New Books In Critical Theory

In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves beyond simplistic understandings of societal turbulence or even disaster, arguing that crises have come to mean something very specific. Where previous analyses have treated economic and ecological crises as separate phenomena, Holgersen reveals their profound interconnection within capitalism's contradictions. Central to the book is the idea that both economic and climate crises are crises of capitalism specifically, and the powers that be are not willing to acknowledge it.  Holgersen delves into today’s economic and ecological crises to demonstrate that they are not exceptions to an otherwise functioning system but integral to its operation. It is naive to see these upheavals as opportunities for reform or revolution. They are the bedrock of the status quo. Fortunately, the vicious circle sustaining capitalism is not founded on an iron law. Our historical mission i

What does the history of Liverpool tell us about the future of Britain? In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2025), Sam Wetherall, a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World at the University of York, tells the story of the city through the lens of ‘obsolesce’. This powerful framework structures a narrative that sees the story of Liverpool as both one of state ineffectiveness, indifference, and brutality, and one of solidarity and alternative forms of community and organising. The analysis is rich with details, ranging widely across the city’s rich social, cultural and economic story. Offering Liverpool as a blueprint for pessimism and optimism, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social scientists, and anyone interested in politics, culture and society today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The recent removal of information about Black, Indigenous, and female military personnel from the Arlington National Cemetery’s website exemplifies how cancel culture intersects with broader societal dynamics, particularly in the context of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Under directives from the Department of Defense, pages highlighting notable veterans, such as Colin Powell, Jackie Roberson and members of the Tuskegee Airmen were deleted. These actions align with executive orders targeting DEI efforts in federal agencies, raising concerns about historical erasure and its implications for marginalized groups. This form of cancel culture—removing or altering narratives—reflects a modern-day example of erasure as a defense mechanism. Psychoanalytic theory offers insights into this phenomenon, particularly through concepts like repression and the “return of the repressed.” Erasure can be seen as a defense against confronting uncomfortable truths about systemic inequities or historical injus

In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power. Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad period

Atiya Husain’s No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge and Terrorism (Duke University Press, 2025) uses the FBI Most Wanted lists to rethink theoretical relationships between race and Islam in the United States. Husain traces the genealogy of wanted posters and how theories of the “average man” informs the use of photographs and its accompanying descriptions on most wanted posters. To probe this pattern further, she closely considers the activism and Islam of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur and her addition to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist List in 2013. Shakur was the first woman added to this list and joins Muslims, who are oddly not racialized in the descriptions on the poster. This peculiar pattern forces us to contend with how race as a category oscillates between racelessness and race, and therefore reveals the categorical limitations of the discourses of racialization of Muslims. It is here that the work of Black Studies scholars, such as Sylvia Wynter, offers us necessary conceptual pathways forward. This

What explains the growing divide between elites and the broader public in democracies across Europe and the United States? In this episode of International Horizons, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck joins RBI director John Torpey to discuss the rise of populism, the limits of globalism, and the tensions between democracy and capitalism.  Drawing from his recent book, Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism (Verso, 2024), Streeck examines how market forces, technocracy, and the erosion of national sovereignty have fueled discontent across the transatlantic world. He also reflects on the educational divide shaping political cleavages, the challenges posed by immigration, and the implications of U.S. foreign policy and security commitments in Europe and beyond. The conversation explores the shifting foundations of the postwar international order and the prospects for a more democratic and egalitarian global system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show

Why does occupation reliably predict political leanings? What is social capitalism, and how does it span income classes? If social capitalists are sincerely committed to equality and “wokeness,” why do they simultaneously benefit from—and perpetuate—the very inequalities they denounce? Join us as we dive into Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024). We explore al-Gharbi’s central argument: the disconnect between the stated values of the "symbolic capital elite" and the real-world consequences of their actions, despite their genuine intentions. Al-Gharbi draws parallels to past "great awakenings"—periods of profound cultural upheaval and shifting attitudes toward civil rights. We also examine whether defining "wokeness" is essential to his thesis, and al-Gharbi clarifies some of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of his work. Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Commu

Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Tiffany D. Joseph exposes the insidious contradiction of Massachusetts' advanced health care system and the exclusionary experiences of its immigrant communities. Joseph illustrates how patients' race, ethnicity, and legal status determine their access to health coverage and care services, revealing a disturbing paradox where policy advances and individual experiences drastically diverge. Examining Boston's Brazilian, Dominican, and Salvadoran communities, this book provides an exhaustive analysis spanning nearly a decade to highlight the profound impacts of the Affordable Care Act and subsequent policy shifts on these marginalized groups. Not All In is a critical examination of the systemic barriers that perpetuate health care disparities. Joseph challenge

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest (West Virginia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jason L. Newton provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape. Back when resources started running scarce, the environment of the forest and bodies of workers became the natural resources from which mills and landowners extracted. Bodies and cutover landscapes were mobilized in new ways to increase the scale and efficiency of production—a brutal process for workers, human and animal alike. In the Northern Forest, an industrial working class formed in relation to the unique ways that workers' bodies were used to produce value and in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest environment. Cutov

In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equal

The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health (Routledge, 2024) brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm. Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference.  Voices from these groups confront and challenge standard approaches to mental difference. They advance new structures of meaning and pract

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data. While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiati

Today’s guest is Dr Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason (Bloombury, 2024), lecturer in digital media at the University of Southampton, and researcher into digital culture and the humanities, the history of philosophy and contemporary continental philosophy, and technologies of the self. We discuss three areas that concern the odd character that is Peter Sloterdijk; namely, spheres, the practising life and his rehabilitation of philosophy as wisdom. Dr Thomas Sutherland is a deep dabbler in Sloterdijk’s thought, having written various papers on his work, including Peter Sloterdijk and the ‘security architecture of existence’: immunity, autochthony, and ontological nativism, and Ontological co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's spherological philosophy of mediation. He is also familiar with a regular mention here on the podcast, François Laruelle and his non-philosophy. We touch on; Sloterdijk’s original work on Cynicism and

As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing. As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control (U California Press, 2025), Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allo

The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms. Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical tradi

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of decolonisation. Rao takes readers on a journey through South Africa, England, the US, Ghana, India, Australia, and Scotland, revealing how statue controversies have dramatically rearranged the canon of anticolonial political thought. By examining these debates through a personal and literary lens, Rao addresses the multifaceted issues of justice, cultural memory, and belonging. The Psychic Lives of Statues (Pluto Press, 2025) examines both the toppling of colonial statues and the raising of postcolonial ones, demonstrating that the statue form as a medium of representation and a bid for immortality is by no means obsolete. Engaging with artists, scholars, and activi

Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers a prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.  In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology.  Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offer

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confi

Today I talked to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025). For more than two decades, Neocleous has been a pioneer in the radical critique of policing, security, and warfare. Today we will discuss his newest work on the theory and practice of pacification, which, he argues, is “social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace.” Pacification not only aims to counter resistance to capitalist exploitation, dispossession, and displacement, but it aims to prevent such resistance from emerging in the first place by constructing social institutions and the built environment. Pacification is a totalizing process by which states deploy social policies, symbolic practices, and coercive operations in order to produce cooperative – or at least acquiescent – subjects. However, pacification never succeeds in obscuring the antagonistic nature of capitalist social relations. Consequently, pacification becomes an endless social war for peace. Mark Neocleous is P

In his new book, Nathan K. Hensley describes a mood or a vibe or an intuitive response to the contemporary moment when one feels powerless in the face of collapsing societal systems. Given the entrenched nature of the present crisis, with compulsory happiness being marketed by the culture industry, how does one work within systems from which no true escape is possible? In order to uncover a prehistory of this feeling, he goes back to the nineteenth century - to artists like J.M.W. Turner and writers like Emily Bronte and Christina Rossetti who were thinking about what it means to inhabit a world omnivorously captured by capital. Nathan K. Hensley is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford, 2016), and co-editor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham, 2018). With Devin Garofalo, he is currently coediting a collection of essays that's forthcoming from Northwestern UP, The Barbara Johnson Collective. His new book is Action wi