The twin crises of immigration and mass migration brought new urgency to the balance of power between progressive, humanitarian groups and their populist opponents. In the United States and many European countries, the outcome of this struggle is uncertain, with a high chance that the public will elect more politicians who support an agenda of nativism and privatization. The Antiegalitarian Mutation makes a forceful case that those seeking to limit citizenship and participation, political or otherwise, have co-opted democracy. Political and legal institutions are failing to temper the interests of people with economic power against the needs of the many, leading to an unsustainable rise in income inequality and a new oligarchy rapidly assuming broad social control. For Nadia Urbinati and Arturo Zampaglione, this insupportable state of affairs is not an inevitable outcome of robust capitalism but rather the result of an ideological war waged against social democracy by the neoliberal governments of Reagan, Thatcher, and others. These giants of free-market fundamentalism secured power through legitimate political means, and only by taking back our political institutions can we remedy the social ills that threaten to unmake our world. That, according to The Antiegalitarian Mutation, is democracy's challenge and its ongoing promise.

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living. Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism. This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth. Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.

The full chronological sweep of democracy, from the assemblies of ancient Mesopotamia and Athens to present perils around the globe. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read. This compact history unspools the tumultuous global story that began with democracy’s radical core idea: We can collaborate, as equals, to determine our own futures. Acclaimed political thinker John Keane traces how this concept emerged and evolved, from the earliest “assembly democracies” in Syria-Mesopotamia to European-style “electoral democracy” and to our uncertain present. Today, thanks to our always-on communication channels, governments answer not only to voters on Election Day but to intense scrutiny every day. This is “monitory democracy”—in Keane’s view, the most complex and vibrant model yet—but it’s not invulnerable. Monitory democracy comes with its own pathologies, and the new despotism wields powerful warning systems, from social media to election monitoring, against democracy itself. At this urgent moment, when despots in countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia reject the promises of democratic power-sharing, Keane mounts a bold defense of a precious global ideal.

An Australian Book Review Best Book of the Year A disturbing in-depth exposé of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world. One day they’ll be like us. That was once the West’s complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them. Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy and its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy. They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of government based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents. Casting doubt on such fashionable terms as dictatorship, autocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, Keane makes a case for retrieving and refurbishing the old term “despotism” to make sense of how these regimes function and endure. He shows how they cooperate regionally and globally and draw strength from each other’s resources while breeding global anxieties and threatening the values and institutions of democracy. Like Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends. And, like Montesquieu, he worries that the practices of despotism are closer to home than we care to admit.

Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity's transparency and commercialism. Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars. Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.

Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Following the financial crisis of 2008, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie,” a disgraced ideology that staggered on like an undead monster. After the political ruptures of 2016, commentators were quick to announce “the end” of neoliberalism yet again, pointing to both the global rise of far-right forces and the reinvigoration of democratic socialist politics. But do new political forces sound neoliberalism’s death knell or will they instead catalyze new mutations in its dynamic development? Mutant Neoliberalism brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism—political theorists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists—to rethink transformations in market rule and their relation to ongoing political ruptures. The chapters show how years of neoliberal governance, policy, and depoliticization created the conditions for thriving reactionary forces, while also reflecting on whether recent trends will challenge, reconfigure, or extend neoliberalism’s reach. The contributors reconsider neoliberalism’s relationship with its assumed adversaries and map mutations in financialized capitalism and governance across time and space—from Europe and the United States to China and India. Taken together, the volume recasts the stakes of contemporary debate and reorients critique and resistance within a rapidly changing landscape. Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Sören Brandes, Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Julia Elyachar, Michel Feher, Megan Moodie, Christopher Newfield, Dieter Plehwe, Lisa Rofel, Leslie Salzinger, Quinn Slobodian

This book argues and demonstrates that fascism did happen in contemporary society such as especially America, as during post-2016. It classifies and discusses the main elements of fascism to see if these reveal and replicate themselves in America post-2016. It discovers the specific syndromes of fascism in America post-2016 that reveal and replicate universal fascist features. It detects the main social causes of fascism in America post-2016. It identifies primary counterforces to fascism in America and elsewhere. Lastly, the book constructs a composite fascism index and calculates fascism indexes for Western and comparable societies like OECD countries. These indexes provide suggestive evidence that fascism happened in America and other OECD countries, even if not in Western Europe, especially Scandinavia.