Tim Barker A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism by Jairus Banaji (2020) Capitalism is either eternal or it isn’t. There are people who defend the first view, or something close to it – the 2014 multivolume Cambridge History of Capitalism opens in Babylonia, circa 1000 BCE – but it is much more plausible that capitalism, like most… Read More Transition Theory
Review of Susan Buck-Morss, Year One: A Philosophical Recounting Buck-Morss imagines universal history outside of its traditional parochialism. By Nasrin Olla Philosophers of the enlightenment such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel imagined their projects as universal in reach and scale. Whether these philosophers were writing about the social contract, the foundations of moral law or… Read More Year One: A Philosophical Recounting
Eric Bennett First posted April 26, 2018 NB: This comment on the issues connected to ‘multi-culturalism’ and ‘deconstruction’ is written about American literary and media studies departments, but is relevant in other continents. DS Now that we have a culture of higher education in which business studies dominate; now that we face legislatures blind to the… Read More Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem
J.J. Charlesworth Capitalism is making us mentally ill because we’ve all accepted its new message – that our freedom can be found in our constant self-realisation, which turns out to be our never- ending self-exploitation. That’s the driving message of Byung-Chul Han’s newly translated extended essay (it’s 130 pages long), but its bleak diagnosis of… Read More Topology of Violence, by Byung-Chul Han
First posted January 13, 2013 NB: These extracts are from the Book within a Book in Chapter 9 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; first published in 1949. Sixty fours years later, the dystopian vision contained in the book throws light on the contemporary world, its fascination with war, violence and the fanatical ideologies that justify a continuous system of thought… Read More Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace
First posted September 13, 2017 While Hindu-right organisations, under the patronage of the Narendra Modi government, are claiming spaces within the spectrum of associations with instrumental roles to play in the India’s nationalist movement, the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) – the primary government-sponsored institution for funding historical research and publications – has found itself… Read More Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta: ICHR Blocks Manuscript on Freedom Struggle Because It Makes the Sangh Look Bad, Alleges Historian
Literature once filled in archival gaps by saying the unsayable. Now a younger generation is devising new modes of telling the story and finding new stories to tell. By Parul Sehgal Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying… Read More Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition
The English novel at the end of the 19th century had a problem, and that problem was French. Emile Zola had thrown the first stone. In his 1875 manifesto, Le Roman Experimental, the prominent French novelist insisted that in order to survive the industrial age the novel would have to turn away from the charms of… Read More Why Turgenev Remains One of the Most Important Russian Writers
Papyrus by Irene Vallejo review – how books built the world What do you give the queen who has everything? When Mark Antony was wondering how to impress Cleopatra in the run-up to the battle of Actium in 31BC, he knew that jewellery would hardly cut it. The queen of the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt… Read More The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
Deeply researched and lucidly written, Gandhi’s Assassin does a good job in its portraiture of Nathuram Godse and in reporting details of the plot to kill MK Gandhi NB: The murder of Gandhiji has been immersed in ideological sophistry ever since 1948. Thousands of Sangh Parivar allies celebrate his assassination on the one hand (especially… Read More Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha
After the truth-shower 