Over recent years, it seems ‘radical’ has become a dirty word. In the wake of the anniversary of 1968, and with books and films galore about the romance and failures of revolutionary life and thought, it seems we’re comfortable with radicalism as an object of nostalgia, but less willing to understand its contemporary legacy – and its trivialisation.

Culture Wars is exploring radicalism – past, present and future – in an attempt to understand a lived tradition as well as how certain ideas filter through the culture. Having focused on past ‘Radical Thinkers’ and the legacy of 1968, touring from Iran to Haiti, investigating the role of ideology and demise of the traditional Left, we turn towards two contemporary variants: ‘political Islam’ and the environmentalist movement. These reviews and essays constitute a critical investigation of what shapes contemporary attitudes towards the future.

You can’t buy freedom

A reflection on Benjamin Franklin's counterposition of freedom and security

Franklin employs a commercial metaphor: liberty as something to be traded for safety, or, by implication, any other desirable abstract noun. It captures well the naivety with which liberty is often discussed, the failure to understand what freedom really means.

Oddly innocent moments

Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee (2007)

What’s noticeable in fact is the lack of any deep sense of good and bad beyond what personally affects the protagonists (many have lost those close); there are simply ‘sides’ - and ‘people’.

The personal and the political

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile, by Helen Rappaport (Hutchinson, 2009)

A new biography of Lenin recreates his exile years in fine-grained detail, but it intriguingly invokes feminism as a prism through which to makes sense of the past.

Questioning the carnivalesque

Is feudal ritual really a convincing model for contemporary revolution?

When the abandoned placards have been swept up and the first cars and pedestrians are released from the bottleneck to take back the formerly ‘liberated’ streets and town squares, the city seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief as the normal routine resumes unscathed. Serious change cannot be effected without action, but ‘aimless hyper-activism’—doing because ‘something must be done’—can actually channel energies away from any seriously progressive project aimed at large-scale social change.

Swimming against an authoritarian current

The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, by Brian Monteith

The Bully State is often useful and entertaining. But Monteith’s anthropomorphising of social pressures into a list of bullying ‘socialist’ do-gooders risks underestimating an important part of hyperregulation today.

Ahistorical analysis

Why Not Socialism? , by Gerry A Cohen (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Cohen’s mental project is clearly within the bounds of analytical political philosophy, and distorts his view of socialism at a number of key points, rendering it sophisticated but an ultimately unconvincing response to the question of why not socialism.

Legal highs

Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer, by Michael Mansfield (Bloomsbury, 2009)

Mansfield displays a passion for moral argument, which is likely to become rarer and thus considered more and more radical over time, as more and more regulation creeps into the courtroom. It is unlikely that the barristers of tomorrow will dare to talk with any normative authority for fear of missing some vital detail and finding themselves debarred.

Sound bites from a revolution

A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine, Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Although we follow Paine through the upheaval of two revolutions, however, seeing him succeed and fail in his struggle to influence their direction, and meet some great historical actors along the way (Jefferson, Danton, Burke), we leave the play surprisingly ignorant of the content of his arguments

A more or less partisan press?

The Political Economy of Media: enduring issues, emerging dilemmas, by Robert W Mc Chesney (Monthly Review Press, 2008)

Counter to the underlying implication in this collection, it cannot be simply business’ bloodthirsty desire for profit that has led to the disintegration of stalwart journalism and civic life today. There is also the matter of a very real defeat of the left, and the discreditating of any alternative, which has hurried on apathy, cynicism and lack of political contestation tout court.

Cold and oppressive yet strangely comforting

Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadare (Canongate 2007)

Overall, the charm of this book lies in the innocent, imaginative playfulness of the young narrator, and the unselfconsciousness of his voice. Whether it was the best book published in English in the whole world in 2005 remains an open question.

Moving on the human rights debate

Human Rights and Social Movements, by Neil Stammers (Pluto Press)

Although Stammers makes a powerful and timely case for revaluating our ideas of human rights independently from the state and the law, a more critical approach could easily have led him to conclude that NGOs in fact enforce this connection rather than challenging it.

Divine violence

Violence, by Slavoj Žižek (Profile Books)

If the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ has been spread, like an infection belonging and intrinsic to Modernity, to all values; if all values are now questionable, relative, contingent and unreliable; if any ideological power is fatally undermined by its secret obscene supplement, then the West has become openly and fatally violent to itself, through its devastating self-deconstruction.

Bad capitalism; paltry anti-capitalism

Feelbad Britain: How to make it better, edited by Pat Devine, Andrew Pearman and David Purdy (Lawrence and Wishart)

The government has not simply run out of ideas; the very New Labour project was a hollow shell devoid of any view of society or a connection to any social base.

Mine the past, move on

Maggie's End, The Shaw Theatre, London

The play’s blatant agenda as an agitprop piece for the ‘Reclaim Labour’ movement lead it into trouble as soon the central issue of Thatcher’s funeral begins to take shape.

Changing cultural paradigm

Subcultural pluralism and the new social order: the end of the culture war and the dawn of a new American society

America is no longer the ‘melting pot’: it no longer assimilates minority groups into the majority culture. Instead of a homogeneous cultural majority imposing Western values on ethnic minorities, we now have heterogeneous cultural pluralism developing through acculturation.