Theoria

Shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, Wolfgang Streeck emerged as a highly influential and ambitious critical theorist of capitalism and crisis. Streeck's crisis theory of capitalism is built around an account of neoliberal policy reform as a family of responses to economic upheavals that first emerged during the 1970s. Based on an analysis of four major shocks all occurring in that decade, I argue that Streeck's crisis theory is excessively economistic in its understanding of the crisis tendencies that first propelled neoliberal reform and insufficiently attentive to the global context of their emergence. Theorising the significance of this pivotal historical moment requires more attention to the conflictual entanglements between societies of the Global South and North in the context of decolonisation, war and revolution, and a more nuanced appreciation of the political context of economic reform.

Forms of African relational ethics that prioritise the value of harmony struggle to accommodate arguably valuable disharmony, such as disruptive emotions like anger. A wider literature on political emotions has defended the value of such emotions and even proposed that a particular form of injustice, affective injustice, can arise if we fail to create space for them. While it has recently been proposed that Thaddeus Metz's African-inspired relational moral theory can accommodate disruptive emotions and address affective injustice, in this philosophical article I argue that any success that Metz's account has in this regard is superficial. This critique has important implications: either we need to engage further with disruptive emotions and affective injustice within an African relational ethics, or it may be the case that we instead need to return to how we conceptualise affective injustice to ensure that it does the justice-promoting work that we want it to do.

In The New Religious Intolerance, Martha Nussbaum addresses rising intolerance and fear of difference in contemporary societies. She suggests overcoming these issues through ethical consistency, equality, and the cultivation of sympathetic imagination. Nussbaum views this imaginative engagement as a form of civic friendship essential for societal transformation. However, we argue that her concept of civic friendship is problematic. First, Nussbaum's criteria do not suffice to define friendship. Second, this thin concept of civic friendship is unlikely to achieve the societal transformation Nussbaum envisions. We propose developing a more substantive account of civic friendship. This paper aims to create an Aristotelian account of civic friendship within a capabilitarian framework compatible with contemporary, plural societies.

This article argues that Alain Badiou's theory of the subject offers conceptual resources that help make sense of ordinary life-experiences of ‘evental moments’ and enable the critique of hypertrophic forms of political or corporate agency. The article identifies a set of ideas through which Badiou's philosophy contributes to much-needed emancipatory thinking today. As it investigates the notions of horlieu and the event, the article stresses that true political change requires the emancipation of the ‘quasi-totality’, something that ‘reactive’ political or corporate subjects would not be able to deliver. The piece emphasises that, for Badiou, universalist equality is the indispensable game-changer of politics, and that every single person can contribute to genuinely egalitarian projects. In Badiou's view, there are no meta-subjects and meta-events. Everyone can experience truth in their lives.

The article explores the role that can be played by philosophy education in terms of addressing the crisis of subjectivity and modernity in Africa. Philosophy education in Africa can play the function of liberating Africans from alien modalities of existence and ways of being, and in return embarking on a new journey of self-invention. Without succumbing to a reactive epistemic nationalism that identifies the totality of European philosophy with the ideologies of colonialism, there is a need to develop a form of philosophy education that is cognisant of the troubled path within which the African mode of individual existence and modernity are constituted within. This contributes to the development of a vision of an African future that is founded on collective histories and struggles.

Daniel Akech Thiong, The Politics of Fear in South Sudan: Generating Chaos, Creating Conflict, 2021. London, Zed Books, Bloomsbury Publishing, xxii +217 pp. ISBN: 978-1-7869-9678-7 (hbk)

Norman Ajari, Darkening Blackness: Race, Gender, Class and Pessimism in 21st – Century Black Thought, translated by Matthew B. Smith, 2024. Polity Press, 219pp. ISBN: 978-1509555000 (pbk).