Political Theory
18 Nov 2022
A transcript of our interview with Quinn Slobodian on the history of neoliberalism.
27 Dec 2020
From The Dig archives: Dan interviews Melinda Cooper about her book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which makes the case that neoliberalism and social conservatism have been consistent collaborators in creating...
11 Dec 2020
What happened to social democratic politics? Dan interviews sociologist Stephanie Mudge on her book
Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism.
11 Oct 2019
Dan interviews Alex Gourevitch about how 19th century US labor radicals remade the idea of freedom into a principle of working-class social transformation.
13 Sep 2019
Dan interviewed legendary feminist scholar Silvia Federici on Caliban and the Witch at her Brooklyn apartment. Next year, he’ll make a return trip to discuss Wages for Housework.
20 Feb 2019
Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—Marx’s take on revolution and reaction in mid-19th century France, the broader theories he develops about history and the relationship between politics and the class war, and how...
23 Jan 2019
Democracy is the proposition that the people should govern themselves. But who are the people, and how should they govern? Populist movements attempt to answer these questions. In response, establishment figures insist that it is...
16 Jan 2019
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14 Nov 2018
Neoliberalism: we all hate it, but what does it mean? Dan talks to intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian about his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which tells the story of...
12 Sep 2018
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11 Aug 2018
That right-wing people in the US and Europe have made George Soros the answer to so many troubling questions is not very surprising: he’s a billionaire, he’s Jewish and, unlike most of his cohort, he...
20 Jun 2018
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05 Jun 2018
For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class—whether their assets be human slaves, factories or extractive industries—democracy must...
04 May 2018
This is part two of Dan’s interview on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to have rights.” This episode covers a lot, including why we must fight not only to expand the democratic political community...
01 May 2018
What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of “the right to have rights” as millions of refugees found themselves without a...
21 Mar 2018
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07 Feb 2018
Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar...
19 Dec 2017
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor returns to The Dig to discuss her new book How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Forty years ago, a group of black feminists coined the term “identity politics”...
31 Oct 2017
Rana overturns conventional accounts of American history, from settlement and Revolution to the Populists and the present day. In reality, settler-colonialism, empire, and a brutally exploitative economic system grounded in racial subjugation have always been...
24 Oct 2017
Read the transcript here
24 Oct 2017
@CoreyRobin points to a tension that has defined conservatism from the get-go, between two competing conceptions of virtue and nobility: one defined by political and military distinction and another by entrepreneurial acumen and accumulated wealth....
11 Apr 2017
Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in...
28 Mar 2017
What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of...