The Future Regained: Radical Thought After the End of History

The Future Regained explores five concepts at the cutting edge of contemporary radical theory: degrowth, abolition, neo-feudalism, post-dialectics, and hyperpolitics. Oliver Eagleton evaluates their competing visions of the world to come, engaging critically with thinkers such as Andreas Malm, Chantal Mouffe, Wolfgang Streeck and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Audacious and incisive, the book parses their work for insights into a more coherent and effective anti-capitalist politics.

A generation ago, the triumph of neoliberalism appeared to foreclose the future itself. Labour's forward march was halted, grand narratives discredited, and history seemingly brought to an end. Yet this perpetual present could not endure. Intensifying disorder, ecological breakdown and a pervasive expectation of catastrophe once again compel political thought to look forward. Today, the left has been vindicated by the return of the future, but remains unable to shape it.

Against this impasse, Eagleton assembles the strongest currents in contemporary left theory to recover a modernist sensibility and outlines the prospects for an egalitarian tomorrow. This is both a readable introductory survey and a major theoretical intervention by a rising star of the left.