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Social democracy may be the solution to the problems of some fortunate subset of individual nations, but it is not a solution for the world as such—that is, to collective global problems and to the problems of poorer nations around the globe today. Instead, social democracy—so I argue in a forthcoming publication—fundamentally hinges on the preservation of difference, and in many cases the active production and acceleration of differences between nations, for internal, nationally-bounded ends.[1] Social democracy is, finally, about furthering the well-being of a nation’s own citizens—and by extension, a given state’s own national interests. If everyone were to become a high-functioning Nordic welfare-capitalist society, for instance, the difference-reliant components inherent to the social-democratic model of political economy would in short order begin to break down.

I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consult the draft here)[1], which is about how societies deal with crime and punishment, and how they structure the policymaking processes around crime control and imprisonmnet. That might not sound very abstruse, but, alas, it is (for substantially defensible reasons, I  claim).

Dwight Garner (2023), The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

There’s much jocularity in The Upstairs Delicatessen, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s witty, if meandering, literary-cultural commentary on two seemingly unlikely topics: novels and eating. Garner’s Delicatessen, as the subtitle lightheartedly proclaims, is a book “on eating, reading, reading about eating, & eating while reading.” But while nominally weighing in on literature and food, the book is also a poignant meditation on meatier topics, like class, culture, place, and power.

Israel cannot continue its war on Gaza indefinitely—not so much owing to grueling moral quandaries or unbearable ethical qualms, but due to strictly fiscal and macroeconomic concerns, with all the political-economic consequences that an expensive war must have for both Israeli society and state in...

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023). The War That Must Not Occur (translated by Malcolm Debevoise). Stanford University Press.

What is the “war that must not occur” of which the French philosopher and Stanford professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy speaks? All wars are aberrations best avoided, of course, manmade errors in the universe’s (at times overlong) arc bending toward justice, but there is one impermissible mistake that stands above all others: the ever-present, ghoulish specter of nuclear war.

Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a terrible, and untenable, human cost, with UN Secretary General António Guterres repeatedly calling for a ceasefire and determining that Israel was responsible for “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.[1] After nearly a month of war, some 9,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, largely involving a combination of airstrikes and mortar attacks, including white phosphorus artillery shells, according to Amnesty International, “which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful.”[2]

Shadi Bartsch (2023), Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.

Shadi Bartsch, a Classics professor at the University of Chicago, has written an interesting, if uneven, book that starts as a study of the reception of the Western classical tradition in Chinese public discourse, before veering off into something far more ambitious and, perhaps as a result, hazy and ill-defined: A mapping out of what one might call contemporary Chinese ideology, the convergence of Confucianism and state socialism in the era of Xi Jinping, and its rhetorical appropriation of parts of the Western tradition.

Joseph Vogl (2022), Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.

What is the relationship between information, financial capitalism, social media, and the “new” right, from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, from Orbánto Trump and the emerging “national conservative” movement in Britain? In this book, originally published in German in 2021, Joseph Vogl, professor of modern German literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, argues that we live in an age characterized by ressentiment, in which both Silicon Valley and liberalized financial capital play decisive roles.

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023). On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12723/nixons-madness.

In a global system of (supposedly) rational international actors, could an irrational feint—pretending to mercuriality, slouching towards unpredictability—constitute a higher form of rationality than “pure reason” alone? In On Nixon’s Madness, the historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson takes a closer look at the famed “madman theory,” and its apparent progenitor, President Richard Milhous Nixon.

Observers of Donald Trump’s presidency will recall similarities between DJT and Nixon’s apparent policy posture: Keep your enemies on their toes by faking a kind of absolute volatility. In Trump’s case, threatening to derail the special relationship with South Korea, or pull out of NATO (to extract concessions in defense spending from European member states), have been chalked up to the madman theory in action: Trump wouldn’t really have pulled the plug, so the conventional wisdom goes—or would he? This “X factor,” this uncertainty about the genuineness of the feint—in essence a question about authenticity, representation, and stagecraft—is what is supposed to make the madman theory’s corollaries such a powerful foreign policy instrument.

Introduction

A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a term that was appropriated and “sociologized” by Max Weber; it was the French mid-20th century sociologist Raymond Aron who expressly coined the term sociodicy, even though it was his student and collaborator Pierre Bourdieu who became its most famous and frequent exponent. On Bourdieu’s usage, sociodicies are narratives that try to shield dominant social strata from criticism over inequalities, hierarchy, domination, and social suffering (that is, pain and distress originating from the social order rather than individual pathology). To take just one example: The idea of social mobility has functioned as a powerful sociodicy in U.S. society, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999: 51) point out, justifying the existence of significant inequalities on the grounds that any one individual has the (theoretical) possibility of climbing up the social ladder—even if this possibility is, in reality, largely illusory.