A timely book addressing the burning concerns of our times, from the
excesses of capitalism to the global crisis of leadership.
There is widespread agreement, across a voluble political spectrum and
around the planet, that we live in times of intensifying insecurity and
turmoil. If ours is an age of transition, its direction is anything but
certain. Momentous transformations in ecology, geopolitics, and everyday
life are shadowed by a suffocating sense of stasis. The limits to
capital and the limits of nature are entangled in frightful ways, while
the profoundly obsolete form of leadership, domination, and conflict
exacerbate an already baleful situation. And yet struggles for
liberation have not been quelled. Terms of Disorder confronts this
moment by probing some of the defining terms in the modern vocabulary of
emancipation, with the aim of testing their capacity to name and orient
collective action set on abolishing the present state of things. Ranging
from communism to leadership, the eleven keywords addressed in this book
provide a set of interlocking points of entry into the common task of
forging a political language capable of navigating our disorientation.
If, as Gramsci famously noted, the interregnum is a time when the new
struggles to be born while the old order is moribund, we may wish to
heed Cedric Robinson's call to "choose wisely among the dying."
