They are the lighthouses of the year that is coming to an end, thinkers who brightened the way a little in a turbulent year marked by war. The Albanian-British Lea Ypi showed us how freedom can be manipulated; the Russian Sergei Guriev, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris, researched the nature of the new dictators of the 21st century; John Gray distilled his clear pessimism; Australian McKenzie Warkel gave us her Marxist analysis and punk vibe; Timothy Garton Ash, his defense of Europe; and the thinker of capitalism and love, the French-Israeli Eva Illouz, her look against the tide.
Lea Ypi, the thinker of freedom
Lea Ypi in her home in London, last March. Ione Saizar
Lea Ypi led the way. The 44-year-old Albanian author, professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, has created an international narrative style with Libre, a work that combines memory and reflection and defends Kant's modernity in dark times. She does this a year before Kant's 300th birthday, but rather than writing a treatise on philosophy, Ypi opts for narrative memory to invite us to consider what it means to be free from the girl's voice, that she was. The curiosity and daring of his childhood allow him to ask the necessary questions about the world in which he lives, but Libre is not a melancholic work, but a call to the present, to this new context of international barbarism that is a would require a firm commitment to Kant's eternal peace.
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When darkness falls, the compass is our hope, and Ypi comes to tell us something like that. Isn't modernity the wish that the world can become better? For Ypi, hope is an antidote to our nihilism because “it does not seek to guarantee the right outcome, but rather to preserve the right principle: the one on the basis of which a moral world makes sense.” So Libre contains a valuable promise of freedom precisely then , when politics trivializes it in order to put it in the service of ideology. It invites us to reflect on what it means to be free and shows us how autocracies exploit freedom, but also democracies, and makes us aware of our paternalism in interpreting stories that we perceive as distant.
Ypi therefore dares to see the end of history from the side that Fukuyama did not see, of that Europe which, after the fall of communism, received fruitless lessons in democracy and whose hopes were not fulfilled. And it is this bold combination of otherness and universalism, supported by the power of her own narrative voice, that makes Ypi one of the authors of the year. By Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán
Sergei Guriev, the professor who dissects the new dictators
Sergei Guriev in front of one of the Science Po buildings in Paris, on January 25, 2022. James Hill (Redux / Contact)
Five years ago, two university professors raised alarm bells about the state of democracies. In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt analyzed the blackout that plagued freedom in the world and that soon led to a “democratic recession,” accompanied by a gloom and the proliferation of illiberal democracies.
Two other professors, Sergei Guriev (51-year-old rector of Sciences Po in Paris) and Daniel Treisman of the University of California, have come full circle by writing “The New Dictators.” The changing face of tyranny in the 21st century – the Putins, Erdogan, Orbán, etc. – who are a new generation that bears little resemblance to their bloody predecessors, the Hitlers, Stalin, Mao… They have changed the military uniform to wear formal suits, they fly to the Davos Economic Forum on private planes, they have stopped shooting their opponents in crowded football stadiums, and they hire professional consultants and pollsters for their political practice.
The new dictator model is based on a brilliant idea. Their main goal is still to monopolize political power, but today's strongmen are aware that violence is not always necessary or even convenient in the current situation. It is not convenient for them to keep track of them. Instead of terrorizing citizens, a skilled ruler can control or reshape his people's views of the world. You can lure your citizens into compliance or even enthusiastic approval. Instead of repressing harshly, the new dictators manipulate. They are dictators of manipulation.
These new dictators control citizens by distorting information and faking democratic processes. They use democratic institutions (even participating in international institutions) to manage them from within. Which does not mean that they can give up this manipulation at any time and return to crude oppression. This is exactly what Putin did with the war in Ukraine. By Joaquín Estefania
John Gray, the prophet of pessimism
Philosopher John Gray photographed in Bath, United Kingdom, on October 6, 2023. Ione Saizar
My old teacher, a true skeptic, used to say that he was only optimistic about the future of pessimism. This maxim can certainly be applied to John Gray (75 years old), the most iconoclastic and incredulous thinker in the marketplace of ideas. Or the sentence that Dante placed at the entrance to hell: “Give up all hope.” Hope in this case is what guides all enlightened discourse, the belief in progress, in the power of reason and the increasing improvement of humanity. If Camus claimed that “the tragedy of our generation is to have seen a false hope” and to have trusted in the liberating power of revolutions, only to later end in new forms of domination, Gray doubles down on this complaint by pointing to the Inevitability of frustration defies all expectations. Improvement. Any apparent progress is always precarious and temporary; not much can be expected from the crooked tribe of humanity. He has been saying this for several decades and sees it confirmed today in what he sees as the final crisis of liberalism, the last heir to enlightened optimism. His most recent book, “The New Leviathans,” is subtitled “Thoughts After Liberalism.” Fukuyama is already dead and buried, and optimists like Pinker won't stop making fools of themselves. Where is this approach of humanity to liberal principles? Or, given the dangers of AI, the emancipation that science would bring us? And the prosperity we expected from the capitalist world market has led to a mad rush to ecological destruction of the planet. Add to this the misery of new wars in Ukraine and Israel and the frightening anticipation of a possible conflict between the United States and China. Yes, 2023 has vindicated the pessimists, and John Gray is their prophet. By Fernando Vallespin
McKenzie Wark, from auto theory to heterodox Marxism
McKenzie Wark last June. Clémence Poles
More recently, the name McKenzie Wark (Newcastle, Australia, 1961) has been associated with her autofictional works (such as Reverse Cowgirl or Raving, published by Caja Negra), in which she recounts her late trans experiences and emerges from anecdote raises to arrive at autotheory: a new way of approaching thinking. Also as a commentator on today's most powerful thinkers regarding their interests, as seen in Collective Intelects (La Caja Books, 2023).
These interests revolve around a heterodox Marxism that focuses on the analysis of the political economy of the information society. His reading of Marx is one that overlaps with the scientific and technological, as the new knowledge economy creates new classes and social conflicts. For example, between the hacker who creates, innovates, subverts (perhaps his best-known work was dedicated to him, A Hacker Manifesto, published by Alpha Decay in 2004) and the vectorist who monopolizes values by controlling media, infrastructure or intellectual property Property. These are ideas he also explores in Capitalism is Dead (Holobionte, 2021): Capitalism is no longer what it was, it is something else that may not be worthy of the name. And the new model in the middle of the Anthropocene could be even worse.
The also heterodox Situationist International, which is activist in nature and punk industry, was another of her areas of interest, as can be seen in the work The beach under the street (Hermida, 2018), which places Guy Debord and his cronies in the context of struggles of the 21st century. She is interested in media, digital culture and technology and has contributed new approaches to intellectual property, as a means of creating scarcity in the intangible field of knowledge or the importance of the collective intellect, which goes beyond the classic figure of the intellectual. By Sergio C. Fanjul
Timothy Garton Ash, a liberal intellectual who defends Europe
Timothy Garton in Oxford last March.David Levenson (GETTY IMAGES)
For years, the shadow of democratic regression has been projected onto the horizon in the construction of a Europe that, despite Hungarian subversion, is gradually being armored and federalized. This was already a realistic fear in the 2019 European Parliament elections, and it will be a realistic fear again in the new year. We are still living with the hangover of Brexit and the national-populist siege of the worn-out founding project of social democracy, defined by Tony Judt and designed for a world that has little to do with today. Since 2022, these tensions have been added to the wars at the ends of the continent, in which we are discovering our place between powerlessness and resignation, when the power that predominates is the hard power. A secondary location. But despite all the worries, it remains a place of extraordinary freedom. “Despite all its shortcomings, limitations and hypocrisies, despite all the setbacks of recent years, today's Europe is still much better than the one I wanted to explore in the early seventies, not to mention the hell my father found.” in his youth.” The sentence can be read at the end of a cultured, luminous and illustrated speech from 2023: the essay Europe (Taurus) by Timothy Garton Ash (68 years old), which deals with contemporary European history with the autobiography of author overlaps. A book, a beacon. This British academic – a member of the continental elite who has been involved for decades in the forums where the West's best public debates take place – is a paradigmatic example of the liberal intellectual who does not in false nostalgia, but is committed to the defense of threatened values with in-depth knowledge of the other Europe, without which it is not complete. That is the theme of the book and that is what he talks about. Like Snyder, like Applebaum. As references that, based on thought, i.e. contradictions, champion democratic resistance to regression. By Jordi Amat
Eva Illouz, that unpleasant voice that goes against the grain
Eva Llouz photographs in Paris in October 2020. Manuel Braun
It is as if history had not stopped proving Eva Illouz (62 years old), the great French-Israeli sociologist, macabrely right. The prolific thinker on capitalism and love focuses her work on emotions and debunks myths such as that of romantic love. The focus is on the power imbalance between men and women, exacerbated by the impact of disposable transactional relationships with Tinder in hand. The Consumption of a Romantic Utopia or The End of Love are two of his great works. His conclusions are becoming increasingly valid. But while she focused on romantic relationships from the academy, in her dual role as an intellectual citizen in the newspaper Haaretz – which is as progressive as it is a minority in Israel – she warned of her country's drift. To what extent Netanyahu's nationalist populism threatened the health of Israeli democracy and its security. How his extremist coalition led the country into the abyss. He writes about this in “The Emotional Life of Populism” (Katz, 2023), in which he analyzes the political manipulation of emotions. depict fear, disgust and national pride; The emotions that he believes “fuel the conflict” and shape the narrative that can undermine democratic institutions from within.
I wrote this before October 7th. Before the massacre of Israelis by the Islamist movement, Hamas unleashed an unprecedented military response from Israel, pulverizing the laws of war as we knew them live and before the impassive gaze of half the world, massacring thousands of civilians in the Gaza Strip and killing two million She condemned them to repression. Illouz once again chooses an uncomfortable voice, this time for those who were his audience: global progressivism. He has condemned the occupation and attacks on Palestinians for years and now condemns the response of the global left, which he accuses of “moral insensitivity.” The one who sympathizes with the dead Palestinians, but finds it difficult to condemn the barbarism towards the Israeli victims. A few concessions from a thinker used to going against the grain. By Ana Carbajosa
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