Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe. Victor Mallet. Hurst. 2026.

A far-right French president?

Will France find itself led by a far-right 31-year-old in 2027? Surprisingly, it looks likely, with Jordan Bardella leading in polls on the French Presidential election to take place next year. Even more surprisingly, in a country where most presidents have placed a strong emphasis on classical education and culture, Bardella has no university degree. And to complicate things further, he supports a staunch anti-immigrant policy, despite himself being of Italian and even Algerian descent.

This paradoxical situation matters for both France and Europe. The country is a nuclear power and veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, and one of the main engines of the European Union. Unlike Italy, Germany, or Spain, France remains a thoroughly centralised country, concentrating enormous power in the hands of the president. More than impacting French people, a Bardella presidency would embolden far-right leaders throughout the world.

The far right’s appeal in rural France

To understand this phenomenon, Victor Mallet, a journalist at The Financial Times and the author of several books, has written a crisp and lucid account of the reasons behind the far right’s success in France. He stresses a neglected factor: the far right’s newly established roots in many local communities. He depicts the slow but relentless momentum of the far-right juggernaut, delving deep into the country’s political history and social fabric. He achieved this by conducting interviews in neglected rural villages, and in rust belts ravaged by the disappearance of traditional manufacturing. His book is both an essay – backed by statistics, informed by social science literature, and extensive endnotes – and a travelogue, one that took him from the comfort of his Paris office to meet far-right leaders and their electorate living outside major metropolitan areas. He crisscrossed France from Etrepangy in Normandy to Beaucaire on the Mediterranean Coast, including Hénin-Beaumont in France’s northern Rust Belt, which Marine Le Pen has represented in Parliament since 2017.

As a French academic, I was surprised by the picture the book reveals because (like many others) I had limited my mental cartography to liberal and cosmopolitan locations. The most vivid pages are testimonies from people living in remote corners of France, where non-existent public transport demanded Mallet make long journeys on foot to reach his interviewees. One teaching assistant from Normandy states: “I voted for Mélenchon [the far-left leader] in 2022 in the first round, and in the second round I voted for Le Pen.” This is a recurring theme in Mallet’s book: the deep divide between pro-globalisation cosmopolitans embodied by President Emmanuel Macron, and the anti-globalisation of the far right and far left. Both “are relatively sympathetic to Russia,” (99) but disagree regarding environmental issues and immigration. Bardella has called the EU Green Deal one of the “biggest degrowth plan of the last 50 years” proposed by “EU ayatollahs” (178), while the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) has regularly condemned lax environmental policy.

Marketing xenophobia and racism

The rejection of foreigners looms large in all far-right parties, including in France. Mallet nevertheless reminds us that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) is not openly racist and xenophobic, unlike her father’s Front National. The latter was formed by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 with former French members of the Waffen SS, who fought in Hitler’s army during the Second World War, and with former members of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS, or Secret Army Organisation), a seditious movement opposing Algerian independence that tried to assassinate Charles de Gaulle for his role in Algeria’s independence. Le Pen was the most presentable face of many fringe, far-right movements.

Marine Le Pen’s strategy of what the French call “dédiabolisation” (counter-demonisation) of her father’s radioactive FN has worked: the party is still fiercely hostile to immigration, but it is now seen more as anti-establishment than as racist.

Mallet excels at uncovering paradoxes related to racism: he interviews a leader of a mosque in Hénin-Beaumont, who speaks positively of the current mayor, Steve Briois of the FN. He also reminds us that during the second round of the 2022 presidential election, Le Pen won more than 60 per cent of the vote in the predominantly black regions of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the French Caribbean. It therefore appears that Marine Le Pen’s strategy of what the French call “dédiabolisation” (counter-demonisation) of her father’s radioactive FN has worked: the party is still fiercely hostile to immigration, but it is now seen more as anti-establishment than as racist.

The double act of Le Pen and Bardella

While Marine Le Pen was the natural leader of the French far right, successfully increasing the political importance of her new, seemingly more moderate RN, she is now embroiled in a trial where she is accused of embezzling European Parliament funds, thereby disqualifying her from the next presidential election. While a successful appeal would allow her to run, the next far-right candidate is more likely to be Bardella, a prodigy who won the first campaign he led for the RN at just 23 years of age, during the 2019 European election. While many observers have likened Bardella to porcelain – shiny but brittle – Mallet finds him rather sturdy. He and Le Pen form a seemingly unbreakable political couple.

Both Le Pen and Bardella share a Trump-like understanding of how much ordinary people resent the metropolitan elites

Both share a “Trump-like understanding of how much ordinary people resent the metropolitan elites” (135), even though Le Pen is the Parisian daughter of a millionaire. Bardella comes from a deprived neighbourhood, but “he was privately educated, and his father gave him a Smart car and regular holidays abroad” (108). Both are socially liberal, defending women, gays, and Jews, both for personal reasons and because it helps them to target Muslims. Lively portraits of Le Pen and Bardella – and countless RN voters – are what make the book such a page-turner.

The future of the French far right

The broader analysis of the rise of the far right is more traditional, with an emphasis on the support of conservative billionaires Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Edouard Sterin, and on its populist discourse contradicting factual evidence regarding the economy, crime, and climate change. In terms of economic policy, it is difficult to gauge whether the RN will lean toward the dirigiste instincts of Le Pen or towards Bardella’s inclination towards the free market. They certainly promote a pro-business agenda, particularly regarding the dismantling of environmental regulations. The French right shamelessly uses popular historical references, often quoting Charles de Gaulle, France’s most popular leader, who was, ironically, a primary target of the far right. De Gaulle fought against the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and granted Algeria independence, and was at odds with the far right on both issues.

Mallet broaches but ultimately leaves open-ended what is perhaps the biggest question: whether a new far-right president would transform France into an authoritarian regime like Hungary’s Orbán or simply give it a more conservative direction, like Italy’s Meloni.

Mallet broaches but ultimately leaves open-ended what is perhaps the biggest question: whether a new far-right president would transform France into an authoritarian regime like Hungary’s Orbán – a plausible outcome considering France’s institutional system with a “near-monarchical president” (102) – or simply give it a more conservative direction, like Italy’s Meloni. The book sketches out several scenarios, including a possible financial crisis, but presents none as a forerunner. Europe is rarely mentioned; the wider world even less so. Given the weight of Orbán and Meloni in Trump’s Washington, it would be surprising if a Bardella victory in 2027 did not resonate on the other shore of the Atlantic.

Of course, this 264-page book is not comprehensive, but its shortness and liveliness are also its major appeal. While the endnotes span over 40 pages, some important books are missing, such as Luc Rouban’s recent La vraie Victoire du RN, which dissects the latest presidential election. The book also includes at least one minor inaccuracy, on page 117, which states that Bardella dropped out of his geography studies at Sciences Po; he was actually enrolled at Sorbonne Université. A valuable complement to Mallet’s down-to-earth and personal approach is Patrick Lehingue and Bernard Pudal’s newer, more academic study, Du FN au RN. Les raisons d’un succès, and sheds light on long-term social, economic, institutional, and cultural dynamics that explain the rise of the far right in France.

Overall, this book is a depressing read for liberals. It tells the tale of how two improbable leaders – a woman in an arch-conservative party, and a young nationalist with a foreign-sounding name – managed to stoke and exploit the grievances of peripheral voters. The presidential election in 2027 will reveal how far they can push their success.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain. Sara B. Hobolt and James Tilley. Oxford University Press. 2026.

The Britain that Brexit built

Not long after the 2016 Brexit Referendum, we were at a family gathering where I learned that a couple of my relatives had voted Leave. I didn’t tell my wife until we got home. Why? Because I knew she’d have been upset, maybe even angry. Ten years later, I’m pretty certain from one or two things they’ve said now and then that those relatives are no longer entirely convinced that they or the country made the right choice. As for my wife, I really don’t need to ask. If anything, she’s even more sure than she was back then that Brexit was a stupid idea foisted on a country by opportunistic, morally dubious politicians who took cynical advantage of peoples’ often wilful ignorance and tapped into their prejudices.

Leave and Remain as identities

Hobolt and Tilly’s largely quantitative but always approachably-written book makes it clear that an awful lot of Brits have, like my wife, stuck to their guns rather than, like my relatives, reconsidered their position. By exploiting a wide range of surveys (including panel and tracker surveys from YouGov which they tailored themselves, as well as others taken off the peg from polls conducted for, among other outfits, the British Election Study and the Centre for Social Investigation) the authors show definitively that the majority of people who voted in 2016 and are still around, have retained their Leave and Remain identities. Moreover, they make it clear that, in the ensuing years, the divide “went well beyond a disagreement over EU membership and became a lens through which people interpreted the economy, democracy, and each other’s character.”

Just as importantly, they claim (and amply demonstrate) that the 2016 referendum did not merely unleash forces that had lain dormant in the British electorate for decades, as many – including Sobolewska and Ford and Clarke et al – have suggested. Rather, the referendum and the arguments that followed it actually engendered those identities and the ingroup attachment and outgroup hostility that, sadly, accompany them. Indeed, that is part of their wider claim (again one that is supported both by the research of other scholars and by the empirical evidence upon which they draw) that issues can give rise to identities that encompass a whole host of attitudes and values – if, that is, certain conditions are met.

And in Brexit they most certainly were. Brits were always more lukewarm about the EU than many of their European counterparts, but before 2016 they really weren’t (in marked contrast to the Conservative Party, for example) particularly exercised about it. The referendum and its immediate aftermath changed all that, transforming this “indifferent scepticism” into a diluted version of the affective polarisation in the United States that Lilly Mason, among others, has written about so powerfully and presciently.

That was because the vote involved a conflict which was “clear, salient and binary, intensifying group boundaries” (which they label issue contestation). It saw people engaged in “behaviours like voting [and, later on, offline and online activism] that reinforce[d] their identity and commitment to a group” (issue expression). And Brexit was one of those issues that “cuts across traditional party lines, allowing new identities to emerge outside the existing partisan structure” (issue alignment). Yes, there was some correlation between attitudes toward the EU and the way people voted in the referendum; but, Hobolt and Tilley stress, “it was the act of voting that created Brexit identities. Remainers and Leavers were both children of the referendum”.

The referendum’s legacies

This is not all they show. Indeed, the book is full of insights that help explain the party and electoral politics of the last ten years. It is now increasingly common, for example, for political scientists to argue that, underlying the evident fragmentation of the country’s party system, there are essentially two competing blocs comprised, on the one hand, of the self-styled progressive parties (the Greens, Labour and the Lib Dems) and, on the other, their right wing opponents (the Conservatives and Reform UK). Hobolt and Tilley show that, given how long-lasting and encompassing the identities triggered by Brexit have proved to be, this underlying logic has a lot to do with the sorting that took place in the aftermath of the referendum – particularly as it became clearer to voters after 2017 which side of the divide different parties were on.

Social media, incidentally, doesn’t appear to have had anywhere near as much influence on reinforcing those identities as some of us might have assumed. The “echo chambers” that really matter, Hobolt and Tilley show, are our real-life friends and family, not folk we follow on our platforms of choice. Where we live doesn’t count for much either, although personality traits do. And so strong is our very human desire to belong that, rather than adjust our views to fit the facts (for example, on the economy), we bend reality so that it accords with what we presume is our side’s take.

They also show that Remainers are significantly more likely to have retained their issue-based identity than Leavers. This they convincingly explain by pointing to the very fact of losing being more emotionally painful, Additionally, they remind us that the genius of the Leave campaign, which was to keep things as vague as possible about what would come next, also meant that by no means all the winners were satisfied with the “messy reality” of Brexit.

Accordingly, the book also throws up a counterfactual that may well haunt many readers: what might have happened had Remain won? This is something the authors, understandably, only touch on briefly. By their logic, the referendum would presumably still have given birth to the identities they talk about. But – given the fact that, had it gone the other way, it would not have triggered feverish debate about when and how to effect the UK’s withdrawal – whether it would have seen those identities harden quite as implacably as they did, who knows? Personally, I suspect not. Then again, after reading this excellent book, I’m more aware than ever that any guess on that score will, inevitably, be the product of my own Brexit bias.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Benjamin Selwyn will speak about the book at an event hosted by LSE Department of International Development on Wednesday 18 March 2026 find details and register to attend.

Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics. Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold. Oxford University Press. 2025.

Capitalist value chains

From the onset of globalisation (around the late 1970s to the early 1980s), global production has increasingly been organised across borders. Large transnational corporations (TNCs) have emerged organising transnational production in what is frequently referred to as Global Value Chains (GVCs). A new book by Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold critiques the existing literature on GVCs, arguing that they don’t deliver on their promise of prosperity for workers and the planet.

The exploitation of human labour and expropriation of nature are both regarded as essential for capitalist accumulation

Selwyn and Bernhold’s key contribution is that they locate their analysis of transnational production within what Karl Marx referred to as the “hidden abode of production”. Thus, instead of GVCs, they coin the term “Capitalist Value Chains” (CVCs), defined as “historically specific configurations of [international] capitalist class relations that contribute to heightened exploitation of labour and appropriation of nature by capital” (6). Their analysis is based on a detailed understanding of Marxist political economy and the way exploitation is increased through a combination of absolute and relative surplus extraction within CVCs (24). “Under capitalism,” they write, “economic growth is driven forward by capital’s insatiable and never-ending demand for profit rather than for human or environmental need” (230). By this logic, the exploitation of human labour and expropriation of nature are both regarded as essential for capitalist accumulation.

Exploiting workers and the environment

Selwyn and Bernhold’s second major contribution is their focus on the plight of workers. In an impressive range of empirical examples throughout the volume, they demonstrate how working people are losing out in CVCs. Key here is their notion of immiserating growth regimes, where corporations profit because “workers do not earn sufficient wages in a normal working day to sustain their and their family’s social reproduction costs” (134). Rather than enabling development, CVCs cause widespread poverty, the authors maintain. Importantly, they go beyond the World Bank’s international poverty line and in line with the Asia Floor Wage to focus on a living wage, which also includes, for example, access to health services and education in addition to a minimum wage (135).

Third, Selwyn and Bernhold excel at highlighting the causal dynamics underpinning relentless environmental destruction due to the expansion of capitalism through CVCs: “CVC hyper-specialization entails an increase in production, transportation, and energy use – accelerating climate breakdown and mass environmental ruin” (206). Savings due to new technologies will only increase investment and accumulation due to capitalist competition, resulting in yet further environmental destruction, they argue. By revealing this process, Selwyn and Bernhold successfully debunk the myth that an expansion of CVCs would help to address the ecological crisis (218).

Capitalism’s ever-larger crises

As impressive conceptually and empirically this volume is, it does have some arguable shortcomings. First, CVCs have driven the transnationalisation of production, which in turn has underpinned the emergence of transnational capital as leading class fraction at the global level. And yet, the authors portray TNCs such as Apple or Microsoft simply as US capital, being increasingly challenged by Chinese CVCs, i.e. Chinese capital. Thus, the authors risk falling into a state-centric trap in their analysis of transnational capital, conflating particular class fractions with specific states. Yes, states such as the US, Japan and China have facilitated the transnationalisation of ‘their’ large corporations (89, 111). The strategic considerations of these TNCs have, however, outgrown their initial home country setting.

Second, the authors overlook the structuring conditions of the capitalist social relations of production, especially the way capitalism is prone to crises. Together, their rather state-centric approach to CVCs, as well as their choice to disregard capitalism’s tendency towards crisis have significant implications for their understanding of geopolitics. Capital is presented as all-powerful and almost completely dominant at the very moment when increasing geo-political conflicts tear at its very structure. The Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli-US attack on Iran and the numerous tariff wars incited by the US are all signs of a global capitalism steeped in crisis. The book was completed in 2024, but some of these developments were already apparent then.  

A heightened level of state intervention underpins the current, volatile global geo-political environment, characterised by trade wars and military conflicts.

William Robinson’s analysis of global capitalism’s crisis provides an explanatory corrective here. Robinson illustrates well how, against the background of a declining rate of profit, global capitalism has become engulfed in a crisis of overaccumulation. As companies increasingly struggle to find profitable investment opportunities for their record profits, he points out that “since 1980, uninvested corporate cash holdings have ballooned to 10 per cent of GDP in the United States, 22 per cent in Western Europe, 34 per cent in South Korea, and 47 per cent in Japan”.

Increasing state intervention

As it is the role of states as nodal points in the global political economy to ensure the continuation of capitalist accumulation, more and more governments around the world are intervening into the economy not only trying to ensure the fortunes of “their” particular capitalist class fractions, as Selwyn and Bernhold may argue, but even more importantly to attract investment by transnational capital. In other words, when analysing the internal relations between global capitalism and international geopolitics, we have to focus on the way and the degree to which the interests of transnational capital have become internalised within various state forms. Even the US has to work hard to ensure capital investment and to date it is doubtful to what extent it will be successful at securing some reshoring of manufacturing by corporations such as Apple. Ultimately, it is this heightened level of state intervention which underpins the current, volatile global geo-political environment, characterised by trade wars and military conflicts.

A must-read for everyone interested in how the latest phase of capitalism is pushing humanity and the planet towards the brink.

The authors’ argument that “China has evolved from the workshop of CVCs, via technological innovation, to become a challenger to increasing numbers of US high-tech CVC firms” (112) is also debatable. By contrast, Sam King argues that it is especially the “grip over the high-end of the labour process” – in particular over microchips – that the United States is now wielding against China in the “trade war,’” which indicates China’s continuing subordinate position. Moreover, capitalism’s internal contradictions and related crisis tendency have affected China too, reflected in ballooning banking assets looking for profitable investment opportunities, out of control household and corporate debt levels and “a slowdown in growth rates; and social polarization.” China’s Belt and Road initiative is also a vehicle of creating profitable investment opportunities to counter its own crisis of overaccumulation. Ultimately, only the future can tell whether China will be able to catch up or not.

These criticisms should not, however, be read as dismissing the huge contributions of this book for illuminating the ways CVCs work to the detriment of workers and the environment. The book is a must-read for everyone interested in how the latest phase of capitalism is pushing humanity and the planet towards the brink.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Women’s Library is the oldest and largest library in Britain devoted to the history of women’s campaigning and activism. It was officially opened in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service and was renamed the Fawcett Library in 1957 in memory of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and The Women’s Library in 2002. It moved to LSE in 2013 and has remained there since.

Throughout its history, encompassing different names and locations, the Library has remained faithful to its original aims: to preserve a history of the struggle for women’s suffrage and to provide access to materials that can be used by contemporary women’s rights campaigners. It contains an array of personal and organisational archives, books, journals, pamphlets, zines, audio-visual, objects, textiles and visual materials relating to campaigning and activism from the late 19th century onwards.

It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women

To mark its 100^th anniversary, a new exhibition at LSE explores its collections from the viewpoint of researchers and their current engagement with the materials, and celebrates the figures who created, maintained and expanded the Library in its early years. It is striking how much the development of the library depended upon the long-term work of determined women: the first official librarian was Lahore-born Vera Douie who managed the Library for over 40 years.

You can listen online to an oral history of her memories about the library produced in 1975 as part of a suffrage history interviews project. Below is a reading list of books to accompany the exhibition, shedding light on the powerful history of the Library and the women behind it.

Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their circle. Elizabeth Crawford. Francis Boutle Publishers. 2002.

Elizabeth Crawford’s Enterprising Women sheds light on the networks of women who fought for the vote and, after winning it, continued to work after with campaigning organisations such as those preserved in the Library. The book focuses on the women of the Garrett family, providing a fascinating account of how members including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emily Davies made pioneering achievements for women in such diverse fields as education, medicine and interior design.

Turning the Tide: The life of Lady Rhondda. Angela V. John. Parthian. 2013.

The exhibition celebrates some of the many campaigning organisations who contributed to improving the lives of women. These include the work of the Six Point Group founded by Lady Rhondda in 1921 to press for changes in the law of the United Kingdom in six areas: improving legislation on child assault;  legal rights for widowed mothers; legal rights for unmarried mothers; equal rights of guardianship for married parents; equal pay for teachers and equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service.

Angela V. John’s fascinating biography of Lady Rhondda, Turning the Tide, reveals that she was the director of over 30 companies and the first woman president of the Institute of Directors in the 1920s. She also founded Time and Tide magazine, an influential, all-female produced publication which played a key role in covering politics and the arts in the interwar period.

Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-64. Caitriona Beaumont. Manchester University Press. 2013.

Many of the campaigning organisations archived in the Women’s Library were small grassroots groups run by dedicated volunteers, often from their own homes. Caitriona Beaumont’s Housewives and Citizens is an excellent insight for anyone interested in these groups. It focuses on six organisations in the period 1928-64: the Mothers’ Union, the Catholic Women’s League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (whose records are held by LSE) and the National Union of Townswomen’s Guild.

Many of these published journals which included calendars of events and articles on campaigns, which are rich sources of information on women’s local, regional and national activism. The LSE Digital Library has recently added the Townswoman, a journal published by the Townswomen’s Guild.

A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a Group of Women Set Out to Change the World. Jane Cholmeley. Mudlark. 2024.

Feminist book publishing is a key theme in the exhibition, (including the work of the Sheba Press which became a pioneering publisher of Black women. A Bookshop of One’s Own is a riveting account of the women who set up and ran the famous Silver Moon bookshop on Charing Cross Road, written by one of its co-founders, Jane Cholmeley. The bookshop championed women’s and feminist writing, like that of Sheba. Watch a YouTube video of or read a Q&A with the author from 2024 detailing the trials and tribulations and the grit and optimism required to open a bookshop in 1980s London despite a lack of business experience and funding!).

For more recent accounts of journal publishing by feminists. I would also recommend the Liberating Histories website which provides detailed timelines, research bibliographies and teachers notes of iconic and recent feminist magazines ranging from Spare Rib to Red Rag.

Chrystal Macmillan, 1872-1937: Campaigner for Equality, Justice and Peace. Helen Kay and Rose Pipes. Edinburgh University Press. 2024.

The exhibition also emphasises the long history of feminist internationalism, as many organisations engaged in international campaigning and forged alliances with their peers overseas. This historical biography by Helen Kay and Rose Pipes celebrates the achievements of Chrystal Macmillan, a remarkable woman who was one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She was also an organiser of the 1915 International Women’s Congress at The Hague, which urged political leaders to use mediation to stop World War One.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. Rachel Holmes. Bloomsbury. 2020.

Did you know that suffrage campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst was also politically involved in Ethiopia? In 1935 she campaigned against the Italian invasion of the country and in the 1950s moved there permanently, working ceaselessly to improve social conditions and writing a detailed history of the country as well as founding a newspaper.

This was one of the great surprises I discovered from a recent biography of Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes which offers a highly readable insight into the achievements of her long, impactful life, including those that have been less examined. Watch a video of the author speaking about the book at LSE library.

Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles. Imaobong Umoren. University of California Press. 2018.

An LSE author who has also emphasised the long history and importance of transnational feminist connections is Imaobong Umoren, based in the Department of International History. Her book, Race Women Internationalists, which won the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize, focuses on the lives of American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson, exploring how they created and used global networks to campaign against colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism.in the 20^th Century.

I hope these recommendations have inspired you to explore the exhibition and Women’s Library itself. During March, look out for links I will be posting on Instagram of other recommended resources available via LSE Library, including databases of articles and primary resources. LSE staff and students can book one-to-one advice sessions for further help researching women’s history resources.

Note: This article gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies procession with Frances Balfour, Millicent Fawcett, Emily Davies and Sophie Bryant, 13 June 1908. Credit: The Women’s Library collection by LSE Library on Flickr.

The LSE exhibition The Women’s Library at 100: celebrating a century of collections, curated by Patricia Owens, Kelly Bosomworth, Grace Heaton, Lyndsey Jenkins, Claire Cunnington, Caroline Derry, Nazmia Jamal, Angèle David-Guillou, and Gillian Murphy, runs from 2 March to 30 September 2026.

A launch event for the exhibition will take place next Thursday 12 March from 5 to 8 pm at LSE – find details and register.

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Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures. Zeynep Kilicoglu. Routledge. 2025.

Empowerment, vulnerability and global hierarchies 

While humanitarian programs targeting refugee women have always been strongly motivated by assumptions about their gender-specific vulnerability, a language of gender equality and women’s empowerment have been increasingly embraced in international policy and governance frameworks. Scholars and aid organisations are increasingly recognising that displacement does not always or only make women vulnerable. The upheavals of war, migration and exile can also provide new opportunities and prompt renegotiation of gender norms. However, in a context of political backlash against refugees and persistent xenophobia, racism and state violence directed at them in host countries, what does the empowerment of refugee women mean? How do efforts at empowering refugee women play out in landscapes of global and historical hierarchies and local, everyday hostility? In Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment, Zeynep Kilicoglu offers an original analysis of these questions through a rich analysis of humanitarian aid practices in support of women asylum seekers in the United Kingdom (UK) and in France.

In the UK, feminist-oriented humanitarian actors perceive the provision of practical support and essential services for women as inherently linked to a broader social justice agenda that seeks to dismantle unjust structures rooted in racism, sexism, and neocolonialism.

The book draws on extensive empirical work conducted via semi-structured interviews with refugee women and aid professionals, and participant observation in refugee communities. Notably, the study focuses on women-only or feminist organisations supporting refugee women, rather than more mainstream – and male-dominated – actors in the humanitarian aid sector. The actors in focus have a clear operational focus on women’s empowerment and can be expected to take a more explicit feminist stance. This sets the book apart from previous analyses of humanitarian gender policy and practice, where major international agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have often been the focus of critique. Yet even among these actors, how feminism is mobilised and what empowerment means can vary considerably. Kilicoglu represents her interlocutors with empathy and nuance, but also critically demonstrates that a feminist orientation does not inoculate well-meaning aid workers from – sometimes unintentionally – reproducing global and local patterns of inequality and injustice.

Collaborative approach in the UK 

Through her fine-grained analysis, Kilicoglu brings the work and interactions of aid workers and refugee women to life and reveals striking differences between the UK and France. In the UK, feminist-oriented humanitarian actors perceive the provision of practical support and essential services for women as inherently linked to a broader social justice agenda that seeks to dismantle unjust structures rooted in racism, sexism, and neocolonialism. Programs treat refugee women as partners alongside humanitarian workers, team members and friends often invite them to participate and take up leadership positions. This model diverges from restrictive asylum systems and the dominant logics of mainstream humanitarian aid and challenges representations of refugee women as vulnerable and passive victims. Here, empowerment means not only responding to practical and legal needs for support but creating space for refugee women’s agency and amplifying their voices in political activism.

However, this approach is not without challenges. Notably, a feminist agenda that seeks to empower refugee women through challenging restrictive gender norms can sometimes clash with the need to accommodate diverse cultural and religious beliefs. Aid workers express frustration over examples where refugee women are seen as unwilling to question traditional gender norms and patriarchal community and family structures. In this way, the feminist goals that aid workers espouse come into tension with their aspirations to solidarity, respect and mutuality towards refugee women.

Hierarchical dynamics in France 

In France, organisations take an entirely different approach to empowerment. Organisations supporting refugee women focus strongly on legal support and advocacy, based on a narrow understanding of empowerment as achieving a secure legal status. Humanitarian workers take a technocratic approach emphasising legal expertise and focusing on guidance to refugee women and working with state agencies to facilitate asylum processes. This approach positions aid workers as experts and decision-makers, and refugee women firmly as dependent recipients. This hierarchical relationship is compounded by the dominance of representations of women asylum seekers as victims of gender-based violence. In part, this is an example of how refugee women’s vulnerability is strategically leveraged to secure their access to protection and rights, as an emphasis on gender-based violence might increase the chances of a successful asylum claim. However, this framing simultaneously reinforces an image of refugee women as vulnerable victims by default, and obscures diversity in women’s experiences and needs for protection and support.

Alongside legal assistance, French aid actors focus on integration of refugee women through practical support but also sensibilisation to “French values”. Here, gender equality and women’s empowerment are framed as French values that refugee women must be educated on and work to internalise. This approach reinforces racial and cultural hierarchies between French women, representing a superior culture, and refugee women, viewed as deficient and in need of reform.

Political culture and women’s movements 

Kilicoglu convincingly argues that the distinct political cultures of the UK and France explain these differences in how they each approach empowerment in humanitarian aid to refugee women. In the UK, a multiculturalist tradition and immigration history makes for more acceptance of diversity, a more participatory and activist aid sector less dependent on state funding, and a women’s movement promoting a more inclusive form of feminism. In contrast, the republican political culture in France positions the state as the sole provider of rights and resources, and many humanitarian organisations operate in a technocratic fashion as extensions of the state. French feminism is shaped by universalist values that leaves little room for recognition of refugee women’s agency and their alternative perspectives and interpretations of feminism.

However, as Kilicoglu shows, French aid actors in the Calais region differ from those in other parts of France through a more activist approach closer to that of UK actors. The example of Calais offers fascinating insights into dynamics of change that have broader relevance in a global context of state repression against migrants. After the French government dismantled the Calais refugee camps in 2016 and state-funded humanitarian aid providers pulled back, their space was taken over by less formal and more participatory grassroots networks. These activists adopted a more collaborative approach to the refugees, as well as a more radical critique of existing relations of power. Thus, an environment of heightened state repression fostered a more solidarity-based approach to humanitarian aid, with the potential of more fundamentally disrupting and challenging the global order that produces displacement and suffering.

Kilicoglu adds nuance to previous literature that has demonstrated how humanitarian politics are shaped by, and reinforce, global hierarchies and colonial legacies

Through the analysis of political culture and context, Kilicoglu adds nuance to previous literature that has demonstrated how humanitarian politics are shaped by, and reinforce, global hierarchies and colonial legacies. In this context, feminist ideals can be mobilised as symbols of civilisational difference that works to uphold, rather than disrupt, inequality. While this book supports these arguments, and illustrates them in rich empirical detail, it also adds novel insights about how specific political, institutional and ideological structures and governing logics shapes the interpretation and implementation of global norms, and thereby the lives of refugee women. Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment offers essential insights to scholars, activists and practitioners interested in the gender politics of humanitarianism, as well as European refugee politics. Beyond that, it will appeal to those more broadly interested in the dilemmas of feminist activism and solidarity across differences and asymmetries of power and privilege.  

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: UN Women on Flickr.

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Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Conservatives vs. the administrative state

In the early decades following the Progressive Era, as the administrative state grew and put down roots, conservative Republicans and their business and intellectual allies railed against Democratic presidents – Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson – for advancing big government and progressive programs. But the Republican Party was fairly diverse and moderate at that time, and its staunch conservatives were shouting from the margins. The party as a whole, moreover, was in no position to take on the administrative state even if it wanted to. Congress was controlled by Democrats, who stood ready to defend it against any opposition. The courts were filled with judges who accepted it as a modern reality and adapted their jurisprudence to accommodate it. And the bureaucracy was in the expert hands of experienced civil servants who were adept at defending their turf.

Yet conservatives wouldn’t forever reside at the margins. They rose to political power during the late 1970s, elected Ronald Reagan president, took control of the Republican Party (eventually), and dedicated it to undermining the administrative state. The obstacles to change were the same as before. But conservatives hit upon a novel solution that, for professed believers in limited government and individual liberty, has to be regarded as the ultimate irony: they would endorse and pursue a presidency of extraordinary power, capable of dominating, retrenching, and sabotaging the administrative state unilaterally through top-down presidential control of the executive.

Hence the new asymmetry. Democrats didn’t need a president to pursue such domination, because the administrative state was largely performing functions that they supported. If the agencies and programs just did their jobs and carried out their legal missions, the progressive agenda would be advanced. This state of affairs, moreover, was the prevailing status quo; and as political scientists have long known, it takes much less power to protect the status quo than it does to change it. Conservative Republicans were on the other end of this power equation. They were the ones seeking to upend the established system. And to do so, they recognised, they needed a vastly more powerful presidency than the Democrats did.

The pursuit of extraordinary power

Their pursuit of extraordinary power took decades, and it continues today. Its first stirrings can be seen in the “administrative presidency” of Richard Nixon’s final two years in office. But it was Reagan who embraced it as a full-blown, systematic strategy of conservative governance. This involved greatly magnifying the presidency’s traditional reliance on centralisation and politicisation to enhance top-down control. But it also involved a radical move of great historical consequence: Reagan’s Department of Justice, led by Ed Meese, began developing the Unitary Executive Theory (UET), a new line of legal theory that rejected the traditionally understood constraints of statutory law and separation of powers and claimed that the Constitution grants presidents vast inherent powers of unilateral action and supreme authority over all agencies within the executive – what they do, how they do it, how they are staffed, and what decisions get made.

An anti-system populist base [in the Republican Party] yearned for strongman leadership: a president who would exercise unilateral power untethered to traditional democratic norms and procedures.

Over time, the theory came to be more fully developed and diversified by conservative legal scholars. It also was sharply criticised, not simply for its questionable jurisprudence but for its potential to unleash and legitimize strongman powers threatening to democracy. Those fears appeared to be borne out during the presidency of George W. Bush, whose administration relied on the UET to justify controversial actions – notably, the torture of prisoners – that violated existing law. Prominent legal scholars soon began pointing to Bush as the poster boy of an antidemocratic president.

The arrival of the strongman

Bush, however, was but a pale imitation of the real thing, which was coming soon enough. Conservatism itself was slowly being transformed and rendered much more extreme by the rise of right-wing populism, which began to threaten democracies throughout the developed West during the 1990s, was supercharged in the United States by the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and became the controlling force within the Republican Party. The party’s pursuit of extraordinary presidential power was no longer just a strategic choice. It was now magnified and driven to extremes by an anti-system populist base that yearned for strongman leadership: a president who would exercise unilateral power untethered to traditional democratic norms and procedures.

In Donald Trump, they found their man – and put American democracy in great danger. That danger was very real during Trump’s first term and has so far been magnified during his second. There is good reason to think, moreover, that it will persist well after he leaves centre stage. For with the Republican Party in the thrall of populist forces – an entrenched feature of American politics that will not end soon – future Republican presidents will have much the same incentives to embrace the role of the strongman.

This is an extract from Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency by Terry M. Moe and William G. Howell, published by Princeton University Press, 2025 © reprinted here by permission.

Note: This extract gives the views of the authors and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Cristi Dangeorge on Shutterstock.

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Performing Power. Marcus Morgan. Polity. 2025.

Marcus Morgan’s book Performing Power (2025) makes an important contribution to understanding the symbolic and affective dimensions of political life. Performance and the related concept of performativity have long served as a productive metaphor in social theory, from Austin’s philosophy of language and Goffman’s sociology to what is arguably today the most widely recognised articulation in the work of Judith Butler.

A rich and analytically rigorous framework for understanding how power is structured, exercised and contested in contemporary societies.

Despite its long-standing presence in theory, its wide use, and its diverse operationalisations, Morgan offers the most systematic and ambitious attempt to develop a theory of social performance to date. In so doing, he draws on cultural sociology, a distinctive sociological approach developed by Jeffrey Alexander and his collaborators, characterised by a sustained effort to place meaning at the centre of analysis. At the same time, he shows how material structures and power relations shape the emergence, enactment, reception and interpretation of performance. The book offers a nuanced theory of social performance, foregrounding the enabling and constraining force of cultural structures while integrating the material conditions that shape its production and consumption. The result is a rich and analytically rigorous framework for understanding how power is structured, exercised and contested in contemporary societies.

Theories of power and performance 

The book is divided into three parts, addressing conceptual clarification, the analysis of performative structures, and the development of a new theoretical model. The first part offers a critical engagement with theories of power and performance, the two foundational concepts of the study, and explores their points of intersection. Chapter one sets out the importance of performance in the production, transmission, and legitimation of power from the outset, beginning with a systematic overview of major conceptualisations of power in sociological and, more broadly, social theory. Chapter two turns to the concept of performance itself, where Morgan distinguishes between artistic and social performance, while also tracing the connections between what is conventionally recognised as performance and what may be understood as such. In contrast to everyday understanding of performance as something artificial and deceptive, this book shifts the focus toward a broader understanding of social performance as a way of expressing meaning in order to achieve something.

Cultural structures of performance 

For Morgan, performance is the concept that makes it possible to avoid privileging either structure or agency, and instead to approach social reality in a synthetic manner. The second part of the book (Chapters three and four) is devoted to examining the cultural structures on which performance is grounded and to analysing their character. Morgan conceptualises performance on the basis of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, which employs the theatrical metaphor to theorise human agency in everyday interaction, as well as cultural sociology. He highlights the cultural structures that constitute performance, such as binary codes, narratives, genres, character types, and casting. The author then turns to rhetoric as a means of producing persuasive speech and performance and to its capacity to mobilise audiences, as well as to ritual – not simply as a stabilising mechanism of social integration, but as a dynamic force capable of generating social transformation.

The third part develops Morgan’s new theoretical model of performative success (Chapters five, six, and seven). Drawing heavily on Alexander’s cultural sociology, he begins with the model of social performance articulated within this approach. For Alexander, social performance entails the mobilisation of a background system of collective representations, actors capable of bringing these codes and scripts alive, specific spatial and temporal settings, particular audiences who interpret the meanings of the performance, and relations of power. Success is emergent rather than guaranteed: it depends on the effective fusion of performance’s elements to secure audience identification, emotional engagement and orientation toward action.

The value of resonance

In the following chapters Morgan builds a framework for modelling social performance on Alexander’s framework while revising it in significant ways. He retains the Strong program’s commitment to treating culture as relatively autonomous and to viewing performative acts as mobilisations of existing cultural structures. However, he offers a different conceptualisation of power. Distinguishing between its various dimensions, he maps the power relations that shape the context in which performance emerges and unfolds, as well as the forms of power generated through performance.

Morgan argues that performative success hinges on resonance: the capacity of skilful actors to mobilise shared cultural structures, recombine them in innovative ways, and frame perceived problems as offering solutions or a resolution of emotional tensions

In doing so, he moves beyond treating power as merely one element among others and develops a more complex account of performative success. Rather than locating success in the fusion of elements, as in Alexander’s approach, Morgan argues that it hinges on resonance: the capacity of skilful actors to mobilise shared cultural structures, recombine them in innovative ways, and frame perceived problems as offering solutions or a resolution of emotional tensions. This shift from fusion to resonance is one of the book’s most original theoretical interventions.

Performance strategies and the materiality of power 

One question that remains open concerns the extent to which actors are strategically oriented. The book distances itself from conceptions of culture as a repertoire of symbolic resources from which actors strategically select elements for action. Instead, performative structures are presented as deeply internalised, shaping dispositions and perceptions, particularly when they draw on seemingly universal cultural forms such as binary oppositions. At the same time, those involved in the production of performance clearly do make choices, selecting narratives and symbolic resources in ways that increase the likelihood of conveying a desired message and orienting audiences toward particular ways of thinking or acting. A tension thus emerges between viewing social performance actors as either strategically oriented or guided by largely tacit, semi-reflexive engagements with deeply embedded cultural structures.

Overall, Morgan advances a theory of social performance while deepening our understanding of power relations, both as a structuring context and as an outcome of performance. By “context”, he refers not only to forms of domination embedded in language and culture, but also to questions of access to the material means that render performances persuasive and shape audiences’ interpretive capacities. In this way, he avoids a criticism often directed at cultural sociology: that it overlooks material asymmetries, preexisting power relations, and remains overly idealist. At the same time, his strong emphasis on cultural structures allows him to account for why certain performances prove successful even when enacted by actors who occupy structurally subordinate positions within a given society.

Morgan offers a productive analytical tool for examining the complexity of symbolic action and public struggles over power.

The book’s analytical framework constitutes its most significant contribution, offering a productive lens for research across diverse political contexts – from contemporary right-wing populist mobilisations and progressive social movements to historical cases, as Morgan’s analysis of the Black Consciousness Movement illustrates. By reworking an apparently Marxist vocabulary, forces, means and labour of production and consumption, here referring to the symbolic domain, Morgan offers a productive analytical tool for examining the complexity of symbolic action and public struggles over power. The book will be of primary interest to sociologists, but its conceptual innovation extends its relevance well beyond the discipline.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Jason Burke. The Bodley Head. 2025.

Anna D’Alton (AD): In your book, The Revolutionists, you focus on a period of political violence between 1967 and ‘83, wherein a new transnational terrorism emerged. What did that involve, and what factors created it?

Jason Burke (JB): I look at a wave of violence in the 1970s which saw extremists using transnational terrorist violence as a weapon in a new way. There had been transnational attacks before, but this was quantitatively and qualitatively different: there were many more attacks involving a much wider range of both targets and perpetrators than ever before. These were designed to be spectacular or attention-grabbing in a way that struck me as new, too. A high-profile example I look at in the book is the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

One cause of this wave of violence is the emergence of new media technology that its perpetrators wanted to exploit to raise the profile of their various grievances. Another factor is the new strategic terrain of contemporary aviation and its infrastructure which enabled numerous airplane hijackings. And you also have a very important moment of global agitation and protest in the late 1960s in support of so-called revolutionary causes. It’s this that generates the political energy that underlies the violence of the ‘70s and a very internationalised vision of revolutionary activism.

The book is about individuals, and what brings a person to use (often lethal) violence, their motivations and the circumstances that might direct them towards that kind of activity

But at around the same time in the Middle East, you have the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War in 1967 and the broad changes geopolitically, socially and politically that followed it. Israel’s victory and its repercussions pushed Palestinian armed groups towards a new strategy. All of this comes together and generates the wave of transnational political violence that you see from the late ‘60s through to the mid ‘70s.

AD: Why do you think it’s worthwhile to understand not just the attacks, which encompass hijackings and bombings and other types of violence, but the people behind them and their motivations? I’m interested as well in your use of the term “revolutionists”.

JB: The term “revolutionist”, popularised in the 19th century, refers to people whose profession is effectively attempting to foment a revolution. Importantly, it is neither “revolutionaries” nor “terrorists”, both of which wouldn’t have been acceptable as a title of the book. To use either would be to take an immediate political stance, which I did not think would be helpful.

The book is about individuals, and what brings a person to use (often lethal) violence, their motivations and the circumstances that might direct them towards that kind of activity, and the personal consequences, positive and negative, that follow. More broadly, it’s about how political and religious movements looking to effect change generate extremist fringes that see violence as the only useful tactic, and how that can play out historically.

The characters are also fascinating in their own right. They’re complex individuals who act out of multiple motives. I in no way sympathise with them, but I have attempted to render them as human beings with the complexity we all have. I think that approach makes it much easier to understand what happened in specific events, and to understand the events of that period more broadly.

AD: You look at the solidarity that was built internationally across different causes, from the liberation of Palestine to Vietnam’s struggle against the US, and multiple anti-imperialist causes. Did they manage to build solidarity?

JB: There was plenty of rhetorical and aspirational solidarity. There was a strong sense of solidarity between Western European leftists and the Viet Cong, or earlier with the Algerians and their fight against the French, or later, with those fighting on the ground against the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and of course, with the Palestinians. European radicals genuinely believed that they could help bring about a global revolution that would end the twin scourges of imperialism and capitalism through their support of causes in the Global South.

One of the reasons I wrote the book was to consider the trajectories of the leftist radical movement alongside that of the Islamist movement in the same period.

In practical terms, it was difficult to instrumentalise that solidarity. You had organisations with divergent agendas, ways of working and cultural approaches, which led to misunderstandings, arguments and few examples of successful collaboration.

AD: In the second half of the book, you look at the rise of Islamic extremism, and you argue there was a failure in the revolutionary leftist movement, a vacuum that Islamism stepped into.

JB: One of the reasons I wrote the book was to consider the trajectories of the leftist radical movement alongside that of the Islamist movement in the same period. The ‘70s saw the resurgence of faith-based political ideologies across the Islamic world. The key moments for modern political Islamism and its extremist variants, I argue, are in the mid- to late 60s, which aligns with that moment of global revolutionary mobilisation, activism and protest.

By the mid-70s in the West, that wave of mobilisation had receded. Some people were repelled by some of the violence that it entailed, others had just moved on or redirected their political energies into other, narrower, identity-based causes such as environmentalism or the anti-nuclear movement. Also, in the West, you’d had a lot of reform. The movement of the late ‘60s had achieved many of its aims, at least in social and cultural terms. It had gained better reproductive rights for women, lowered voting ages, secured better funding for universities and successfully challenged post-war political hierarchies. There was much less reason to protest by the end of the decade.

Iran is back in the news these days. People forget that the Left in Iran was a real force for a long time before it was crushed by Iranian authorities.

But in the Middle East, there were no such gains. Any left-wing radicalism was ruthlessly repressed. The material circumstances that so many people wanted to change remained the same. So, there was inevitably a vacuum, and that meant a different revolutionary programme – with different ideas and vocabulary – that diverged from the Left in some areas. But it was still, at heart, a programme of transformation of society, culture and much else towards an imagined utopia.

Iran is back in the news these days. People forget that the Left in Iran was a real force for a long time before it was crushed by Iranian authorities. In the ‘70s, the main armed violent opposition groups that targeted the Shah’s regime were on the Left. By 1980, they were all in prison or exiled or dead, leaving a massive vacuum that greatly aided the radical clerics to take power.

AD: That example of Iran and Shah Khomeini coming to power, and many of the events you explore in the book are seismic moments, and it feels like we’re still seeing the effects of them play out today. You see it in counterterror policy and US relations with so many Arab countries.

JB: As I researched, I was astonished by how much of the politics we see today has its roots in this period in the ‘70s. You see it the current situation in Iran, and in Sunni jihadi activism – Bin Laden was a child of the 70s. He was 13 in 1970, his formative experiences were during that decade. You see it in the role of states like Syria in the region, or indeed Israel, and the rise of the Right there during that period.

The events of the ‘70s and early ‘80s fomented a new understanding of terrorism. Rejecting that which had been prevalent earlier in the decade which described terrorism as a criminal activity, effectively, with social and political and other root causes, this new framing which saw terrorism as a cancer that could be cut out. And it viewed terrorists as mad, bad or misled, but certainly not acting out of an authentic desire to change their and other people’s circumstances.

AD: It’s interesting to consider that reframing in light of the recent decision from the UK’s High Court to overturn the Government’s proscription (in 2025) of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

Yes it is. The definition of terrorism and application of the noun “terrorists” – which I don’t use at any point in the book, deliberately – is hugely politicised. You very rapidly run out of fingers if you want to start counting governments, democratically elected or otherwise, that have described their enemies as terrorists.

There are technical definitions of terrorism, including under UK law. In the case of Palestine Action, it seems very difficult to argue that their actions, their activities meet the standard or broadly accepted definitions of terrorism. And it seems to me to be highly politicised and counterproductive to characterise them in that way.

Note: This interview gives the views of the person interviewed and the interviewer, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire. Carl Rhodes. Bristol University Press. 2025. The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich. Evan Osnos. Simon & Schuster. 2025.

We have a billionaire problem. The release of the latest tranche of the Epstein Files in late January 2026 has shaken the world. Though the depraved nature of Epstein’s sexual exploitation of girls and young women was already well known, the disturbing details and vastness of the network of people involved in these crimes, whose wealth and power insulated them from consequences and criminal charges, is difficult to digest. Epstein used his vast personal fortune to bend democracy, and he is rightly reviled for actions that United Nations’ experts suggest may amount to crimes against humanity.

There is a risk that the power concentrated in Epstein’s hands will be seen as dangerous only because he and those who sought his favour were depraved […] deflect[ing] from the reality that accumulating such extreme wealth and power is, in and of itself, dangerous

There is a risk, however, that the power concentrated in Epstein’s hands will be seen as dangerous only because he and those who sought his favour were depraved. Such a framing deflects from the reality that accumulating that level of wealth and power is, in and of itself, dangerous to democracy. It fundamentally erodes decision-making by and for the people. Against this backdrop, two timely, well-written books examine the lives of today’s very rich, the myths that surround them, and the power they wield. If Epstein’s crimes are rightly condemned, both authors remind us that political outrage and mobilisation is necessary to challenge the real billionaire problem: their outsized influence in every aspect of life.

Debunking myths about billionaires 

In Stinking Rich: The Four Myths of the Good Billionaire Carl Rhodes, the Dean of the University of Technology Sydney’s Business School, argues that there is widespread respect, even awe for the wealthy (50), while the poor are scorned for failing to “dream hard enough” (51). In today’s culture, Rhodes argues that four major myths about the billionaire dominate, each of which must be challenged as part of a broader political project to limit wealth inequalities and strive for a more equal world.

First, he critiques the closely allied celebrations of the “heroic” and self-made billionaire that claims inequalities are earned through the hard work of the talented few. Inherited wealth, he observes, enables the rich to take chances and so become even richer. In 2019, Forbes magazine celebrated Kylie Jenner as “the youngest self-made billionaire” (91), for her business, Kylie Cosmetics. Characteristically, she is, in fact, the daughter of very wealthy parents, made world-famous and then rich through a reality television serial. There is a “glass floor” (101) ensuring that the children of the very rich, like Jenner, “have a safety net of returning to relative material comfort should their entrepreneurial ventures fail” (59). President Trump is another example of the supposedly heroic, meritorious billionaire; he claims he built his businesses using a “small loan” of $1 million from his father. Of course, most parents cannot lend their children such sums. Moreover, the actual value of the loan of was closer to $61 million (48).

Today’s wealthy do not earn money from what they do but what they own

Most wealthy people today are not rich because of wages or a salary compensating them for their talent and work. They do not “earn” their wealth through their labours, as most of us do, but through shareholder investment in their successful enterprises. As the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk has only a $56 000 (US dollars) salary, but, as Rhodes explains, he has an “insanely high net worth […] a result of the appreciating value of his company on the stock market” (64). Combined with billions in government subsidies and corporate tax avoidance, the reality is that today’s wealthy “do not earn money from what they do but what they own” (66).

Tax evasion and political influence 

Next, Rhodes takes aim at another myth: that of the generous billionaire. There are, he recognises, billionaires who donate significant fortunes to various causes. Among them, Yves Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor sportswear and equipment company, Patagonia, stands out: he donates 100 per cent of profits to non-profit organisations he created to support ecological causes. If admirable, this means that tackling urgent public issues, like climate change, depends increasingly upon the idiosyncratic personal priorities of the very rich. Moreover, Rhodes points out that many billionaires are made through paying much less tax than most working people. In 2007 and 2011 “[Amazon owner Jeff] Bezos paid no federal income taxes at all – zero dollars. Ditto for Musk in 2019.” Generosity, in short, depends upon accumulating wealth by avoiding taxation. This gives philanthropic capitalists significant personal power to decide what public problems will be solved, through their “generosity”, acting as a substitute for democratic decisions about public expenditures.

Finally, Rhodes laments the myth of the vigilante billionaire, who will single-handedly use his business acumen to save the world, where democratic public institutions have failed. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, in 2020, “twice as many billionaires were attending as there were heads of state” (127), reflecting the power and influence of the very rich to meet and decide on global priorities After his 2025 Presidential election, Trump named thirteen billionaires (including Musk) to the top ranks of his administration (xiv), making the influence of the ultrarich nakedly visible. In lieu of genuine democratic decision-making the vigilante billionaire steps in and is celebrated for his capacity to cut through failures of bureaucracy. “Whether billionaires do good or bad,” Rhodes concludes, “everyone remains at their mercy” (75).

Superyachts and their owners 

In The Have and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, New Yorker writer Evan Osnos explores the world of superyachts and their owners. Across nine chapters, he describes how the very wealthy spend, keep and lose their wealth. The aim is to shed light on “the true power of the world’s biggest fortunes” (xiv), amidst vast inequality, and to do so by studying “the thinking and behaviour” (xvi) of the ultrarich. To those ends, Osnos secures a rare interview with billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, traces the rise and fall of shadowy figures in the underworld of cryptocurrencies and Ponzi schemes, and investigates why monied families in Greenwich, Connecticut decide to support Trump for the Republican leadership. He details usually hidden lives, creating a “field guide to the ultrarich” (xvi), in a world in which “greed” is “celebrated” (265), and the drive for profit comes before anything else, whether climate change or social justice (188).

Those who inherit vast fortunes spend practically unlimited resources skirting legal requirements meant to divert some private wealth into public coffers, for democratic redistribution.

A superyacht reaches up to 180m in in length and cost half a billion dollars (22) or more. “In the yachting world,” Osnos recounts, “stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido.” (9). Built for Russian oligarchs seeking to escape the law or as a diversion for “bored billionaires” (22), they are sites of excess and displays of status. If stories of luxurious consumption excite and appal, it is the ways that the wealthy exercise their influence, while detaching themselves from the fate of others, that is most shocking.

Osnos introduces us to China-born billionaire Guo Wengui, whom Osnos describes as “either an asset of the FBI or a target” (224). In 2015, Guo moves into a luxury apartment in New York City, claiming to be a dissident from the Communist regime. He soon buys a membership to Mar-a-Lago resort, better to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump, and later sponsors Steve Bannon (236) with whom he starts “an alternative-news platform” (236). During the pandemic, he spreads misinformation about COVID-19, hawks crypto-currency and, despite his own claims to be a dissenter, foments diasporic unrest against Chinese political exiles, claiming they are “fake pro-democracy activists” (238). Guo creates and shares pro-Trump messages leading up to the 2020 election, and later asserts that the election was stolen. In 2023, he is arrested for more than one billion dollars US in fraud, his role as a Chinese operative, an American intelligence asset or opportunist, still unresolved.

The lives and motivations of billionaires 

If Guo is one illustration of illicit power exercised through economic might, Zuckerberg is a more familiar member of the billionaire class. An “oddity” (88), well-known for evincing little introspection or emotion, Zuckerberg is most animated when discussing his hero, the Emperor Augustus: he hopes to secure greatness on the scale of the emperor’s “two hundred years of world peace” (92), even if this requires difficult “trade-offs” (92). Zuckerberg’s influence, if not formally imperial, is certainly outsized. As a Stanford historian of technology points out, Facebook, “is the arbiter of truth and decency for two billion people” (88) but Zuckerberg’s own trade-offs at Facebook have tragic consequences. In Myanmar, Facebook messages share and amplify virulent anti-Muslim discourse, targeting the Rohingya minority. If Zuckerberg insists that this is “terrible”, he is “frustrating and evasive” (106) in responding to Osnos’ questions about why he is not doing more to limit violence-inciting content. Although Zuckerberg eventually commits to hiring and training more Burmese speakers to moderate content, in January 2026, the World Court at the United Nations opened a case considering the charge of genocide against Myanmar. In terms of its wide-reaching influence, Osnos concludes that Zuckerberg, “succeeded, long ago, in making Facebook great. The challenge before him now is to make it good” (116).

Decisions made by billionaires are consequential for everyone on the planet, whether the ultra-wealthy invest in mining or green technologies, sports teams or the arts, the mass media or political parties, superyachts or philanthropy. 

Other chapters zone in on various billionaire figures and the power they hold, from the boom-and-bust tale of a Hollywood schemer who raises half a billion dollars in a Ponzi scheme, to the travails of a wealth manager who spectacularly falls out with the heirs to the Getty fortune, to the breathtaking hypocrisy of Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson, who attacks “elites” as if he were the beleaguered underdog, despite his inherited fortune. These stories, Osnos argues, reveal deeper truths. The warn us about the attraction of get-rich-quick schemes in a nation where attaining wealth is central to the American dream. They remind us that the line between tax optimization and tax evasion blurs, when those who inherit vast fortunes spend practically unlimited resources skirting legal requirements meant to divert some private wealth into public coffers, for democratic redistribution. Perversely, resentments over vast economic inequalities are channelled into populist attacks on amorphous “elites”, by some of the wealthiest people in the United States, in what Osnos describes as “performances of solidarity with the masses that would have impressed the Castros” (159).

Dethroning the ultra-wealthy 

In examining billionaires, Rhodes, the scholar, is more overtly pedagogical. He seeks to educate readers about the politics and policies that have led to enormous inequality and to unmask the ideologies that justify the existence of billionaires and their “enormous power” (122). Osnos, the journalist, seeks to “show not tell” allowing his interlocutors to underscore, “the true power of the world’s biggest fortunes” (xiv). Their contributions fill out the more historical, and, at times, technical descriptions and explanations made by, among others, the French economist Thomas Piketty, whose work has sought to track the growth of inequalities, over more than a century, across the globe. The picture that emerges from the two books reviewed here is one of democratic politics collapsing into plutocratic rule. What we need, politically, Osnos warns, is to tackle the real problems we face: “inequality, immobility and intolerance” (161), or we risk the end of any semblance of democratic rule and a shared, public life. Doing so is both more necessary and more challenging than ever before.

The billionaire problem we face today is not confined to Epstein. The bigger issue, as both Rhodes and Osnos emphasise, is that today’s extreme wealth means extreme, concentrated power. Decisions made by billionaires are consequential for everyone on the planet, whether the ultra-wealthy invest in mining or green technologies, sports teams or the arts, the mass media or political parties, superyachts or philanthropy. Amidst plenty, tens of millions are without adequate food, water or housing. The choices ahead are stark. We can accept continuing inequality and the myths that justify great wealth for the very few. Or we can commit to more egalitarian economic policies and a shared political life. We cannot have both.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities, and Neighbourhoods. Anne Power. Policy Press. 2025. 

How housing reflects social life

“Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.” – Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

This passage from Oliver Twist draws readers into the cramped interiors and precarious lives of the urban poor, making housing conditions inseparable from social injustice. It is fitting, then, that Dickens’s world serves as a touchstone for Anne Power, Professor Emerita of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. As its title signals, Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities, and Neighbourhoods shifts attention from buildings to the social life they sustain – or fail to sustain. For Power, housing is not simply infrastructure, but a complex combination of stability, dignity, and belonging. She argues that the wider role of housing involves valuing and protecting the lowest-income communities. Dickens’s London offers an early literary record of what happens when the ground beneath those communities collapses. 

The way housing is designed, developed, and managed is central to creating and sustaining communities. Housing policy, in short, shapes collective life.  

The book’s authority rests on experience as much as analysis, drawing on decades of work in housing systems, urban regeneration, and low-income neighbourhoods. This includes her leadership of LSE Housing and Communities and direct involvement in improvement initiatives including the 1966 “End Slums” campaign with Martin Luther King and the Urban Task Force (1998). Power is extraordinarily well placed to write on housing, and in this book, she expertly combines policy expertise with practical knowledge. The resulting book offers a precise mixed-methods design with apt case studies and persuasive policy arguments, and speaks to students, scholars, and practitioners alike. 

The book advances an expansive understanding of shelter as a constant across human history, from “prehistoric cave dwellings to rudimentary huts, portable tent homes, stone cottages, tenements, and terraces, to semi-detached houses and high-rise blocks” (3). This long view allows her to treat housing as a social process rather than a static object, one that includes informal and precarious dwellings alongside formal stock. This dynamic view of shelter is echoed by fellow LSE professor Claire Mercer’s The Suburban Frontier (2024), which details suburban growth and squatting in Dar es Salaam, and Carolyn Whitzman’s Home Truths (2024) that explores Canada’s housing crisis. Power’s central claim gives the book its force: “the way housing is designed, developed, and managed is central to creating and sustaining communities” (vi). Housing policy, in short, shapes collective life.  

Housing as key to social reform 

In the first section, Power identifies the influence of Robert Owen (1771-1858), founder of utopian socialism and among the first to connect fair, accessible housing to the creation of “a productive and cooperative society that took care of basic needs while protecting and advancing people’s wellbeing” (11). This framing is apt, as Owen emphasised mutual respect between workers and supervisors that extended to renters and social landlords. Likewise, social reformer Octavia Hill (1838-1912), co-founder of the National Trust (1895), demonstrated how attentive management, affordable rents, and decent conditions could improve everyday life. Her hands on approach to property management proved “if you treat tenants with respect and fairness, you could establish a two-way trust that would keep your properties in good condition and your tenants happy” (15). Together, Owen and Hill establish the foundations for a collective and sustainable approach to housing managment. 

Where the first section establishes these reform principles, the second turns to 20^th-century overcrowding and demolition. Power details the 1974 financial crisis that nearly bankrupted the UK and the austerity measures that followed. Citing examples like the Charteris Road community and Finsbury Park in North Islington, she links economic retrenchment to intensifying social problems, clearance schemes, and state-led rehousing. Immigrants and newcomers were frequently excluded from these plans and pushed into cramped, deteriorating private rentals, exacerbating existing inequalities. Legislative responses – the Race Relations Act (1968) and the Homeless Persons Act (1977) – sought to define “priority need” and address discrimination, but policy often lagged behind lived conditions. 

Place-based investment, shortcomings in housing provision 

Section three, “Targeting the Poorest Areas,” shifts to the 1997 election of the New Labour government and its stated commitment to “equality of opportunity” (95). Tony Blair’s platform – “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, “education, education, education,” and the insistence that “no-one should be disadvantaged by where they live” – folded housing into broader neighbourhood renewal strategies. Despite Blair’s success offering low-income families supplemental support through tax credits, the Housing Benefit did not have the same effect. Power notes, “to prevent the risk of arrears…Housing Benefit was paid directly to landlords” (96). As such, the connection between landlord and tenant diminished, creating a “system that lacked mechanisms for picking up problems or generating responsibility” (96). By revealing the shortcomings of impersonal property management, Power emphasises the need to protect low-income communities from further decline. 

Power successfully illustrates that housing policy is never merely technical – it determines whether communities hold together or come apart.

The fourth and final section, “Changing the Basis of Welfare,” brings the argument into the 2000s and 2010s. Returning to the principles articulated by Hill and Owen, Power argues that long-term stability depends on community-based management grounded in fair rents, decent housing conditions, and trust between tenants and landlords. Writing through the 2008 financial crisis and the premiership of Gordon Brown – credited widely for stabilising the global financial system – Power notes both meaningful reductions in child and pensioner poverty and persistent shortcomings in affordable housing provision. Even so, she concludes that the thirteen years of New Labour government produced tangible, ground-level gains for low-income communities. 

A framework for reading marginalised neighbourhoods 

Ultimately, in Beyond Bricks and Mortar, Power asks readers to see housing as more than a physical or economic commodity; it is the social foundation on which dignity, stability, and belonging rest. Advocating a community-based approach to social housing, she grounds policy in respect, stewardship, and everyday care. Each case study tests this principle in practice, showing not only what fails but what works. Power successfully illustrates that housing policy is never merely technical – it determines whether communities hold together or come apart.

For scholars like me – currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the literatures of Canadian suburbs – this argument can apply in other contexts. Power’s attention to tenant-led networks, local organising, and the daily practices that sustain belonging offers a concrete framework for reading marginalised neighbourhoods. Her model travels well as a set of principles, though its reliance on the institutional strength of Britain’s social-housing sector may be harder to reproduce in more fragmented, market-led contexts. 

I see both the promise and the limits of that transfer in the neighbourhood of Jane-Finch in Toronto, where newcomers are attracted by affordable rents and transit access and where community groups, cultural events, and religious gatherings operate as infrastructures of care. Residents share information, resources, and rituals, building systems of support that counter the area’s persistent stigma as a crime-ridden periphery. Power’s work is a crucial contribution to the work of capturing such textured social life that goes far beyond the physical shelter and policies that try to contain it. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Anne Power will speak about the book at a public LSE event on Tuesday 3 March, The care economy and social housing. Find details and register to attend.

Main image: I Wei Huang on Shutterstock.

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