TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features All change is for the worse? Pessimists will find evidence in Joad Raymond Wren’s The Great Exchange: Making the news in early modern Europe, reviewed for the TLS by Noel Malcolm.
The following essay was written by AI and edited by Intellicurean:
One often hears that art is a refuge from the storm, a quaint hermitage for the sensitive soul. But when the storm is a veritable tempest of tyranny, what then? Must beauty shrink to a whispered metaphor, or can it, with a flourish, confront the grotesque, form itself a weapon, and memory its shield?
Peter Weiss, the German-Swedish playwright and novelist, perhaps best known for his provocative Marat/Sade, offers an unflinching answer in his masterwork, The Aesthetics of Resistance. This three-volume novel—published between 1975 and 1981, and only recently fully translated into English by Joel Scott for Verso Books—presents not merely a chronicle of Europe’s descent into fascism, but an audacious theory of survival, contemplation, and rebellion through the very act of art.
In a perceptive recent essay for Liberties Journal, Jared Marcel Pollen explores the novel’s radical scope, elegantly correcting a common misattribution of a pivotal political aphorism. Not Lenin, but Maxim Gorky, Pollen reveals, claimed that “aesthetics was [his] ethics—the ethics of the future.” More than a mere historical footnote, this elegantly salvaged reversal encapsulates the novel’s very governing spirit: that beauty, far from being a retreat from political crisis, is its very precondition for meaning, that art does not merely ornament truth, but, with a surgical precision, it excavates it.
A Chronicle of Darkness and Light
The Aesthetics of Resistance unfolds in the shadow of Europe’s unraveling, commencing in 1937, as Hitler consolidates power and Stalin’s purges silence dissent. The narrative spans the years up to 1942—a period that Hannah Arendt once called “midnight in the century.” But unlike conventional historical fiction, Weiss offers no linear tale of protagonists moving toward neat resolution. Instead, he crafts a philosophical Hades-wanderung—a relentless descent through betrayal, failed revolutions, ideological fracture, and the wreckage of cultural inheritance.
The text itself resists easy consumption. Its dense, paragraphless pages—walls of syntax without clear beginning or end—mirror the labyrinthine realities its characters inhabit. In an interview with The New York Times, translator Joel Scott remarked that reading Weiss is like “being submerged in consciousness,” and likened the novel’s structure to a frieze: a continuous mural of intellect, grief, and memory. This relentless, frieze-like form compels the reader to engage with history not as a series of discrete events, but as an overwhelming, cumulative force, a continuous present of trauma and resistance. The novel is as much a meditation on how we perceive history as it is on history itself.
Learning as Rebellion: The Proletarian Bildungsroman
At its core, The Aesthetics of Resistance is a Bildungsroman—a novel of education and formation. But it defiantly eschews the genre’s traditional bourgeois framework. This is no Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus spiraling through self-inquiry in cloistered academic halls. Weiss’s narrator—working-class, gentile, unnamed—does not wander through elite libraries or university quads. Instead, he and his comrades read Dante, study Greek sculpture, and debate Marxist theory in factory basements and kitchens, under constant threat of arrest or worse.
This autodidacticism—the practice of self-teaching—is not a mere supplement to formal education but a radical replacement. The narrator declares early on: “Our most important goal was to conquer an education… by using any means, cunning and strength of mind.” Their knowledge is not earned; it is stolen—like Promethean fire—from the guarded sanctums of official culture. This echoes Friedrich Schiller’s view in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) that beauty cultivates moral freedom, acting as a safeguard against the dehumanizing mechanisms of state power. Indeed, in a totalitarian state that mutilates truth and simplifies human experience, the very act of preserving intellectual complexity – a core tenet of Weiss’s autodidacts – becomes, as Susan Sontag argued in “On Style,” an ethical stance in itself, an insistence on the primacy of certain values. In Weiss’s hands, this ethic becomes urgently, tragically manifest.
Art at the Crossroads: Form, Violence, and Hope
The profound question that animates Weiss’s project is not simply how to survive violence, but how to perceive it. What happens to art, to the very faculty of perception, when the world collapses into brutality? One compelling answer emerges in the novel’s early scene at the Pergamon Altar, a Hellenistic frieze of the Gigantomachy—a mythic war between gods and giants—housed in Berlin’s museum. As Nazi banners flutter outside, the young resisters look upon this magnificent fragment of antiquity and see not quaint myth, but relentless struggle. They interpret the contorted figures as symbols of class war, reclaiming the altar from its imminent fascist cooptation.
This interpretive act—the deliberate reading “against the grain”—is both aesthetic and political, a defiant reconstitution of meaning. It echoes Walter Benjamin’s chilling thesis that “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Indeed, as Pollen writes with chilling precision, the Nazis, in their grotesque appropriation of classical forms, hollowed them into “plaster emptiness.” Weiss’s characters do the opposite: they revive these ancient forms by placing them in urgent dialogue with their own suffering, thus universalizing the struggle against domination, making the “mass of stone” a value “belonging to anyone who steps in front of it.”
The novel closes with a powerful meditation on Picasso’s Guernica, his monumental canvas depicting the bombing of the Basque town in 1937. The painting, the narrator insists, does not merely show war—it registers “an assault on the ability to express things.” Guernica marks a new kind of aesthetic task: not only must art represent horror, it must endure it. The painting outlasts its own referent, becoming what philosopher Elaine Scarry once called “a durable object,” an artifact that shelters memory and meaning long after political systems fall and the bombs cease to drop. In Alfonso Cuarón’s bleakly prescient dystopian film Children of Men (2006), Guernica appears, almost unnoticed, in the sterile interior of a government building—a poignant token of lost humanity. This, precisely, is Weiss’s abiding fear: that without the active labor of interpretation, without the human will to engage, even the greatest artistic achievements become mere decor, robbed of their subversive potential.
Witness and Memory: The Imaginative Faculty as Resistance
Some may, of course, recoil, finding The Aesthetics of Resistance too cerebral, too demanding, perhaps even too… Germanic, to resonate beyond the intellectual class. It’s a fair, if somewhat lazy, concern. And yet, as Timothy Snyder so chillingly reminds us in On Tyranny, fascism thrives precisely when the imagination is starved—when complexity gives way to cliché, when memory is replaced by manufactured myth.
Weiss’s project is a counteroffensive. His characters repeatedly ask, with desperate sincerity: “What does the Divina Commedia have to do with our lives?” In posing the question, they model the very activity the novel enacts—bridging distant beauty with present suffering. As Pollen notes, Weiss is not proposing simplistic analogies between then and now, but calling us to maintain the capacity for analogy—the capacity to perceive echoes and derive moral relevance from history, an imaginative act in itself.
Art, then, is not escapism. It is a form of mnemonic defense, a profound act of spiritual preservation. Horst Heilmann, a real historical figure and one of the novel’s central martyrs, declares: “All art… all literature are present inside ourselves, under the aegis of the only deity we can believe in—Mnemosyne”—Memory, mother of the Muses. Here Weiss evokes a stunning theological shift: divinity no longer lies in revelation, but in remembrance. Not in salvation, but in reckoning. Weiss shares this ethos with writers like W.G. Sebald and Toni Morrison, both of whom insisted that literature’s task is not to uplift, but to testify. In her Nobel lecture, Morrison described language as “the measure of our lives,” and warned that its decay is the first sign of cultural amnesia. Weiss anticipates this danger, and his novel becomes a fortress of form against forgetting.
Style as Weapon, Not Ornament
Perhaps the greatest gauntlet Weiss throws down, the element that still most sharply divides critics, is his distinctive style. The novel’s paragraphs can stretch for pages. There is no chapter division, no conventional dialogue, and barely a linear plot. But this excess is deliberate. As George Steiner observed in The New Yorker, Weiss “wanted his novel to resist readability as a form of moral laziness.” This is not to suggest the novel is obscure for its own sake, a mere affectation of difficulty. Rather, its very form embodies its thesis: the reader’s discomfort, the laborious trek through its unbroken syntax, becomes an echo of the characters’ own relentless, desperate struggle for meaning amidst chaos. Like Thomas Bernhard, whose relentless monologic fury shapes Correction and Extinction, Weiss denies literary comfort. Instead, he offers friction, density, and dissonance—qualities perfectly befitting a narrative of clandestine, underground resistance, where truth arrives not through effortless clarity but through sheer, unyielding persistence. In his study The Work of Literature, philosopher Peter Szondi described literature as a form that must “carry contradiction inside itself.” Weiss takes this principle further: contradiction is not a flaw but a crucial feature of truly resistant art. The reader’s discomfort, then, is the novel’s ethical demand.
Toward the Future: A Testament Against Forgetting
Weiss died in 1982, a year after completing his trilogy. In a rare interview that year with Der Spiegel, he confessed that his greatest fear was not censorship but irrelevance—that art would become mute in the face of spectacle. That fear feels chillingly prescient. As Western democracies flirt again with the seductive sirens of authoritarianism, and as history is re-scripted by those who profit from collective forgetting, The Aesthetics of Resistance emerges not merely as literature but as an instruction manual for endurance.
Its lessons are not limited to Germany or the 1930s. They resonate in Chile’s brutal reckoning with Pinochet, in the defiant murals of Belfast, in the urgent poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, and in the resolute chants of Tehran’s women today. Where brutality seeks silence, art insists on form—on surviving and shaping what was meant to be annihilated.
Weiss leaves us with a final, searing proposition: Imagination lives as long as resistance lives. And when resistance ends—when truth is reduced to slogan, when memory collapses into myth—then imagination, too, begins to die. But while a single reader still labors through his walls of text, still stands before the Pergamon frieze and refuses to see mere stone, Weiss’s profound vision endures. This is the essence of The Aesthetics of Resistance: not to comfort, but to compel. Not to promise victory, but to remind us that moral clarity comes not from slogans, but from study. And that to understand the past is not merely to remember—it is, in the most profound sense, to resist the future that forgets it.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘American Dreamer’ – On the enduring greatness of Gatsby; Tear down the museums?; Big tech is watching you; A new Locke manuscript; The ultimate declutter and An epic bromance for our times…
The centre left has joined the populist right in despairing of good government By Sam Freedman
This week’s TLS, featuring Michael LaPointe on ‘Gatsby’ at 100; Cordelia Fine on modern privacy; Seamus Perry on Byron; @TristramHuntVA on decolonizing national collections; @judecook_ on Alexander Starritt; @DavidRArmitage on a new John Locke manuscript – and much more pic.twitter.com/mENrZgnPrs
One finds oneself, much like a seasoned playgoer observing a particularly convoluted modern drama, grappling with the profound complexities of our age. The curtain, it seems, has risen on “Trump 2.0,” a performance so bewildering in its contradictions that even the most astute critics of human folly might pause for breath. This curious administration simultaneously seeks to disentangle itself from global commitments while igniting fresh international disputes; it endeavours to depreciate the dollar to boost exports whilst clinging to its status as the world’s reserve currency; and it champions a reduction in global economic reliance while striving to unilaterally dictate global economic terms. The American colossus, one might observe, appears caught in a most perplexing dance with its own identity, and the global audience watches, utterly transfixed.
It is into this very contemporary conundrum that Quinn Slobodian, a historian of capitalism whose intellectual acuity is as sharp as a well-honed epigram, strides with his latest volume: Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2025). This title, one must concede, possesses a certain Wildean flourish, hinting at the delightful audacity within its pages. Slobodian, with the keen eye of a diagnostician, posits that the apparent contradiction of the Far Right simultaneously embracing pro-market liberalism and social hierarchies – facilitating the free movement of capital but not of people – is, in fact, no contradiction at all. He argues that neoliberalism has always possessed the intellectual elasticity to accommodate such a narrative.
The Unruly Offspring of Thought: “Bastards” and “Volk Capital”
Slobodian’s current work builds upon his earlier seminal analyses in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan, 2023). However, Hayek’s Bastards shifts its chronological focus decisively to the 1990s, illuminating this pivotal decade through the lens of figures not previously central to his explorations. If Globalists dissected the intellectual elite of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and Crack-Up Capitalism examined market radicals within the broader globalisation context, this new work turns its penetrating gaze to paleo-libertarianism. This intriguing ideological fusion, combining libertarian disdain for global governance with paleo-conservative traditionalism and isolationism (a distinct contrast to the more recent neoconservative branch of the Republican Party), forms the crux of Slobodian’s argument.
At the heart of Slobodian’s contention lies a startling conclusion: the rise of the Far Right is an acceleration, not a rejection of capitalism; a frontlash, not a backlash. He meticulously demonstrates how right-wing libertarians of the 1990s, through their convergence with paleoconservatives and their burgeoning interest in biology, IQ, and gold, inadvertently laid the intellectual foundations for our present reality.
In a recent conversation with Asensio Robles of Comillas Pontifical University, Slobodian elucidated the two primary concepts underpinning his book. The notion of “bastards,” he explains, serves as a vivid metaphor for the generations of intellectual influence, where adherents, though inspired by mentors, may diverge significantly from the original spirit and content of their masters’ work. In the case of Friedrich Hayek, Slobodian points to those who, in their pursuit of his scientific and complexity-focused ideas, veered into domains such as scientific racism or the belief in human nature as an absolute organizing principle. These, Slobodian asserts, represent the “illegitimate” heirs who strayed far enough to betray Hayek’s fundamental principles.
Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel laureate in Economics (1974) and a leading figure of the Austrian School of economics, is perhaps best known for his fervent defense of free-market capitalism and his critiques of central planning, notably articulated in his seminal 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argued that economic coordination arises not from central design, but from a “spontaneous order” – the result of millions of individuals making decisions based on dispersed, localized knowledge communicated primarily through the price system. He believed that any attempt by the state to centrally plan the economy would inevitably lead to a loss of individual liberty and, ultimately, totalitarianism, because such planners could never possess the vast, tacit knowledge embedded within a decentralized market.
The second crucial concept is “Volk capital.” Slobodian critiques the common, overly generalized understanding of neoliberalism as simply advocating for the commodification of all things and the reduction of all humans to an interchangeable substance. By adopting a narrower, more historically precise definition, focusing on a discrete group of thinkers (including those within the Mont Pèlerin Society, which Hayek co-founded in 1947), he reveals a significant inflection point in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw a shift in neoliberal thought towards an emphasis on human difference, rather than equality.
Slobodian argues that the universalizing concept of human capital became “re-grounded” in specific genetic populations or cultural groups. He observes the re-emergence of 19th-century notions of the “Volk”—the idea of an essential character of a kinship group—fused with economic categories. This, he contends, transforms “human capital” into “Volk capital,” demonstrating how an ideology often associated with abstract market principles could regress to antiquated distinctions. For instance, by the 1980s, Hayek himself, often considered a progenitor of neoliberalism, suggested a unique quality of the Western world in producing an “optimal economic actor.”
A “Frontlash” Unveiled: Beyond the “Left-Behinds” Narrative
Slobodian further clarifies the genesis of these two books, revealing they were initially conceived as a single grand volume. The political shocks of 2016-2017 – the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit “Leave” vote, and the rise of parties like Alternative for Germany – prompted his inquiry. He expresses dissatisfaction with mainstream interpretations that viewed these developments as a revolt against neoliberal capitalism by those “left behind” by globalisation. This narrative, he argues, incorrectly positioned figures like Trump and Boris Johnson as unexpected challengers to the neoliberal consensus.
To counter this, Slobodian first introduced the concept of the “zone” in Crack-up Capitalism. This refers to more fluid spaces for investor capital within nations, such as freeports in the United Kingdom or the proliferation of Special Economic Zones in countries like China and India. He notes that in 2017-2018, much of the apparent economic nationalism was, in fact, about creating these spaces for capital mobility. For example, as of 2023, there were over 7,000 Special Economic Zones globally, employing tens of millions of people and contributing significantly to trade and investment, illustrating this practical application of “zones.”
He then sought to integrate the observation that many within the alt-right in 2016 originated from the paleo-libertarian camp. These individuals, skeptical of both global and national governments, sought a fracturing of the state system. The “grand narrative” of bundling these ideas proved “quixotic,” leading to the separate publication of Crack-up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards, the latter focusing on the paleo-alliance between dissident right-wing figures and the neoliberal movement.
The Unseen Hand of Difference: Chronology and Community
The chronological alignment between the two books is evident. In Hayek’s Bastards, the post-Cold War period is presented as a moment of reckoning for neoliberals, who questioned whether they had truly “won” or if “state spending and socialism” persisted in new guises, such as environmentalism or feminism. Similarly, in Crack-up Capitalism, the 1990s marked a breakthrough for zones, representing a form of globalisation that fostered “diversities across territory” rather than uniform regulatory spaces. The fundamental thread uniting both narratives, Slobodian suggests, is the “use of difference, politically or economically.” This challenges the widely held assumption that the 1990s and 2000s were periods of increasing uniformity, arguing instead that they were also times when “irreconcilable differences” were intensified and leveraged for new political agendas.
Slobodian also tackles the pervasive assumption that neoliberalism is solely a celebration of individualism. He argues that while individualism is indeed a focus, neoliberals are intensely concerned with the conditions under which it can be realized. When the traditional “republican tradition” – based on an impartial state providing space for individual expression – is discarded, a new framework for community must be forged. This is particularly true for the “subgenre of neoliberal thought” that advocates for the dissolution of the state.
In this context, the necessity arises to constitute communities that can function and allow for individual expression without uniform regulations from a representative state. This leads to an interest in factors like the role of ethnic homogeneity in decreasing transaction costs and fostering trust, thereby allowing communities to self-perpetuate. It also involves examining the importance of the “social contract” as a literal set of terms for participation in smaller communities, and questions of social reproduction – specifically, the necessary gender orders to ensure sufficient population in a “closed-border model of political organization.” This, he notes, is where anarcho-capitalists and conservatives find common ground, the former seeking abstract individual freedom but recognizing the need for parameters, and the latter striving to preserve existing moral and cultural orders.
A striking observation from Slobodian’s research is the neoliberal fear that the Cold War might have been “lost” despite the Soviet Union’s collapse, due to persistent high state spending. The end of the Cold War, Slobodian reveals, raised the possibility of completely dismantling the social state, which in turn brought forth new questions about how a post-redistributive order could be anchored. This, he asserts, directly relates to the current moment in the United States, where campaigns to significantly cut the federal budget, such as proposals to reduce it by one-third (as seen in certain fiscal proposals from conservative groups, often citing a need to return to pre-expansion levels of spending), would necessitate the dismantling of the existing social state. This scenario, he suggests, brings to mind the ominous question posed by Charles Murray regarding the aftermath of the welfare state’s disappearance – whether it would lead to anarchy, organic self-organization, or a segment of the population perishing. The “vexed triumphalism” following the Cold War, Slobodian concludes, thus set the stage for the “apocalyptic forms of politics” now all too familiar.
The Historical Lens: Unveiling Hidden Cleavages
Slobodian highlights the remarkable absence of significant sectarian splits within neoliberalism between the 1940s and 1980s. The clear ideological battle lines drawn between the “free, liberal, capitalist” world and the “planned command economies” of the communist bloc maintained a cohesive front. However, with the abrupt erasure of this divide in the 1990s, two paths emerged: either assume inevitable global convergence and the end of meaningful political divisions, or contend that divisions persisted, merely migrating to previously overlooked domains. The global Right, he observes, opted for the latter.
The 1990s became a period of “restless search for a new enemy” for the Right. This sometimes involved resurrecting older tropes, such as the anti-Semitic portrayal of George Soros as a conspiratorial figure, a narrative prominently used by figures like Viktor Orbán. Neoliberals, too, participated in this search, ultimately identifying their new adversary in the Left’s “march through the institutions” – specifically, movements advocating for gender and racial equality and a “politically correct” discourse. Slobodian emphasizes that this framing of issues like affirmative action and state-led efforts to redress inequality began remarkably early – some 35 years ago. He argues that the Left, too focused on internal critiques of a more mainstream neoliberalism (like that associated with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama), was often “caught off guard” by the “disruptive politics of the last decade,” failing to recognize the emerging “villain” that would ultimately manifest in today’s culture wars.
Slobodian’s methodological approach, as noted by Robles, is characterized by his commitment to “reading against the grain.” He consistently challenges conventional wisdom: if neoliberalism is thought to strive for state dissolution, Globalists shows its reliance on state intervention; if it promotes a borderless society, Crack-up Capitalism highlights its attention to “human separation”; and if the alt-right is seen as a backlash, Hayek’s Bastards frames it as a “frontlash,” an acceleration of the ideology. This “counterintuitive position” is, for Slobodian, a means to explore the profound revelations found within such contradictions. His advice to students – to begin a paper with “We think it’s like this, but it’s actually like that, and I’m going to show you why” – underscores his dedication to empirical evidence and intellectual revision.
He also draws a strong correlation between the 1990s and the 1960s, suggesting that understanding paleo-libertarian interests in hard borders, IQ, and gold necessitates examining earlier debates surrounding the 1965 Immigration Act, 1960s evolutionary psychology, or monetary reform post-Bretton Woods. These two decades, both periods of relative prosperity, represented moments where attempts were made to reconfigure societal settlements. Slobodian contends that the Left’s focus on criticizing a “progressive neoliberalism” (e.g., of the Clinton or Obama era) that paid “lip service” to 1960s social movements while blunting their critical edge meant they were “caught off guard” in 2016. He suggests that identifying what neoliberals “worried about” in a given decade, such as environmental demands disrupting growth models in the 1970s and 1990s, could reveal “vulnerability in the economic system” and “soft spots” for counter-movements to exploit.
Future Horizons: AI, Animals, and the Unseen Hand of Technology
Regarding future inquiries, Robles points to the absence of cryptocurrencies and AI in Hayek’s Bastards. Slobodian confirms these will be explored in his forthcoming book, Muskism, co-authored with Ben Tarnoff, which will delve into AI, effective altruism, and superintelligence. This work is slated for release next year.
However, Slobodian maintains a critical stance on cryptocurrencies, viewing them as “parasitical on a functioning traditional monetary system” and primarily “a hedge-speculative asset” or “plaything for a small number of libertarians and more recently large investors.” He believes his skepticism has been “a wise bet,” as the number of “true believers” in blockchain as a political template remains small, with most investors using crypto like any other growth sector.
Intriguingly, Slobodian’s other new research direction looks not to the digital future, but to a historical “backward” step: the changes in the human sciences in the postwar decades, specifically “How humans became animals at Harvard.” This project will explore the world of figures like Richard Herrnstein (a student of B. F. Skinner) and E. O. Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s, examining how humans were increasingly “analogized to animals.”
In Hayek’s Bastards, Quinn Slobodian has, with surgical precision, woven a compelling and unsettling thread through the tapestry of intellectual history. He compels us to confront the uncomfortable truths about the origins of our present predicament, reminding us that the seemingly spontaneous outbursts of populism are, in fact, the meticulously cultivated fruits of a long and complex intellectual lineage. One leaves his analysis with a renewed sense of vigilance, a heightened awareness of the subtle, often insidious, ways in which ideas, like the most potent of poisons, can mutate and proliferate, shaping our world in ways we are only now beginning to comprehend. Indeed, the stage is set for future acts in this ongoing drama, and one eagerly awaits Slobodian’s next intellectual curtain call.
“The Cynic & The Dandy” is an AI-generated essay series based on a hypothetical collaboration between Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
Some of the highlights of this week’s Country Life.
Meet the coastal superheroes
John Lewis-Stempel celebrates the depth and breadth of sea-birds spotted over British waters, from the dive-bombing gannet to the pick-pocket herring gull
Heavy petal
Catriona Gray meets artist Rachel Dein, whose botanical bas-reliefs really stand out from the crowd
I’ve got chills, they’re multiplying
Tom Parker Bowles savours the ultimate thirst quencher — a fruity and refreshing sorbet
Arts & antiques
Kenilworth Castle is reliving its central role in the 19-day wooing of Elizabeth I exactly 450 years on, as Carla Passino discovers
Back to Brideshead
Britain’s historic country houses are the much-loved stars of a host of films and television dramas, often leaving big-name actors in the shade, finds Ben Lerwill
The Experts’ Experts
Designers and architects from Country Life’s Top 100 throw open their contacts books to reveal the specialists they turn to when seeking inspiration for a country-house project
Peter Jones’s favourite painting
The chair of the British-Italian Society chooses a compelling and mysterious portrait of Christ
SAVE at 50
Founding trustee Simon Jenkins reflects on 50 years of SAVE Britain’s Heritage and the charity’s battles to safeguard a string of historic buildings
The legacy
Dedication’s what you need and Ross and Norris McWhirter, the twins behind the Guinness World Records, had it in abundance, as Amie Elizabeth White learns
Suits you!
When did the sodden knitwear cossie give way to the glamorous bikini? Deborah Nicholls-Lee dives into the history of swimwear
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell is beach ready with a collection of coastal favourites
Sheer bliss
Caroline Donald hails the blend of love and laissez-faire that has created a spectacular garden on an escarpment overlooking the sea at Ash Park in Devon
A smell by any other name
Ian Morton profiles the flora and fauna causing a stink in the natural world, some to attract a meal or mate, others to repel a predator
Tyger, tyger burning bright
Tipu Sultan threw a spanner in the works of Britain’s Imperial ambition, but the Tiger of Mysore was an inspiration to Blake and Keats, reveals Lucien de Guise
Winging it
Mark Cocker pays tribute to the beauty, elegance and laser-like predatory precision of the kestrel
The following essay was written by ChatGPT, and edited by Intellicurean, through the creative filter of Oscar Wilde’s barbed wit and George Bernard Shaw’s moral seriousness, of a review of John Bellamy Foster’s “Albert Einstein’s ‘Why Socialism?’: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay” as it would appear in an esteemed magazine or journal.
In an era where celebrity chatter often drowns out meaningful discourse—ephemeral as the pixels that transmit it—it is both refreshing and necessary to recall that Albert Einstein was not merely a demigod of science, floating above the affairs of humankind. He was a thinker with moral conviction and intellectual courage. John Bellamy Foster’s timely volume, Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay (Monthly Review, July 2025), excavates an overlooked manifesto whose radical clarity remains provocatively undiminished by time.
Unpacking Einstein’s Socialist Vision
More than seventy-five years have passed since Einstein contributed his essay Why Socialism? to the inaugural issue of Monthly Review in May 1949—right in the throes of America’s Red Scare. In that climate of ideological hysteria, even reason itself was suspect. Yet Einstein, with characteristic directness, named capitalism as the source of modern spiritual and economic malaise. “The economic anarchy of capitalist society,” he wrote, “is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.”
This was no armchair abstraction. It was an act of moral and intellectual defiance in an era of conformity. Rather than tempering his critique to placate the political climate, Einstein diagnosed capitalism as a system that cripples the individual, erodes social cohesion, and mistakes profit for purpose. His socialism, then, was not bureaucratic dogma, but a humane vision: a call for solidarity, responsibility, and human dignity.
Foster’s introduction accomplishes three critical feats. First, it confirms Einstein’s consistent—if unfashionable—commitment to socialist ideals. Second, it situates Why Socialism? within a contemporary moment of deepening ecological and geopolitical crisis, not unlike the postwar anxieties Einstein addressed. Third, and most compellingly, Foster refuses to treat Einstein’s words as nostalgic artifacts. Instead, he reads them as instruments of moral interrogation for the present.
Einstein’s Moral Urgency in a Cynical Age
A powerful moment recounted in Foster’s commentary draws from a recently unearthed interview transcript titled, YES, ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS A SOCIALIST. In it, Einstein recounts a chilling conversation: a friend, contemplating nuclear annihilation, casually asks why Einstein is so concerned about humanity’s extinction. The question is as nihilistic as it is sincere—eerily prefiguring today’s fatalism disguised as realism.
Einstein’s response was telling. He saw this resignation not as philosophical sophistication, but as a symptom of capitalism’s emotional deadening. A world driven by profit, he argued, had alienated people not only from one another but from their very capacity to find joy. “The naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment of life,” he mourned, had become a casualty. The resulting solitude, he observed, was not noble introspection but a prison built of egotism and insecurity.
In Why Socialism?, Einstein extends this observation: “Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being… As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings… and to improve their conditions of life.” The essay thus offers not just an economic critique, but a portrait of the spiritual crisis induced by capitalism.
A Socialism of Decency, Not Dogma
Einstein did not envision socialism as the rigid apparatus of state control feared by his critics. Instead, he imagined a cultural and moral transformation—one that would replace competition with cooperation, and empty success with meaningful contribution. “In addition to promoting his own innate abilities,” he wrote, “education would attempt to develop in [the individual] a sense of responsibility for his fellow man in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.”
This human-centered socialism bears more resemblance to George Bernard Shaw’s ethical idealism than to any centralized Leninist command structure. It’s a socialism that asks not only how society is organized, but what kind of people it produces.
Economic Insecurity and the Specter of Waste
Foster’s commentary reaches its most powerful moments when it highlights the relevance of Einstein’s critique in light of today’s contradictions. Technological progress has not delivered leisure or security—it has exacerbated anxiety. “The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job,” Einstein observed. “Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than an easing of the burden of work for all.”
The implications are strikingly modern. The rise of AI, automation, and gig economies has done little to stabilize human life. Meanwhile, the grotesque spectacle of billionaires launching vanity rockets while basic needs go unmet seems to fulfill Einstein’s warning: “Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… at the expense of smaller ones.”
Einstein’s insights cut deeper than economics. He warned that unbridled competition produces “a huge waste of labor and… crippling of the social consciousness of individuals.” Foster echoes this, showing how the very mechanisms that promise efficiency often produce alienation and redundancy. In a world where millions remain hungry while supply chains overflow, the diagnosis of “planned chaos” is tragically apt.
The Courage to Imagine a Better World
To Foster’s credit, the book does not shy away from the difficulties of implementing socialism. It acknowledges Einstein’s own candor: that centralized systems can create new forms of domination. “How can the rights of the individual be protected,” he asked, “and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?”
Foster does not offer easy answers, nor does he romanticize Einstein’s views. But what he recovers is the philosopher’s refusal to retreat into cynicism. Einstein, like Shaw, understood that history does not advance through comfort or caution. It advances through the courage to propose—and live by—dangerous ideals.
This moral clarity is what makes Why Socialism? enduring. In an era when capitalism insists that no alternatives exist, Einstein reminds us that alternatives are always possible—so long as we preserve the moral imagination to conceive them.
No Middle Ground—And That’s the Point
If one criticism can be leveled at Foster’s approach, it is that he leaves little room for ambiguity. This is no quiet meditation on gradual reform. It is a call to judgment. In a time when readers often seek the past as comfort, Foster compels us to read it as confrontation. The result is not a nostalgic ode to Einstein’s politics but a provocation: What kind of civilization do we want?
Einstein wrote, “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented towards social goals.” The boldness of that sentence still stings in a society that treats cooperation as utopian and hoarding as genius.
Foster’s restraint is notable throughout—he avoids both hagiography and polemic. He invites the reader to wrestle with Einstein’s ideas, not worship them. The book’s greatest achievement is that it makes us take Einstein seriously—not just as a physicist, but as a moral thinker who challenged the logic of his time and, perhaps, still ours.
Conclusion: A Dangerous Hope
To read Why Socialism? in 2025 is to hear a still-resonant signal from a thinker who refused to let go of the future. Einstein’s socialism was never about bureaucracies—it was about the possibility of decency, of cooperation, of lives lived without fear. And if that vision sounds naive today, then perhaps the problem lies not in the vision, but in the world that has taught us to dismiss it.
As Foster’s book makes clear, the choice remains what it was in 1949: between solidarity and atomization, between a society built on care or one cannibalized by competition. It is, at bottom, a choice between life and extinction.
One imagines Einstein, ever the pragmatist with a poet’s soul, would have approved.
In The New Yorker essay “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics,” Kyle Chayka explores how social media has become not merely a communication tool for political figures but the primary arena in which politics itself now unfolds. The piece contrasts the digital personas of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani to illustrate how posting has evolved into a core exercise of power and a new form of political identity.
Chayka begins by chronicling former President Trump’s frenetic use of Truth Social, the platform he created after leaving Twitter. Trump does not merely announce decisions online; he appears to make them there. For instance, in June 2025, Trump unilaterally declared and publicized a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Truth Social after having ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only days earlier. He issued warnings and taunts in the same all-caps style he once used to brag about the size of his nuclear arsenal compared to Kim Jong Un’s. The essay argues that this real-time posting has compressed world-shaking events into casual, ephemeral updates, trivializing violence and policy into the equivalent of viral content.
Yet Trump is not alone in harnessing the power of constant broadcasting. Chayka turns to Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York State assembly member and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who embodies a different approach to digital politics. Where Trump’s style is bombastic and combative, Mamdani’s presence on TikTok and Instagram is more polished and warm. His short-form videos—some produced by the creative agency Melted Solids—blend documentary realism with the aesthetics of viral influencer content. Clips of Mamdani walking through Manhattan or spontaneously greeting his filmmaker mother, Mira Nair, have garnered millions of views. His collaborations with high-profile digital creators like the Kid Mero and Emily Ratajkowski reflect an understanding that modern campaigns are not only about policy but about generating a steady stream of engaging material.
Chayka underscores that both politicians are symptoms of the same phenomenon: social media has swallowed the traditional infrastructure of political communication. No longer is there a clear boundary between a politician’s private musings and official pronouncements. The medium has become the message—and often the entire substance. Even memes have turned into flash points of political conflict. The article recounts how U.S. border officials detained a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who carried a satirical meme of Vice President J.D. Vance on his phone, suggesting that political images have acquired the power to implicate their holders in ideological battles.
This transformation, Chayka argues, has significant consequences. Trump’s unfiltered posts, once viewed as a sideshow, have become a primary instrument of governance, with the potential to inflame conflicts or disrupt alliances. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s refined authenticity—crafted through video diaries and collaborations—illustrates how even progressive candidates must adopt the same always-online posture to cultivate a political following. While Mamdani’s style is less aggressive than Trump’s, it similarly depends on projecting a version of authenticity that is inseparable from performance.
The essay closes by reflecting on the future of American politics in this environment. The Democratic Party has struggled to counter Trump’s cultural dominance, as shown by tone-deaf spectacles like a Pride concert at the Kennedy Center with anti-Trump parodies of Les Misérables. In contrast, Mamdani’s campaign has generated genuine enthusiasm. Yet Chayka raises an open question: can the idealistic energy of this new digital-first politics survive the compromises of actual governance? If online performance has become the main credential for leadership, it is unclear whether any politician—no matter their ideology—can avoid the pressures of perpetual self-promotion.
In the end, Chayka’s essay offers a clear warning: social media has transformed politics into a theater of the immediate, where every post carries the weight of policy and every meme can become an instrument of power. Whether this dynamic can be reconciled with the demands of responsible government remains the central challenge of the digital age.
Strengths of the Essay
Compelling Illustrations of Digital-First Governance
The article effectively juxtaposes Trump’s all-caps proclamations with Mamdani’s handheld videos.
Vivid examples: Trump’s posts about Iranian bombings feel almost satirical in their triviality—like “food grams”—yet they are deadly serious.
The Vance meme incident (Norwegian tourist Mikkelsen denied entry partly over a meme) underscores how digital artifacts can become politically consequential.
Clear Argument
Chayka convincingly demonstrates that posting is no longer merely a marketing tactic—it is a form of exercising power.
The phrase “influencer-in-chief” encapsulates this new paradigm succinctly.
Timeliness and Relevance
The piece captures the unsettling normalcy of this phenomenon—how we now expect statecraft to be conducted via apps.
It connects to broader anxieties about the erosion of institutional boundaries between governance and entertainment.
Balanced Comparison
The contrast between Trump’s aggression and Mamdani’s optimism avoids simple equivalence.
The essay suggests that while style differs, both are beholden to the same dynamics: immediacy, spectacle, and performative authenticity.
Areas For Further Exploration
A Critique of Consequences
While Chayka notes the trivialization of serious decisions (e.g., bombings posted like selfies), he stops short of examining the systemic dangers—the erosion of deliberative processes, the collapse of public trust, and the incentivizing of extremism.
A deeper dive into why social media rewards such maximalist performances—and how this affects democracy—would have been valuable.
An Exploration of Audience Complicity
The essay portrays politicians as the main actors, but it could interrogate how audiences co-produce this environment: what are the incentives to consume, share, and reward this content?
Do voters really want “authenticity,” or simply entertainment masquerading as politics?
Further developed Historical Context
While the piece references Trump’s first term, it could have drawn richer parallels with earlier media transformations:
Roosevelt’s radio “Fireside Chats”
Kennedy’s TV charisma
Obama’s early social media campaigns
This would help readers situate today’s moment within a longer trajectory.
Broader Implications
The essay ultimately raises unsettling questions:
If the performance of authenticity is now the primary qualification for political power, how do policy substance and institutional competence survive?
Is there any way for governance to reassert seriousness, or will the logic of virality always prevail?
What happens when online theater collides with offline consequences—wars, economies, civic life?
These questions feel especially urgent given that the piece suggests this dynamic is not limited to Trump’s right-wing populism but has also infiltrated progressive candidates.
*THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY CHAT GPT AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Joyce Carol Oates on serial killers and toxic metals, Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s domestic army, David Shulman on the second Nakba, Regina Marler on the Brothers Grimm, Michelle Nijhuis on what we save, Peter Canby on the murder of a priest, Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Albert Barnes’s art sense, Ian Johnson on Xi père, Lola Seaton on Sheila Heti’s deceptive ease, James Gleick on AI nonsense, poems by Milan Děžinský and Devon Walker-Figueroa, and much more.
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