The Ideas Letter

Feliz Año Nuevo. There is a lot to tackle in this issue so let’s jump straight into it. We lead with two very sharp essays that will ruffle some feathers and raise a few eyebrows. Productive dissent, considered critique—this is our daily bread. We hope you engage with these texts in that frame of mind.   

First off is a piece by former BBC journalist and long-time Ukraine observer Leonid Ragozin that spotlights the lesser-appreciated story of the country’s democratic regression. Ragozin draws uncomfortable conclusions that merit attention and debate. We follow with the fine sociologist and author Gary Younge and his tough-minded critique of a celebrated new book from his fellow sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. Younge worries that al-Gharbi is drawing sociological conclusions without accounting for society and allows his master concepts—wokeism, in the first instance—to go undefined.

For our curated selection we lead with Wolfgang Streeck’s trenchant piece on the troubling politics of German anti antisemitism. Few people had on their bingo card that Deutschland would be the geography where combating antisemitism (and shielding Israel) would morph into a professional religion. A conversation between Adam Tooze and Ding Xiongfei, originally published in the Shanghai Review of Books, follows. Per usual with Tooze, the sky’s the limit, but here especially is a dissection of his political economy, his polemics with Perry Anderson, and the climate condition as refracted through a Toozian (and Chinese) lens.  

If you have a spare two-and-a-half hours, a recent conversation in The Dig between Wendy Brown and Quinn Slobodian merits a close listen. The venerated political theorist and critic of neoliberalism and the historian of neoliberalism have a go at those themes and more. Taped after Donald Trump’s triumph last November,