Progressive Geographies

Irene Cheng, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America – University of Minnesota Press, August 2023

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a utopian impulse flourished in the United States through the circulation of architectural and urban plans predicated on geometrically distinct designs. Though the majority of such plans remained unrealized, The Shape of Utopiaemphasizes the enduring importance of these radical propositions and their ability to visualize alternatives to what was then a newly emerging capitalist nation. 

Drawing diagrammatic plans for structures such as octagonal houses, a hexagonal anarchist city, and circular centers of equitable commerce, these various architectural utopians applied geometric forms to envision a more just and harmonious society. Highlighting the inherent political capacity of architecture, Irene Cheng showcases how these visionary planners used their blueprints as persuasive visual rhetoric that could mobilize others to share in their aspirations for a better world. 

Offering an extensive and uniquely focused view of mid-nineteenth-century America’s rapidly changing cultural landscape, this book examines these utopian plans within the context of significant economic and technological transformation, encompassing movements such as phrenology, anarchism, and spiritualism. Engaging equally with architectural history, visual culture studies, and U.S. history, The Shape of Utopia documents a pivotal moment in American history when ordinary people ardently believed in the potential to reshape society.

Carlo Ginzburg, Secularism and its Ambiguities: Four Case Studies – Central European University Press, July 2023 (Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lectures)

In the best micro-historical tradition, Carlo Ginzburg, himself one of the founders and icons of this genre of historiography, dissects four moments of European intellectual history. This book relives the experience that participants in the Natalie Zemon Davis Lecture Series at the Budapest campus of Central European University had in 2019 listening to Ginzburg’s eloquent and engaging discourses. For the purposes of this volume he has re-edited and completed the leporello of cases charged with the inherent ambiguity between secularism and religions.

Secularism is often identified with rejection or at least distancing from the sacred. However, if one assumes that secularism also appropriates and reworks the sacred, its ambiguities come to the fore. The dilemma accompanies the reception of La Boétie’s Servitude volontaire between 1574 and today. Before Walter Benjamin, the lesser-known 19th-century Léon de Laborde defended the profanity of reproducing the arts. The tension around the secular pervades the case of the College de Sociologie (Paris, 1937-1939), an attempt to analyze the ideological components of fascism. The fourth lecture approaches a much-discussed contemporary phenomenon – fake news – from a long-term perspective. To what extent are some disturbing features of the world we live in the result of a long, tortuous, unpredictable trajectory?

Evgenia Iliadou, Border Harms and Everyday Violence: A Prison Island in Europe – Bristol University Press, September 2023

The Greek island of Lesvos is frequently the subject of news reports on the refugee ‘crisis’, but they only occasionally focus on the dire living conditions of asylum seekers already present on the island. Through direct experience as an activist in Lesvos refugee camps and detention centres, Iliadou gives voice to those with lived experiences of state violence. 

The author considers the escalation of EU border regime and deterrence policies seen in the past decade alongside their present impacts. Asking why the social harm and suffering border crossers experience is normalized and rendered invisible, the book highlights the collective, global responsibility for safeguarding refugees’ human rights.

Christopher Smith (ed.), Sovereignty: A Global Perspective – British Academy/Oxford University Press, November 2022

Sovereignty has been at the heart of political philosophy for centuries, and yet it is far from clear what work sovereignty is actually doing in the modern world.  Is sovereignty indivisible?  Why are some international interventions acceptable but others condemned or resented?  Is sovereignty always popular?  What role does sovereignty have in a world of international finance, global information exchange, and supranational regulation?  Is sovereignty only relevant to some parts of the world or of global relevance? This volume will place the intellectual roots of sovereignty in a conversation with sociological theory and the realities of a globalised world to create a broader context for our contemporary debates.

Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory – Verso, July 2023

Capitalism, by the twenty-first century, has brought us an era of escalating, overlapping crisis – ecological, political, social – which we may not survive. In this brilliant, wide-ranging conversation, political philosophers Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi identify capitalism as the source of the devastation and examine its in-built tendency to crisis. In an exchange that ranges across history, critical theory, ecology, feminism and political theory, Fraser and Jaeggi find that capitalism’s tendency to separate what is connected – human from non-human nature, commodity production and social reproduction – is at the heart of its crisis tendency. These “boundary struggles,” Fraser and Jaeggi conclude, constitute capitalism’s most destructive power but are also the sites where a fighting left movement might be able to halt the destruction and build the non-capitalist future we so desperately need.

A crucial text for students of political theory, economic theory, and social change, Capitalism offers an invigorated critique of twenty-first century capitalism and an incisive study of our current conjuncture.

Update: there is an extended interview with Sebastian Budgen of Verso Books here

Update 2: Adam David Morton discusses Fraser’s earlier Cannibal Capitalism at Progress in Political Economy.

It will still be some time before I return to work, as there are medical issues still to be resolved. I’m not returning to the research for my new Indo-European thought project yet, but I will be sharing a few things here and on social media – mainly the work of others that looks interesting.