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Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present
Social theory for damaged times
Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.
Riley brings the theoretical canon to bear on problems of intellectual culture and everyday life, working through Weber and Durkheim, Parsons and Dubois, Gramsci and Lukács, MacKinnon and Fraser, to weigh sociology’s relationship to Marxism and the operations of class, race and gender, alongside discursions into the workings of an orchestra and the complicatedness of taking a walk in a pandemic.
Invitations rather than finished arguments, the notes attempt to recover the totalising perspective of sociology—the ability to see society in the round, as though from the outside—and to recuperate what Paul Sweezy described as a sense of the ‘present as history’.
Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the coronavirus.
Riley brings the theoretical canon to bear on problems of intellectual culture and everyday life, working through Weber and Durkheim, Parsons and Dubois, Gramsci and Lukács, MacKinnon and Fraser, to weigh sociology’s relationship to Marxism and the operations of class, race and gender, alongside discursions into the workings of an orchestra and the complicatedness of taking a walk in a pandemic.
Invitations rather than finished arguments, the notes attempt to recover the totalising perspective of sociology—the ability to see society in the round, as though from the outside—and to recuperate what Paul Sweezy described as a sense of the ‘present as history’.
160 pages, Paperback
Published September 13, 2022
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223 people want to read
About the author
Dylan Riley
12 books13 followersDylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is on the editorial committee of New Left Review.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 8, 2024
I’m not a fan of gnomic writing, though this small intellectual diary works in the way of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ by developing most notes beyond one-sentence pithiness. The focus however is more like ‘Theses on the Philosophy of Sociology.’ Most notes are very interesting, such as 104’s thesis that race doctrine develops in capitalism as a means of explaining the world, particularly to address the contradiction between the formal equality required for a wage labor regime and unfree labor existing alongside it, as well as to explain the uneven development that routinely occurs in capitalism. Many notes address sharp polemics within sociology, but they are not entirely opaque to laypersons such as me. Committed and useful.
September 21, 2022
Rather a mixed reaction to this book, the format of short pieces on topics, some of them linked in order, is a refreshing approach. It is simpler to consider one theory or idea at a time,and progress through the subject. But equally the points made become difficult to mentally carry forward. It also presumes a good knowledge of previous commentaries and reactions, and their authors/originators, which reduces its clarity if they are not familiar to the reader - and a good number of assumed theories were unfamiliar to me.
September 26, 2022
A la Pensées et Minima Moralia, eli ainakin perintönsä puolesta tämän pitäisi kutkutella just niinku silleen. Ehkä Rileyn tavoitteleman "nykyisyyden historiallisuuden" hassuutta edisti se että jotkut teemat tuntuivat vain nykyisyydeltä, siinä missä edellä mainitut esikuvakirjat ovat nykyisyytensä historiallisuuden takia nykyään historiallisia ja samalla silti yleisiä.
Aforistiikka ja fragmentaarisuus palvelevat kokonaisvaltaisen katsontakannan tahdittamana yleistavoitetta: rajallisten palasten vetämistä kontekstiinsa säilyttäen niiden yksilöllisyyden ja erityisyyden–prosessi jota Riley toivoo voivansa verrata vaimonsa kutomaan tilkkutäkkiin (olin helpottunut kun ei taas käyty noloa anglo-saksista alustusta siitä mitä Aufhebung tarkoittaa ja miten se sopii tähän).
Siisti kirja ja useampiakin siteeraamisen ja mieleen painamisen arvoisia pätkiä. Olen etenkin kiitollinen siitä kuinka säästelemättä Riley uskaltaa ruotia (etenkin amerikkalaista) nykyakatemiaa sen kovakätisistä ja välillä harkitsemattomista ristiretkistä. Suurin heikkous oli kuitenkin ehkä myös marxilaiselle yhteiskunnan ulkopuolelle asettujalle tyypillinen ankkuroitumimen, vaikka tämä on Rileyn nimeämän muodottoman virran dogmin (the dogma of shapeless flux) edessä varmaan oikeakin reaktio, joskus.
Aforistiikka ja fragmentaarisuus palvelevat kokonaisvaltaisen katsontakannan tahdittamana yleistavoitetta: rajallisten palasten vetämistä kontekstiinsa säilyttäen niiden yksilöllisyyden ja erityisyyden–prosessi jota Riley toivoo voivansa verrata vaimonsa kutomaan tilkkutäkkiin (olin helpottunut kun ei taas käyty noloa anglo-saksista alustusta siitä mitä Aufhebung tarkoittaa ja miten se sopii tähän).
Siisti kirja ja useampiakin siteeraamisen ja mieleen painamisen arvoisia pätkiä. Olen etenkin kiitollinen siitä kuinka säästelemättä Riley uskaltaa ruotia (etenkin amerikkalaista) nykyakatemiaa sen kovakätisistä ja välillä harkitsemattomista ristiretkistä. Suurin heikkous oli kuitenkin ehkä myös marxilaiselle yhteiskunnan ulkopuolelle asettujalle tyypillinen ankkuroitumimen, vaikka tämä on Rileyn nimeämän muodottoman virran dogmin (the dogma of shapeless flux) edessä varmaan oikeakin reaktio, joskus.
April 3, 2025
This is probably the closest thing I’ve read to theory. I picked up this book because the author claims it’s a blend of individual experience and political/sociological commentary, so I thought it would be an accessible entry point into larger economic concepts, but there was absolutely no balance. It read as disjointed anti-woke leftist snippets that lauded Marx above all else (or else). When he used “whence” in a sentence he reminded me why I don’t read this stuff. He seems like the kind of guy to get off on his own pretentious contradictory stances. He completely lost me when he made the claim that ACTUALLY in professor-student relationships, professors are the real victim of “bureaucratic feminism” 🤧🤧🤧 obnoxious
April 12, 2024
A book focused on (Marxist) sociological criticism, an academic field about which I only have a layman's knowledge. At times, I found the specificity (or specialized language and references) difficult to navigate. That said, I also found much of it to be clearheaded, perceptive, and intelligent, and its arguments either convincing, or well worth engaging with, even when I disagreed.
April 11, 2023
The book is a series of short notes mostly reflecting on different questions arising from American politics (particularly debates about Trump and about left strategy), academic sociology, Marxism and everyday life during the covid-19 pandemic. The author is a member of the New Left Review editorial committee and a historical sociologist at UC Berkeley, with a particular affinity for Antonio Gramsci. The form of the book has gains and losses: the gains are compression, clarity and a polemical swiftness which is refreshing. It's clear this is a form that writers should use more often. The losses are that Riley is released from the obligation to be fair to and accurate about his opponents: sometimes he is blatantly caricaturing the positions he opposes, though not always: some of his criticisms are sharp and funny. There is inevitably the question of what this form amounts to in the end, especially given that the notes are organised chronologically, not by topic and – bizarrely – there is no index. For me, the answer is: a few nuggets of gold related closely to the topics i'm interested in, some interesting notes on topics I am less engaged with, quite a few I was indifferent to, and a handful that I disagreed strongly with or was even quite alarmed by (the one on Title IX cases was eyebrow-raising, to say the least).
Given the note form potentially allows the author to range flexibly and widely over any topic, the most striking thing is how narrow the focus of the collection is. (The inclusion of notes about everyday life is a bit of a red herring here.) Were he to follow Gramsci's practice and organise his notes under running themes, two of the most numerous would be, 'memos to my colleagues in the Berkeley Sociology Department' (mostly: stop taking Bourdieu seriously) and another 'lessons for the Jacobin editorial committee' (from an academic Leninist [?] to 'neo-Kautskyites'). But there is strikingly little reflection on personal experiences of political practice, on culture, or on the politics and history outside of the US. There is no real reflection on intellectual work in academia and in the New Left Review editorial collective. Nor is there as much direct reflection as one might expect on the figures by whom Riley is clearly most inspired: the classical Marxists, Gramsci, and New Left Review members like Perry Anderson (who is probably too close a mentor to be the object of critical analysis). Yet the handful of notes touching on Gramsci were some of the highlights of the collection. One on Luxemburg suggested Riley might be an interesting reader of her work. There is a general sense that – reflections on his family life and everyday life aside – there are some subjects perhaps too close to home, and that he is more comfortable engaging topics outside the zone of his strongest intellectual influences.
Given the note form potentially allows the author to range flexibly and widely over any topic, the most striking thing is how narrow the focus of the collection is. (The inclusion of notes about everyday life is a bit of a red herring here.) Were he to follow Gramsci's practice and organise his notes under running themes, two of the most numerous would be, 'memos to my colleagues in the Berkeley Sociology Department' (mostly: stop taking Bourdieu seriously) and another 'lessons for the Jacobin editorial committee' (from an academic Leninist [?] to 'neo-Kautskyites'). But there is strikingly little reflection on personal experiences of political practice, on culture, or on the politics and history outside of the US. There is no real reflection on intellectual work in academia and in the New Left Review editorial collective. Nor is there as much direct reflection as one might expect on the figures by whom Riley is clearly most inspired: the classical Marxists, Gramsci, and New Left Review members like Perry Anderson (who is probably too close a mentor to be the object of critical analysis). Yet the handful of notes touching on Gramsci were some of the highlights of the collection. One on Luxemburg suggested Riley might be an interesting reader of her work. There is a general sense that – reflections on his family life and everyday life aside – there are some subjects perhaps too close to home, and that he is more comfortable engaging topics outside the zone of his strongest intellectual influences.
September 23, 2022
I have a lot of love and respect for the way this collection was written: first by hand in a notebook and then only edited once as it was transcribed digitally.
I unfortunately struggled with some of the more opaque sections, especially anything too bogged down with sociological historical references and debate, but I also don’t know how I felt about the author’s critique of “racial capitalism” and how often that theme came back to the center. I do think there were some shining moments of observation and real concrete, humanizing anecdotes that rooted some of the theory. I liked that he was inflammatory for the hell of it in fun little ways, snide comments, etc.
My favorite part was when he compared each micro-essay to a granny square that his wife was crocheting, and hoped that their combination would form something even near as beautiful as the blanket his wife’s pieces would become.
I unfortunately struggled with some of the more opaque sections, especially anything too bogged down with sociological historical references and debate, but I also don’t know how I felt about the author’s critique of “racial capitalism” and how often that theme came back to the center. I do think there were some shining moments of observation and real concrete, humanizing anecdotes that rooted some of the theory. I liked that he was inflammatory for the hell of it in fun little ways, snide comments, etc.
My favorite part was when he compared each micro-essay to a granny square that his wife was crocheting, and hoped that their combination would form something even near as beautiful as the blanket his wife’s pieces would become.
September 1, 2023
It is possible for geniuses to explain things in ways that non-geniuses can understand but sometimes they need to switch formats to do it.
I've spent a stupid amount of time trying to understand Marxism - political science in general, in fact. I ought to have just gone to college or something but it's too late for that so I buy books and subscribe to periodicals and so on. I follow interesting lefties on Twitter, I read Substacks and listen to podcasts. I'm all over it. But to be honest it's not really working. I mean it goes in one ear and out the other.
The best I get is a very gradual - almost undetectable in fact - improvement in my understanding. Pretty much the same kind of glacial change I'm seeing in my ability to write poetry (which I've also been doing for years) or to construct decent-looking shelves for all the fucking books. This has got to do with my age obvs but also, it's clear, to do with the fact that I'm doing this in the piecemeal, unsystematic way of a distracted hobbyist.
My kids went off to university and studied this stuff for three years and now they explain it to me like I'm an idiot. I obviously envy their comprehensive, organised understanding, given to them in the time-honoured way by experts and, in fact, by geniuses. But I'm still here, trying to figure it all out.
This guy, Dylan Riley, is one of the geniuses, a big brain who teaches sociology in California and writes books and papers and long articles about Marxism and society and so on. He came to my (disorganised) attention last year when he co-wrote a piece for New Left Review - with an even bigger genius called Robert Brenner (who has a whole area of disagreement named after him) - about the emergence of something they call 'political capitalism'.
I won't try to explain it in any detail - I'd certainly get it all wrong - but it's a fascinating idea that seems to account for the way investors and corporations continue to make increasing profits even as the return on investment declines almost everywhere. The piece has been influential beyond lefty circles and the ideas contained in it have begun to show up in mainstream politics and journalism.
Political capitalism - the delivery of economic outcomes by non-economic means - is known by others as 'neofeudalism' and sometimes 'technofeudalism'. Some Marxists, though, are dismissive of this whole discussion - where the proponents of political capitalism see a new terrain of accumulation and exploitation, they see only more capitalism. Evgeny Morozov, another genius whose specialism is a Marxist reading of the Internet and computing, has written a very comprehensive survey of the various flavours of technofeudalism.
Anyway, the piece - and the other stuff he's written that I've dug out since then - is full of deep insights and lofty ideas, as you'd expect, and a lot of it goes whoooooosh over my head while I wrinkle my brow. So I was kind of intrigued to learn that Riley had also written a little book made up of tiny, informal notes that he wrote to himself - in longhand in an actual notebook - during the pandemic.
To be clear, these are not the shopping lists ("400 rolls of toilet paper, 20kg spaghetti") that I was writing during the pandemic, they're notes about the genius stuff - and in particular they're reflections on Covid, lockdown, the bail-outs and so on. So I thought "that's going to be right up my street, it's going to be accessible Marxism that I can get my head around, in small chunks that aren't going to put me off and make me feel stupid."
And it is. I mean it's still full of big ideas and a lot of assumptions are made about the reader's understanding of politics and sociology (get ready for a lot of Durkheim) but it's also full of nifty, two- or three-line insights - aphorisms, I guess - that genuinely illuminate the whole scene, the whole post-pandemic, end-of-the-end-of-history, collapse-of-neoliberalism thing - but also Trump, music education, the economics of slavery, socialist utopia…
Riley's language is never less than academic and can be po-faced. He never doesn't take himself seriously, which is something I also kind of envy, actually. I mean the confidence to lay down idea after idea without at any point feeling the need to make a joke at your own expense or understate your intelligence or whatever.
Like, for instance, demolishing the whole idea of democracy in four lines:
Or illumating the present moment via the ancient state:
That kind of thing.
And it's one of those books that make you think "come on, geniuses, why don't you do this in all your stuff? If you can make big ideas clear in a flash and in about 300 words of pellucid prose in one format, why can't you do it when you're filling a big, fat book?" Is there something about the stylistic liberty provided by the informal layout that permits these more relaxed, generous, explanatory insights and something about the academic format that inhibits them?
Anyway, Riley's book is a jewel - and it's so short you'll read it in a couple of days - or, since it's not in any way linear, you can just keep it by the toilet.
I've spent a stupid amount of time trying to understand Marxism - political science in general, in fact. I ought to have just gone to college or something but it's too late for that so I buy books and subscribe to periodicals and so on. I follow interesting lefties on Twitter, I read Substacks and listen to podcasts. I'm all over it. But to be honest it's not really working. I mean it goes in one ear and out the other.
The best I get is a very gradual - almost undetectable in fact - improvement in my understanding. Pretty much the same kind of glacial change I'm seeing in my ability to write poetry (which I've also been doing for years) or to construct decent-looking shelves for all the fucking books. This has got to do with my age obvs but also, it's clear, to do with the fact that I'm doing this in the piecemeal, unsystematic way of a distracted hobbyist.
My kids went off to university and studied this stuff for three years and now they explain it to me like I'm an idiot. I obviously envy their comprehensive, organised understanding, given to them in the time-honoured way by experts and, in fact, by geniuses. But I'm still here, trying to figure it all out.
This guy, Dylan Riley, is one of the geniuses, a big brain who teaches sociology in California and writes books and papers and long articles about Marxism and society and so on. He came to my (disorganised) attention last year when he co-wrote a piece for New Left Review - with an even bigger genius called Robert Brenner (who has a whole area of disagreement named after him) - about the emergence of something they call 'political capitalism'.
I won't try to explain it in any detail - I'd certainly get it all wrong - but it's a fascinating idea that seems to account for the way investors and corporations continue to make increasing profits even as the return on investment declines almost everywhere. The piece has been influential beyond lefty circles and the ideas contained in it have begun to show up in mainstream politics and journalism.
Political capitalism - the delivery of economic outcomes by non-economic means - is known by others as 'neofeudalism' and sometimes 'technofeudalism'. Some Marxists, though, are dismissive of this whole discussion - where the proponents of political capitalism see a new terrain of accumulation and exploitation, they see only more capitalism. Evgeny Morozov, another genius whose specialism is a Marxist reading of the Internet and computing, has written a very comprehensive survey of the various flavours of technofeudalism.
Anyway, the piece - and the other stuff he's written that I've dug out since then - is full of deep insights and lofty ideas, as you'd expect, and a lot of it goes whoooooosh over my head while I wrinkle my brow. So I was kind of intrigued to learn that Riley had also written a little book made up of tiny, informal notes that he wrote to himself - in longhand in an actual notebook - during the pandemic.
To be clear, these are not the shopping lists ("400 rolls of toilet paper, 20kg spaghetti") that I was writing during the pandemic, they're notes about the genius stuff - and in particular they're reflections on Covid, lockdown, the bail-outs and so on. So I thought "that's going to be right up my street, it's going to be accessible Marxism that I can get my head around, in small chunks that aren't going to put me off and make me feel stupid."
And it is. I mean it's still full of big ideas and a lot of assumptions are made about the reader's understanding of politics and sociology (get ready for a lot of Durkheim) but it's also full of nifty, two- or three-line insights - aphorisms, I guess - that genuinely illuminate the whole scene, the whole post-pandemic, end-of-the-end-of-history, collapse-of-neoliberalism thing - but also Trump, music education, the economics of slavery, socialist utopia…
Riley's language is never less than academic and can be po-faced. He never doesn't take himself seriously, which is something I also kind of envy, actually. I mean the confidence to lay down idea after idea without at any point feeling the need to make a joke at your own expense or understate your intelligence or whatever.
Like, for instance, demolishing the whole idea of democracy in four lines:
To imagine a postcapitalist political order is to imagine an order without sovereignty—and therefore without the metaphysics of sovereignty and its terminology, such as “democracy”—but with coordination and rationality.
Or illumating the present moment via the ancient state:
The state is an object of struggle among competing political-capitalist cliques. In antiquity two models emerged: the universal monarchy, which to some extent disciplined these groups; and the unstable republic, which allowed them to run rampant. Are there not analogues in the current period? Putin’s Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, and the United States the unstable republican form.
That kind of thing.
And it's one of those books that make you think "come on, geniuses, why don't you do this in all your stuff? If you can make big ideas clear in a flash and in about 300 words of pellucid prose in one format, why can't you do it when you're filling a big, fat book?" Is there something about the stylistic liberty provided by the informal layout that permits these more relaxed, generous, explanatory insights and something about the academic format that inhibits them?
Anyway, Riley's book is a jewel - and it's so short you'll read it in a couple of days - or, since it's not in any way linear, you can just keep it by the toilet.
December 24, 2022
A collection of short essays, some simply a paragraph and others a couple of pages long, that range across topics both current/all-encompassing and obscure/academic. It's less unified than a book-length work or even a collection of traditional essays, but what emerges is a sense of Riley's approach and toolkit for analysing ideas and phenomena. Critique is emphasised, and he's sharp and always ambitious in moving outside, above, or burrowing below the paradigms of existing debates. Even within their short length, essays that start slow can take an unexpected turn into being illuminating. I definitely want to re-read this one and take notes on the particularly incisive essays, as well as Riley's theory of critique itself.
August 23, 2023
minima moralia-stijl notities, geschreven tijdens de pandemie en de presidentsverkiezingen en de eerste maanden van Bidens presidentschap. De meeste gaan over sociologie, sociale en politieke theorie en marxisme en de relatie tussen die drie en zijn aangevuld met meditaties over de vreemde, nu al weer bijna vergeten sensatie van de lockdowns. Riley schreef ze met de hand en werkte ze daarna uit op de computer: een vorm en werkwijze die ik herken en die mij erg aanspreekt. Doordat de teksten niet eindeloos zijn bewerkt hebben ze een een polemische directheid, maar toch zijn ze wat onpersoonlijk.
September 30, 2024
One way to open your eyes is to read these short essays.
I’m not a Marxist (as I belong to the rentier class) but I find the Marxist analysis insightful as an explanation of how things work or fail to.
And, now, Back to enjoying my dividends.
I’m not a Marxist (as I belong to the rentier class) but I find the Marxist analysis insightful as an explanation of how things work or fail to.
And, now, Back to enjoying my dividends.
September 26, 2022
Dylan is hopelessly trapped in cartesian rationalism and it is painful to see over and over again beautifully constructed polemics that are then denuded by his thin, flat, rigid episteme.
November 23, 2022
3.5 Stars. Minima Moralia in a K-19 Mask
April 1, 2025
A lot of sociological gems in this book. Even when Dylan’s wrong it’s interesting
May 8, 2025
Prodding, frustrating, brilliant
June 11, 2024
Despite it's fragmented form, there's sophisticated argument here, much like *Minima Moralia*. At the risk of bowdlerizing it, a few favorite fragments of fragments:
"Neither the interwar fascists nor Trump can be described as antidemocratic in the sense that they reject the will of the demos" (18)
"Trumpism can be summarized as a reactionary revolt against political capitalism, however much it also embodies it. Its dream is the Jeffersonian petit bourgeois utopia of self-made men w/o the welfare state, financers, & paper $" (24)
"Perhaps what Timothy Snyder meant to say is that the basis of democracy is the elite's shared commitment to patriotic hypocrisy" (25)
"For Lukacs, sociology is rather a reaction to Marxism: a totalizing counterscience provoked by the theory of its class enemy" (29)
"When will the crackers produce a Bernie?" (31)
"Both Marx & Hayek were fascinated w/ the blind character of social coop under capitalism: a society of all-round interdependence mediated by private decisions. Whereas this contradiction inspired Hayek to compose quasi-Burkean hosannas to ignorance, Marx identified it as the fundamental weakness of capitalism" (39)
"All of Hayek's arguments are based ultimately on the ideal of the social as a manifestation of the sublime, leaving the analyst in a state of dumb credulity. Marx's arguments derive from precisely the opposite impulse: that society is a creation of the human species, and potentially controllable by its rationality" (40)
"a judgement based on the ability to disengage politics from other activities & to evaluate it in a quasi-aesthetic mode...Isn't that what Machiavelli was trying to teach us?" (43-44)
"Putin's Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, & the US the unstable republican form" (44)
"Weber's total, if implicit, convergence with Lenin on precisely this point: both of them saw the terms democracy & the state as antithetical" (73)
"the reader can quickly classify all works into two categories: more or less sophisticated neo-Burkean or neo-Robespierrian arguments" (101)
"Neither the interwar fascists nor Trump can be described as antidemocratic in the sense that they reject the will of the demos" (18)
"Trumpism can be summarized as a reactionary revolt against political capitalism, however much it also embodies it. Its dream is the Jeffersonian petit bourgeois utopia of self-made men w/o the welfare state, financers, & paper $" (24)
"Perhaps what Timothy Snyder meant to say is that the basis of democracy is the elite's shared commitment to patriotic hypocrisy" (25)
"For Lukacs, sociology is rather a reaction to Marxism: a totalizing counterscience provoked by the theory of its class enemy" (29)
"When will the crackers produce a Bernie?" (31)
"Both Marx & Hayek were fascinated w/ the blind character of social coop under capitalism: a society of all-round interdependence mediated by private decisions. Whereas this contradiction inspired Hayek to compose quasi-Burkean hosannas to ignorance, Marx identified it as the fundamental weakness of capitalism" (39)
"All of Hayek's arguments are based ultimately on the ideal of the social as a manifestation of the sublime, leaving the analyst in a state of dumb credulity. Marx's arguments derive from precisely the opposite impulse: that society is a creation of the human species, and potentially controllable by its rationality" (40)
"a judgement based on the ability to disengage politics from other activities & to evaluate it in a quasi-aesthetic mode...Isn't that what Machiavelli was trying to teach us?" (43-44)
"Putin's Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, & the US the unstable republican form" (44)
"Weber's total, if implicit, convergence with Lenin on precisely this point: both of them saw the terms democracy & the state as antithetical" (73)
"the reader can quickly classify all works into two categories: more or less sophisticated neo-Burkean or neo-Robespierrian arguments" (101)
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews