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The article reviews the social theory of Harry Redner with particular reference to his view of the relationship between high literacy (book culture) and civilization. The question is posed whether, alongside book culture, an axial-type metaphysical culture is also key to the definition of civilization.

A critical analysis of Carl Schmitt's account of the conflict between sea and land power, and the metaphysical and religious underpinning of these conflicting powers.

This is a philosophical argument in defence of a traditional approach to learning. The traditional approach focuses on hard work, persistence, durability, character, thinking and creation. The article takes issue with the post-modern style of education that is rooted, socially, in a mix of Keynesian economics, information accumulation, social media, and a glib existential now-ness. An education that does not instil in the young a work ethic and a respect for the production of knowledge (indeed production of all kinds) induces in them a sense that worldly goods are handed-out rather than made and created by great effort. A political economy and a society that assumes that will wither and decline.

[Extract] Across forty years from the 1950s to 1990s, Cornelius Castoriadis developed a critique of bureaucratic capitalism. The article looks at the strengths and weaknesses of Castoriadis' theory. The weaknesses stem from Castoriadis' economic theory; the strengths from his theory of meaning. Castoriadis' attempt to link a critique of growth to the critique of bureaucracy fails but his analysis of the tenuousness of meaning in modern bureaucratic societies is much more successful. Bureaucratization causes the draining of meaning (imaginary significations) from societies dominated by public and private bureaucracies. Superficiality, incoherence and sterility triumph over sense. Societies become consumed by hobbies and lobbies, and foist a huge amount of junk on their denizens. Junk science, junk art, junk politics, junk culture and junk everything proliferates. Everywhere one turns trivial pursuits prevail.

The article is an evaluation of the economic, organizational and social theory of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism 15 years after its publication. The role of network capitalism, state capitalism, and aesthetic capitalism in French social life is analysed. The article concludes that flexible network capitalism was largely a chimera of the 1990s and that French political and economic life today is dominated by an ailing state capitalism.

Daniel Bell was one of the leading American sociologists in the 20th century, widely read both inside and outside the universities. He produced influential theses about the rise of post-industrial society and about the cultural contradictions of modern capitalism that saw it torn between restraint and hedonism. Bell was also notable for another reason. He was, most certainly on cultural matters, a conservative, and on a number of policy matters he was closely associated with the first generation of American neo-conservative thinkers. Bell's conservative inclinations were rare in the American academy of his time, and this essay explores the nature and significance of those conservative views.

[Extract] The 1950s and 1960s saw the beginning of the end of the European nation state. The European Community, later the European Union, began to eat away at national sovereignty. Immigration programmes started to erode cultural sovereignty. The motive for immigration in some cases was the playing out of the final chapter of European empires. In other cases, immigration marked the beginning of Europe's demographic decline. As local European fertility rates fell below replacement numbers, immigrants made up the difference.

The Council of Europe's 2008 White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue signalled - with a measure of deep concern - the limits of multiculturalism and its attendant problems of identity politics, communal segregation, and the undermining of rights and freedoms in culturally closed communities. The White Paper proposed the replacement of the policy of multiculturalism with a policy of intercultural dialogue. The article in response reflects on the paradoxical nature of all discursive models of dialogue, including that of the Council of Europe, and suggests in its place a dramaturgical model of dialogue. All forms of dialogue that rely on discursive interaction run into the problem of incommensurable values, principles and ultimate authorities. From Weber and Kelsen to Castoriadis and Lyotard, this problem has been well assayed. It is not surmountable by the length, relative intensity or presumptive civility of a dialogue. Neither 'willingness to listen' nor 'open-mindedness' - let alone 'debate' and 'argument' - can solve the deep, difficult aporias of fundamental value conflicts. Nor can appeals to human rights, democracy and the rule of law, though the Council of Europe believes otherwise. We live in a world where liberal values of these kinds are routinely contested by militant pre-enlightenment communities. Dialogue can make no substantive difference to this. What then can? Historically and structurally, patrimonial cultures are only transformed under dramaturgical conditions. The article explores how the modern society of strangers mobilizes role playing, public acting, dramatic dialogism and various types of social dramaturgy (afforded especially by the anonymous theatre of its cities, markets and publics), and causes thereby the ironic incorporation or else the gradual withering-away of patrimonies, patriarchies and other kinds of pre-enlightenment communities.

Three fundamental systems of communication are defined: information, explanation, and imagination. Information is based on analytic distinctions between objects in the world. Explanatory communication provides knowledge through discourse, narration, logic, rhetoric and other forms of systemic elaboration. Intellectual discovery relies on a third system of communication, that of imagination. Rather than distinction or elaboration, imagination is rooted in intuition and analogy. The most powerful medium of the imagination is antonymous insight. The article discusses examples of the latter from warfare, politics, and science.

Andrew Benjamin's book Disclosing Spaces (2004) presents a theory of painting. The theory is developed via a meticulous analysis of a series of individual artworks. The pivot of Benjamin's theory of painting is the idea of relationality. The theory is critically reviewed with reference to the works of Edward Hopper, Gerhard Richter and Jacques-Louis David.

[Extract] Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime despising the nineteen-sixties - all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar. This comic tale of mistaken identity is the the story of his life. No matter what he says - let alone what he sings - it seems to make no difference. When he wrote a percussive-pulsating one chord rant-chant against living in a 'Political World' in 1989, it was dismissed by critics - sub-standard Dylan, they said. What they were really saying was: no, we don't believe you. You are a protest singer at heart. You don't really loath politics, whatever you might say or do. So books continue to be written about him as if he was a nineteen sixties political radical playing loquacious-hipster king to Joan Baez's platitudinous-remonstrating queen. No matter how much he might excoriate this notion of his marvelous biography, Chronicles, Volume One - one of the great pieces of American literature, on a par with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Angie March - it changes nothing. Left-liberal writers still compulsively lionize him in their own image - and their feckless children, who populate the modern media machines, regurgitate the same risible clichés about him.

[Extract] When the world recession in 2008 began, the economy wars, which had been dormant for two decades, flared again. After thirty years of the culture wars, this came as a bit of a relief. In one corner, we had the followers of John Maynard Keynes(1883-1946), who were filled with a kind of self-belief that we had not seen since the 1960s. They had a few scores to settle. In another corner were the market friendly followers of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) and Milton Friedman (1912-2006). They were looking a bit bloodied after having dominated public polity for two decades. Looking on skeptically from outside the ring was another cohort, the admirers of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). These were, as usual, less combative than the other fighters, and had a quizzical eye trained on all of the pugilists. Part of the skepticism of the Schumpeter camp was a wariness of public policy tout court. It did not matter whether this was a policy bent on big government or one in love with small government. Schumpeter had been a student of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire Finance Minister, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. Schumpeter himself was the first Minister of Finance of the modern Republic of Austria. He seemed to take away from that unusually intimate experience of public policy a strong sense of the need for economists to look beyond rhe policy cycle and explore the deeper structures and long-run temporalities of economies. Schumpeter was a great economist who at the same time understood the power of history and society in shaping economies. He also appreciated the power of the imagination. He observed that modern capitalist economies were driven as much by creative impulse and imaginative insight, as they were by the more commonplace behaviors that arose out of greed, interest, need or calculation. It was not that societies could not-or should not-control such behaviors or encourage them, depending on prevailing economic philosophy. It was just that some of the most decisive economic outcomes could not be determined by such policy tools. Somewhere beyond them, in a larger social-historical zone, lay the human drive to innovate and create.