Book review: colonial coptivity during the First World War: internment and the fall of the German empire, 1914-1919 by Mahon Murphy

In Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919, Mahon Murphy offers a comprehensive study of the experiences of the 20,000 Germans in colonies who spent in time in Allied captivity during World War One. This is an impressive analysis that uses internment as a prism to examine the War’s extra-European theatres, underscoring the conflict’s global dimensions and critically examining imperial notions of race, writes Joshua Smeltzer

Book review: Marx, capital and the madness of economic reason by David Harvey

In Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey provides a new systemisation of Karl Marx's work in order to uncover, explore and explain the 'madness of economic reason' in the twenty-first century. This is an impressively wide-ranging work that draws upon Marx as a toolbox for contending with the crises of capital today, but Joshua Smeltzer is left questioning ..

Book review: assembly by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Why is it that so many revolutions and other social movements have seemingly failed to bring their emancipatory ideals into being? In response to this enduring question, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer Assembly, which inverts the traditional division of revolutionary labour to give strategic force to the assembly of the multitude. While the book aims to offer a blueprint for forms of collective organisation that can bring about a more democratic and just society, Joshua Smeltzer is unconvinced that the authors’ hollowing out of the traditional sphere of the political can deliver this social alternative

Book review: the ordinary virtues: moral order in a divided world by Michael Ignatieff

In The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World, Michael Ignatieff aims to take ethics out of the seminar room by examining the role of 'ordinary virtues' such as trust, forgiveness and reconciliation in local contexts and settings. While the book travels the globe to underscore both the fragility and strength of community-based networks of solidarity as part of Ignatieff's broader commitment to ..

Carl Schmitt's Historicity between Theology and Technology

This thesis interprets the work of the German jurist and state theorist Carl Schmitt through the lens of a ‘double-historicism’ by using unpublished archival materials – journal entries, letters, manuscripts, and marginalia. Not only were Schmitt’s ideas and writings shaped by his intellectual and political context, but he himself viewed legal and political concepts as historically contingent. The first chapter reconstructs the ‘canonization’ of Carl Schmitt in the field of political theory, focusing on the reception and sanitization of his work in English language scholarship. The second chapter excavates Schmitt’s concept of ‘historicity’ and his turn to the founder of the Historical School of Law, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in lectures given in 1943 and 1944. I then argue this historical turn is the key to understanding Schmitt’s postwar work, connecting four major monographs published concurrently in 1950. The following chapters show how Schmitt mobilizes historicity as a critique of natural law theories and the right of resistance against tyrannical regimes (chapter 3), the appropriation of Scholastic just war doctrines in the postwar period (chapter 4), Marxism’s weaponization of legality (chapter 5) and utopianism as a form of annihilation of law and the ‘de-localization’ of both nature and man (chapter 6). Schmitt saw both legal positivism and natural law theories as posing an existential crisis to the future of jurisprudence, one that could only be overcome by recourse to a self-reflexive history of the discipline

Book review: the remnants of the Rechtsstaat: an ethnography of Nazi law by Jens Meierhenrich

In The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law, Jens Meierhenrich challenges the perception of Nazism as an absence or perversion of legal oversight, instead outlining how jurists and practitioners mobilised and transformed key concepts within German law to support the actions of the Nazi regime. Focusing particularly on the figure of Ernst Fraenkel and his formative work The Dual State – a critical ethnography of negotiating and challenging the changing terrain of law under Nazism – this is a valuable conceptual history of the German Rechtsstaat and a testament to the courage of its guardians in the 1930s, finds Joshua Smeltzer

Five recommended reads for the Armistice Day Centenary

To mark the he centenary of the Armistice that ended the First World War, LSE Book Reviews recommend five recent academic books that explore different aspects of the conflict, ranging from the significance of 1917, the crucial role played by women scientists and the often neglected experiences of Muslim combatants

Reading list: 5 recommended reads for the Armistice Day centenary

11 November 2018 is the centenary of the Armistice that ended World War One. To mark the occasion, we recommend five recent academic books that explore different aspects of the conflict, ranging from the significance of 1917, the crucial role played by women scientists and the often neglected experiences of Muslim combatants

How can students-as-partners work address challenges to student, faculty, and staff mental health and well-being?

Mental health has emerged as a critical area of attention in higher education, and educational research over the last 15 years has focused increasingly on emotions and wellbeing at all stages of education (Hill et al., 2021). While definitions of well-being vary, most are premised on “good quality of life” (Nair et al., 2018, p. 69). Within the last few years, we have experienced an intersection of several forces that undermine or threaten good quality of life. These include the uncertainties prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Hews et al., 2022, U.S. Surgeon General, n.d.), climate change (Charlson et al., 2021), racism and social injustices (Williams & Etkins, 2021), the cost-of-living crisis (Montacute, 2023), and the lack of motivation and higher incidence of mental health issues associated with growing concerns about job prospects and income (Chowdhury et al., 2022). This fifth iteration of Voices from the Field explores some of the ways in which students-as-partners work can address challenges to the mental health and well-being of students, faculty, and staff. This focus, proposed by members of the IJSaP Editorial Board, both responds to the intersecting realities named above and remains true to the goal of this section of the journal, which is to offer a venue for a wide range of contributors to address important questions around and aspects of students-as-partners work without going through the intensive submission, peer-review, and revision processes. The prompt we included in the call for this iteration of Voices was: “In what ways can students-as-partners work address challenges to the mental health and well-being of students, staff, and faculty posed by the current realities in the wider world (socio-political, environmental, economic, etc.) that affect higher education?