The Ideas Letter

Quinn Slobodian, whose new book—Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right—is being debated far and wide, has penned for The Ideas Letter a magisterial romp through metaphor. The natural sciences loom large in the neoliberalism conception, and Slobodian walks us through its myriad permutations, concluding with metaphor’s corrosion at the hands of Silicon Valley’s reactionary accumulation regime. 

Minna Salami follows with a twist on the populism debate as it pertains to Africa. Salami deploys Nietzsche to wade through the thicket of power relations in the human mind and how this relates to fundamental questions around decoloniality. Her conclusions may rankle, but they demand a response. 

Leif Weatherby then poses uncustomary questions about the AI condition. For Weatherby, we should be laser-focused on controlling data in the face of digital bureaucracy. Instead, we are seduced by the sci-fi dimensions of AI reasoning and thus blind to the main event. He reframes the debate accordingly.   

Our curated section commences with the Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa and his effort to reanimate a weather-beaten developmentalist debate. For Chelwa, the concept of emancipation can’t be overlooked; it must be grappled with, as it is intrinsic to any conception of progress. His frame is orthogonal to Salami’s.  

Then for our curated content, Jacob Dreyer, in American Affairs, deploys the great Chinese intellectual Wang Hui to make sense of the dialectical dynamic around nationalism and capitalism—as well as Dreyer’s own sustained concern:the dialectical relationship between China and the U.S.  

This Ideas Letter concludes with a podcast on empathy—indeed, the war on empathy as it has emerged from the precincts of the tech,