Stop, Look, and Listen #26
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warning: Addiction; Ethnic cleansing.
The past week’s recommended podcasts and articles, grouped thematically, on the topics of:
Contested histories of political ideas.
The coming Labour government.
Bordering practices.
Animation and cinema.
Contested histories of political ideas
In this forum hosted by The Philosopher, Dan Taylor, Gil Morejon, Marie Wuth, and Jack Stetter discuss the relevance of seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza to contemporary political debates about relationality, anarchism, racial imaginaries, and war, as well as the remoteness of some aspects of his thought from the purposes of those who seek to reclaim those ideas today.
On this episode of the New Books Network podcast, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Matthijs Lok about his new book Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past, and how counterrevolutionary thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries deployed ideas of European civilisation and aspects of Enlightenment thought to critique the radical political transformations of the period.
Host Jeffrey Rosen welcomes William B. Allen and Alison LaCroix onto the We The People podcast to discuss the different ways in which the US Constitution was deployed during political disagreements between the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War.
On the Past Present Future podcast, David Runciman and Robert Saunders explore the intellectual currents and political contexts the shaped landmark generation elections in the modern United Kingdom. This episode on the 1906 election covers how the Liberals thrashed the Conservatives, badly divided over the issue of tariff reform, to institute a period of welfare expansion. In this episode on the 1945 election, meanwhile, they examine how the Second World War legitimised Labour’s economically interventionist programme, despite Conservative efforts to portray it as dangerous and intrusive.
Jonas Bakkeli Eide interviews Kei Hiruta for the Journal of Historical Ideas Blog about his book Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity, the connections as well as disjuncture between Arendt’s and Berlin’s modes of political philosophy and the reasons for the hostility they (unevenly) held towards each other.
Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell talk to John Ganz on the Know Your Enemy podcast about his new book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, and the reconfiguration of the American right around the point of the 1992 US Presidential Election in the wake of the Cold War and deindustrialisation.
Andrew Smith reflects in The Conversation on Emmanuel Macron’s recent evocation of the memory of the French historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch, executed by the Nazis during the Second World War, and queries whether Macron has misinterpreted the lessons Bloch drew from 1930s French politics in his own complacent response to the rise of the far-right National Rally party.
The coming Labour government
James Butler writes for The LRB Blog about the gulf between the significance of the outcome of this week’s UK General Election and the scale of the challenges facing the next government, and questions whether the ambiguities and contradictions in Labour’s coalition of interests can survive once it is in government.
David Edgerton argues in this piece for The Guardian that we should take the avowed conservatism of Labour under Keir Starmer at face value, and that it is more likely that the party will face a subsequent challenge from the radical right or left than form a genuinely transformative government itself.
Liam Byrne considers the parallels between Tony Blair’s and Keir Starmer’s efforts to rebrand Labour in the 1990s and 2020s respectively, in this article for The Conversation, but also the vast gap between the genuine prospect for change New Labour seemed to promise in 1997 and the relative lack of ambition and vision in Labour’s current offer to the country.
Writing for The Guardian, Andy Beckett examines what Starmer’s ‘changed’ Labour Party looks like at the grassroots, focusing on the Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven constituency, where left-wing incumbent Lloyd Russell-Moyle was ousted as candidate following a complaint levelled against him, and the divisions in the party are likely to continue simmering after the election is over.
Amid the scandal over candidates and officials betting on the timing and outcomes of the election, Guardian reporter Rob Davies scrutinises the relationship between the Labour Party and the gambling lobby, and whether the financial and personal connections between the two will prevent Labour addressing the need to better regulate gambling and address the harms it causes once in office.
Bordering practices
Rine Vieth interviews Stephanie DeGooyer on the New Books Network podcast about her book Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization, and the ways in which early modern philosophical treatises, novels, and court proceedings all comprised textual spaces in which outsiders could be incorporated into a more expansive idea of the nation.
In this post for his On this and that, and the other newsletter, Martin D. Brown considers the charge of ‘Westsplaining’ as a response to claims made by outsiders about the politics of Central and Eastern Europe, arguing that regardless of the frequent validity of the accusation, it also often shuts down the possibility of recognising connections with histories of colonialism beyond the region.
Phil Jones interviews Helmut Scholz about his childhood experience of deportation from Czechoslovakia to Germany, as one of three million ‘Sudeten Germans’ expelled by the new government after the Second World War, on this episode of the BBC World Service’s Witness History programme.
Paul Benjamin Osterlund writes for his FLANÖR newsletter about the continued division of Cyprus’s capital, Nicosia, since the island was split in two during the war of 1974, and the very different parallel lives of Greek Cypriot residents in the southern part of the city and of their Turkish Cypriot counterparts in the north.
On this episode of the The Eurasian Knot podcast, hosts Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova talk to Kevin Platt about his book Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders, the distinctiveness and diversity of Latvia’s Russophone population, and the marginal position they have occupied within Latvia since the break up of the Soviet Union.
Animation and cinema
Josh Spiegel discusses the ground-breaking The Muppet Movie in this article for Crooked Marquee: its anarchistic approach and smuggling of more mature themes into a seemingly child-friendly film, the strong chemistry and improvisation by its voice performers, and the high calibre of both its guest stars and its songs.
On The Next Picture Show, Tasha Robinson, Genevieve Koski, and Scott Tobias, look back at Pixar’s 2012 film Brave, its depiction of its adolescent medieval princes hero Merida against the backdrop of the studio’s unpleasant gender politics, and its treatment of the tempestuous relationship between Merida and her mother.
Matthew Downhour reviews the liberal politics of Disney’s 2023 film Wish for his Apply Liberally newsletter: the way its protagonist Asha chooses her own path and challenges the status quo in the fictional kingdom of Rosas; the arbitrary and authoritarian rule of its leader King Magnifico; and its reconciliation of the desires of the individual with the needs of the community.
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