It is a supreme honor to feature Martin Jay, a legendary figure in European intellectual history. Marty (as he is known by the legions who revere him) blazed trails in his early work reconstructing the history of the Frankfurt School, which shaped how intellectuals came to read critical theory. It also inspired a decades-long comradeship with the recently passed Jürgen Habermas. There has been a blizzard of obituaries of the great philosopher of the public square, but Jay here offers something different: colorful personal reminiscences that spotlight Habermas’s great talent not only for critique but for listening.
The historian Sarah Miller-Davenport takes up Zohran Mamdani’s promise to rebuild a social democratic New York by reverting to a worker-centered New Deal liberalism. She argues that the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s impelled grim, austere neo-liberalism but that Mamdani’s affinity to Fiorello La Guardia, NYC’s New Deal mayoral hero, suggests a humane alternative to market rule. Just short of 100 days into Mamdani’s stewardship, the jury’s out: Is this the road back to worker power?
The distinctive voice of Afra Wang has been in our pages before; here, she takes up the idea of “jailbreaking,” as both an actual act and a metaphor for how technological peripheries innovate by challenging, copying, and reassembling what the center produces. Wang’s piece made me recall the thesis of the historian James Billington, whose magisterial The Icon and the Axe considered the history of Russian culture through the frame of borrowing, adaptation, and then radical innovation. Perhaps peripheries have always been destined to do exactly that, whether in technology or in culture?
Leading off our curated section, Alani Golanski has long paired his legal practice with a passion for philosophy and literature. In a law review essay, Golanski asks how the law itself can be distinguished from the rule of law and asserts that we should consider different conceptions, not one fixed approach. Golanski is skeptical of tying the law to moral ideals because the rule of law then ceases its critical function and in the end criticality should triumph.
Jordana Timerman, the managing editor of The Ideas Letter, is a Buenos Aires–based journalist. In a piece marking the fiftieth anniversary of the start of Argentina’s dirty war (which lasted until 1983), she relates the national tradition of historical memory that defines—and, under the presidency of Javier Milei, tests—the meaning of her country’s democracy. Never forget? For Timerman, that credo has been ritualized.
My OSF colleague Brian Kagoro is next up with a spirited and thoughtful interview about forms of development in Africa. Kagoro has had a storied career working across the continent on issues of justice, development, democracy, and all in between. His wise yet sharp counsel is everywhere evident in the discussion.
Finally, Martin Plaut looks squarely and provocatively at the thorny issue of reparations and wonders why current demands target Western states exclusively. Plaut suggests that this framing is historically incomplete because slavery was not only a European or Atlantic system; it also long involved African, Arab, Ottoman, and Indian participation.
At the time China tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, the tenor titan Dexter Gordon was in the recording studio testing an explosion of his own: an eighteen-minute, full-album-side blues masterpiece entitled “Tanya.” Dexter was never as harmonically febrile as John Coltrane or as mesmerizing a storyteller as Sonny Rollins, but his large sound and laid-back romanticism had considerable power. It’s hard to find a modal blues more “in the pocket” than this.
—Leonard Benardo, vice president at the Open Society Foundations
Martin Jay’s Habermas
Martin Jay
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Habermas’s legacy endures not only because of his defense of deliberative democracy: He also set an example of the engaged intellectual who treats public argument as a shared, open-ended search for truth rather than a partisan performance. In this reminiscence, Jay credits Habermas with combining theoretical ambition, civic commitment, and an extraordinary capacity to listen—with a distinctive talent for absorbing opposing arguments, reconstructing them generously, and keeping the conversation going.
“There was, to borrow one of Habermas’s own favorite polemical ploys, no ‘performative contradiction’ between his theory of ‘communicative action’ and his own role as a public intellectual. The former placed enormous value on the intersubjective exchange of ideas without regard for the status or power asymmetry of their proponents in the hope that the better argument would prove persuasive. The latter manifested in a lifetime of interventions in the most urgent issues of the day, where the continuity between his most refined theoretical work and his advocacy of specific political positions can be readily discerned.”
Mamdani Lands at LaGuardia
Sarah Miller-Davenport
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Zohran Mamdani’s victory is often cast as a generational shift, but Miller-Davenport places it within a longer history of New York’s political economy. She traces how the city’s fiscal crisis in 1975 dismantled a robust social democratic urban order and installed a model of governance shaped by finance, austerity, and the disciplining of labor. Mamdani’s appeal, she suggests, lies in his effort to recover an older tradition that once defined the city—and to challenge the idea that it was ever foreclosed.
“Mamdani’s self-identification as a socialist, a position once assumed to make a mayoral candidate unelectable, even in New York, has only amplified his success with younger voters. Most of them likely know nothing of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, but they have lived in its shadow. Educated young professionals, once the beneficiaries of the neoliberal turn in New York and elsewhere, find themselves increasingly vulnerable to the instabilities wrought by market forces beyond their control. The historical shifts precipitated by the city’s fiscal crisis ultimately came for them as well, even if others bore their consequences more painfully and immediately. The global financial crisis in 2008 made clear, among other things, that Wall Street’s culture of risk-taking was disastrous for all but the few for whom it was staggeringly lucrative.”
The Center and The Periphery
Afra Wang
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Wang positions China’s recent technological ascent in a long tradition of improvisation, repair, and rule-bending born of scarcity and unequal access to global systems. Consider pirated software and modded Apple devices but also AI distillation and industrial scale, she argues, and the line between copying and innovating looks unstable throughout history: Invention often builds on imitation.
“The center and the periphery of technology are temporary coordinates, sustained by incumbency and institutional memory and the story that the center tells about itself. What moves the center and the periphery is the accumulated pressure of small, repeated acts: a teenager dragging a lock bar across a screen, a little chip 贴片 improvising connectivity from underneath a SIM card, a machine blueprint rebuilt from memory in a country that was told it could not have one, a model weight distilled from a frontier system by engineers working at the margin with incomplete access and abundant ingenuity.”
Conceptions of Law, Ideology, and the Rule of Law
Alani Golanski
Hofstra Law Review
Journal Article
Golanski argues that we must analytically distinguish the law from the rule of law. Pivoting away from abstract definitions, he proposes a more “bottom-up“ interpretation, in which the rule of law is debated critically, allowing underlying forms of oppression and power to be exposed.
“The regulative conception of law in turn grounds both (1) an openness to the ways in which people actually experience what they understand to be their legal system, in addition to and apart from the ways in which theorists conceptualize whether a legal system exists in various settings, and (2) a well-motivated and multifaceted perspective on the rule of law. While mainstream scholarship views the rule of law construct generally as instilling norms that sustain stable governance, critics have often pointed to its vulnerability, particularly in its rule by law guise, to being exploited in service of ruling ideologies. This article contends that, far less appreciated, the rule of law project can be conducive in its moral evaluative commitments to an oppositional ideology in service of democratic agency and an ameliorative social function.”
The Liturgy of Memory
Jordana Timerman
Buenos Aires Herald
Essay
Argentina’s post-dictatorship democracy has been anchored in a shared language of memory that came to function as a kind of civic foundation. That democratic consensus was long capable of containing deeper political and social fractures, but these are now being exposed by the Milei government’s open challenges to the institutional and symbolic commitment against the human rights violations of the dictatorship.
“Memoria, Verdad y Justicia began as a demand addressed to power. Over time it also became something else: a narrative through which democracy tells the story of its own origins. … And like all inherited stories, its meaning is never entirely fixed. Traditions survive not because they eliminate disagreement, but because they provide a framework within which disagreement can take place. The rituals remain. The march returns each year. The words are still the same. … But the country that pronounces them is not quite the same one that first gave them their force. The question each anniversary poses is not whether the past can be settled, but whether we are still willing to be unsettled by it.”
Rethinking Africa’s Development
Brian Kagoro
African Renaissance Podcast
Podcast
Kagoro argues that Africa’s “crisis of development” isn’t about scarcity so much as a failure to transform colonial structures into systems of collective-wealth creation, which have been compounded by what he calls “debt alcoholism”—short-term borrowing detached from any long-term development strategy. Claims for reparations for slavery aren’t moral appeals but calls for the repayment of a historical debt—which continues to sharpen inequality in the global financial and ecological conditions under which Africa is still forced to borrow today. Kagoro argues that the continent’s predicament is mis-allocated power and unrealized capacity. A meaningful transformation will require unlocking domestic capital, restructuring institutions, and leveraging collective African agency.
“Struggle does not happen because it looks possible. Struggle happens because it is just. If you don’t remedy the historical and continuing treatment of Black people—whether as migrants or as Africans—these same forces will continue to abuse you in your own countries. … I’m not saying ‘give us’—let me give you a sense. When you go to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and raise the question of equity vis-à-vis Black ownership, what are you saying? Are you asking for charity? When you raise the issue of reparations in South Africa—remember, reparations include land—when you say, we want our land back, what are you asking for? A handout? Of course you know what will happen: the moment you say we’re going to take the land, you get the kind of reaction we saw in the White House … But that is the nature of the struggle.”
Widening the Reparations Debate
Martin Plaut
The Round Table
Journal Article
Plaut argues that the reparations debate should not only focus on Europe and the transatlantic slave trade but be widened to include other societies that also took part in enslaving Africans over centuries. At the same time, he suggests that any serious discussion of justice must confront the fact that forms of slavery still exist in parts of Africa today.
“… It is incumbent on Europeans and Americans to treat the claims of Africans and members of the African diaspora with greater seriousness. This is not the place to unpick the lasting harm that enslavement inflicted on Africa’s peoples, a scar that is to be found wherever its people now reside. Just as others need to address the question, so too does the West.”