What's Left of Philosophy

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Megan Hyska to discuss her work on propaganda. She takes us through the history of the term propaganda, what makes propaganda a distinctly political concept, and how propaganda helps create or inhibit group agency. She shows why thinking that assumes propaganda can only work by manipulating our irrationality fails to help us see that propaganda can be effectiv...

On this episode we are joined by Dr. Søren Mau to discuss his new book, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital . We talk about why economic power is different than violence and ideology, what’s distinctive about the human being in terms of its metabolic exchange with nature, and what this means for capitalist reproduction and the possibility of its interruption. Speakin...

In this episode, we discuss the ideas of economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek as they appear in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom . This influential book was written in response to what Hayek saw as the trend towards socialism in the mid-twentieth century and it offers his defense of “classical liberalism.” We examine the political and epistemological premises of Hayek’s theory of libert...

In this episode we finally get down and dirty with the big dog of Anglophone political philosophy, John Rawls. We discuss his 1993 book Political Liberalism , which expands on his earlier theory of justice to develop an account of the pluralistic tolerance at the heart of a liberal society characterized by the fact of a diversity of incommensurate but reasonable worldviews. We talk about what Rawl...

In this episode, we unpack tensions between theories of equality that emphasize opportunity and outcomes in a discussion based upon Christine Sypnowich’s recent Boston Review article, “Is Equal Opportunity Enough?” We also discuss our very own William Paris’s response to Sypnowich in his essay “The Art of Equality.” We debate whether liberalism is tied to capitalist institutions, what it means to...

In this episode we talk about Antonio Gramsci’s book The Modern Prince . Written while imprisoned by the fascists in Mussolini’s Italy, the work is a reflection on the party as a form of organization and the importance of leadership for revolutionary socialist politics. We discuss Gramsci’s realist approach to politics as an art and science, his insistence on partisanship as a condition for object...

In this episode, we are joined by Michael Thomas to talk about Black aesthetics and hip hop in particular. We work through what it means for hip hop to be a 'problem space' that reconstructs the cultural contradictions and political messaging of a racist society in a way that is not essentializing and that aspires to address social problems without producing easy answers. Main themes inc...

In this patrons-only episode we discuss Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 The State and Revolution . When he’s not snarkily dragging his political opponents for their opportunism and philistinism, Lenin tries to work through some of the most hotly contested ideas in Marxian political theory, including the role of the state in capitalist society and its ‘withering away’ after the revolution, the problems of bo...

In this inaugural episode of our new series on aesthetics, we discuss Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man . We begin with his assessment of the French Revolution and its perceived failure to deliver on its lofty republican ideals, focusing on his ascription of this failure to the fragmentation of the modern self and society. We then attempt to wrap our minds around...

In this episode, we take a deep dive into Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks . We discuss his views on racism as a form of alienation and narcissism, assess that status of reason throughout his argument, and interrogate his emphasis on futurity over history. Throughout we defend his theory of social pathology and his embrace of reason and universal humanism. This episode should be a...

In this episode we are joined by Devin Zane Shaw to talk about his book Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy . We discuss the concept of the ‘three-way fight’, what Beauvoir’s analysis of the antinomies of action can teach us about emancipatory violence, and the necessity of community self-defense. Ambiguity may be an inescapable condition for those of us who trul...

Feeling alienated? In this episode, we are here for you. We dig into three periods of Herbert Marcuse’s thought. Marcuse was Martin Heidegger’s student in the 1920s, a member of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, the philosopher of the New Left in the 1960s, and stays haunting the petit bourgeois in the 2020s. We pay our respects and get to the bottom of his influence on critical theory, social mo...

In this episode we dig into some early writings by the incomparable black radical feminist and communist Angela Davis. We reflect on some of the contradictions involved in the transformation of women’s labor in the development of patriarchal capitalism and the latent potentials for the emancipated life in common that these developments nevertheless carry within themselves. We talk about the radica...

We couldn't put together a new episode for you this week, so we thought we'd unlock an old Patreon exclusive! Thanks to everyone who helped us pick which one by voting in our Twitter poll. We'll be back with a brand new ep next Monday. -- In this episode, the crew takes on a beloved figure of the academic 'left': Michel Foucault. The discussion gravitates around Foucault’s...

In the second installment of our “What is Liberalism?” series we discuss the relationship between liberalism and the institution of the police. If a core principle of liberalism is the equal application of the law, then some enforcement mechanism is necessary to ensure the stability of the social order. The problem is that in liberal democracies the police are asked to equally apply the law while...

In this special holiday episode we bring in the new year by being complete and total haters! We keep it real light and breezy for this short little convo. We drag Auld Lang Syne, the concept of New Years’ resolutions, the very notion of historical dates, and also for some reason the city of Boston. At one point the discussion turns into an unboxing video, which is great content for a podcast, famo...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was many things, but chill was not one of them. In this patron-exclusive episode we have no chill either, getting into it about the renegade philosopher’s Discourse on Inequality , his totally bizarre fictional state of nature, and his stunningly prescient critique of modern society. You know, we aren’t primitivists at all, but sometimes it’s kinda hard to maintain that this...

In this episode we talk with Jacob Blumenfeld about the concept of property in German Idealism. As it turns out, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each had a pretty different idea of property than their Anglo counterparts who were out there apologizing for private property as a natural right and capitalism as freedom. Some might even say that socialism is what completes the system of German Idealism. They m...

Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism is probably the most important foundational text for modern sociology, and we think that’s kind of a downer, actually. We talk about how we are thoroughly unconvinced about his central historical claim in the book, which seems to be that the Protestant reformation created the subjective conditions for the emergence of capitalism somehow....

This is a tribute episode to the great Mike Davis, the visionary social theorist and comrade who recently passed away in October 2022. We discuss his pathbreaking social analysis of Los Angeles, his political economy of urban life, his fondness for and reactivation of Marx’s political writings, and his unique ability to locate concrete phenomena within a specific historical conjuncture. Despite hi...

In Part Two of our two-part mini-series we discuss the work of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope . We ask what difference there is between the thought of Bloch and Theodor Adorno, how hope and utopia enable political action, and why so many traditions seem to abhor the concept of utopia. Expand your horizons and come learn how to hope again in this episode! This is just a small clip from the ful...

In part one of our two-part mini-series on hermeneutics and utopia we discuss the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer in his 1983 text Praise of Theory . We talk about the importance of prejudice and tradition for self-understanding, ask whether the natural sciences or the human sciences have sole claim to truth, and praise the (qualified) freedom of theory from instrumental reason (continental philosop...

In this episode we are joined by Martin Hägglund to discuss the existentialist's argument for what makes human life meaningful—and why democratic socialism is the logical conclusion to reach after having considered the matter carefully. We also dig into the limits of social democracy, the need for the state, and the revaluation of value that is yet to come. leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil...

In this episode we are joined by James Callahan (aka Crane) to talk about Gillian Rose’s book Hegel Contra Sociology . We explore Rose’s critique of early twentieth-century sociology, which she argues was completely hampered by the limitations of its neo-Kantian framework. Looking to break out of this transcendental circle, Rose turns to Hegel and defends a highly original and sophisticated readin...

In today’s episode we talk about Guy Debord’s critique of life under modern capitalism by looking at his scathing and provocative The Society of the Spectacle . Is it true that all that was once lived is now mere representation? That the whole of society is mediated by an endless proliferation of passifying images? That the fullness of life has been replaced by its bloodless negation in survival?...