Chiara Bottici, Neil Faulkner, Rose Sydney Parfitt, Tim Jacoby, Charlie Post, Yannis Stavrakakis, William I. Robinson, Laurence Davis, Elena Loizidou, Cenk Saraçoğlu, Eva Nanopoulos, Chip Berlet, Stephen Hopgood, and Jessica Northey over at Verso:

Chiara Bottici

Associate Professor in Philosophy at New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College (New York). Her recent books include Imaginal Politics: Images beyond Imagination and The Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014), Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity(Cambridge University Press, 2013), co-authored with Benoit Challand, and the co-edited collections, The Anarchist Turn (Pluto 2013, with Simon Critchley and Jacob Blumenfeld), and Feminism, Capitalism and Critique (Palgrave 2017, with Banu Bargu).

In fact, fascism has never gone away. If by fascism, we mean the historical regime that created the name and embraced the ideology explicitly, then we have to conclude that the concept is only applicable to the political regime that reigned in Italy between 1922 and 1943. This, however, amounts to little more than a tautology: "the Italian fascist regime" = "the Italian fascist regime." History clearly never repeats itself, so any attempt to apply the category of fascism outside of that context would be doomed to fail. That may be a necessary cautionary remark for historians, but how about social and political theorists? Can fascism be a heuristic tool to think about and compare different forms of power?

If by fascism we mean a political model that was only epitomized and made visible by the Italian kingdom during 1922-43, then we arrive at a very different conclusion. Consider for a moment the features that characterize that form of power: hyper-nationalism, racism, machismo, the cult of the leader, the political myth of decline-rebirth in the new political regime, the more or less explicit endorsement of violence against political enemies, and the cult of the state. We can then certainly see how that form of power, after its formal fall in 1943, continued to exist in different forms and shapes not simply in Europe, but also elsewhere. We can see how fascist parties continued to survive, how fascist discourses proliferated and how different post-war regimes emerging world-wide exhibited fascist traits without formally embracing fascism.

More here.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary over at Political Research Associates:

On July 3, 2017, France experienced an unusual spectacle. With all the regal pomp that the French state and the Palace of Versailles can accord, newly elected President Emmanuel Macron addressed both houses of parliament, only the fourth such address since 1873.

Macron used his speech to lay out a program of severe transformations to the French state and society: breaking labor and enacting economic “reforms”; decreasing the number of parliamentarians; minimizing legislation and legislative oversight; and making permanent aspects of the constitutional “state of emergency” France has been under since the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. In other words, far from the image of a liberal democratic savior painted by the Anglo-American press, Macron outlined a program to maintain and consolidate minority-government rule. In terms that hovered between self-parody and pure mysticism, Macron called this an “efficient,” new “contractual republic.” From the dais of the Sun King, Macron proclaimed—several decades after the fact—that we are all human capital now.

Macron’s program is anti-democratic in everything from its rejection of civil rights and equal protection to perfected neoliberal economic “reforms.”¹ It even takes aim at the democratic institutions of the state itself. In structure and even aesthetic, “Macronism” presents a postmodern pastiche of hyper-modern technocracy and ancien regime all at once. Understanding why this program is so attractive to the political center, and to liberals more broadly, is vital in order to understand the volatile political climate on both sides of the Atlantic. As with the supposedly “boring” political situation in Germany, where the neo-fascist Alternative fur Deutschland party will now be the first Far Right party to enter its parliament since the end of WWII, Macron also represents a rightward trend: a brand of authoritarian liberalism that emboldens the Right, facilitating its political maneuvering, and allowing even small radical right-wing movements outsized influence over national policy.

And yet, Macron’s election was met with near universal acclaim among nominally left-of-center politicians and media commentators across Europe and North America. “About as exciting and theatrical as electoral politics gets,” exclaimed The New York Times.² Macron’s movement was held up as an exciting prospect, a new “revolution” from the center, a response to “Trumpism” the world over and in the United States in particular. This despite the fact that, just as in the Netherlands and Austria, the French Far Right, while not winning the election, still received higher support in the national contest than ever before.

More here.

Tobi Haslett in The New Yorker:

Seriousness, for Susan Sontag, was a flashing machete to swing at the thriving vegetation of American philistinism. The philistinism sprang from our barbarism—and our barbarism had conquered the world. “Today’s America,” she wrote in 1966, “with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.” Intellectuals, doomed to tramp through an absurd century, were to inflict their seriousness on Governor Reagan and President Johnson—and on John Wayne, spareribs, and the whole shattered, voluptuous culture. The point was to be serious about power and serious about pleasure: cherish literature, relish films, challenge domination, release yourself into the rapture of sexual need—but be thorough about it. “Seriousness is really a virtue for me,” Sontag wrote in her journal after a night at the Paris opera. She was twenty-four. Decades later, and months before she died, she mounted a stage in South Africa to declare that all writers should “love words, agonize over sentences,” “pay attention to the world,” and, crucially, “be serious.”

Only a figure of such impossible status would dare to glorify a mood. Here was a woman who had barged into the culture with valiant attempts at experimental fiction (largely unread) and experimental cinema (largely unseen) and yet whose blazing essays in Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books won her that rare combination of aesthetic and moral prestige. She was a youthful late modernist who, late in life, published two vast historical novels that turned to previous centuries for both their setting and their narrative blueprint; and a seer whose prophecies were promptly revised after every bashing encounter with mass callousness and political failure. The Vietnam War, Polish Solidarity, aids, the Bosnian genocide, and 9/11 drove her to revoke old opinions and brandish new ones with equal vigor. In retrospect, her positions are less striking than her pose—that bold faith in her power as an eminent, vigilant, properly public intellectual to chasten and to instruct. Other writers had abandoned their post. So Sontag responded to a 1997 survey “about intellectuals and their role” with a kind of regal pique:

What the word intellectual means to me today is, first of all, conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines about the role of intellectuals in which well-known intellectuals have agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, irrelevance, obsolescence, and imminent or already perfected disappearance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies, they belong.

She held a contrary creed. “I go to war,” she said a decade after witnessing the siege of Sarajevo, “because I think it’s my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be, and war is a tremendous reality in our world.” Behind the extravagant drama, though, was a shivering doubt. Her work rustles with the premonition that she was obsolete, that her splendor and style and ferocious brio had been demoted to a kind of sparkling irrelevance. The feeling flared up abruptly, both when she was thrilled by radical action and when she was aghast at public complacency.

More here.

Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian:

Fifteen years ago, I published Globalisation and Its Discontents, a book that sought to explain why there was so much dissatisfaction with globalisation within the developing countries. Quite simply, many believed the system was rigged against them, and global trade agreements were singled out for being particularly unfair.

Now discontent with globalisation has fuelled a wave of populism in the US and other advanced economies, led by politicians who claim that the system is unfair to their countries. In the US, President Donald Trump insists America’s trade negotiators were snookered by those from Mexico and China.

So how could something that was supposed to benefit all, in developed and developing countries alike, now be reviled almost everywhere? How can a trade agreement be unfair to all parties?

To those in developing countries, Trump’s claims – like Trump himself – are laughable. The US basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation. In some of these institutions – for example, the International Monetary Fund – the US still has veto power, despite America’s diminished role in the global economy (a role which Trump seems determined to diminish still further).

To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that US trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations. It was an agenda written by, and for, large multinational companies, at the expense of workers and ordinary citizens everywhere.

Indeed, it often seems that workers, who have seen their wages fall and jobs disappear, are just collateral damage – innocent but unavoidable victims in the inexorable march of economic progress. But there is another interpretation of what has happened: one of the objectives of globalisation was to weaken workers’ bargaining power. What corporations wanted was cheaper labour, however they could get it.

More here.

Adam Tooze over at his website:

it was not the politics of crime that led Stephen Miller to invoke Mariel in his exchange with the Times. It was economics. Mariel has a double life. It is on the one hand an emblem of social and political crisis in Miami in the 1980s. But at the same time and in rather contradictory ways it also serves economists as a crucial field for studying the labour market impact of mass migration.

What has lured economists onto this fraught terrain is not the temptation of scoring a mention from a Trump spokesperson. What makes the Mariel Boatlift irresistible is a question of methodology. Economists don’t like complex entangled histories. It is hard to cleanly identify causation in complex social settings. So their gold standard are so-called “natural experiments” – both terms carry heavy weight – by which they mean moments when out of complex and entangled social reality emerge events or interactions that seem truly exogenous and random and thus allow the clear identification of what is cause and what is effect.

Generally in studies of labour markets and immigration such moments are not easy to find. Judging the impact of the large migrant flows from Mexico on US labour markets is difficult because those migrant flows are themselves heavily influenced by the level of unemployment in the US. By contrast, Castro’s decision in early 1980 to open the Mariel port to emigration was exogenous. We do not need to worry that our assessment of the impact of the Cuban migrants on the Miami labour market will be muddied by the fact that the Cubans chose to migrate to a labour market that was particularly well-suited to receiving them. The inflow of migrants from Cuba and Haiti raised Miami’s workforce by 7-8 percent in a matter of months over the spring and summer of 1980. Such an increase in the supply of labour ought to “show up” in increased pressure on wages, perhaps particularly at the bottom end of the labour market. The hope, of course, is that once we have cleanly identified mass migration’s impact on wages and employment in Miami in 1980 we can transfer those insights to other settings where the chain of cause and effect is more tangled.

More here.

Justin Smith on William Gass over at n+1:

WILLIAM HOWARD GASS, who died on December 6 at the age of 93, is one of the very few philosophers of the 20th century to transcend the essential boringness of that social identity. What university committees did he serve on? What was his teaching load? What was the “impact factor” of the journals he published in? Who cares. Gass, who completed his dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Max Black at Cornell University in 1954, and who worked for a short time with (to the extent that one could work with) Ludwig Wittgenstein, also wrote what is perhaps the greatest, bleakest, most rigorous, and finely calibrated American novel of his era, 1995’s The Tunnel. Impact factor: either “incalculable,” or “n/a,” depending on your view of disciplinary boundaries.

Yet his literary output must not be seen as an abandonment of his earlier trajectory. Idiosyncrasy is the integrity of genius, it is sometimes said. Gass was writing philosophy the only way he could. His principal preoccupation in philosophy was with metaphor, which you might think is a perfect point at which to bring philosophy and literature into conversation. You might think this, until you read Black on the subject, writing around the same time Gass was completing his graduate work under him: “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black observes, “is to belittle him—like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting.” He concludes that while metaphors are unavoidable and might sometimes be harnessed for salutary ends, they are, in general, dangerous, “and perhaps especially in philosophy.”

More here.

Sarah Jaffe reviews Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank in Dissent:

Yet sometime between the release of the hardcover and the paperback edition of Listen, Liberal, America elected Donald Trump, a man who seems to roll up all of the worst parts of the conservatism that Frank loves to sharpen his claws on into one administration bent on nothing but more graft and more wreckage.

Frank, in some ways, deserves credit for seeing elements of Trumpism coming, but he also misdiagnosed some of its roots. The flaw in many of Frank’s zingers is a tendency to oversimplify, to reduce things to binaries—culture versus economics, business versus government—when the reality is more complex. His oeuvre tells the story of how the politics of class became another kind of identity politics; in telling that story, he inadvertently shows how so many people miss the fact that class is a relation of power bound up in one’s income, yes, but also race and gender, sexuality, education, even geographic location. To “talk about class,” as so many have exhorted since the 2016 election, is not simply to talk about the workers at Carrier, but to understand the material conditions that determine one’s position and power in society. Sometimes Thomas Frank seems to get that; other times he doesn’t.

The culture war that produced Trump wasn’t a battle on elite college campuses or in the pages of white papers read inside the Beltway. Instead it was a war that was fundamentally economic at its core, its cultural anxieties wrapped around the reality of decline. The culture that the workers at Carrier and Rexnord mourn is one of long days but predictable schedules, grueling work but relatively high wages and benefits, the occasional strike that bound them closer together and left them with battle stories for later.

What should have been shocking about Trump, in other words, was less that he used a combination of racism, brutish attacks on his opponents, and braggadocio about his business exploits to vault to the top of a heap of Republican nominees: it was that he combined it with at least some attention to the economic concerns of workers at Carrier.

This was, looking back over the past few decades, both shocking and inevitable.

More here.

The first of 5 lectures by Anwar Shaikh on his new book Capitalism (the other 4 can also be found on YouTube).

Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in The Guardian:

The US has experienced a perfect storm of radical policy changes which have all contributed to this surge in inequality. The tax system, which used to be progressive, has become much less so over time. The federal minimum wage has collapsed, unions have been weakened and access to higher education has become increasingly unequal. At the same time, deregulation in the finance industry and overly protective patent laws have contributed to booms on Wall Street and in the healthcare sector, which now makes up 20% of national income.

These forces led to an upsurge in wage inequality in the 1980s and 90s which did, admittedly, stabilise at the beginning of this century. Since then, though, the growing importance of income derived from capital – and the growing concentration of wealth – have been key drivers of inequality. The rich are getting older, and a growing chunk of their income comes from passive capital ownership rather than active work. It’s a second Gilded Age.

The tax bill just passed by the US Senate will not only reinforce this trend, it will turbocharge inequality in America. Presented as a tax cut for workers and job-creating entrepreneurs, it is instead a giant cut for those with capital and inherited wealth. It’s a bill that rewards the past, not the future.

Critically, the bill massively cuts corporate income taxes, mainly by reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. Whatever one believes about the long-term effects of cutting corporate taxes, it is clear that in the short and medium term, the cut overwhelmingly benefits shareholders who can reap their additional profits without any extra work.

More here.

Dani Rodrik in Prospect:

Not so long ago, the argument over globalisation was seen as done and dusted—by parties of the left as much as of the right.

Tony Blair’s 2005 Labour conference speech gives a flavour of the time. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Blair told his party. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” There would be disruptions and some might be left behind, but no matter: people needed to get on with it. Our “changing world” was, Blair continued, “replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt” and “slow to complain.”

No competent politician today would be likely to urge their voters not to grumble in this way. The Davos set, the Blairs and the Clintons are all scratching their heads, asking themselves how on Earth a process they insisted was inexorable has spun into reverse. Trade has stopped growing in relation to output, cross-border financial flows have still not bounced back from the global crisis of a decade ago, and after long years of stasis in world trade talks, an American nationalist has ridden a populist wave to the White House, where he disavows all efforts at multilateralism. Those that were cheerleaders of hyper-globalisation at the turn of the century stand no chance of understanding where it has gone wrong without realising how little they understood the process they were championing.

Back in 2005, in that same Blair conference speech, there was scope for doubt, and “no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.” What of social solidarity? Would globalisation sweep it away? Blair insisted it could survive, but only if it were repurposed. Communities could not be allowed to “resist the force of globalisation”; the role of progressive politics was merely to enable them “to prepare for it.” Globalisation was the foregone conclusion; the only question was whether society could adjust to the global competition.

More here.

Lance Taylor over at INET:

Over the past four decades, American household incomes have become strikingly more unequal, along an unsustainable path. But as of late 2017, prospects for attacking inequality are bleak, whether or not the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress manages to pass a tax cut favoring businesses and high-income households. Fundamental changes in income and wealth distribution will require equally fundamental changes in the way the economy generates and distributes pre-tax incomes.

What is required are policies that go beyond the tax code to shift the very balance of power between workers and employers. Doing so would allow real wages to catch up to productivity and capital gains to be more equitably shared among the population. It would shrink inequality for years to come.

This paper looks at several key topics that relate to our country’s growing inequality and the ways in which it can be remedied.

First, it’s worth examining the likely macroeconomic effects of the tax package. They will be visible but small. Republican efforts will push up the federal deficit as a means to transfer funds to business and rich households. Growth dynamics sketched below suggest that the deficit and incomes of the rich cannot rise indefinitely. This analysis also shows how, over time, rising income inequality creates greater concentration of wealth, which is almost certainly on the cards. For rich households, wealth accumulation is driven by high saving rates from high incomes, capital gains on existing assets, and receipts from initial public offerings which are highly visible but quantitatively not so important. Over the past few decades, capital gains have been a main driver for wealth concentration.

More here.

Over at King's Review:

In your piece in Inference, you trace the recent ‘death of the centre left’, a political movement across the West in the 1990s that was marked by its faith in liberalised international markets. How has neoliberalism contributed to the collapse of the ‘centre-left’ in Europe (see your piece in Inference)? Is internationalisation – not only of markets but of governance – in for instance the form of the EU part of this demise?

At some point in the 1990s both the center-right and the center-left in Europe had concluded that future prosperity would depend on opening national economies to the world market, combined with “structural reforms” of national institutions to make them more “competitive”, i.e., attractive to free-wheeling international capital, especially finance capital. Internationalism and neoliberalism thus came hand in hand. In Europe there was agreement among governments that the EU should and could be converted from what had in the 1970s become a supranational welfare state-in-waiting, into an engine of coordinated liberalization. Using the EU for this had the advantage that it allowed national governments, left or right, to evade responsibility for the market pressures and institutional revisions they had unleashed on their peoples, by claiming that these had been imposed on them from above and that they were part and parcel of an internationalist “European idea” anyway. Very importantly, European Monetary Union, created in the 1990s under global pressures for fiscal consolidation – to reassure the “financial markets” of the solvency of increasingly indebted states – served as a vehicle for the constitutionalization of balanced budgets in national states, something that would have been much more difficult if not impossible if it would have had to be sold by democratically elected governments to their voters. In that sense, the demise of the center-left parties was self-inflicted: they had underestimated the capacity and resolve of their peoples ultimately to defend themselves, if need be by turning to new “populist” parties and movements.

On the other end of the political spectrum, you define the problem of the right as crucial. Not only are new radical rightwing parties formed, such as the AfD, they also manage to profit from the death of the left. You describe how members of the former communist party (SED) are now likely to vote radically right. Does ideology really not matter anymore? Are then perhaps the terms left and right not the right references to describe Western political landscapes?

SED membership did not mean much ideologically; we are talking about a communist state party. But it is true, not just in Germany but also elsewhere, especially in France, that a relevant share of left voters have turned to the right. The most important reason, I think, is that they no longer felt represented by their former center-left parties, who had joined the center-right by telling voters that they couldn’t help them anymore because of “globalization”, and they now had to fend for themselves: become “flexible”, get “retrained” etc.

More here.

Ed Simon in Avidly:

In the stone tower of his chateau in Dordogne, the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne worked on his essays while surrounded by classical quotations painted on the oak beams of his study. Here, among the scenic vineyards within site of the Pyrenees, Montaigne had aphorisms of scholarly Horace, tragic Sophocles, introspective Lucretius, and of course the Bible, stenciled in red and green on the bare wooden joists and columns of the library. I like to think of Montaigne’s decorative fragments as a type of architectural adage, or epigraphic interior design. Indeed they served the same function that an epigraph does at the beginning of an essay or a novel, to introduce themes, spur anticipation, to pause for an initial reflection, to possibly connect the author to illustrious predecessors, and perhaps to also react against those same predecessors. But epigraphs are probably theorized about as much as wallpaper is. Indeed the epigraph to a book, if it is thought about at all, is normally simply classified as another bit of paratextual adornment that is largely unimportant. In the Great Chain of Being that constitutes what occupies our literary attention, epigraphs are much lower than titles, perhaps only a bit higher than blurbs and ISBN information. For many, focusing too much on the epigraph would be, if I am to extend my architectural metaphor, as if we stayed in the foyer rather than entering the building. But as an ornate decorative doorknocker can tell us something about the owner of a house, so to can an epigraph tell us something about a book before we cross the threshold of its entrance. Epigraphs (and decorative door-knockers) may be rarely analyzed, but neither are they incidental. Whether we’re considering epigraphs while interpreting a literary text, or we’re utilizing them in our own writing, what we need is a general theory concerning their use. And so I tentatively offer some thoughts on epigraphs here.

Jerry Fodor dismantles Pinker back in 1998 at the LRB:

A lot of the fun of Pinker’s book is his attempt to deduce human psychology from the assumption that our minds are adaptations for transmitting our genes. His last chapters are devoted to this and they range very broadly; including, so help me, one on the meaning of life. Pinker would like to convince us that the predictions that the selfish-gene theory makes about how our minds must be organised are independently plausible. But this project doesn’t fare well. Prima facie, the picture of the mind, indeed of human nature in general, that psychological Darwinism suggest is preposterous; a sort of jumped up, down-market version of Original Sin.

Psychological Darwinism is a kind of conspiracy theory; that is, it explains behaviour by imputing an interest (viz in the proliferation of the genome) that the agent of the behaviour does not acknowledge. When literal conspiracies are alleged, duplicity is generally part of the charge: ‘He wasn’t making confetti; he was shredding the evidence. He did X in aid of Y, and then he lied about his motive.’ But in the kind of conspiracy theories psychologists like best, the motive is supposed to be inaccessible even to the agent, who is thus perfectly sincere in denying the imputation. In the extreme case, it’s hardly even the agent to whom the motive is attributed. Freudian explanations provide a familiar example: What seemed to be merely Jones’s slip of the tongue was the unconscious expression of a libidinous impulse. But not Jones’s libidinous impulse, really; one that his Id had on his behalf. Likewise, for the psychological Darwinist: what seemed to be your, after all, unsurprising interest in your child’s well-being turns out to be your genes’ conspiracy to propagate themselves. Not your conspiracy, notice, but theirs.

more here.

Episode 2 of the new podcast Trotsky and the Wild Orchids [h/t: Leonard Benardo].

Amal de Chickera in openDemocracy [h/t: Ram Manikkalingam]:

2. ARSA terrorists and the Burmese state – the world judges the perpetrators, not the crime

The most immediate reactions to the events since 25 August were very insightful. Many countries were nuanced in their response to the atrocities committed by the Myanmar military, which were touted as a “clearance operation”.

They were quick to point out the state’s right to protect its territorial integrity, and were supportive of state efforts to root out terrorism. No state questioned if the ARSA attacks were the excuse Myanmar had been waiting for, or looked at the atrocities in the context of Myanmar’s decades-long track record on the Rohingya.

The gripe was with the degree of force used by Myanmar and its indiscriminate nature. It was not with the fact that force was being used at all. And so, Myanmar was called on to carry out its clearance operation with restraint. This is akin to asking a rapist to in future, only commit sexual harassment.

By contrast, condemnations of ARSA – the fledgling militant outfit – were fast, furious and uncompromising. The killing of 12 police officers was condemned without qualification; not so, Myanmar’s killings, rapes, arsons, forced expulsion etc., of Rohingya in the hundreds of thousands.

This duality of response is telling of a deeper (perhaps the deepest) problem in global politics. And it is not just limited to state responses. States are at the centre of the status quo, and states will be extremely conservative and cautious in their criticisms of other states, while being liberal and (almost) uninhibited in their criticisms of actors who confront or threaten states.

More here.

Timothy Shenk in TNR:

The notion that a government’s chief obligation is getting stuff done is a fairly recent arrival on the historical scene. Not until the twentieth century did it attain the commonsensical status it enjoys today. As Antonin Scalia observed with characteristic snark, the Constitution “contains no whatever-it-takes-to-solve-a-national-problem power.” Policy arose in fits and starts over centuries, and the legacy of that jagged evolution is still with us. Today, policymaking has taken over a government that is nonetheless bound by the Constitution; politicians promise to swoop in and fix whatever has gone wrong, while working in a system that is designed to curb the impulse to intervene. That tension has helped bring us to our current impasse, where Americans ask more than ever from a government they increasingly distrust.

Understanding how we arrived at this juncture is the task that political scientists Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek have set for themselves in The Policy State. Completed at the onset of the Trump administration, it is a slender volume that draws upon their decades of research on the making and remaking of American political institutions. The book is also a sterling example of political science at its best: analytically rigorous, historically informed, and targeted at questions of undeniable contemporary significance. In the measured tones of senior academics, Orren and Skowronek uncover a transformation that revolutionized American politics and now threatens to tear it apart.

When James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and other delegates gathered in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution in 1787, they aimed to balance two conflicting imperatives. They wanted a state powerful enough to take decisive action in a few key areas but not so strong that it would give way to tyranny. They also wanted a government accountable to the will of the people but equally able to resist demagogues, who might sway voters with what Madison called a “wicked project” like the “equal division of property.”

More here.

In The Guardian, its editor-in-chief Katharine Viner:

No former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public.” So began the announcement, nearly 200 years ago, of a brand-new newspaper to be published in Manchester, England, which proclaimed that “the spirited discussion of political questions” and “the accurate detail of facts” were “particularly important at this juncture”.

Now we are living through another extraordinary period in history: one defined by dazzling political shocks and the disruptive impact of new technologies in every part of our lives. The public sphere has changed more radically in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries – and news organisations, including this one, have worked hard to adjust.

But the turbulence of our time may demand that we do more than adapt. The circumstances in which we report, produce, distribute and obtain the news have changed so dramatically that this moment requires nothing less than a serious consideration of what we do and why we do it.

The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, stated a very clear purpose when it was established in 1936: “to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference.” As an editor, it’s hard to imagine a finer mission for a proprietor: our sole shareholder is committed only to our journalistic freedom and longterm survival.

But if the mission of the Scott Trust is to ensure that Guardian journalism will exist for ever, it is still left to us to define what the mission of that journalism will be. What is the meaning and purpose of our work? What role do we play in society?

More here.