This chapter employs an archive that was counterinsurgent in its creation in order to tease out an insurgent narrative of the uprisings, spotlighting the demands and experiences of working people as it traces the spread of labor unrest across various plantations that year. The central argument is that despite racialized job segmentation, residential segregation, and disparate historical experiences, the unrest demonstrates active cooperation among the Black and Indian communities that confronted the sugar industry and colonial state. In this case, strong racial identities did not preclude joint action. The chapter demonstrates that laborers were not only aware of their position in the colonial economy, but also advanced a vision of modern politics and connected their interests to global concerns of their day, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia and ideas about communism.

Whereas the previous chapter traced the early debates between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the proper strategies for African American advancement – between Washington’s emphasis on vocational training and gradual assimilation and Du Bois’s call for the “talented tenth” to lead in social and political uplift – the Harlem Renaissance represents a new, more experimental phase of African American thought. Concentrated in Harlem during the 1920s, this movement produced groundbreaking literature, art, and music that explored the meaning of Black identity, freedom, and creativity. Figures like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Schuyler interrogated existing social norms while celebrating the distinctiveness of Black culture. Locke’s philosophy of cultural pluralism emphasized that African American culture was not a problem to be solved but a source of inherent value, teaching readers how culture can shape identity and influence broader societal understanding. Magazines like Fire!!! and works such as Jean Toomer’s Cane and Nella Larsen’s Passing pushed narrative boundaries, illustrating the ways in which art can challenge assumptions about race, gender, and desire.

Following the “Second Industrial Revolution” and the Sino-Japanese (1894-5) and Russo-Japanese (1904-5) Wars, the first decade of the early twentieth century witnessed a burgeoning international culture of protest, in which Japan played a pivotal role. The Meiji Revolution inspired the “cooperative” progress championed by Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin. And Japanese socialists joined their Russian counterparts in a transnational campaign for peace in 1904. At the same time, Japan became a breeding ground for revolution in China and anti-colonial agitation in Southeast Asia. Japan’s pivotal contribution to the Allied cause in World War I confirms not a wartime end to the growing global integration of the latter nineteenth century but a new centrality of Asia in global affairs.

Chapter 4 discusses the life and thought of Samuel Eisenstadt, one of the founders of the Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics. Eisenstadt was a Russian-born Jewish legal scholar. His career spanned pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, Mandatory Palestine, and Israel. His legal scholarship drew on the German Historical School, which viewed law as a historical and cultural phenomenon, and on Marxist legal theory, which described law as an instrument of class struggle. Eisenstadt sought to show the superiority of Jewish law, for example, by arguing that traditional institutions of Jewish legal education were better than Western ones because of their non-elitist and non-materialist nature, or by arguing for a genealogy of labor and international law which located its origins in the Bible. Eisenstadt was also engaged in apologetic efforts to defend the more problematic aspects of Jewish law, such as its treatment of slaves and women. Eisenstadt’s legal thought provides an example of the intersection of legal nationalism and socialism, and the attempt to reconcile Jewish traditions with progressive ideology.

Radical economists were ready to join movements calling for social justice as organizers and advocates but they were also ready to step into the role of policy experts to advance those causes. At a time when think tanks were proliferating as a new way to conduct politics through knowledge making and policy design, radicals worked with leading Washington DC institutions on the Left. Radical economists joined the Institute for Policy Studies to advance its political economy programmes and to counter federal budget orthodoxy. Radicals joined the Cambridge Institute to advance its vision of grassroots urban socialism and community empowerment. Radicals’ relationships with trade unions aligned it with the research mission and themes of the Economic Policy Institute. And it was thanks to the initiative of a radical that the Institute for Women’s Policy Research was formed. Through decades of involvement in public policy, albeit always outside government, radicals have enriched understandings of the inequities of American capitalism and focused attention on those policies that can bring about repair and redress.

In this chapter, I examine attempts to respond to the scenario of unmitigated capitalism, where the rich continue to get richer. This second possibility focuses on how greater economic equality might be created. I discuss four approaches. First, I explore how taxation can be used to redistribute wealth. Next, I introduce the emerging idea of “degrowth” – the purposeful shrinking of some parts of the economy to protect the environment. Third, I examine communism as a means of pursuing economic equality. Finally, I outline socialism as a fourth path toward building more equal societies. I identify and articulate the strengths and limitations of each approach. These reflections lay the foundation for the third and final possibility.

This chapter critiques competing ideologies – socialism, populism, and liberalism – and their impacts on development. It revisits dependency theory, institutional economics, and recent policy experiments in Latin America. While state-led models expanded access and welfare, they often fostered dependency and inefficiency. A reformed liberalism, focused on inclusion, accountability, and strategic intervention, emerges as a viable path forward.

Drawing on archival sources from Paribas as well as published statements from bank chairmen Jean-Yves Haberer, Michel François-Poncet and André Lévy-Lang, this chapter examines Paribas in the European economy of the 1980s and 1990s, the evolution of the bank’s business strategy amid the macroeconomic changes of market integration and market openings, and the bank’s perspectives on the Single Market and banking regulation in European economic governance. If carmakers like Volkswagen and BMW expressed enthusiasm about the business opportunities of the Single Market Program for their supply chains, production, and distribution and even supported the EEC’s efforts to develop environmental regulations, merchant banks like Paribas seemed rather ambivalent and even directly opposed to the regulatory and social dimensions of market integration through their lobbying efforts and business interest associations. In the early 1990s, the opening of Central and Eastern Europe presented new investment and growth opportunities making Paribas much more interested in business opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe, the “CEE,” than in the business environment of the EEC and its Single Market.

Chapter 6 uses the insights gleaned from the interviews in Chapter 5 to frame intra-left legal debates over the determinacy of legal reasoning, the significance of legal consciousness and discourse, and the utility of reasoning from the designation “capitalist.”

This chapter focuses on the cultures of war victory in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and their successor states, a topic which illustrates global themes in the history and memory of war in the twentieth century and beyond. The First World War left a complex legacy of societal division, conflicting experiences, memories, continuities, and ruptures. This chapter shows how a complex legacy evolved in the twentieth century, and how it was reshaped by successive regimes and political orders to better fit shifting political interpretations of global history.

The introduction outlines the main issues tackled in the volume and presents urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward as a case study for the search of a socialist everyday, different from and alternative to the capitalist one. It highlights how this search embodied a specific understanding of the political economy, and how it highlighted contradictions within the Maoist project of revolution. Finally, it describes the sources and methodology adopted in the book.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

Chapter 3 INTELLIGENCE SOCIALISM opposes two radically different views about the relation between skills and intelligence—elitism and socialism. Elitism—pervasive in popular culture as well as in psychometrics—is the view that only a particular class of skill—‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’ or ‘embodied’ skills—manifests intelligence. I single out the best case for the stronger socialist claim that no principled difference in intelligence can be found between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, and practical, or embodied skills.