Daniel Colligan holds a PhD in sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center.
Capitalism is a distinctive mode of economic organization, one that emerged relatively recently in human history. What distinguishes it, a new history argues, is not a reliance on coercion or colonialism but the way it subjects everyone to market dictates.
Tech capitalists are now marketing the ability to customize your baby’s inherited traits. The process is currently unable to deliver on its promises — but it raises serious concerns about the prospect of genetically encoding inequality.
Declining birth rates around the world may pose new challenges for humanity. A new book on the topic by Elon Musk–funded economists indulges in questionable philosophy and sci-fi speculation that fails to shed much light on this important topic.
Last month’s gathering of pronatalists in Austin, Texas, revealed a right-wing milieu riven by internal contradictions — and without a plausible plan to significantly increase birth rates.
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.