Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not only a work of economic history and theory but also a political and normative argument and a critique of ideology. It is invaluable for its magisterial documentation of increasing inequality in capitalism, and unprecedented US economic inequality in particular. I situate it within philosophical conceptions of justice. I also identify it as a non-determinist critique of the political economy of capitalism and a substantive and methodological challenge to mainstream economics. I discuss not only what Piketty does not do, as some Marxists do, but what Piketty does do and summarize some of his central claims. I then discuss some problems in his work, some of which have not been addressed in the literature. In particular Piketty’s concept of labor income masks forms of capital, and given his arguments, gender and all women’s reproductive practices should have been addressed more fully.

Judith Butler maintains that the universality of the precarity of life confirms the interdependence of lives. Such interdependence makes us fundamentally responsible for the lives of Others. Through the application of Marx’s critique of capitalism as ontological degradation, we ask whether the notions of a life and of lives as Butler outlines them in her recent works are adequate to ground moral understanding and practice, or whether, the manner in which human lives produce and reproduce themselves within the capitalist context (now being globalized) problematizes the revision of the ethical. We therefore expand from her claim that “moral theory has to become social critique if it is to know its object and act upon it” (Butler, 2004).

Drone warfare, particularly in the form of targeted killing, has serious legal, moral, and political costs so that a case can be made for an international treaty prohibiting this type of warfare. However, the case would be stronger if it could be shown that killing by drones is inherently immoral. From this angle I explore the moral significance of two features of this technology of killing: the killing is done by remote control with the operators geographically far away from the target zone and the killing is typically the outcome of a long process of surveillance. I argue that remote control killing as such might not be inherently wrong but poses the risks of globalizing conflict and prioritizing troop protection above civilian safety, while the “deadly surveillance” aspect of drone killing makes it most clearly intrinsically wrong.

This paper explores the historical conditions under which the object of humanitarian discourse is conceived and organized. What is problematic about this discourse is not only the alarming reality of humanitarianism’s intertwinement with militarism and political power, but also the calculated arbitrariness of redress that brings into question which norms guide public articulations of victims’ suffering. By questioning how a specific understanding of the other is formed, this paper aims to draw attention to the inconsistencies associated with the problematic relation between witnessing atrocities and the moral responses that this should entail.

Current struggles over laws prohibiting and criminalizing the public disclosure of violence in the spaces of animal use in the US have underscored the centrality of exposés to animal activism. This article complicates the activist belief in the power of exposure—“If slaughterhouses had glass walls . . .”—by drawing on the insights of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir concerning the prevalence of bad faith in systems of oppression and exploitation. I describe four forms of bad faith common to these systems, and offer suggestions for exposés of the animal enterprise modeled on Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s “engaged exposés.”

Taking the work of Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism, as a point of departure, this essay explores the concept of pensiero debole (weak thought) and its application to progressive contemporary Latin American governments, which the authors describe as “communist in spirit.” The essay embraces pensiero debole as a method to disagree with Vattimo and Zabala’s assessment and to contrast the policies of state capitalism carried out by those governments to the praxis of anti-systemic social movements engaged in a reformulation of territorial autonomy consonant with what John Holloway calls Change the World Without Taking Power.

Socialism is meant to be democratic. Socialist democracy demands solidarity but it remains unclear what solidarity consists of. Theorists provide a range of different characterizations of solidarity which are adequate in their contexts but will not suffice as the basis for socialist democracy. This paper shows how we should not understand that needed solidarity; it is not merely a solidarity based on commonalities that overlooks difference. On the contrary, it needs to be a kind of solidarity that establishes close but complex relations between various groups through their commitment to taking their differences seriously. There are many different ways of taking differences seriously. At the end, this paper makes some suggestions for further research to clarify the concept of solidarity in spite of difference.

This paper argues for the legitimacy of daydreaming as an important condition of a liberatory political vision, using a Marcusean framework to supplement and extend the critique of productivism recently made by Kathi Weeks. By differentiating free time from mere pastime, I show that daydreaming not only builds our political imagination, but it also reminds us of the value of unproductive free time. Situating Marcuse within a survey of the role of play and leisure in Aristotle, Schiller, and Marx, I show how Marcuse’s theory integrates neglected historical possibilities for reconceptualizing leisure as a right and not a luxury.

Beginning from a critique of neoliberalism, and in particular of its concept of freedom, I develop an alternative notion of freedom as love. In order to escape the current neoliberal hegemony, I argue that we must reconnect with the radical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I thus take as my starting point the debate between Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm over the nature of freedom that took place in the pages of Dissent in the mid-1950s. Building on their work I construct a theory of freedom as “connective expression.”

This is the introductory essay for the first of two special issues of Radical Philosophy Review marking the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the twentieth century’s most provocative, subversive, and widely read works of radical theory—Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), which we now reassess in an effort to contribute to the critical theory of our time. What are the possibilities and limits of our current situation? What are the prospects for moving beyond one-dimensionality? A summary of each of the articles featured in this special issue is also provided.

I discuss how I came to read, interpret, understand, critique, and use One-Dimensional Man, and I consider the book’s reception and relevance in the 1960s when it appeared, suggesting how its ideas relate to experiences and developments within US society and global capitalism from the 1940s and 1950s. Then, I examine how the model of one-dimensional society was put in question by the struggles and upheavals of the 1960s, how Herbert Marcuse revised his model in the 1970s, and how it fares in making sense of developments in the succeeding decades, up to the present. Thus, my interpretation will be philosophical, historical, and political, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse would want it to be.

In this historical contextualization of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, I present critical arguments that Marcuse deploys in the US context—especially in light of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. I argue that (1) Marcuse’s critical perspective worked to deprovincialize Anglo-American philosophy and to demythologize the extravagantly glorified and sanitized “American Pageant” view of the world that prevailed in the United States at the time and (2) Marcuse’s critical pedagogy thus led to a revitalization and recovery of philosophy in the United States after World War II.