'Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.’ This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in ...

Elections in Poland.

During this year’s protests against the Eurozone’s austerity measures—in Greece and, on a smaller scale, Ireland, Italy and Spain—two stories have imposed themselves.footnote 1 The predominant, ...

Icoined the term ‘antisystemic movement’ in the 1970s in order to have a formulation that would group together what had, historically and analytically, been two distinct and in many ways rival kinds ...

What follows is rather like the famous courtroom scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947).footnote 1 In that noir allegory of proletarian virtue in the embrace of ruling-class decadence, ...

Labour productivity took off, as farms came to resemble open-air factories. Given the limits to the growth of the demand for agricultural outputs, the sector then shed workers at an incredible pace.

It is hard to define his mood exactly, but Karl Marx was certainly elated around the time of his twenty-sixth birthday in May 1844. He was living in Paris, newly married; his daughter, Jenny, was just ...

The same bifurcation, however, can be found on the Left. If we look at great modern historians of the Left, we find complete indifference to the role of ideas in Fernand Braudel, contrasted with ...

In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the army general Stumm von Bordwehr asks, ‘How can those directly involved in what’s happening know ...

It has become a staple of conventional wisdom that global economic power is shifting inexorably towards the East and the South. Many insist that we are on the brink of a world-historic rebalancing ...

In times like these, the very appearance of an essay like Oliver Eagleton’s offers a glimmer of hope.footnote 1 His critique of my work is both historically conscious and generous towards the often ...

Back in 2011, as the political effects of the Great Recession were just beginning to appear, Peter Mair wrote about an emerging divide in European party systems between ‘parties which claim to ...