This article claims that contemporary decolonial thought, by equating universality and coloniality as such exclusively with the history of European modernity, risks collapsing into a metatheoretica...

Please join us for the launch of our special issue ‘The Neoliberal-Fascist Nexus’ in Distinktion: A Journal of Social Theory

This article revisits Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory to address what is identified as a persistent conceptual deficit in the sociology of technology, particularly in relation to digitalization, ar...

How might emotional life be best explained and accounted for in sociological theory? How is it that phenomena that seem so subjectively fleeting, and fundamentally individual nevertheless display r...

The rise of authoritarian populism has forced many democracies to consider how best to defend democracy against its inner enemies. In the literature on democratic self-defense, one often distinguis...

This paper offers a theorization of contrarianism in Silicon Valley, presenting it as a strategic rationality underpinned by institutional infrastructure. Rather than treating contrarianism as prin...

Volume 26, Issue 2 of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

The recent US presidential election has re-energised a debate about Trumpism and fascism that has been percolating since 2015. This debate has unfolded in stark binary terms of presence or absence....

This article proposes three distinct perspectives on and approaches to the study of hybridisation across society, industries, and academia enabled by General Purpose Technologies like AI and blockc...

This article recovers and develops Marx’s highly original materialist theorization of democracy and constituent power in Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State. Through close textual analysis and th...

This article brings together two distinct research trajectories – the growing characterization of neoliberalism as a monster and the recent debate on whether Foucault was a neoliberal – to investig...

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, oft...

A series of recent works have put forward a post-commodification understanding of the contemporary economy as based on one central economic form. While this approach allows us to conceptualize the ...

Despite burgeoning literature on platform work, there has been a lack of scholarship which carefully considers what we mean by the terms control and (particularly) resistance in the context of algo...

Volume 26, Issue 1 of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, oft...

We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people’s actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that p...

Alienation became a central but controversial concept in the reception and interpretation of Karl Marx’s thought after the posthumous publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 19...

The concept of ‘reaction’ has been frequently viewed pejoratively in the history of social and moral theory, as unthinking and often resentful. But ‘reactions’ of various kinds play a central role ...

Volume 25, Issue 3 of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

Explore the current issue of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Volume 25, Issue 2, 2024

Explore the current issue of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Volume 25, Issue 2, 2024

This essay explores some of the ways in which, between 1907 and 1911, the young Lukács articulated a conception of life as that which could not be formed or transformed under the fallen and inauthe...

How do we deal with the inescapability of the political present? In making sense of an all too binding temporality such as the Anthropocene, we seem to find a standpoint in the crisis of the human ...

This is a forum containing six short interventions on the 2023 co-authored book, Global Libidinal Economy. In the first intervention, the co-authors lay out their book’s key arguments. What follows...

By Maxximilian Seijo & Scott Ferguson A thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in o…