Robert S. Leventhal Lou Salomé was undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and articulate women of her era. Her own writing, especially her essays on sexuality and erotism, have value not merely in their historical reflection of the era in which they were written, but in their own right as documents of radical femininity in the… Read More Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Chronicle of a Relationship 1882
Trent Dalton On 10 January 2000 I started my first job in journalism at the Brisbane News. I was 20 years old, a starry-eyed rube from suburban Bracken Ridge who didn’t even know what a flat white was. On my first day my editor had the rest of the journos join us at a cafe to welcome… Read More I thought I was too cool for love. My rock idol knew better
Inspired by Che Guevara, Jean Ziegler has spent the past 60 years exposing how Switzerland enabled global wrongdoing. His enemies accuse him of treason Ziegler would use the term “secondary imperialism” to define his country’s modus operandi. This was not the first-order French, British or, later, American imperialism… It was a more discreet kind of… Read More ‘Here lives the monster’s brain’: the man who exposed Switzerland’s dirty secrets
Gareth Dale Hungarian social theorist Karl Polanyi is best known for his exploration of the collapse of liberal institutions that occurred between 1914 and 1945. His book, The Great Transformation, traces the catastrophes of those decades to the globalisation of market liberalism. In his view, the attempt by liberal social engineers to establish a “self-regulated” market… Read More The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is a classic critique of capitalism – but it wasn’t an overnight success
Laura Kipnis Agnes Callard doesn’t just admire Socrates, the philosopher forced by his fellow Athenians to drink hemlock in 399 BCE; she wants to be him. Entirely conscious of himself as an icon, Callard writes, Socrates “presented himself as a person one can become.” Following in his path, she styles herself as the sort of… Read More Is Agnes Callard Making You Uncomfortable?
By Jairus Banaji Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981), left Germany for the US when he was 22. Mattick saw the revolutions in Russia and China as ‘not proletarian revolutions in the Marxist sense, leading to the “association of free and equal producers”, but state-capitalist revolutions, which were objectively unable to issue into socialism’. ‘Marxism served here… Read More Paul Mattick Sr. (1904–1981)
It is difficult to imagine today how strongly the reaction in the public was against Fischer’s challenge of a deeply entrenched national myth… the warning he wanted to give to younger historians was to avoid national partiality and not to identify the writing of history with nationalist causes or government politics. He lived his advice.… Read More Professor Fritz Fischer (1908 – 1999)
An excerpt from Adman Madman by Rupangi Sharma and Prahlad Kakar NB: Prahlad and I go back sixty-three years, so he is among the few l can classify as chaddi dost. I first saw him in knickers and hairy legs when his mum, a friend of my parents, brought him to the Sainik School Kunjpura… Read More Memoir: Prahlad Kakar and Dilip Simeon: A Friendship in the Shadow of the Naxals
The name of the book clearly suggests that it is part of a glorification drive for Modi. We need to ask whether it is appropriate to use university resources for this campaign. Apoorvanand The vice-chancellor (VC) of Delhi University, Yogesh Singh, last week exhorted the audience at a program in the conference hall of the university to think about giving… Read More A Controversial ‘Book Launch’ and Delhi University’s Descent Into Party Propaganda
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption Philipp Felsch, translated by Daniel Bowles Reviewed by Morten Høi Jensen In 1935, the Russian-born philosopher Dimitry Gawronsky wondered how it could be that Nietzsche was held to be “the pioneer, the ideological founder of the Third Reich” at the same time that he… Read More Operation Nietzsche
After the truth-shower 