Progressive Geographies

An interesting discussion of Ethan Kleinberg’s new book, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past, with a link to a panel discussion of the book with Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott, Carol Gluck and Stefanos Geroulanos.

Peter Linebaugh’s address to the House of Commons on the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest on the Verso blog

This text, delivered in the State Rooms at the House of Commons on 7 November 2017, was first published in Counterpunch. 

Two winds have propelled me here to you, to this House of Commons.

One wind, a hurricane and diabalo, brought flood and fire threatening the destruction of petrochemial civilization, call it capitalism. Homelessness or prison accompany the wind from, Detroit, Michigan, to Houston, Texas, from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean to northern California at the Pacific edge.

A second gentler, softer wind, a zephyr, has renewed my spirit from the Lacandón jungle in Chiapas where the Zapatistas have vowed to protect the forest and reclaim the land, or from the Great Plains of the American continent where pipe lines of oil and gas endanger the pollution of land and the rivers. Encampments of indigenous people and their allies by prayer and by protest have become, in their words, “water protectors.”

Then, day before yesterday on Guy Fawkes Day, with some merry companions of the indigenous people of these islands, I visited Sherwood Forest and Laxton parish in Nottinghamshire. [continues here]

Jens Bartelson, War in International Thought – now out from Cambridge University Press

As scholars and citizens, we are predisposed to think of war as a profoundly destructive activity that ideally should be abolished altogether. Yet before the twentieth century, war was widely understood as a productive force in human affairs that should be harnessed for the purposes of creating peace and order. Analyzing how the concept of war has been used in different contexts from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, Jens Bartelson addresses this transition by inquiring into the underlying and often unspoken assumptions about the nature of war, and how these have shaped our understanding of the modern political world and the role of war within it. He explores its functions in the process of state making and in the creation of the modern international system to bring the argument up to date to the present day, where war is now on the centre stage of world politics.

Elizabeth Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary – published earlier this year with Stanford University Press. Thanks to David Beer for the alert.

An internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena—including money, gender, urban life, and technology—that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.