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AbstractThe story of the Oran-based Jewish merchant Jacob Lasry (1793–1869) illustrates how preexisting North African business practices survived and adapted to the radical dislocations of the French conquest of Algeria. In the 1830s, French political turmoil and indecision helped foster a chaotic situation where French generals with nebulous goals "outsourced" financing and even military campaigns to local experts in Algeria. Lasry's business success in the economy of the early conquest invested him with a degree of power vis-à-vis the French administration, whose other proxies sometimes ended up in severe debt to him. With the rise of a "civilizing mission" discourse in the 1840s and 1850s, aspects of this mission, too, were outsourced to local experts. Despite his Moroccan birth, Gibraltarian family, and British subjecthood, Lasry used his stature to secure the official position of president of the province'sconsistoire israélite, charged with advancing French civilization among Oran's indigenous Jews.

AbstractBhakti is viewed as a movement that is subversive of orthodoxy, and inverts the societal norms prescribed by thedharmashastras. This paper looks at the Bhakti movement's long history and transformations into the nineteenth century in Punjab. If womanlydharmawithin the normative tradition is defined by sexual containment through marriage and wifehood, the accumulated Bhakti legends and hagiographies are examined to see the place of the prostitute in it, and the limits of its revolutionary potential are brought to the fore. By looking at the writings of the Muslim prostitute Piro who comes to live in the establishment of a 'Sikh' guru Gulab Das, in Chathianwala near Lahore during the period of Ranjit Singh, this paper attempts to read Piro's use of Bhakti legends and imagery to build support for her unusual step. The imbrication of the Gulabdasis in hybrid practices that borrowed elements fromadvaita, Bhakti and Sufi theologies is also delineated. The paper shows Piro's engagement with the radical potential of Bhakti, but also maps her move towards social conformity—the paradox that makes her look at herself simultaneously as a courtesan and as a consort.

The following resources represent a selection of starting points for finding information about dystopian literature, political movements, activism opportunities, and current radical thought.

SummaryThis article investigates the entangled histories of radicals in Detroit and Turin who challenged capitalism in ways that departed from "orthodox" Marxism. Starting from the 1950s, small but influential groups of labour radicals, such as Correspondence in Detroit and Quaderni Rossi in Turin, circulated ideas that questioned the Fordist system in a drastic way. These radicals saw the car factories as laboratories for a possible "autonomist" working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system. They criticized the usefulness of the unions and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization. These links were rekindled during the intense working-class mobilization of the late 1960s, when younger radicals would also engage in a dialogue across national boundaries that influenced each other's interpretation of the local context. These transnational connections, well-known to contemporaries but ignored by historians, show how American events and debates were influenced by, and impinged on, distant countries, and how local activists imagined their political identity as encompassing struggles occurring elsewhere.

Carl Schmitt and James Joyce, contemporaries, responding to the crisis of European civilization of the interwar years, are brought into conversation with one another through the mediation of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Schmitt as representative and advocate of Apollonian logocentrism and Joyce of Dionysian muthos. Parallels as well as differences in these authors' works are examined to illuminate the figure of the dictator and the theme of political theology, and to reveal the deep affinity between Schmitt and totalitarianism on the one hand and Joyce and radical and plural democracy on the other.

Recent years have seen a surge of studies that examine the inclusion-moderation hypothesis with reference to political Islam: the idea that political groups and individuals may become more moderate as a result of their inclusion in pluralist political processes. Most of these interventions adopt one of three foci: (1) the behavioral moderation of groups; (2) the ideological moderation of groups; and (3) the ideological moderation of individuals. After a discussion of various definitions of moderate and radical, the concept of moderation, and the centrality of moderation to studies of democratization, the author examines the scholarship on political Islam that falls within each approach. She then examines several studies that raise questions about sequencing: how mechanisms linking inclusion and moderation are posited and how other approaches might better explain Islamist moderation. Finally, she offers a critical analysis of the behavior-ideology binary that animates many of these models and suggests some fruitful paths for future research.

Compared with some of his contemporaries Brailsford is relatively neglected today. He offered incisive analysis of the international relations of his times, discussing political and economic aspects together. He grounded his contributions upon a view of human nature that drew on the ideas of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet. A cosmopolitan, socialist political philosophy also underpinned his work. Brailsford was sharply critical of balance-of-power theory, which served to veil the actual intentions of statesman and the capitalist entrepreneurs whose policies they benefited. He was also critical, like Laski, of sovereignty theory which masked the dominance of capitalist interests in the modern state and international system. Over several decades these aspects of his work contributed to his proposals for a radical league of nations. His work will be of interest to IR scholars today.

The start of the 21st century has seen the very concept of the political become devalued, and the body-politic has become a casualty of the nihilism and neurosis afflicting western cultures. Kristeva's call for the rehabilitation of public life, of the political, and for the rethinking of freedom, it seems, comes at the right time. Her proposed politics of revolt and Ranciere's radically democratic politics of the no-part are valuable attempts to effect such a rehabilitation. By turning to these two figures and placing them in dialogue we can gain a renewed appreciation for what democracy ought to be and begin to conceptualize and re-envision what a healthy, optimally-functioning democratic body-politic looks like. Kristeva's proposed rehabilitation of public life, particularly when viewed alongside Ranciere's, lands her squarely in the company of other theorists who propose a politics of radical democracy to solve the current political problematic. Her conception of a 'democracy of the multiple' challenges the current pluralistic democracies in place today. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd, copyright holder.]