The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something of a fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it.

By looking at the manner in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu have sought to understand the political nature of their work and explained their interventions in political affairs, this article defines the action they saw as possible and necessary for intellectuals. As it can only involve others, this action can take the form of dialogue and explanation or of a collective intellectual. In the texts where they reflect on their political involvement outside of parties and government, both authors assert the impossibility to evade politics. By comparing their positions, we begin to develop a critical phenomenology.

For about the last ten years, a steadily growing stream of publications is feeding a fascinating international debate on the development of an Eco-Marxism. In this paper, the attempts to “ecologize” Marxism are critically discussed, starting with John Bellamy Foster’s path-breaking reconstruction of Marx’s conceptof “metabolic rift” and the Marxian analysis of the privatization of the commons. Although Marx’s understanding of the limits of nature is only partial, authors such as Paul Burkett have convincingly shown a reconstructed Eco-Marxism follows the fundamental tenets of ecological economics. This approach can also fruitfully inform the development of an ecosocialist political project.

The point of departure of this study is Walter Benjamin’s last text, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin appeals to the significance of theology for historical materialism in order to overcome one of the decisive reasons why Marx’s unique theoretical project, in its positivistic interpretations, was not understood with the necessary radicality and had been in danger of losing its explanatory power and revolutionary impulse. The necessity of looking back to the past constitutes the basic theme of the study, and it is analyzed at the epistemological, ontological and political levels. The view backwards is also necessary because the past shows how all its atrocities, which we think have been overcome, may at any time return in a way which we are unable to imagine.

This article explores how the notion of obesity as health problem (1) functions to obscure or justify global inequities related to food production and access and (2) indicates still deeper problems of injustice and the neglected role of embodiment in analyses of justice and injustice, and notions of political subjecthood. Food, the need to eat, and the food system shape social existence profoundly yet are underexplored in philosophy, especially political philosophy. Drawing on disability theory and food studies, this article uses the crisis of body weight to explore relationships between neoliberalism, transnational capitalism, the industrialized agro-food system, and world health. Obesity discourse spotlights lifestyle choices of individuals, casting women especially as making irresponsible decisions for their families. A politically informed (and more medically sophisticated) perspective suggests that the real crisis is a social pact, which I term the ThinContract, predicating personhood and full social inclusion on body type.

The conventional view is that analytic philosophy has dominated American philosophy departments since 1950 and that continental philosophy and pragmatism have been marginalized almost out of existence due to philosophical inferiority or McCarthyist persecution. But a precise historical treatment of transformations in the field shows that this is, in fact, the golden age of continental philosophy and pragmatist scholarship, that McCarthyism had nothing to do with pragmatism’s fall from dominance, and that the shape of the field depends more on larger academic-historical trends. However, McCarthyism likely had lasting effects on analytic control of powerful qualifying institutions.