Brian Elliott

Walter Benjamin has become a decisive reference point for a whole range of critical disciplines, as he constructed a unique and provocative synthesis of aesthetics, politics and philosophy. Examining Benjamin’s contributions to cultural criticism in relation to the works of Max Ernst, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, this book also situates Benjamin’s work within more recent developments in architecture and urbanism. This is a concise, coherent account of the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s writings to architects, locating Benjamin’s critical work within the context of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

Portland, Oregon enjoys a growing reputation as a beacon of urban sustainability. Its modern planning history has seen effectve efforts to curb urban sprawl and introduce a comprehensive mass transit system. More recently, the city has also become a hub for a “makers” movement involving a plethora of local, small-scale craft production. Within this context, Portland is also home to a thriving urban agriculture scene, featuring community gardens, community-assisted agriculture, farmers’ markets, food co-ops, and various farm-based education and outreach programs. While recent case studies of Portland insist that the social sustainability case made for urban agriculture (UA) remains open, this position is arguably unwarranted and lacks an adequate grasp of the critical urban geography perspective developed in the work of David Harvey and Neil Smith. Following the lead of what Chiara Tornaghi calls “the critical geography of urban agriculture,” Portland’s urban agriculture should, on the whole, be seen as an adjunct to rather than a resistance movement against advanced neo­liberal urban governance.

Over the last two decades the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben has attracted widespread attention both within philosophy and more broadly across the human sciences. Central to the thinking of Nancy and Agamben is a shared theory of community that offers a model of resistance to oppressive power through radical passivity. This article argues that this model inherits the inadequacies of Martin Heidegger’s attempts to conceptualize society and history. More specifically, Heidegger’s understanding of collective history in terms of ‘destiny’ implicitly regulates the figure of community proposed by Nancy and Agamben. This alignment with the Heideggerian notion of destiny means that these later thinkers fail to offer a credible model of resistance in terms of concretely determined means of productive counter-practices. As a consequence the usefulness of the thinking of Nancy and Agamben as a conceptual framework for emancipatory politics is at best extremely limited

In the novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence a miniature history of the English working class can be found. Through their sympathetic portrayals, these authors transformed working-class culture from a patronizing pastiche into a vital reality. This achievement was crucial to the rise of the English working-class as the key agency of democratic reform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In our own times, by contrast, depictions of working-class culture are patronizing at best, if not openly denigrating. This crisis of representation has born recent fruit in the phenomenon of populism, a long-term consequence of the undermining of genuinely popular rule under neoliberal capitalism. Returning to the works of Eliot, Hardy, and Lawrence in this book the author offers a sense of direction for contemporary politics, by rediscovering the vital force of working-class culture.

Since the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the interests of the working class have become progressively more marginalized within mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. Years of austerity politics following the financial crash of 2008 deepened popular disenchantment with the political class, paving the way for the 2016 Brexit referendum result. This, Brian Elliot argues, has precipitated a crisis of British democracy. Does the current wave of populism constitute a threat to or promise for democracy? What has led to the emergence of populism and to what extent can populism be shaped into a program of progressive reform of democracy today? In this timely new book, Brian Elliott takes a long view on populism, tracing its history back to the struggles waged by the British workers’ movement of the nineteenth century to gain general enfranchisement. Countering the depiction of populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism, Elliott argues that the populist sentiment contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Identifying and examining the contemporary challenges of work, Elliott outlines a new working-class politics to overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years.

Natural Catastrophe is an original contribution to the growing field of the environmental humanities. It offers an unorthodox reckoning with the narrative of natural catastrophe that sustains both environmental and neoliberal solutions to the problem of climate change and calls for a return to the radical experiments in political thought seen in the nineteenth century.’ Janet Stewart, Durham University A lively introduction to the social and political dimensions of the current climate change and sustainability debates The voices proclaiming that climate change is a natural catastrophe grow ever more strident. This book offers the persuasive alternative argument that climate change is in fact a profoundly political phenomenon and a symptom of neoliberal governance. Viewing it as such helps us to understand how, across wealthy liberal democracies, environmental concern has increasingly been framed as a consumer responsibility issue rather than as a matter of structural social–political transformation. Thinking of a world truly beyond climate change requires us to reimagine the state beyond its current neoliberal configuration. This book argues that, in order to achieve this, environmental politics in the West needs to renew the Marxist challenge to the global market’s benign production of social utility and construct a new non-apocalyptic politics of nature.

Constructing Community examines community from the particular perspective of the shaping and control of urban space in contemporary liberal democracies. Following a consideration and critique of influential theories of community that have arisen within European philosophy over the last three decades, Brian Elliott investigates parallel approaches to community within urban theory and practice over the same period. Underlying the comparison of political theory and urban practice is a basic assumption that community and place are intimately connected such that the one cannot be adequately understood without the other. The underlying intention of this book is to advocate a particular understanding of community, one that centers on collective, grassroots oppositional action. While it draws on certain current theories and practices, the model of community put forward is far from the orthodox position. This study is a provocative and original analysis of the question of urban politics in contemporary liberal democracies. It offers a strong case for reconsidering current debates on democratic politics in light of the connection between political power and the control of public space and the built environment.

Phenomenology is one of the most pervasive and influential schools of thought in twentieth-century European philosophy. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the idea of the imagination in Husserl and Heidegger. The author also locates phenomenology within the broader context of a philosophical world dominated by Kantian thought, arguing that the location of Husserl within the Kantian landscape is essential to an adequate understanding of phenomenology both as an historical event and as a legacy for present and future philosophy.

Continental philosophy over the past two decades has increasingly turned its attention to social and political matters. Two key figures involved in this move, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, have advanced a position centering on the idea of singular community . This article sets out the basic features of this idea and contrasts it with Habermas' theory of communicative or dialogical community . Habermas is open to the criticism that his theory of community is constructed according to an unduly narrow construal of legitimate argumentation and democratic participation. The idea of community advanced by Nancy and Agamben, in contrast, appears to lack any credible criteria of community inclusion or identity. In conclusion, it is suggested that both theories of community fall short by neglecting the task of constructing and preserving actual sites of collective democratic action and resistance.

In the first years of its existence between 1957 and 1960 the efforts of the radical collective the Situationist International (SI) centred on its program of “unitary urbanism.” This program sought to challenge the functionalist character of hegemonic forms of urban planning through novel practices of urban experimentation and contestation. Situationist urbanism arose largely through the collaboration between Guy Debord and the Dutch avant-garde architect Constant. This article explores the political dimension of situationist urbanism and the tensions that led to Constant’s secession from the group in 1960. Through analysis of the affinities and divergences between urbanism in its modernist and situationist forms a case is made for the crucial contribution situationist practices might make to the restoration of public space as a vital arena of contemporary political contestation and community.