Institute for Human Sciences

Russia’s authoritarian regime owes its tenacity to the reversal of two central communist precepts, writes Ivan Krastev. First, its abandonment of the ideology of public interest prevents it being measured against its own standards. Second, its policy of open borders diffuses protest potential from a dissatisfied middle class.

Hungary’s media law could lead to a depoliticisation of the media the likes of which exists in Russia and in other post-Soviet democracies, writes the former OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. The alterations to the law on the basis of the agreement with the European Commission will do little to this halt this tendency.

Faith in the “efficient markets hypothesis” is largely to blame for the massive deregulation of the late 1990s and early 2000s that made the crisis more likely, if not inevitable. Two economists excoriate the ideology of self-regulating markets and its pseudo-scientific foundations.

The climate justice position is necessary but not sufficient for comprehending the current crisis, writes Dipesh Chakrabarty. As a geophysical force, the human species wields a new kind of agency unaccounted for in familiar narratives of the history of capitalist growth.