Daniel Colligan is a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War, the largest European uprising before the French Revolution, in which peasants seized upon the radical implications of Martin Luther’s theology to challenge a hierarchical social order.
The bright minds at McKinsey & Co. are arguing that declining birth rates mean that people need to work more hours for more years and maybe give up retirement altogether. No thanks.
The relevance of declining birth rates to left-wing concerns, like welfare-state sustainability, is more complex than generally acknowledged. The real reason for the Left to support pro-family policies is to make families possible for those who want them.
A new book, Remembering Peasants, takes a close look at Europe’s vanished peasantry. Mixing history, personal memoir, and anthropology, it is a vivid reminder of an experience that has only recently disappeared from the European landscape.
A new book tells the story of American communism as an integral part of 20th-century US history, with Communists “as social critics and agents of much-needed social change.”
The podcast Chapo Trap House’s miniseries Hell on Earth is an entertaining story which proposes that the Thirty Years’ War midwifed the birth of capitalism. Ultimately, however, the interesting argument doesn’t hold up.