At the Crossroads of Philosophy, Politics, and Culture

Martin Jay applies lessons he has learned from a long and distinguished career as a European intellectual historian to a wide range of current issues in politics and culture. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, these essays tackle a number of timely and controversial issues: Trump’s debts to the Left, the rise of conspiracy theories, the lack of empathy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the declining interest in the concept of alienation, the role of lying in politics, the challenges faced by Black artists, the dubious idea of the judgment of history, the demonization of social abstractions, the effect of contrasting an active notion of “the people” to a passive one of “the population,” and the implications of a “unified executive theory.” Among the theorists whose legacies are examined are Jürgen Habermas, Zygmunt Baumann, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel.