Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation(HERETICAL THOUGHT SERIES)

The last twenty years have witnessed a proliferation of radical social and political movements around the world, in wave after wave of struggles against intersecting forms of exploitation, domination, and subalternization. From the International Women's Strike and Occupy, to #BlackLivesMatter and direct action against the climate emergency, a series of common questions have continually re-emerged as immediate and practical challenges. How should radical political movements relate to the state? What makes emancipatory politics fundamentally different from both technocratic and populist models of "politics as usual"? Which forms of organization are most likely to deepen and extend the dynamics that led to the emergence of these movements in the first place? To investigate the goal, nature, method, and organizational forms of radical political engagement against the neoliberal consensus, Peter D. Thomas draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader and political theorist best known for his ideas about hegemony. Hegemony is a concept that, most commonly understood, describes either the way in which a political system functions from the top down, through a culture of passive consent, or a process of neutralizing cultural and political differences to form unity in a nation state. Interestingly, both the left and right have seized on this idea, but, of course, to different political ends. In Radical Politics, Thomas argues that both of these interpretations are misapprehensions of the radical potential of Gramsci's ideas. Offering a new reading of Gramsci, Thomas contends that hegemony is a process of differentiation in which political culture is always changing, and always with the goal of moving toward expanded freedom. Over the course of the book, Thomas looks at the way in which various theorists have approached the dilemma of how to engage productively in radical politics and explains why hegemony is a method of doing politics rather than an end goal. A distinctive and forceful contribution to ongoing debates about the nature and orientation of contemporary emancipatory movements, Radical Politics provides a counterintuitive interpretation of Gramsci's famous and newly relevant work.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Radical Politics against the New World Order 1. Final Cause: Politics Beyond the State 2. Material Cause: The Constitution of the Political 3. Efficient Cause: Hegemony as a Method of Political Work 4. Formal Cause: The Question of Organization Conclusion: Contemporary Self-Emancipation

About the Author :
Peter D. Thomas is Professor in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment and serves on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism and the International Gramsci Journal.

Review :
Framed by a distilled and incisive analysis of the current conjuncture, Peter D. Thomas draws on his expert knowledge of Gramsci's revolutionary thought to challenge contemporary figures like Laclau and Negri, to clarify the recent cycles of mass mobilization and neoliberal reaction, and to help us 'break with the self-defeating structures of feeling and response' that remain such profoundly entrenched features of our age. Peter D. Thomas asks perhaps the most fundamental strategic question of radical politics: how can the wide-ranging and various movements for self-emancipation gain power together while also fostering the diversity of aims and strategies that is their core strength and value? This question has gained new urgency in the last decade, Thomas reminds us, as a wave of radical movements sweeps the world, astonishing in their resilience and creativity. It is also an old question, however, and Thomas shows us how we can think with-and not merely venerate-those who have faced it before, above all the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. This book not only offers new insights to both political theorists and political activists, but also opens a place of dialogue for radical theory and radical practice. In this book, Peter Thomas teases out the far-reaching implications of Gramsci's insistence that we approach the state not as some fixed entity, but rather as unstable assemblages of relationships that are themselves unstable, continually shifting as they move through history - an approach that offers genuine emancipatory potential in our 21st century moment when so many of the old fixed certainties of political identity seem to have crumbled. Deploying a deeply informed survey of the last half century of debate among leftists on the nature of the state, Radical Politics is essential reading for all those interested in Gramsci, and in the potential for transformative change in our seemingly ever more broken world. With Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation Peter Thomas enhances his already outstanding reputation as one of the most original and profound political theoreticians of our times. In Radical Politics, the author of The Gramscian Moment returns to Gramsci to answer [...] questions which remain central for both political theory and practical action today. Neither mere archaeology of Gramscian thought, nor indulgent pleasuring in 'left melancholia,' Peter Thomas' compelling new book offers a timely and propositive clarification of the goals, nature, methods and forms of contemporary movements underway. In Radical Politics Peter D. Thomas refuses left melancholia and pessimism, foregrounding instead the vibrant emancipatory movements that have sprung up in the past 20 years. As the pre-eminent interpreter of Antonio Gramsci's writings for Anglophone audiences since the publication of The Gramscian Moment in 2009, Thomas now insists on the imperative for re-reading Gramsci in the present conjuncture to complement and extend new ways of doing politics. This exciting and challenging book will stimulate debate for years to come. Peter Thomas' Radical Politics brilliantly invites us to leave behind left-melancholia and to understand our political present - the social movements and left experimentations of the past twenty years - in their own terms. This does not mean leaving behind the left's theoretical or historical past. On the contrary, Thomas' book engages us in a tight dialogue between the mobilizations of recent years and a renewed and original interpretation of Gramsci's notion of hegemony and of the integral state, with the goal of making us alert to what the new forms, compositions, and methods of recent movements can teach us about winning the struggle for emancipation. Radical Politics adopts an Aristotelian framework of the causes to analyze Gramsci's theories and their applications to contemporary radical politics...Thomas provides a new insight into Gramsci and, through Aristotle, creates a vehicle for translating Gramsci for contemporary radical politics.