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Anton Jäger Profile picture
Anton Jäger
@AntonJaegermm
Historian of political thought | Lecturer @UnivOxford | Works on populism etc. Usual disclaimers.
Aug 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Truly one of the most shameful episodes in European intellectual history Franz Neumann agrees to supervise a student working on a topic which the entire natsec establishment fears will sour relationships with a newfound Cold War client state, major philosopher sabotages its publication only to serially plagiarise it for her essays.
Jun 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
When you think about it it really is crazy that the true sovereign of the world's imperial hegemon is basically an academic seminar in which a couple of legal scholars larp as historians all day. 'I read an interesting book of historiography last week, let me go Thanos on all of our institutions and constitutional order with this.'

Jun 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Issue is more that the framework used to read the School's decoupling from militantism is not parsimonious enough - why use conspirationist narratives when you could simply point at the dull compulsions of academic grant-getting and funding for German émigrés in the 1940s? Even someone like Neumann did work for the OSS believing that they were going to promote New Dealism around the globe - the CIA we know from the McCarthyite 1950s was simply not as visible then.
Apr 6, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
My kind, dialectical suggestion to contemporary liberals agonizing over their tradition's 'darkest hours' in the 19th century is that they develop the same tolerance for ambiguity which the best contemporary Marxists developed for the "really existing socialisms" of the 20th. People left 'and' centre just need to realize that history contains both progression and regression, that it can open up certain avenues for freedom while completely shutting down others. Similarly, liberalism had obviously emancipatory and obviously regressive effects.
Mar 30, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
In the 1840s Belgium was the most liberal state on the European mainland with the most developed capitalist economy, and it still had a potato famine which was only offset by massive internal and international migration. In fact, if you read any book about the Hungry Forties you realize just how important the safety valve of (mostly colonial) migration was to absorbing these food shocks.
Mar 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Huntington argues for a typology of 'civilizational' difference but has nothing remotely close to a theory about why 'clashes' happen - let alone whether it's the civilizations that clash. H predicted that Russia would never invade Ukraine due to civilizational similarity. Stuff like this makes you realize that both right and left are paying very dearly for their thirty-year neglect of materialist thinking.
Mar 28, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
In hindsight the dearth of properly materialist analyses of the Merkel era and Merkelism is fascinating. Even today M appears as an 'effect without a cause', a leader without qualities or opinions who nonetheless presided over a deeply ideological process of elite stabilization. So many political categories seem to ricochet on the hard postmodernism of Merkel - a woman who is everything to everyone, devil and saint, a transformist hero who both saved and destroyed Europe.
Mar 8, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Yes, because Marxism is not a monocausal science of human motivation but a probabilistic theory about the material constraints on human action. Its model of determinism is ‘parametric’ rather than ‘mechanical’, as Ernest Mandel put it in his critique of GA Cohen. (Non-vulgar) Marxism doesn’t claim that ‘all’ human decisions have economic motives but rather that economic structures impose constraints on human agency - within the parameters unexpected moves and decisions are still possible.
Mar 7, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
1870, not 1914, seems like better parallel for what's happening - workers' movement underorganized, a declining power as France launches offensive war over the Rhine provinces to consolidate hegemony but ends up pushing remaining German states closer into the Bismarckian bloc. Leaving out the nuclear component ofc
Feb 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Will die on this hill: despite obvious difference in political systems, it’s still lowkey Orientalist to call Russian capitalists ‘oligarchs’ while Bezos, Musk, Branson consistently go by title ‘billionaires’ and their hold over Atlantic politics is arguably more oligarchical. We can claim that our liberal oligarchies are better places to live, but please stop pretending the label only applies ‘over there’
Nov 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Imagine delivering a lecture to students where you define the state as “a compulsory political organization successfully upholding a claim to monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” while Freikorps and councilist soliders are readying guns to fire at each other outside. Apparently the student club thought of inviting Eisner before Weber in early 1919; instead Eisner travelled to Switzerland with Robert Michels (?) and wrote his own reply to 'Politics as a Vocation', some months after Eisner heckled Weber at a rally.researchgate.net/publication/26…
Sep 20, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Not the first to say this, but this is a great piece revisiting the 'corporate liberalism' frame from Sklar to Weinstein and what use it might still have in understanding today's turn to 'activism' in business circles. I have some questions though:
thebaffler.com/salvos/conserv… (1) Even though it's indispensable for understanding the corporate consolidation of American capitalism in the early 20th c, Sklar etc have always been less interesting on the paternity of Progressive-era state building, and just how much it owed to the previous populist eras.
Aug 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Dreaming of becoming the type of guy who majors in polsci at 21, lands a natsec internship at 22, and then writes the new Afghan constitution at 23, only to tweet "how could this happen?" from my DC condo at 31. Don't look up this person's account, they obviously don't exist (even though they obviously do).
Apr 21, 2021 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Re-reading @IsabellaMWeber's book on China and these tweets does give you a feeling of a certain ‘doux commerce’ thesis that runs through left and liberal writing on global capitalism post-1989, from Thomas Friedman to Antonio Negri. Story runs like this: under US tutelage the globe was forced into market interdependence, which in turn led to a global commercial society in which classical warfare became impossible. A variety of Smith’s argument about perpetual peace, but now in hollow neoliberal mode.
Apr 16, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Can we please not have another round of Foucault/neoliberalism discourse with no one even mentioning the names of Rocard, Lepage, Glucksmann, Barre, and Giscard d'Estaing? It would be nice to have some actual history in an essentially historical discussion. It sounds like a snobbish attempt to raise the entrance barrier for a debate but if you have no interest in the contexts a thinker worked and wrote in you're not doing intellectual history but shopping for concepts or defending a school. Fine, but they're two different things.
Apr 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Need more work on the parallels between the turn to asset welfare in the 1980s and 90s and the rise of the cash transfer state - the politics of property and the politics of precarity as part of the same neoliberal doublet; always in tension, but also strangely complementary. Britain a perfect case study for this: the privatization of the council housing stock in the 1980s is followed by a tax credit revolution under Blair in the 1990s, in which the low-wage economy is accepted as a baseline and welfare increasingly marketized.
Apr 8, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I'm sure the point has been made in passing but there really are two central problems with the emerging 'neo/techno-feudalism' synthesis which few critics have focused on, sometimes even explained as a full-on "transition from capitalism back to feudalism."aljazeera.com/program/upfron… (1) the idea that capitalism somehow abolished ‘personal domination’ and completely separated political from economic power. That was always a propaganda talking point; in practice impersonal market power and personal power have always been intertwined across capitalist history.
Apr 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What Freud and Marx do have in common is that every generation of mainstream scholars rediscovers their basic insights and then sells it as revolutionary wisdom - a nice oedipal cycle. Specimen one

Jan 4, 2021 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
This 2015 LRB letter contains one of the most convincing counterarguments to Mair's "ruling the void" thesis - the civil society crisis is real, yes, but asymmetrically, not quite for the propertied parts of society. 'Disorganized' capitalism is only here for the subaltern. Neoliberalism only wrecked the left-wing side of civil society and instead 'recreated' the right-wing one: while unions and workingmen's associations declined, private schools, CoE, and the Eton-Oxford pipeline maintained ruling class association.
Nov 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Truly the most talented bully this planet will ever contain. Also such an interesting window into the 'habitus' of New York lumpen capital, the kind of skills you have to develop to survive and prosper in that milieu.
Nov 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Churchill once wrote a counterfactual history of the American Civil War, where Confederacy wins at Gettysburg, marches on Washington and then emancipates slaves with British help. No need for Reconstruction (!) - by 1905 an Atlantic white bloc achieves global hegemony. Image jstor.org/stable/4633653…