Overview

In the West, ""the Left,"" understood as a loose conglomeration of interests centered around the goal of a fairer and more equal society, still struggles to make its voice heard and its influence felt, even amid an overwhelming global recession. In Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that only by broadening the domain of what is considered political and what can be made into politics will the Left be able to respond forcefully to injustice and inequality. In particular, the Left requires a more imaginative and experimental approach to the politics of creating a better society. The authors propose three political arts that they consider crucial to transforming the Left: boosting invention, leveraging organization, and mobilizing affect. They maintain that successful Left political movements tend to surpass traditional notions of politics and open up political agency to these kinds of considerations. In other words, rather than providing another blueprint for the future, Amin and Thrift concentrate their attention on a more modest examination of the conduct of politics itself and the ways that it can be made more effective.

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9780822354017

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Reviews

The Left urgently needs redefinition and rejuvenation during a time when the forces of the Right are highly mobilized, blowback from several nonhuman forces has intensified, and a progressive formation will take the form of a pluralist assemblage. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift confront these issues in creative ways, as they explore the levels and modes needed to activate a progressive movement. This is a bracing and timely book. - William E. Connolly, author of A World of Becoming The fundamental question of this exciting book is not 'What is the Left?' Instead, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift provoke us to ask what are the new ways of being human in the twenty-first century and what are the new forms of political action to meet these challenges. - David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life This is a gallant, fluent, very ambitious and formidably well-read book... a fine and rousing book, and required reading for Messrs Miliband and Cruddas... Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift have contrived this novel and vigorous weapon of dissent, so much required to fight the rough beast of a new epoch now slouching towards Wall Street to be born. - Times Higher Education This book makes a much-needed attempt to revamp the Left's struggle to 'voice a politics of social equality and justice'. Problematizing the Left's ongoing failure to capture and cohere people's aspirations, to organize politically and to secure achievements, they focus on an essential and, as they rightly claim, neglected aspect of Left politics: the art of doing politics. Their diag--nosis is that the Left has lost political knowledge and imagination concerning how to force open space for alternative programmes, to project alternative futures and to substantiate latent possibilities for a different world. What has thus been lost, the authors contend, is the ability of 'world making' . - Jessica Schmidt, Radical Philosophy

The fundamental question of this exciting book is not 'What is the Left?' Instead, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift provoke us to ask what are the new ways of being human in the twenty-first century and what are the new forms of political action to meet these challenges. --David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life

Author Information

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography at Cambridge University. He is the author of Land of Strangers and coauthor (with Patrick Cohendet) of Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities. Nigel Thrift is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick. He is the author of Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect and Knowing Capitalism. Amin and Thrift are the authors of Cities: Reimagining the Urban.

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