ABSTRACT While prevailing accounts portray social democratic parties as liberal-democratic bulwarks eroded by rising illiberal populism, this article highlights the emergence of anti-liberal ideological projects from within the center-left itself. It does so by examining the ideological innovation of the post-communist social democratic left in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), focusing on the cases of Czechia and Slovakia. In both countries, over the decade following EU accession in 2004, some politicians and ideological entrepreneurs developed a culturally conservative vision of post-communist social democracy that critiqued West European social democratic models. This alternative emphasized national sovereignty, cultural and national cohesion, and the reassertion of the state’s developmental role, often aligning rhetorically and politically with right-wing populist and conservative forces. Drawing on speeches, interviews and writings, this article examines how the project reframed East–West relationships and framed social liberalism, immigration and multiculturalism as threats to social democratic concepts of solidarity and fairness. The article situates these developments within broader ideological shifts in CEE and contrasts them with parallel debates on the West European left. It concludes by reflecting on whether such conservative variants of social democracy marked a turn toward illiberalism – or an ideological current with democratic potential in a post-liberal era.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ideological struggles and transformations that have shaped educational discourse and practice in Chile. Through a critical analysis of key agents’ narratives, the study identified five distinct ideological configurations, highlighting the interplay between individual agency, institutional structures, and educational policy. Moving beyond the simplistic public-private dichotomy, it explores how individuals navigate and negotiate educational ideologies within material and institutional constraints. By analyzing the pervasive influence of market-driven logics on educational decision-making, the paper uncovers the mechanisms through which neoliberal ideas are embedded in and transformed by social practices. The study emphasizes the importance of understanding the interaction between ideational struggles and material conditions in shaping educational experiences. Ultimately, it calls for reimagining educational frameworks that transcend market-based mechanisms to foster more inclusive and contextually responsive approaches to public education.

ABSTRACT ‘Crisis’ is a word of ancient coinage whose purchase in modern politics is frequently taken to be diminished in discourses of ‘crisis pessimism.’ This pessimism argues that the proliferation of ‘crisis’ into new realms has led to its loss of meaning. This article challenges crisis pessimism by examining its reliance on Reinhart Koselleck’s genealogy of crisis in modernity (the Neuzeit), which emphasizes the acceleration of historical time. I advocate for late modernity as a periodization distinct from the Neuzeit, in which technological-industrial acceleration lives side-by-side with political deceleration in states’ confrontation with crises. Deceleration arises from the disjuncture between three layers of historical time: democratic time, financial time, and Anthropocene time. Rather than a growing gap between experience and expectation, I identify the inversion of the two where future expectation is parasitic on past experience and historical memory, leading in extremis to ‘futureless futures.’

ABSTRACT National conservatism has become a buzzword in right-wing politics in recent years, characterized by high-profile gatherings and universalist aspirations. Due to its relative newness, however, it has not gained appropriate academic attention so far. This article fills this lacuna by offering one of the first sketches of the most typical features of the national conservatism as a novel hegemonic paradigm and transnational phenomenon of the Right. By conceptualizing its ideational grounding, the article sheds light on its evolution as a coherent political ideology. It does so against the backdrop of the most recent scholarly debate on the ideological value and epistemology of contemporary conservatism. It is highlighted that, thanks to its anti-liberal ethos, national conservatism represents one of the best recent examples of the so-called conservative backlash.

ABSTRACT In 1956, Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) read Marx’s Capital in a small group within his intellectual home of Contemporary Issues, a post-Marxist publishing collective and movement based in New York City. This article discovers in the discussions of Bookchin’s reading group a novel strategy for explaining the changing nature of capitalism in the postwar era. From different ideological angles, the group mined Capital for insights into material scarcity, calculation and planning, and the nature/human divide, exhibiting some similarities to other tendencies of the First New Left but also some important differences. Bookchin’s reading of Capital is distinct in this conjuncture because of how he equates the labor theory of value with a theory of social reproduction. Drawing on new archival material, including notebooks, letters and unpublished essays, I demonstrate how Bookchin dissolved an impasse between the post-Trotskyist Josef Weber (1901–1959) and the mathematician Jacob T. Schwartz (1930–2009). My reading of Bookchin’s social-ecological solution to the group’s conflict helps theorists of political ideology better understand the contextual factors of conceptual slippage, whilst also offering another possible (pre)history and thus re-articulation of social ecology.

ABSTRACT This study explores the factors that affect Chinese political identity. Although the Chinese government claims that maintaining the traditional Confucian political heritage represented by the Great Harmony Society (大同社会) and common prosperity is its main source of political legitimacy, this study found that for the majority of Chinese people, their support for the Chinese government is not based on the government’s Confucian political heritage, but rather on the government’s National Accountability system and national-oriented ideology, For individuals, supporting the state is an unconditional moral requirement, even if the state’s performance is not good, so Chinese people have higher political satisfaction. This ideology encourages the state to restrain freedom of the people in the form of omnipotence, and is also responsible for meeting all the needs of the people. This study suggests that China’s thousands of years of centralized political tradition and the inertia of large government have made the people more accustomed to an omnipotent government. The governance of the Chinese government is also a model of external Confucianism and internal law(外儒内法), with Confucian political heritage as the surface propaganda, but the internal system is centralized.

ABSTRACT This article explores the implications of Indonesia’s official state ideology, Pancasila, and its articulations in contemporary Indonesia from the perspective of ‘post-foundational’ agonistic theories of democracy. A set of five precepts created by Soekarno, the nationalist leader and founding president of Indonesia, Pancasila was integral to strategies of social control during the authoritarian ‘New Order’ regime of Soeharto and continues to function in Indonesia as a potent empty signifier, well over two decades after the fall of that regime in the Reformasi of 1998. By engaging with domestic scholarly and political discourses of Pancasila and Pancasila democracy from the agonistic perspective on democracy shaped by theorists such as Étienne Balibar, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, this article points to the tension between the aspiration of the advocates of Pancasila to present Pancasila as democratic and their commitment to seeing Pancasila as an embodiment of traditional culture and values that is essential to the consistency of Indonesian national identity. The relation between the two terms that constitute ‘Pancasila democracy’ is further complicated by the tendency of contemporary proponents of Pancasila to attempt to ‘immunize’ the state ideology from the possibility of interruption and contestation.

ABSTRACT While people use the term ‘mainstream’ on a regular basis, there has been relatively little discussion about what it actually means. Within far-right studies, attempts to define the mainstream often center around party politics and the impact of mainstream party strategies on the far right. While a useful starting point, this focus has led to more rigid conceptions which encourage particular normative assumptions about its identity. Through poststructuralist discourse theory, supported by insights from music studies and critical discourse studies, this article proposes a definition which accounts for its contingency and construction, challenging dominant narratives about its nature. These issues are crucial when we consider the relationship between the mainstream and far right because they encourage us to question their perceived relative positioning. By introducing the concepts of talking ‘with’ and ‘about’ the far right, this piece establishes the need for us to take the role of the mainstream in the mainstreaming of the far right seriously.

ABSTRACT Guénonian Traditionalism, sometimes called Radical Traditionalism or Integral Traditionalism, is an important ideological stream within the contemporary far-right. It condemns modernity for its spiritual emptiness and for the way in which proper authority, which derives from the transcendent, has been usurped. This article asks how Traditionalist principles have worked in practice, taking the attempt to establish a Traditionalist micro-utopia in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1980s. The article argues that the Bloomington community’s practice corresponded with its thought in that it achieved a degree of separation from modernity, but that it was less clearly successful in its spiritual aims, given issues with distracting ambitions, strife, and sex.