The fastest-rising force in Italian politics is Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia—a party with a direct genealogy from Mussolini's regime. Surging to prominence in recent years, it has waged a fierce culture war against the left, polarized political debate around WWII, and even secured the largest vote share in Italy's 2022 general election. Eighty years after the fall of Mussolini, his heirs, and admirers are again on the brink of taking power.Mussolini's Grandchildren d...

OctoberBy: David BroderCan an angry, disaffected, self-destructive young man find hope and solace at an insane asylum when he doesn’t believe they can possibly exist?It is 1983, and Derek is twenty-one and at war with existence itself. If he is vanquished, he lives. If he is victorious, he dies.October challenges all the life-affirming ideas we have been imbued with by calling into question the notions that life has value and meaning, that love is not selfis...

In the nineteenth century, France embarked on the colonization of whole swathes of Africa and Asia. What drove this policy, and what methods did it use to establish and enforce French domination? What disruptive effects did this have on the colonized societies, and what did it mean for their economic and social development? Today, can we say they have been completely decolonized? Empire on the Cheap offers new answers to these ever-controversial questions.Drawing on extens...

Feminist Christine Delphy co-founded the journal Nouvelles questions f�ministes with Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s and became one of the most influential figures in French feminism. Today, Delphy remains a prominent and controversial feminist thinker, a rare public voice denouncing the racist motivations of the government's 2011 ban of the Muslim veil. Castigating humanitarian liberals for demanding the cultural assimilation of the women they are purporting to "save," Delphy sho...

Eminent Italian historian Giovanni Levi once notably remarked that “no one is a Marxist anymore,” pointing to a paradox in Italian cultural history. While what is called "Marxism" was supposedly hegemonic over Italian culture, and especially history writing, for decades in the postwar period, it then seems to have suddenly disappeared.This study questions such a vision of a monolithic and hegemonic Marxism. It starts from the most effective anecdote to all ideologising narratives—t...

It is time for philosophy to return to the city. In today’s crisis-ridden world of globalised capitalism, increasingly closed in on itself, it may seem harder than ever to think of ways out. Philosophy runs the risk of becoming the handmaiden of science and of a hollowed-out democracy. Donatella Di Cesare calls on philosophy instead to return to the political fray and to the city, the global pólis, from which it was banished after the death of Socrates.Suggesting a radical...

A stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century.Immunodemocracy offers a stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century. Moving from the ecological question to the rule of experts, from the state of exception to immunitarian democracy, from rule by fear to the contagion of conspiracy theory, from forced distancing to digi...

Conspiracy theories are neither delusions nor lies, neither simplistic fallacies nor psychological quirks: rather, they are a political problem. They are not so much about truth as about power. Rather than seeking to debunk conspiracy theories as the work of fringe groups and cranks, Donatella Di Cesare develops an original account that portrays conspiracy as the spectre of a shattered community.With the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the distrust of politics and politicians...

As capitalism triumphs on the ruins of utopias and faith in progress fades, revolts are breaking out everywhere. From London to Hong Kong and from Buenos Aires to Beirut, protests flare up, in some cases spreading like wildfire, in other cases petering out and reigniting elsewhere. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop them: as many were reflecting on the loss of public space, the fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis with the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are living i...

The history of universal suffrage is best understood as a conflict between liberal elites and democractic workers' movements, according to Domenico Losurdo. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued that electoral influence should be more pronounced among the educated - and wealthy - than among those working with their hands. Every vote ought not to be counted the same. Countries with deep liberal roots have historically been quick to restrain the spread of the franchise, persisting in discrim...

Human history has always been marked by the mobility of people and populations, from the earliest movement of human beings out of Africa to the flows of migrants and refugees today. While mobility is intrinsic to human nature, migration is not always voluntary: it can be the result of free choice, but it can also be forced, in different ways and to varying degrees.In this book, Massimo Livi-Bacci examines migrations past and present with reference to the degree of free choice behin...

In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda’s essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as ...