What's Left of Philosophy

A live debate on Patrick Deneen’s post-liberal critique of liberalism, from its seductive crisis narrative to its nostalgia for local community and tradition. The discussion examines universities, technology, individuality, nature, and liberalism’s contradictions, while challenging culturalist explanations that ignore history, material forces, exclusion, and the reactionary politics lurking behind them.

Alain Locke’s vision of Black art takes center stage, from Harlem’s creative communities to African traditions, folk culture, poetry, and experimental theater. The discussion explores why art should resist propaganda, how cultural expression can shape collective identity, and whether Black artists today can escape the pressure to moralize. It also considers the uneasy path from particularity to universality, with detours through hip-hop, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and Drake.

A quick update with two opportunities to connect in person: a live recording at the Radical Philosophy Association conference at Pomona College, plus an upcoming Chicago course devoted to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan through the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. The recording also teases what’s coming next and offers a brief word of thanks to listeners.

What does “hyperpolitics” reveal about a time of nonstop political activity but little lasting change? The discussion explores institutional collapse, economic stagnation, internet atomization, climate crisis, and the erosion of social solidarity. It also asks how mass politics might be rebuilt, balancing emergency action with patient organizing, and why hope, humility, and collective deliberation matter.

A lively exploration of Alain Badiou’s vision of politics as a site where truths and transformative events emerge. The discussion moves through radical equality, insurrection against state hierarchies, Nazism and totalitarianism, Saint Paul’s revolutionary faith, and the role of love, mathematics, infinity, and Platonism in shaping political subjects.

A deep dive into how modernity and colonialism are tangled together. They trace Eurocentric claims, exclusions, and stages of modernity. The conversation explores alterity, conquest as a modern subjectivity, and whether Latin America is constitutive of modernity. They end by weighing modernity’s emancipatory promise against its instrumental and mythic uses.

A teaser on Marshall Berman’s take on modernity and its lived contradictions. Short scenes on creative destruction, urban life, and the tension between freedom and stability. Sketches of pessimistic and hopeful responses to modern change. A quick invite to continue the conversation on the full show.

A lively debate about Marx’s 'Fragment on Machines' and what automated systems reveal about labor and value. They link generative AI and data centers to promises of freed time versus intensified exploitation. The conversation weighs political choices, investment priorities, transparency of black-box systems, and how automation reshapes work, teaching, and everyday skills.

In this episode we talk about the political philosophy of early modern jurist Johannes Althusius. For us, he represents a road not taken in political theory, since Hobbes definitively constructed political philosophy around the idea of the self-interested atomized subject and he couldn’t disagree more. Althusius is an axis between medieval and modern thinking about political life, and his federalist vision forces us all to ask odd questions about what we want. History teaches!leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil | @leftofphilosophy.bsky.social References:Johannes Althusius, Politica, translated by Frederick S. Carney (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).Music:“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we talk about the relational paradigm in political philosophy. Made famous by Iris Marion Young, developed later by Elizabeth Anderson, this view of what equality is all about presents a puzzle for the class conscious. It says that the point of equality is to live in a society of equals. Its proponents skewered famous analytical Marxists for having a reductive and economistic view of justice. Was this fair? Join us to find out. This is just a short teaser of the full episode. To hear the rest, please subscribe to us on Patreon:patreon.com/leftofphilosophyReferences:Elizabeth Anderson, “What’s the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.Samuel Scheffler, “What is Egalitarianism?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31(2003): 5-39.Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, 1990. Music:“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com“My Space” by Overu |https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN