Anti Politics

An analysis of the rise of populism and the disavowal of politics in the West in recent years. In recent years, the West has seen a rising tide of populist and anti-political feeling. Figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage have gained power by distancing themselves from “the establishment” and portraying politics itself as the enemy of the people. And it’s not just them — increasingly, the media and politicians of all stripes hurl the word “ideological” as an insult, tie themselves in knots to avoid mentioning “the working class,” and champion the “depoliticising of key decision-making.” In this book, Eliane Glaser — one of the early commentators to call attention to this new wave of populism — takes stock of how we got here and where we’re going. At the heart of this is a vital question: Is the “death of politics” simply an inevitable sign of the times, going hand in hand with climate change, technological development and postmodern malaise? Or is it the intentional result of right-wing engineering? In addressing this question, Glaser shows how forces on the Right have manipulated and benefitted from the apathy of anti-politics; and how the Left’s move to centre under neoliberal leaders has helped in the process. She argues that in order to revive productive engagement and hope for the future, we need to return to three pillars of political philosophy that have become dirty words: ideology, authority and the state. Glaser puts forward a strong and galvanising defence of these foundations, showing that however unpopular they may be, they’re necessary for the functioning of a fair society.

Based on extensive use of primary sources, this book provides an analysis of Solidarity, from its ideological origins in the Polish "new left," through the dramatic revolutionary months of 1980-81, and up to the union?s remarkable resurgence in 1988-89, when it sat down with the government to negotiate Poland?s future. David Ost focuses on what Solidarity is trying to accomplish and why it is likely that the movement will succeed. He traces the conflict between the ruling Communist Party and the opposition, Solidarity?s response to it, and the resulting reforms. Noting that Poland is the one country in the world where "radicals of ?68" came to be in a position to negotiate with a government about the nature of the political system, Ost asks what Poland tells us about the possibility for realizing a "new left" theory of democracy in the modern world. As a Fulbright Fellow at Warsaw University and Polish correspondent for the weekly newspaper In These Times during the Solidarity uprising and a frequent visitor to Poland since then, David Ost has had access to a great deal of unpublished material on the labor movement. Without dwelling on the familiar history of August 1980, he offers some of the unfamiliar subtleties?such as the significance of the Szczecin as opposed to the Gdansk Accord?and shows how they shaped the budding union?s understanding of the conflicts ahead. Unique in its attention to the critical, formative period following August 1980, this study is the most current and comprehensive analysis of a movement that continues to transform the nature of East European society.

Asks how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century.

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

Attributes Canadian withdrawal from the Thaba-Tseka rural development project largely to problems accompanying the expansion of state power ("etatization"). Includes an introductory literature survey on development planning and evaluation in general.

Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges -- from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, Hopkin explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, he discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence. A historically-grounded analysis of arguably the most important global political phenomenon at present, Anti-System Politics illuminates how and why the world seems upside down.

There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation. This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas. In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics.

This book investigates the extent to which depoliticisation strategies, used to disguise the political character of decision-making, have become the established mode of governance within societies. Increasingly, commentators suggest that the dominance of depoliticisation is leading to a crisis of representative democracy or even the end of politics, but is this really true? This book examines the circumstances under which depoliticisation techniques can be challenged, whether such resistance is successful and how we might understand this process. It addresses these questions by adopting a novel comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Scholars from a range of European countries scrutinise the contingent nature of depoliticisation through a collection of case studies, including: economic policy; transport; the environment; housing; urban politics; and government corruption. The book will be appeal to academics and students across the fields of politics, sociology, urban geography, philosophy and public policy.