Gus Mitchell

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Gus Mitchell |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

In the English-speaking world today, Goethe is still, in A. N. Wilson’s pithy phrase, “the Great Unread.” This was not always the case. “Close thy Byron,” wrote the reactionary prophet Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s; “Open thy Goethe.” The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe.

Oct 22, 2024 | 3quarksdaily.com | Gus Mitchell

The following piece is my own minor contribution to the "Surrealism Centenary." I begin with a disavowal of the entire "2024 centenary" enterprise, which seems to have added little to our appreciation of the group, and because I would question allowing Andre Breton, great though he sometimes was, to continue to define the wildly heterodox big bang to which he claimed total definition in October 1924. Let us begin to celebrate the spirit of the surreal again.

Sep 23, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Nicholas Misukanis |Gus Mitchell |Gary Dorrien

Article Toxic Relationship Being Israel’s trusted ally does not require the United States to be Netanyahu’s protector—much less his enabler. Article Two Americas? Heather Cox Richardson argues that there are two Americas: one interested in equality, the other in hierarchy. But it’s not that simple. Article History’s Survivors As the promise of endless material abundance breaks, the resilience of the peasant may no longer seem as irrelevant as it once did.

Aug 26, 2024 | plough.com | Gus Mitchell

What is a peasant? A humble person, one of low rank; the lowest class. Uneducated and unchanging. Crude, coarse, boorish, ignorant. In need of progress. Those notions have stuck to it, but it’s worth returning to the word’s original meaning. The English word (borrowed from French) began to harness associations of rustic poverty in the early fifteenth century, but the Old French païsant means, simply, a country person.

Aug 1, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Gus Mitchell |Peter Quinn |Alexander Stern |George Scialabba

Patrick Joyce’s “personal history” of the European peasantry will likely become the standard introduction to this knotty, misunderstood, and urgent subject. The peasant world “vanished” (to borrow from the book’s subtitle) during the past century. Thanks to global capitalism’s so-far unstoppable acceleration, much of this “vanishing” has taken place only in the past fifty years. Peasants are not gone, however. There are more than a billion worldwide.