The current wave of populism calls to mind the mood of the early 20th century when liberal values in England saw a “strange death.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent designation of liberal values as “obsolete” may sound familiar. This is not the first time the death of liberalism has been announced. As George Dangerfield’s classic… Continue reading “The Death of Liberalism Has Been Proclaimed Before”
Orban’s critics say that since coming to power in 2010, he has tightened control over key institutions in Hungary [File: Julien Warnard/Reuters] In the same week that Russia’s Vladimir Putin declared Western Liberalism was “obsolete”, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has consolidated his control over the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The end of a drawn-out struggle for… Continue reading “The Death of Liberalism, Academic Freedom, and Authoritarian Politics”
GUILD SOCIALISM AND ‘POST-LIBERALISM’ Eliot and Pound of course have been attacked for their bad politics; both were close to Hulme, and Hulme and Pound were deeply involved in the New Age journal, the radical socialist paper that provided a platform for many early modernists. This venue seems to have been a seed-bed for a… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part Two”
In his admiring review of Rebecca Beasley’s Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (2007), Ronald Bush adds one caveat: this exemplary study of the ‘ideological alignment between the oppositional practices of imagism, “anti-democratic” forms of “individualism,” and anarchism’, may ‘[miss] a beat… by not considering the similarly “anti-democratic” features of John Stuart Mill’s… Continue reading “The Anti-Democratic Faces of Modernism – Part One”