on whales and whaling.
  5. Thérèse Raquin (1867) – Émile Zola
    A grim study of adultery and guilt, depicting the murderous passion between Thérèse and her lover, Laurent. Their crime leads to psychological disintegration and ghostly hauntings in this early work of French naturalism.
  6. War and Peace (1867) – Leo Tolstoy
    Tolstoy’s sprawling saga of Russian aristocrats during the Napoleonic Wars interweaves personal transformation with sweeping history, offering a masterful portrait of love, fate, and the forces that shape nations.
  7. Middlemarch (1871) – George Eliot
    Set in a provincial English town, this realist masterpiece follows the intellectual and emotional struggles of Dorothea Brooke and other characters as they confront marriage, ambition, and disappointment.
  8. New Grub Street (1891) – George Gissing
    An unflinching look at the late-Victorian literary marketplace, chronicling the rivalry between idealistic writers and pragmatic hacks, and exploring the compromises required to survive as a professional author.
  9. Ulysses (1922) – James Joyce
    A modernist reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey, set over a single day in Dublin. Famous for its stream-of-consciousness style, linguistic experimentation, and celebration of ordinary life’s hidden richness.
  10. In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) – Marcel Proust
    A monumental seven-volume exploration of memory, time, and desire, chronicling the narrator’s life and the decline of French aristocracy with lush psychological and social detail.
  11. The Great Gatsby (1925) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
    A glittering tragedy of the Jazz Age, centering on the mysterious Jay Gatsby’s doomed pursuit of wealth and love, and exposing the hollowness of the American Dream.
  12. Party Going (1939) – Henry Green
    A surreal, modernist novel about a group of privileged young people stranded in a railway hotel, whose trivial gossip masks a pervasive sense of dread as Europe hovers on the brink of war.
  13. Invisible Man (1952) – Ralph Ellison
    An unnamed Black narrator journeys through racism and disillusionment in America, blending surreal episodes, biting satire, and profound reflections on identity and invisibility.
  14. Things Fall Apart (1958) – Chinua Achebe
    Set in a 19th-century Igbo village, this landmark postcolonial novel traces the cultural collision between indigenous African traditions and British missionaries, through the tragic story of Okonkwo.
  15. The Country Girls (1960) – Edna O’Brien
    The coming-of-age story of two Irish girls escaping their repressive Catholic upbringing, whose quest for independence transformed Irish literature and scandalized conservative audiences.
  16. The Golden Notebook (1962) – Doris Lessing
    An ambitious, formally fragmented narrative about a woman writer dividing her life into separate notebooks—political, personal, creative—and attempting to reconcile them during a breakdown.
  17. The Master and Margarita (1966) – Mikhail Bulgakov
    A satirical fantasy in which the Devil arrives in Stalinist Moscow with a retinue that includes a giant talking cat, exposing the absurdity and cruelty of totalitarian society.
  18. The Rings of Saturn (1995) – W.G. Sebald
    A genre-defying meditation combining travelogue, memoir, history, and philosophy, as a narrator’s walk along the English coast sparks digressions on decay, memory, and loss.
  19. My Struggle (2009–2011) – Karl Ove Knausgaard
    A six-volume autofiction epic chronicling the author’s life in exhaustive detail, from childhood to fatherhood, redefining confessional writing and stirring controversy over privacy and truth.
  20. Conversations with Friends (2017) – Sally Rooney
    A millennial love story about a young Dublin student entangled in an affair with an older married man, written in Rooney’s lucid, understated style that captures the textures of contemporary intimacy.
Essays, Opinion, Politics

‘Populists Are Gaining Power And Keeping It. What Comes Next?’

POLITICO MAGAZINE (April 13, 2025) by Anthony J. Constantini:

In 2017, President Donald Trump was almost the only nationalist populist leader in the West. Liberal democracy — its protection at home and its promotion abroad — was the political default across America and Europe. The United States’ marquee conference for hard-right conservatives, CPAC, featured only one major foreign speaker that year, Britain’s Nigel Farage, who had just resigned as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party after a successful Brexit campaign.

Eight years later, Trump has been joined on the world stage by a plethora of right-wing populists, and nationalism has gone mainstream. CPAC 2025 was a verifiable international event, with guests ranging from Argentina’s President Javier Milei to Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, among many others.

But while it’s clear that nationalism is having a moment, for now it’s just that: a moment.

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Making the West great again will not just aid populists politically. It will do something more important: Inspire Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. Youth throughout America and Europe, instead of being told they are members of a paradisical global society, will be brought up understanding they are part of an ancient and storied civilization. The countries which make up that civilization will have disagreements. But like a family, they will understand that they all share one common, civilizational home.

One worth fighting for.

READ MORE

Anthony J. Constantini writes about foreign policy and international political movements. He is a PhD candidate in American history at the University of Vienna.

Economics, Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essay: ‘Underestimating China’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (April 11, 2025):

Success in great-power competition requires rigorous and unsentimental net assessment. Yet the American estimation of China has lurched from one extreme to the other. For decades, Americans registered blistering economic growth, dominance of international trade, and growing geopolitical ambition, and anticipated the day when China might overtake a strategically distracted and politically paralyzed United States; after the 2008 financial crisis, and then especially at the height of the COVID pandemic, many observers believed that day had come. But the pendulum swung to the other extreme only a few years later as China’s abandonment of “zero COVID” failed to restore growth. Beijing was beset by ominous demographics, once unthinkable youth unemployment, and deepening stagnation while the United States was strengthening alliances, boasting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and other technologies, and enjoying a booming economy with record low unemployment and record high stock markets.

The rise and fall of great powers often begins with flawed self-diagnosis.

A new consensus took hold: that an aging, slowing, and increasingly less nimble China would not overtake an ascendant United States. Washington shifted from pessimism to overconfidence. Yet just as past bouts of defeatism were misguided, so is today’s triumphalism, which risks dangerously underestimating both the latent and actual power of the only competitor in a century whose GDP has surpassed 70 percent of that of the United States. On critical metrics, China has already outmatched the United States. Economically, it boasts twice the manufacturing capacity. Technologically, it dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors and now produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy, bolstered by shipbuilding capacity 200 times as large as that of the United States; vastly greater missile stocks; and the world’s most advanced hypersonic capabilities—all results of the fastest military modernization in history. Even if China’s growth slows and its system falters, it will remain formidable strategically.

Such a commitment is not just a policy, but a signal of the capabilities of the United States, its allies, and partners. The Chinese Communist Party is inordinately focused on perceptions of American power, and a critical input in that equation is its estimation of Washington’s ability to pull in the allies and partners that even Beijing openly admits are the United States’ greatest advantage. Accordingly, the most effective U.S. strategy—the one that has most unsettled Beijing in recent years and can deter its adventurism in the future—is to build new, enduring, and robust capacities with these states. A sustained, bipartisan commitment to an upgraded alliance network, coupled with strategic cooperation in emerging fields, offers the best path forward to finding scale against the most formidable competitor the United States has ever encountered.

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KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chairman and Cofounder of The Asia Group. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

RUSH DOSHI is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

Essays, History, Politics

Essays On America: ‘The Legacy Of The Revolution Is Still Up For Grabs’

BOSTON GLOBE (April 3, 2025) by Ted Widmer:

“O! What a glorious morning is this!”

So Sam Adams is said to have responded to the news of fighting at Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775, arguably the most consequential day in the history of New England.

That day, most agree, marked the beginning of the American Revolution. There had been other acts of violence, by both Britons and Americans, as they jostled over a host of issues relating to Britain’s imperial overreach.

It will be important not only to remember the story but to remember it well. As Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

But in the spring of 1775, low-level squabbling gave way to armies in the field shooting at each other, outside Boston. The so-called “shot heard round the world,” in Emerson’s phrase, was the first volley in a long war, followed by a struggle to establish the 13 Colonies as a coherent nation.

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These ideas were nourished by pamphlets, Election Day sermons, and newspapers — it would be difficult to overstate how important printing and literacy were to the founding generation, especially in Boston. Far from being derided, intellectuals and scientists were critical to the Revolution’s success. One Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, translated his scientific prestige into stunning success as a diplomat to France, our essential ally. Another, Joseph Warren, was a doctor, much admired for his work inoculating patients against smallpox, before he was killed at Bunker Hill.

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Ted Widmer, a consulting editor for this special issue of Globe Ideas, is the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.” He helped to create the George Washington Book Prize, awarded annually to a book about the founding era.

Essays, Physics, Science

Science Essays: ‘The Stagnation Of Physics’

AEON MAGAZINE (April 1, 2025) by Adrien De Sutter:

Browse a shelf of popular science books in physics and you’ll often find a similar theme. Whether offering insights into The Hidden Reality (2011), Something Deeply Hidden (2019) or Our Mathematical Universe (2014), these books hint at an underlying, secret world waiting to be unravelled by physicists – a domain beyond our sensory perception that remains their special purview.

‘It’s akin to knowing everything about sand dunes … but not knowing what a grain of sand is made of’

Over its history, physics has delivered elegant and accurate descriptions of the physical Universe. Today, however, the reality physicists work to uncover appears increasingly removed from the one they inhabit. Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics – a reality to unify all others. As such, physicists appear forced to entertain increasingly speculative propositions.

Yet, with no obvious avenues to verify such speculations, physicists are left with little option but to repeat similar approaches and experiments – only bigger and at greater cost – in the hope that something new may be found. Seemingly beset with a sense of anxiety that nothing new will be found or that future experiments will reveal only further ignorance, the field of fundamental physics is incentivized to pursue ever more fanciful ideas.

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It may even require that we abandon doing physics altogether, in the attainment of an expanded reality that not only accepts but encourages the possibility of difference and more. Or, as the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin once put it, what we require are ‘the realists of a larger reality’.

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Adrien De Sutter completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany. An interdisciplinary researcher specialising in science and technology studies and the history and philosophy of science, he focuses on the philosophical, sociological and political implications of fundamental physics research.

Economics, Essays, Politics

Political Essay: ‘America’s Future Is Hungary’

ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (March 31, 2025) :

lashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year.

Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Society

‘Sweden Has A Big Problem’

THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION (March 28, 2025):

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

On Aug. 12, 2004, celebratory headlines festooned the pages of Swedish newspapers, hailing a huge milestone: On that day a baby would be born as the nine millionth Swede. After years of fretting over declining birthrates, a modest increase in babies born and, crucially, robust migration had pushed that sprawling but lightly populated nation over a longed-for threshold.

In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.

Twenty years later, almost exactly to the day, the Swedish government trumpeted a very different achievement: More people were leaving Sweden than were migrating to it. By the end of the year, a country that had long celebrated its status as a refuge for people fleeing war and repression was touting the fact that fewer people had been granted asylum in Sweden than in any year since comparable records have been kept. To the government, led by the center-right Moderate Party and backed by the hard-line anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, this retrenchment was nothing but a good thing.

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In opening itself up to these questions, Sweden is taking a big gamble. It’s also saying something about itself. “Migration is a bellwether phenomenon,” the sociologist Hein de Haas, a leading scholar of migration, told me. “If you look at the bigger picture, isn’t this growing fear of immigrants showing the lack of confidence of Western societies?”

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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist at The New York Times.

Economics, Essays, Opinion, Politics

‘Make Europe Great Again’

NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE (March 27, 2025) by David Frost:

Just over five years ago, shortly after Boris Johnson won a decisive election victory in Britain and two weeks after Britain finally left the European Union, I gave a speech in Brussels titled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe.”

It hit many British front pages the next day. Partly that was because the speech set out Britain’s uncompromising negotiating position for the next stage of the Brexit talks. But equally it was because it was the first attempt to set out and give renewed intellectual legitimacy to the cause of leaving the EU and of reviving British nationhood. I wanted the British people to hear, after years of being told that to leave the EU was to vote against the modern world, that there was in fact a rational, reputable, and practically deliverable case for national independence. And I wanted Europeans to understand our thinking properly and consider what it meant for them too.

I argued that what we were seeing in Europe was a clash of two revolutions in governance. The first was the creation of the EU itself. As I put it, this was “the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648: a new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation-states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance.”

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I don’t of course expect many in Europe to heed my call. The recent European thrashing around on geopolitics, and the refusal to face Europe’s relative impotence to affect outcomes in Ukraine, suggest that the current leadership of most European countries is unable to see things straight or do more than respond to day-to-day challenges. But the problems will not go away. If conservatives don’t put forward their own clear vision for Europe, then the instinctual movements of the EU and its leaders will dominate. European conservatives are unlikely then to find themselves in a “nation called Europe,” but they will be in a political construct that by design will stop them from fulfilling their conservative goals. The sooner they face up to that, the better. Changing things is, after all, a major task. It took the EU 70 years to get to this point. It will take a long time to reverse it. Better start soon.

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This article appears as “For a Conservative Europe” in the May 2025 print edition of National Review.

David Frost – Lord Frost of Allenton was the minister for EU relations and chief negotiator for Brexit in Boris Johnson’s government. He is now a Conservative Party member in Britain’s House of Lords. His essay is an edited version of a speech given at the Danube Institute, Budapest, on March 4.

Essays, Language, Philosophy, Psychology

Language: ‘Metaphors Make Life An Adventure’

Psyche Magazine (March 25, 2025) by Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley

Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words

Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
– from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer

Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
– from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer

Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive – to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.

This was among the more important claims made by Susanne K Langer (1895-1985), a neglected American philosopher now experiencing a revival. Langer began her career when the analytic approach was in its formative stages. Women philosophers were rare, and women philosophers specialising in logic were an anomaly. However, the argument she made in her bestselling Philosophy in a New Key (1941) – that music and the other arts bear logical insights that language, science and mathematics can’t capture – served to marginalise her from a philosophical establishment that was, by then, hostile to women. One of Langer’s students, Arthur Danto, later explained why he rarely cited her: in graduate school he picked up that she was regarded as ‘poison’ to a philosophical career.

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One of Langer’s legacies is to help us see that language – to stay fresh, to keep step – needs words to be ‘incorrigible weasels’, double agents. Words mean more than we can say, which lets us say new things with old words. Metaphor, Langer reminds us, is what makes ‘human life an adventure in understanding’.

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Sue Curry Jansen is professor emeritus of media and communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her books include Walter Lippmann (2012) and Stealth Communications (2016).

Jeff Pooley is a research associate and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of mediastudies.press. His books include James W Carey and Communication Research (2016) and the co-edited Society on the Edge (2021).