Progressive Geographies

Robert T. Tally Jr., The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity and Apocalyse – Bloomsbury, December 2023

At the dawn of the 20th century, a wide-ranging utopianism dominated popular and intellectual cultures throughout Europe and America. However, within just a few years, dystopia would overtake utopia in the public imagination. 

In the aftermath of the World Wars, with such canonical examples as Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, dystopia appeared to have become a dominant genre, in literature and in social thought more generally. The continuing presence and eventual dominance of dystopian themes in popular culture – e.g., dismal authoritarian future states, sinister global conspiracies, post-apocalyptic landscapes, a proliferation of horrific monsters, and end-of-the-world fantasies – have confirmed the degree to which the 21st is also a dystopian century. 

Drawing on literature such as varied as H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and on TV and film such as The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and The Lord of the Rings, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the landscape of angst created by the monstrous accumulation of dystopian material. The Fiction of Dread provides an innovative reading of the present cultural climate and offers an alternative vision for critical theory and practice in a moment in which, as has been famously observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy, University of Chicago Press, April 2023

At a time of great social and political turmoil, when many residents of the leading democracies question the ability of their governments to deal fairly and competently with serious public issues, and when power seems more and more to rest with the wealthy few, this book reconsiders the very foundations of democracy and justice. Scholar and writer Danielle Allen argues that the surest path to a just society in which all are given the support necessary to flourish is the protection of political equality; that justice is best achieved by means of democracy; and that the social ideals and organizational design principles that flow from recognizing political equality and democracy as fundamental to human well-being provide an alternative framework not only for justice but also for political economy. Allen identifies this paradigm-changing new framework as “power-sharing liberalism.”

Liberalism more broadly is the philosophical commitment to a government grounded in rights that both protect people in their private lives and empower them to help govern public life. Power-sharing liberalism offers an innovative reconstruction of liberalism based on the principle of full inclusion and non-domination—in which no group has a monopoly on power—in politics, economy, and society. By showing how we all might fully share power and responsibility across all three sectors, Allen advances a culture of civic engagement and empowerment, revealing the universal benefits of an effective government in which all participate on equal terms.