What is it going to take to make the Left a vibrant political force again? On the one hand, the Left still feels the aftershocks of the collapse of the Soviet Union and affiliated regimes. Few leftists yearn for another Lenin or vanguard political party. On the other hand, advanced industrial democracies may be entering a new Gilded Age where 1% of the population owns more than 70% of the total wealth. Many people resent the situation whereby some people are born to rags and others are born to riches. How is it possible to channel that resentment in a positive direction, to create a more just and egalitarian future? In In the Spirit of Critique, Andrew J. Douglas proposes the cultivation of a critical ethos that draws upon the dialectical tradition; in Arts of the Political, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift suggest that leftists should use institutions to turn progressive ideals into public policy. Read together, these books bring into stark relief the Left’s current dilemma whether to emphasize either democracy or technocracy.

In the Spirit of Critique provides a masterful overview of the dialectical tradition that runs from Kant and Hegel through Marx and up to Sartre, Theodor Adorno, and the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James. On one definition, the dialectical tradition offers a teleological account of the ways in which historical clashes lead to the individual and communal realization of autonomy. And yet this account of the dialectic seems discredited, both by the fact that a communist revolution did not happen in many advanced industrial societies and that where a revolution did occur, autonomy did not blossom. Douglas seeks to recover a chastened conception of the dialectic. Human beings face many struggles in life, and dialectical thinking “emerges as part of a theoretical account, both descriptive and diagnostic, of our human effort to move through the world and to carve out a more self-satisfying and sustainable existence” (p. 4). The dialectic does not need to be a key to unlock history’s mystery to give clarity and purpose to our struggles. Whereas the early dialecticians had a comic sensibility, confident that history would justify all suffering and strife, Douglas’ twentieth-century protagonists were more attuned to the tragic dimension of the dialectic, where moments of grief need acknowledging and there is little confidence in all of society’s contradictions being sublated (Aufhebung).

How can the dialectical tradition sustain the critical imagination today? The bulk of In the Spirit of Critique is an explication of Sartre’s, Adorno’s, and James’s answers to that question. According to Sartre, the dialectical tradition spotlights the irreducible conflicts in modern societies. Sartre’s contribution to that tradition is to explain that the dialectical tradition cannot overcome the tragedies of lived experience. His conception of the “milieu of scarcity” demands “an inspired and sustained attentiveness to the material and psychic constraints that often delimit the very possibilities we may imagine” (p. 62). According to Adorno, the power of the dialectic is that it offers an account of transcendence that inspires our fight for autonomy even when capitalistic norms penetrate our lives. Douglas shows that Adorno’s redemptive criticism weaves theological motifs into a materialist critique of society. The hero of the book, arguably, is James, who translates and tempers dialectical claims to empower working-class people, specifically but not exclusively African Americans. For James, dialectical thinking is an “ethos of reflective engagement, a way of ‘sharpening’ our instinctive frustrations into politically incisive contradictions that as such can help move the struggle for autonomy in a practical way” (p. 13). One of the key themes for each author is that the dialectical tradition is rhetorical as much as philosophical, that it provides an inspiring narrative as much as a social scientific framework.

How much of the dialectical tradition survives, however, if leftists view it as a just-so story rather than an objective account of history’s movement? Douglas shows how Sartre, Adorno, and James temper the dialectical tradition, or chastise the grandiose claims sometimes made by Hegel or Marx, but Douglas does not elaborate why leftists should situate themselves in this tradition in the first place. If the “Lord and Bondsman” chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is just a yarn, why should leftists not promote more accessible and motivating stories of human struggle and empowerment, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath? In the last paragraph of his book, Douglas states: “[U]ltimately for our purposes a fuller and more affirmative vision of a renewed political would require a conversation with a different cadre of interlocutors” (p. 117). Critical theorists who need an energy boost in dark times should look forward to this next project.

Arts of the Political makes a more direct contribution to the debate over how to rejuvenate the Left. Amin and Thrift assign leftists three activities for achieving the same kinds of successes as those of the nineteenth-century American progressives, British feminists, German Marxists, and Swedish social democrats: 1) Formulate inspiring visions that recast the Left’s historical commitment to contest oppression and achieve justice. 2) Embrace the task of working within institutions. And 3) acknowledge the affective dimension of politics so that leftist politics appeals to hearts as well as minds.

The boldness of this book also poses problems, however, as certain topics are discussed briefly and unsatisfactorily. Take ontology: Amin and Thrift claim that their political theory is “resolutely materialist” and that the Left needs an “ability to stand outside the given to disclose and make way for a new world” (pp. 8, 35), but they do not explain how a resolutely materialist political theory may stand outside the given. Or consider the issue of pluralism. The authors are not “interested in the Left as simply an eclectic mélange of different communities, although we doubt that it can ever be more than a set of sympathetic acquaintances united by common feelings” (p. xiii). What is the difference between an eclectic mélange and a set of sympathetic acquaintances? Amin and Thrift’s view of pluralism might have been enriched if they had engaged other leading theorists of pluralism, such as Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, or John Rawls. Finally, the chapter on affect begins, “It is generally assumed by students of politics that political judgments are—or should be—made in a rational or deliberative manner” (p. 157). The chapter thus attacks a position that no major political theorist, to my knowledge, defends, rather than engages or advances the cutting edge of research on affect.

Perhaps I may focus on the central chapters of the book that are the most detailed and impassioned. In Chapter 5 (“Organizing Politics”) and Chapter 6 (“Eurocracy and its Publics”), Amin and Thrift call upon the Foucaultian Left to relax its suspicion of institutions, particularly bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are powerful entities that can initiate and shape public policy. A well-designed bureaucracy can reconcile certainty and compromise, expert and lay interests, democracy and technocracy. The paradigm is the European Union, “a new type of formally constituted political entity—neither state nor nation—experimenting with multiple and overlapping institutional forms and hybrid forms of deliberation and decision making to construct, regulate, and legitimate a very large and variegated federation of states and societies” (p. 138). Amin and Thrift point to the European Union’s success in crafting a continent-wide water policy to show that bureaucracies can achieve progressive ends. Far better to trust “teams of experts from different professional and national backgrounds” than a political class “likely to fall prey to short-term electoral and popular pressures” (p. 138). In other words, leftists need to temper the ideal of citizen participation in favor of bureaucrats getting things done.

Yet this is the exact type of argument that Douglas contests in In the Spirit of Critique. Even if leftists see the need for deep structural change, they cannot neglect working with ordinary democratic citizens: “After all, who is responsible for bringing about substantive political change? Any answer that hopes to steer clear of authoritarianism must include ordinary people” (p. 89). To their credit, Amin and Thrift acknowledge that the EU’s economic policy has largely supported corporatism and neoliberalism. But their position is that bureaucracies are here to stay and leftists need to harness their powers if they wish to achieve a just, egalitarian society.

I conclude by offering one reason that I share Douglas’s skepticism of leftist praise for technocratic politics. The Obama administration’s signature achievement is the Affordable Care Act. In 2009, the administration had a choice to endorse the public option, a health-care plan operated by the federal government and subject to democratic oversight, or empower the for-profit insurance industry to broaden its coverage. It chose the latter option, entrusting Liz Fowler, an executive from insurance provider WellPoint, to revamp America’s health-care system. According to the investigative journalist David Sirota, Fowler enlisted insurance industry veterans to help write the Affordable Care Act and many now serve as lobbyists for that industry. The immediate beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act, based upon stock price, include health insurance providers such as WellPoint, Aetna, and Cigna. My point here is not to evaluate Obamacare, much less criticize the noble end of providing health-care coverage to more Americans. Rather, I wish to suggest that a leftist faith in technocrats rather than ordinary citizens opens the door for corporate forces to seize the machinery of government. If the Left is to become a vibrant force again, it needs to empower and trust ordinary people to play an active role in self-governance.