Keith Dowding, It’s the Government, Stupid: How Governments Blame Citizens for their own Policies – Bristol University Press, September 2021

Governments have developed a convenient habit of blaming social problems on their citizens, including homelessness, gun crime, obesity, drug addiction and problem gambling.

In this new book, Keith Dowding calls for us to stop scapegoating fellow citizens and to demand more from our governments, who have the real power and responsibility to alleviate social problems.

Watch Keith introduce the book here and listen to him talk about the arguments of the book in more detail in this podcast. You can also read his article on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog.

“Everyone – voters and politicians – should read this book.”Matt Matravers, University of York

“Throws down the gauntlet to political philosophers … Timely and important.”Miriam Bankovsky, La Trobe University

Mark Carrigan, Some thoughts on blogging during a pandemic

Mark’s book, Social Media for Academics, is now in its second edition.

frictionless sovereignty | special issue

b2o: an online journal is an online-only, free-to-read, peer-reviewed journal published by the boundary 2 editorial collective, with a standalone Editorial Board.

Volume 5, Issue 2 (August 2020)
Special Issue: Frictionless Sovereignty
Special Issue editor: Ryan Bishop

1. Ryan Bishop, “Frictionless Sovereignty: An Introduction”
2. Sarah Hayden, “Liquid Citizenship, Liquid Voice and Sensorial Sovereignty”
3. Ryan Bishop and Tania Roy, “Frictionless Sovereignty and the Oceanic Claim: Bio-Aesthetic Engagements”
4. Joseph Owen, “Details, Details, Details: Carl Schmitt’s Borderline Critique of Anticipation”
5. Arne De Boever, “Futures of Sovereignty (Necropolitics in America)”
6. Ryan Bishop and AbdouMaliq Simone, “Extending Sovereignty in the Light of Black Urbanity”
7. Mihaela Brebenel, “Embodied Frictions and Frictionless Sovereignty”
8. Paul Hegarty, “Polar Sovereignty”
9. Dimitris Vardoulakis, “The Antinomy of Frictionless Sovereignty: Inverse Relations of Authority and Authoritarianism”

Beata Stawarska, Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: The Course in General Linguistics after a Century, Palgrave, 2020

There is a discussion at New Books Network

This is the first English-language guidebook geared at an interdisciplinary audience that reflects relevant scholarly developments related to the legacy and legitimacy of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) today. It critically assesses the relation between materials from the Course and from the linguist’s Nachlass (works unpublished or even unknown at Saussure’s death, some of them recently discovered). This book pays close attention to the set of oppositional pairings: the signifier and the signified, la langue (language system) and la parole (speech), and synchrony and diachrony, that became the hallmark of structuralism across the humanities. Sometimes referred to as the “Saussurean doctrine,” this hierarchical conceptual apparatus becomes revised in favor of a horizontal set of relations, which co-involves speaking subjects and linguistic structures. This book documents the continued relevance of Saussure’s linguistics in the 21^st Century, and it sheds light on its legacy within structuralism and phenomenology. The reader can consult the book on its own, or in tandem with the 1916 Course.

Thanks to dmf for the link.

Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America – Princeton University Press, August 2020

Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order.

Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T.Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire.

Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Raceanalyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.