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• Radical Thinkers: Jewish Thought

  40% off until April 25th, with bundled ebooks. Click here to activate.
  
  
  
  Our Radical Thinkers series publishes beautifully designed editions of important works of theory and philosophy. The latest set focuses on four classic works of Jewish thought from Gillian Rose, Jacqueline Rose, Isaac Deutscher and Michael Löwy.
  
  These books are 40% off until April 25. Click here to activate your discount.
  

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  By Verso Books / 21 April 2017 / comments

• Emmanuel Macron, spasm of the system

  First published in Le Monde Diplomatique. Translated by David Broder.
  
  
  
  "I'm going to be very clear..." Probably ignorant of the basic logics of the symptom, Emmanuel Macron seems unable to see how this repetitive way of starting each of his answers betrays the deep desire to cover things up — or rather, to recover them — that animates his whole campaign. "Keep on bathing between vagueness and nothingness" — that is what we should take from each of his promises of clarity. In his defence, we will admit that deferring to the obligation to speak when one's intention is to say nothing at all is one of the curses of this "democracy" that we have still found no satisfactory antidote for. Some will object that most of the candidates end up accommodating to this long and difficult moment — a moment one simply has to go through — and that the campaign-season fib is a well-established genre which should no longer be able to surprise anyone. For Macron, however, the problem takes on unprecedented proportions: not just a matter of slipping across a couple of whoppers, even of the calibre of "my enemy is finance" [as François Hollande claimed before his election in 2012]: rather, his entire campaign, and even his very persona as a candidate, constitute an essentially fraudulent enterprise.

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  By Frédéric Lordon / 21 April 2017 / comments

• Reconceptualizing Family History

  "Frustrated by the fact that most texts on women treated 'the man's world' as the given and then simply asked where and how women fitted in," Stephanie Coontz writes, "I decided to undertake a survey of American gender roles: that was the starting point of the present book" — The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600–1900, published by Verso in 1988.
  
  
  Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters, c. 1863-65. via Wikimedia Commons.
  
  As the focus of her research shifted from "woman's private sphere" to the family as a larger arena in which the public and private intersect, Coontz became more attentive to the diversity of household arrangements across time and space. "Stimulated by the burgeoning research into family history," she writes, "I began to look at the family as a culture's way of coordinating personal reproduction with social reproduction — as the socially sanctioned place where male and female reproductive activities condition and are conditioned by the other activities into which human beings enter as they perpetuate a particular kind of society, or try to construct a new one." 

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  By Stephanie Coontz / 21 April 2017 / comments

• Reconceptualizing Family History (Part II)

  Continued from part I.
  
  
  Detail from Francis William Edmonds' The New Bonnet (1858).
  
  The Limits of Structural and Demographic Analysis
  
  Although it is important to compare demographic trends and household structures and seek their economic correlates, such procedures yield only limited information about the history of families. Olga Linares points out: “Qualitative changes in the meaning of interpersonal obligations may be as important in distinguishing among household types as more easily measured changes in size and form.” Indeed, as Barrington Moore Jr has commented, tabulating structural differences “necessarily involves ignoring all differences except the one being measured.” Changes in social relations and patterns are not “reducible to any quantitative differences; they are incommensurable. Yet it is precisely such differences that matter most to human beings.”47

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  By Stephanie Coontz / 21 April 2017 / comments

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