Blueprints

The Hungarian historian Balázs Trencsényi’s new book Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond offers a transnational excavation of Europe’s crisis discourses, written by a scholar whose own trajectory mirrors the destabilizations he studies. Craiutu argues that by shifting attention from Western Europe to the “peripheries,” Trencsényi recovers forgotten debates and intellectual networks that complicate reassuring binaries between East and West or national and global frames. The result is a multifocal history of European political thought that reveals how the dilemmas of liberal democracy have been most sharply felt—and most imaginatively contested—on the margins.

“One of the main theses of the book is that framing an event as a ‘crisis’ is never a neutral act. Crisis discourses are tools that can be easily abused or weaponized, depending on one’s political agenda. They have significant normative implications and may be used as cathartic mechanisms of creative destruction or, on the contrary, as means of radicalizing existing conflicts. Sometimes, crisis discourses are mere speech acts, seeking to mobilize one audience or another. At other times, they trigger challenges to political regimes. Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin interpreted the social and political crises of their respective times as omens of future revolutions. In other instances, however, crises do not involve a total breakdown of the existing regime but point out opportunities for innovation and structural reform.”

Salami argues that African feminism should not be understood as a “report card” on women’s suffering, but is, in fact, a rich political philosophy that interrogates the very meanings of Africa, feminism, and being itself, challenging colonial educational legacies and the paradoxes that structure feminist thought. Patriarchy in Africa remains deeply rooted—as well as distinct from Western capitalist male dominance—and both nation-states and development-sector “Gender and Development” frameworks often obscure or dilute radical feminist aims. Salami calls for African feminism to build a new language, clarify its own intellectual history, and engage deeply with ideas—rather than tokenistic representation—as the path toward genuine transformation and freedom.

“So, language is something that I want or hope that this book inspires more feminists to engage with. If we think for example of a word like ‘sexism’—it was invented in the 1960s or seventies—and it’s not that women didn’t experience sexism prior to that age, obviously, they did to a greater measure than ever. But the tremendous aid of having that word in order to create new legislation, in order to describe experiences that we have as women and how harmful they are. … What I was motivated to do in the book is to create a new lexicon of sorts with which we can counter the nation- state, oppressive laws, or narratives, whatever it might be, but to have those words or the beginnings for a lexicon with which we can then understand and address those things.”

Farrell argues that the British-Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner’s classical-liberal concept of civil society—a historically contingent space of voluntary, pluralistic associations that can restrain the state—is essential for understanding today’s authoritarian turn on the American right. Farrell defines civil society emphasizing Gellner’s notion of “modular” social life, according to which individuals can freely join and exit associations that remain independent of both government and kinship structures. He stresses that this fragile form of civil liberty arose only through a rare historical stalemate and is now threatened by political movements seeking to capture or destroy the autonomous institutions that make pluralism possible.

“From Gellner’s perspective, civil society is an essential underpinning of our current way of life. The worry is that it is not universally essential. Other ways of organizing society, many of which would strike us as wicked or miserable, can be maintained without it. Indeed, maintaining civil society may be a continual challenge. Civil society requires the management of nationalism (some sense of national identity is good, to mitigate more immediate sources of partiality, but not too much). So too for the market system: ‘a liberation of the market from political control would be catastrophic.’ Civil society may be burdensome to the individual: in many respects, living in a modular world is far more demanding than living in a society where you know exactly what role you are supposed to play. Yet its benefits, in the eyes of those who have adopted its norms at least, are enormous.”

An expert panel of geologists determined that the “Anthropocene” doesn’t qualify as a geological epoch, but the debate over whether it does ultimately exposes deeper confusion about how we conceptualize humanity’s ecological entanglements. With the formal definition of Anthropocene no longer anchored to a geological verdict, we have a chance to reconsider how to conceptualize human impact on the earth. Rather than fixating on competing origin stories or single, exclusive causes, Lähde suggests approaching it as a long, uneven historical process unfolding across many timescales. Indeed, the Anthropocene might be better understood as a different geological term.

“The notion of the Anthropocene as an event, as a long-term process, allows us to keep in mind different rhythms of history at the same time: environmental changes that have roots closer to the surface and those that dig deeper. Why on Earth should anything so complex as our ecological peril have one root cause? This is what roots do, dig into many directions at the same time. This does not let anyone or anything ‘off the hook,’ it means that we have to be mindful of both the younger and the older roots of our predicament, to look at a plethora of root causes.”