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.

The stone and the chicken

On Practice and Contradiction, by Mao Zedong (introduced by Slavoj Žižek)

If the liberal consensus nowadays is that Robespierre’s French Revolution went too far in the pursuit of liberté, egalité, fraternité, then that’s not as damning as it at first may appear.

Putting the hippies on the payroll

Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance, by James Heartfield

Everyone has gone green. Even reprobate oil corporations have stopped funding the ‘global warming sceptics’, as they retool their operations to cash in on the bonanza of carbon-trading. Bewildered by the sudden desertion of their corporate allies, a few isolated libertarians fight a rearguard action against the green tide.

The end of faith is not the answer (on romanticising reason)

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris / The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, by Ed Husain

Leering under the surface of both these texts is a fear of ideology, of anything with a utopian tinge, and a tendency to merge having ideals with both these things. Rather than vetting individual beliefs for rationality, Harris would be better settling for rationality as a bearer of value and cornerstone of a broader world-view.

Cynical capitalism, cynical anti-capitalism

How an unloved system survives by default, and how its would-be critics condemn us to more of the same

In the run-up to Christmas last year, German churches and trades unions joined forces to protest against the loosening of the country’s traditionally restrictive opening hours for shops. Berlin’s city administration, run by Social Democrats and reformed Communists, had passed an amendment allowing shops in the capital to open every Sunday in December, despite objections in terms of both religious tradition and the perceived interests of shop staff.

Reasoning out suicidal mass murder

The Second Plane, by Martin Amis

Martin Amis is one of an increasing number of intelligent independent minds who identify the paralysing malaise at the heart of Western liberalism brought sharply into focus by the paradigm shift created by the Islamist attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. In his introduction to the current work Amis says that if this had to happen - the wake-up calls to the West - ‘then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime’.

Defending the Terror

Virtue and Terror, by Maximilien Robespierre, with an introduction by Slavoj Žižek (Verso)

Maximilien Robespierre was a fearless critic of tradition and incorruptibly committed to liberty: a million miles from today’s webcam jihadists.

In defence of ‘radicalisation’

The Islamist, by Ed Husain

Critiques of Hizb ut-Tahrir focus less on its dodgy mishmash of politics and religion and more on its intense intellectualism. But what’s wrong with devoting oneself to the battle of ideas?

Political Descartes

Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, Antonio Negri

Negri points to how his dualism retains an implicit awareness of the hegemony of the bourgeois form of social existence, and how this can be translated into an imposition on the state’s mode of producing and existing. The seeds of the revolution are sown.

What is a radical reader?

Theory in a pre-political age

Rather than addressing a movement, they addressed other radical thinkers who were perplexed and disoriented by the demise of movements of the left in particular – the organised working class, and anti-imperialist movements. If ‘being radical’ had once been shorthand for supporting these things, this meaning was now all but redundant, and the term was up for grabs. It still is.

What is a radical thinker?

Pulling up the roots

How should thinkers balance intellectual integrity with the need to be understood; how should radicalism express itself in order to be received positively; and if the ultimate aim is doing something, how can theories become manifestos?

Liberalism is dead

Jesus Camp (2006), directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady

Evangelicals care more passionately about politics, and in greater numbers than their liberal counterparts. Their enormous fundraising power makes them a force to be reckoned with. Are they wrong to subject their children to brainwashing? Most certainly – but what alternative are kids being offered?

The truth is not enough

The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it, by Dan Hind

Hind’s argument is made with admirable clarity, but I’m not sure how many of the ‘clowns and anarchists’ he invokes see themselves as champions of Enlightenment as he suggests. Hind claims a clash between two ideas of Enlightenment, rather than the phoney war between faith and reason, is the ‘great divide’ in contemporary politics, but he makes rash assumptions about the people he thinks are on his side, who include many avowed antagonists of Enlightenment.

Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx

Louis Althusser

Whether one subscribes to the now-deceased Althusser’s now-deceased project or not, his attempt to identify what makes a thinker radical deserves serious consideration; and the book is indeed ultimately worthy of inclusion in this Verso series.

Late Marxism

Adorno or the persistence of the dialectic, Fredric Jameson

The problem with using Adorno to reveal the alienating praxes at work within capitalist social relations, is that it’s not really capitalism that’s the problem for Adorno. The ‘reification’ discerned under capitalism – the commodification of social life – is ultimately absorbed back into what Adorno perceives as a far longer history of reification per se.

The erosion of civil liberties under New Labour

Taking Liberties (2007), directed by Chris Atkins

This is an entertaining film that highlights a number of important issues and worthy campaigns, but it does not get under the skin of New Labour-style authoritarianism in the way that authoritarianism is getting under the skin of British society.