Politics & Economics

In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence,...

At the trial in March of Michael Sparks, the first rioter to enter the Capitol illegally, the defence attorney argued that his client had merely been following orders: ‘He was there to do what his president...

The Democratic Party is now the party of labour and of capital; the party of debtors and of bankers; the party of anti-monopolists and of Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security;...

The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to Labour. The party conference in Liverpool last October was swarming with lobbyists. ‘This is my first Labour conference in years,’...

The violent culture Trump promoted is now beatifying him as its most famous victim. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as –...

In July 2020 I drove through Lynch for the first time. Many buildings had been abandoned and boarded up. A rusted chute sloped down from the top of a concrete silo and disappeared into shrubs on the other...

For the left, Macron conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have dissolved [the National Assembly] and I make the...

It was a ‘decade of heroes’, as E.P. Thompson put it. ‘There were Guevaras in every street and in every wood.’ Popular Front coalitions won power in France, Spain and Chile, and sympathisers with...

Macron and his followers are right to think they can ignore events in Gaza so long as they call for a ceasefire and advocate a two-state solution: these gestures cost nothing. Macron can even assert that...

‘I have cognitive problems, clearly,’ RFK Jr said under oath twelve years ago, suggesting that the cause was probably a brain-eating parasite. But he didn’t give up hope that he might one day run...

What is it that is coming to a close? This fourteen-year fever dream of failures, absurdities and outbursts of reaction defies the neat periodisation or symbolisation with which the Thatcher and Blair...

For his part, Saddam Hussein believed that the CIA knew full well his weapons store was empty – which meant he was the subject of yet another conspiracy. Experience had taught him that was usually the...

The Scottish independence movement may not have been as transformative as its supporters hoped, but it was, for a time, genuinely exciting. It raised the political stakes, insisting that those who wanted...

Despite its significance, the 1924 government has not been remembered fondly, even by Labour supporters, and its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister,...

Thatcherism degraded the social fabric to the point where the Tory Party was removed from office in 1997 on a wave of discontent. Thatcherism in its second guise – represented finally by Sunak announcing...

Democracies implode when the authoritarian tendencies of the leaders of mainstream political parties are not reined in by constitutional mechanisms that are supposed to impose checks. 

The slippage between Tata and India speaks not just to Tata’s central place in the development of Indian capitalism but also to the way in which the corporation has variously come to represent progress,...

Samuel Moyn doesn’t really believe that his four Cold War liberals (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar), much less all those to whom that label might conceivably be applied,...