long time in the making, finally out :) plato.stanford.edu/entries/econ...

Unprompted by I wanted to share my thoughts on the Renewal x Tribune issue. It's a real mixed bag with some interesting contributions and some that are not well thought through. It's disappointing how many Labour people can't think of any policy levers beyond tax cuts to incentivise capital.

This is ahistorical nonsense playing to the gallery 🧵 British nuclear power stalled for multiple reasons such as technology (the AGR designed to replace Magnox was plagued by problems), ideology (the private sector isn’t good at delivering projects of this scale…

She had seemingly psychic powers, and correctly deduced that I was on my way back from a conference, without me revealing that. "I bet it was a load of old tosh, I can tell it was", she told me. I chose not to reveal that I had been the speaker, fearing that she was indeed psychic.

Never seen essential criteria like this on a job before, and frankly I don't know if it is really justified from what they set out, but it's a theology job and I'm sure human resources will have had a field day figuring it out.

This divide normalises and institutionalises forms of racism that fit into those respective worldviews. And with that very system itself, its norms and assumptions, coming apart both in the UK and globally, including the relative strength of those wings, those racisms are becoming more egregious.

My review of Anton Jager's Hyperpolitics appears in the next @lrb.co.uk and is online now www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I certainly hope this is some form of technical error - I chased in January and was assured by an administrator that it was out for review - but this absolutely sucks and an editor should have reached out by now.

Is the Elections Bill up to the job? Guy Furlong argues that the bill is jumble of half-measures, reflecting a lack of any coherent theory of what's wrong with democracy, and of what a better democracy might look like: renewal.org.uk/blog/democra...

It's time to send out your applications for this year's Concepta summer schools! Deadlines: 1/ 🇲🇽 Mexico City: 'The Borders of Democracy': 27 April 2/ 🇫🇮 Helsinki: 'Introduction to Conceptual History': 30 April 3/ 🇵🇱 Warsaw, 'Asynchronous Histories': 31 May www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/...

I have a new piece out in the new issue of @renewaljournal.bsky.social, identifying the history of industrial and economic democracy in Thatcherism and identifying lessons for social democrats. renewal.org.uk/journal/volu...

NEW ISSUE ALERT: Renewal 34:1 The Employment Rights Act and the Politics of Work Guest edited by Renewal contributing editors @stevenklein.bsky.social and @fhpitts.bsky.social along with co-editor @lisebutler.bsky.social renewal.org.uk/journal/volu...

I think the experiment can be concluded: It’s clear not. Complex, societies/economies require political parties with large active, memberships & mediating institutions for the formation & organisation of political identity, expression of demands & for policy implementation (1/3)

“Ministers justify cutting help for people too disabled to work by arguing it will remove the “perverse incentives” for benefits, as if a 25 year old bedbound with ME just needs incentivising to get back to the office.” My col. on next week’s Universal Credit cut www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

New Labour joke (apologies): In the 1990s, Labour looked for ideas on how to reposition or rejuvenate itself and return to government. Charlie had a promising idea: lead better.

In a new GHIL Blog post, former scholarship holder Benedikt Sepp (@lmu.de) traces how the AR-15/Armalite brought together American ideas of technological progress, guerrilla tactics in jungle warfare, and racialised ways of imagining enemies, leaving their mark on 2/3

Stumbled over this article on 'key intellectual texts, thinkers and activists' behind Milibandism. 12 years old, it's interesting how, despite the first name on the list now being Chancellor and Ed having a resurgence, so many of the others have fallen away. www.theguardian.com/politics/201...

The @politicalquarterly.bsky.social's editorial policies have likely changed somewhat since the late 1940s.

Marquand - 1998

new episode out today: Habermania! with Steven Klein (@stevenklein.bsky.social) -- we discuss Jürgen Habermas, what it means to carry the torch of the enlightenment today, and the optimistic shape of critical theory born under conditions of relative stability podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1...

Is there an account of what happened to the Sheffield Group? I was reading this yesterday and they mention an intention to publish annually. It's not as if these people disappeared.

As a brief note on the Democracy Volunteers/family voting malarkey. Democracy Volunteers is (among other things) a pressure group supporting campaigns highlighting what they claim is the high incidence and significance of family voting. They are directly tied to legislative changes in this field and

I've written a new blog on what we mean by neoliberalism in historical scholarship, and some misrepresentations I want to engage with (I don't have any beef with this article in particular). benjaminjthomas.net/musings/neoliberalism-troup

My go to critique of Schmitt and Schmittians is that his argument, insofar as it works, relies on there being existential threats to actors. It is the reality of existential threats that creates the exception and the need for decisionism. The problem with the historical Schmitt, and his

For the forum on political economy, Lars Cornelissen answers Samuel Moyn’s call to conceptualize the social side of ideology by turning to Stuart Hall’s idea of ideology as “practical reason,” examining the material networks that led neoliberalism further rightward. @lcornelissen.bsky.social

The paper edition of my book "Capitalism in Contemporary Iran: Capital Accumulation, State Formation and Geopolitics" will be released this month and is included in Manchester University Press’s January Sale. (1/8)

This photo is from an anti-ICE protest. Very worth noticing the language of "unobstructive protest activity." There aren't many examples of successful justice movements succeeding via "unobstructive protest" but even if we say for the sake of argument that it will definitely succeed against ICE, the

My latest article is out in British Politics. I try to account for the distressed confusion gripping the UK government's economic strategy. In honour of the article's namesake, I include a tortured football analogy. It's free to read (open access) here. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Newark has had an independent MP 3 times since 1999 - each time a different MP. That feels like it should be an outlier.

How and why did values become important? Here is an attempt to answer those questions. By Martin Pettersson and myself. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Not a comment on this article specifically, but I have been manifestly disappointed in how commentators have adopted the Government's framing of the day one protections backtrack as a story about trade union pragmatism. In a case where trade unions have to decide between a partial improvement of

I felt a bit of material analysis coming on so I'd encourage you to read together three texts on Zohran Mamdani's politics. First, @dmk1793.bsky.social in Renewal writing from a materialist lens on Mamdani as professional managerial class politics . renewal.org.uk/blog/is-dsa-...

I did a write up on some thoughts I've been playing with on the influential role of student activists in the Conservative Party from the 1950s to the 1970s, which I think is a story that often goes missing in accounts of Conservative modernisation (although my thoughts here are probably derivative)

Was writing this week and came across a fairly surprising finding, that the IQ society Mensa was basically a front for the St Andrews neoliberals/Adam Smith Institute. Fortunately, @lcornelissen.bsky.social already wrote this up recently. keeping-up-with-the-neoliberals.beehiiv.com/p/the-adam-s...

A common dinner party conversation topic for me used to be my thoughts on determinism in philosophy, that while hard determinism is interesting, I refuse to countenance it, because if it were true, my accepting it would make no difference, I couldn't choose to accept it anyway.

On the final day of the New York City Mayoral election, a reminder of this excellent history article on New York, Curtis Sliwa and the history of popular neoliberalism. It's open access to there's no excuse not to give it a perusal.

The basic problem facing the American right today is that the young radical critiques of the U.S.-Israel special relationship are substantively correct but unlike the left the modern right cannot use the language of universalism and hence you get the antisemitism.

To follow this a step further, the problem with climate policy, from their point of view, isn’t that it’s bad for profits per se. (Plenty of profit in green investment.) It’s that it requires shifting so much authority over production away from private property owners and into the public sector.

Today I write about the recent swirl of think tanks centred on growth and progress. And batshit authoritarians. open.substack.com/pub/williamc...

Definitely give this a read. It's an excellent analysis of the relationship between civil society and protofascism as well as the personal history of Wilhelm Röpke but it also demonstrates Pavlos's expertise on the topic of depoliticisation.

Last month I went to Global Progress Action, where I found the global centre left less moribund than its UK equivalent, and wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...

I've written a new blog post discussing and building on the analyses in the recently published 'Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation'. www.benjaminjthomas.net/musings/ashf... 🧵

It's a bit of a shitty attitude to hold but I'm have some measure of relief, for the sake of my intended pipeline of publications, that a key archive is temporarily closed, and thus should limit the risk of my getting gazumped for a future paper while prioritising current work.

I've seen a lot of incorrect commentary on the recent happenings with Your Party. As someone who has a fair amount of experience researching the formation of new political parties that went on to persist and be successful (the German CDU and European EPP): 1) it is not a distinctively leftist

We know that most asylum applicants are ultimately successful so a government dedicated to clearing the backlog could just choose to approve all current applications and clear the backlog, no new centres necessary. That this isn't on the table reflects that 'the backlog' isn't really the issue here.

Check out this excellent article from Joe Merton on the Guardian Angels and popular neoliberalism. Really great at bringing together Fear City, grassroots neoliberalisation, crime and policing, responsibilisation, and race. Timely given the current visibility of Curtis Sliwa. doi.org/10.1093/jsh/...

I would imagine that this newspaper article was probably the first (and only?) to read Margaret Thatcher alongside Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul and Jusos.

Really dispiriting reading this article about Reeves' comments about regulators to a venture capital and private equity summit. The implied subservience from regulators and government to business, and the finance behind it, is telling. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I'm chuffed that the edited volume 'Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation' is now out, including my chapter 'Britain's social market moment', which includes the most interesting finding from my PhD thesis, the transnational influence of West Germany on Thatcherism.