What's Left of Philosophy

In this live discussion we recorded at the Radical Philosophy Association's 2026 conference at Pomona College, we talk about the post-liberal trajectory in recent political theory with Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed as our focal point. Their description of how things feel bad might seem appealing at first blush, but their culturalist orientation and ahistorical diagnosis leaves o...

In this episode, we discuss the aesthetic philosophy of the so-called “Dean of the Harlem Renaissance”, Alain Locke. Locke thought art had a central role to play in the social emancipation of Black Americans. It is through art that the social consciousness of society can mature into becoming genuinely pluralist. However, not just any art will do.  We focus on why he insists there must be a strict...

Just a quick pair of announcements for you! We'll be doing a live episode recording at the Radical Philosophy Association's conference at Pomona College at 8pm next Thursday, October 15.  https://www.radicalphilosophyassociation.org/rpa-biennial-conference.html And Gil will be teaching a class on Hobbes's Leviathan in Chicago next month through the Brooklyn Institute for Social Rese...

In this episode we discuss the concept of hyperpolitics, as originally conceptualized by Anton Jäger. We contemplate the acute lack of substantive political transformation that has resulted from recent upheavals and movements, and wonder about what it would take to revive the kind of mass politics of the early to mid-twentieth century. Throughout, we wrestle with the prevailing sense of powerlessn...

In this episode we discuss the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou. Ever since the 1970s, Badiou’s philosophy has been characterized by an untimely systematicity and an ambitious effort to bring together politics, art, science, and love in a unique synthesis under the aegis of a novel fundamental ontology. In Metapolitics , Badiou explains what he understands by politics as a historical site w...

In this episode, we continue our series on modernity with a discussion of modernity, colonialism, and the future of both. We take up the claim that modernity is a justifying myth for European colonialism and wonder why we are all so enraptured by it. Are the Europeans as modern as we think they are? We also defend modernity’s promise of emancipation and then wonder what the point of all the modern...

In this episode, we begin our new series on modernity with a discussion of Marshall Berman’s 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity . Some of the questions we will tackle in this series will address the substance of modernity, whether modernity is singular or multiple, the relationship of art to modernization, and whether modernity is better understood as a rupture...

In this episode, we use Marx’s infamous “Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse as a starting-point for a wide ranging discussion about the emancipatory and regressive potentials of AI technologies. Marx thought that automated systems of machinery are incredible embodiments of highly developed human knowledge, which render labor increasingly unnecessary in processes of production, opening the d...

In this episode we talk about the political philosophy of early modern jurist Johannes Althusius. For us, he represents a road not taken in political theory, since Hobbes definitively constructed political philosophy around the idea of the self-interested atomized subject and he couldn’t disagree more. Althusius is an axis between medieval and modern thinking about political life, and his federali...

In this episode, we talk about the relational paradigm in political philosophy. Made famous by Iris Marion Young, developed later by Elizabeth Anderson, this view of what equality is all about presents a puzzle for the class conscious. It says that the point of equality is to live in a society of equals. Its proponents skewered famous analytical Marxists for having a reductive and economistic view...

In this episode, we are joined by Assistant Professor of Law Lucien Ferguson  (Chicago-Kent College of Law) to discuss the ambiguities of freedom and labor in the constitutional interpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments that were passed after the US Civil War. Our discussion is guided by the landmark Slaughter-House Cases of 1873 that narrowly construed the federal rights protected by the 14...

Just a quick word about upcoming events you should join us for! SPEP Webinar: Philosophy and Environmental Injustices, with Matthias Fritsch, Romy Opperman, and Michael Peterson, May 25, 5pm Eastern Standard Time https://us.list-manage.com/1tRnwaVjgii?e=e22f097f7b&c2id=b595b31be157b5b356d9b3d96de5843f As noted in the audio, a previous version of this announcement wrongly identified the date of...

In this episode we discuss Kathi Weeks’ 2011 book The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries . The text brings together social reproduction feminism and autonomist Marxism to develop a critique of work as the organizing principle of life and dominant ethos in capitalist society. Weeks argues that the valorization of work is taken for granted even in certai...

This episode engages with Glen Coulthard’s 2014 book Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition . Coulthard weaves a rich and varied tradition of radical Indigenous thought and practice with Marxism and the anti-colonial thought of Frantz Fanon into a distinctive vision of emancipation. Together, we interrogate his claims that dispossession rather than exploitation, or...

In this episode, we discuss Terry Eagleton’s defense of religion. We focus on his diagnoses of the Enlightenment, modernism, and post-modernism as different kinds of post-religious movements. Post-modernism is the only “truly atheist” one, which is one reason it got along with capitalism so well. We also talk a lot about social and spiritual meaning and their importance to Left wing political proj...

In this episode, we discuss Brandon Terry’s 2025 book Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement . There is little doubt that in US the Civil Rights Movement stands out as one of the clearest examples of Black politics in the social imagination. How we narrate the Civil Rights Movement tends to shape our expectations of politics and the future. But what happens w...

In this episode we talk about Max Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory”, which serves as a kind of manifesto for the Frankfurt School of Marxist thought. We talk about how he defines these categories, reflect on whether the distinction holds up, and ask ourselves whether we can call ourselves critical theorists in the present. It turns out grasping oneself as part of a historically...

In this episode we discuss Georges Sorel’s 1908 Reflections on Violence . We focus on his central claim that all of socialism is concentrated in the idea or ‘picture’ of the general strike, scrutinizing his claim that the ‘myth’ of the general strike is even more important than its precise concretion. His emphasis on political myth gives rise to questions about his potential irrationalism and the...

In this episode, we introduce our new series on “Marxism and Religion.” At political, social, and spiritual levels, the series explores this complicated relationship for a transitioning age. We start with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is a political and spiritual beacon for many of us and a democratic socialist by another name. Our discussion explores how MLK Jr. continues to shine light on the...

In this episode, we discuss the work of historian Hayden White. His provocative claim is that the practice is inescapably the practice of narrative forms to give sense and significance to events of the past. It is this form that often supplements, or even outright makes, historical arguments. Is history a tragedy, a comedy, a satire, or a romance? Why did Marx describe history as tragedy and then...

In this episode, we talk about Marx’s critique of the Gotha Program, but you knew that from the title. We discuss Marxian critiques of redistributive left politics, why dogmatic Marxists are wrong about this, and much more. We connect it to the present and disagree. It’s very good. Listen. References: Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/got...

In this episode, we talk about Elias Canetti’s 1960 book Crowds and Power . Equal parts political theory, poetic sociology, and speculative anthropology, this staggering work explores human social life through an increasingly elaborate series of reflections on the nature of crowds. The result is a fascinating typology of different kinds of crowds in which human beings cast off their individuality...

In this episode, we talk with James Chamberlain about his new book, Living Through Capitalism , in which he argues that capitalism is hostile to biological life processes and our ability to know them well enough to lead flourishing lives. Capitalism mutilates all life, and not just human life, in its harnessing of life for its own ends. Only in communities that resist this “strange teleology” that...

In this episode, we take on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments . Although he is now more well known as an economist because of his later book The Wealth of Nations , Smith shows himself to be a philosopher in his own right in Moral Sentiments . Smith, contrary to popular characterizations, wanted to show that our conduct is not solely motivated by egoism or selfishness, but that we are al...

In this episode, we talk about Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s audacious and influential text Intellectual and Manual Labor . A fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School, Sohn-Rethel argued that the social activity of commodity exchange involves a set of real abstractions that actually precede and give rise to the structure of human consciousness and its capacity for mental abstraction. This really puts Kant i...