The Ideas Letter

Raymond Geuss is one of the most erudite political philosophers of our day. Entering his ninth decade this December, Geuss’s modest 1981 book The Idea of a Critical Theory has had an outsized influence on how we understand (from an analytic perspective) the power of Continental philosophy. Today, Geuss may be better known for his indictment of liberal political ideas and his revulsion at moralizing of any kind, especially that proffered by titans like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, who see justice or rational deliberation as desiderata of the open society. Power and ideology play a far more decisive role in Geuss’s analysis, as does political realism.

In his essay for The Ideas Letter, originally presented as a talk in China, Geuss argues that all this yammering about the polycrisis is missing what’s at stake: Western civilization is undergoing a systemic breakdown. This is not some series of overlapping crises but a general dissolution of the Western way of life, in which the ideational “carapace” of Western civilization is “fatally cracked.” Is there any hope left? Or, as was once prophesied by the Sex Pistols, is there “no future, no future, no future for you?”

After Geuss’s stiff drink, JS Tan and Emily Mazo restore our faith by explaining that resistance is alive in the belly of the beast—corporate AI. And this isn’t your mother’s tech-workers’ resistance, but a new form of labor politics taking shape in an industry reshaped by layoffs and starkly unequal bargaining power. Instead of a unified tech worker movement, two distinct labor politics are now forming: one rooted in deteriorating material conditions and the other in the catastrophism stoked by generative AI.

Noortje Marres, a student of Bruno Latour,