The Ideas Letter

Ayşe Zarakol is one of the premier historians of international relations. The history and future of world orders is a recurring subject for Zarakol, and her piece for Ideas Letter 40 asks why the future has been forsaken by today’s geo-strategic writers after its flourishing at the end of the Cold War.

Iza Ding has made a name for herself through the incisive concept of performative governance to explain street-level bureaucracy in China. Here she turns her attention to political theory and the contradictions of liberalism in practice. Using Burkean liberalism as her guide, Ding eloquently suggests an accommodation with liberalism despite its inadequacies.

Lapidary writer Oliver Eagleton has challenged many intellectual conceits of the day. Here he selects Anton Jäger’s notion of hyperpolitics to question whether today’s politics are as ephemeral and unmoored as Jäger contends. Eagleton finds hope amidst the predations, yet also despair, and calls for a politics that remains connected to material realities.

For our curated section we lead with the Aeon essay by my great friend and colleague Ayisha Osori which probes Nigeria’s afflictions. Like Oliver Eagleton, Osori hasn’t lost hope – though she concedes there is a steep uphill climb to achieve activist solidarity.

We follow with a podcast featuring Meera Sabaratnam and a discussion of her useful concept “complex indebtedness.” Sabaratnam’s distinctive account of the international order and its dynamics sheds light on the political nature of the justice claims against that order. There are also helpful echoes to Zarakol’s piece above.

Last is a Jacobin interview with University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld, author of a new book on the history of choice. Hirschmanesque in scope, Rosenfeld asks whether the insistent need to make choices defines the culture of contemporary life.