NLR 127

editorial
NLR EditorsOn Sidecar

Introducing the NLR’s new blog, and a selection of its offerings—critical takes on politics and culture from Russia to Myanmar, Vietnam to Washington DC. A short-form, high-frequency extension of the journal online.

articles
Dylan RileyLockdown Limbo

Personal-sociological reflections on a pandemic year. From hospital consulting room to virtual seminar, rural Kentucky to affluent Berkeley, household isolation as division of labour, and appearances and realities of the wider social order.

Cihan TuğalTurkey at the Crossroads?

Reconfiguration of the AKP regime, amid domestic upheaval, economic turbulence, regional devastation and a growing gravitational pull from Eurasia. Contrasts and continuities of Erdoğan’s militarized foreign policy with the liberal-Islamic formula lauded by the West.

Alexander ZevinA Proudhon For Postmoderns?

The politics of inequality in Thomas Piketty’s monumental Capital and Ideology. Enthusiasms and blind spots of ‘participatory socialism’, consensus and counter-movement, read as a 21st-century iteration of the tradition that descends from Proudhon and Polanyi, against the background hum of r > g.

Claire DebucquoisRed Hands

If the new iconoclasm has summoned objections about erasure of the past, what sort of history does statuary impose on public spaces? An examination of the Congolese predations memorialized in Brussels’s effigy to Leopold II.

Nancy FraserClimates of Capital

Against mere environmentalism, Nancy Fraser places global heating within a general interlocking social crisis. History and theory of capital’s contradictory relation to nature, and the necessity of combined struggle over energy, labour, politics and care, in the latest instalment of NLR’s eco-strategy debate.

reviews
Caution, Metaphors At Work

Francis Mulhern on James Wood, Serious Noticing. The literary critic as arbiter of ‘lifeness’, in a wide-ranging collection of essays.

Vicious, Horrible People

Oliver Eagleton on Owen Jones, This Land. A participant-observer provides a partial view of the manoeuvrings behind Corbyn’s defeat.

Colliding Particles

Jacob Collins on Bernard Harcourt, Critique & Praxis. A challenge to critical theory to return to its world-changing mission.