A Free Left Blog

My book, The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity , is being published on 1st of July, so not long to go now. Last week a courier dropped off my copies - showing this thing  that has been dominating my life for the past few years in physical form for the first time. THE BOOK: it exists I have already posted the backcover blurb and some of the theoretical background . But what is it about, really? How would I sum it up? At the most basic level, The Tribe is an attempt to explain what  on earth is going on with the politics of identity and diversity. How has it come to dominate our public sphere? And what is the role of the progressive liberal-left in this? It obviously has a major role, but how does this work? Why is this combination so powerful? And what are the consequences of it, not least on our public life? It is not a history book. It does not attempt to find 'root causes' for what it going on or to track back in time to find a few individua...

Imprint Academic has made available some details of my book, The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity , on its website  here . [ Update: it is now available for pre-order via Amazon here  and on the Imprint website here ] The Tribe : book cover The blurb reads: From Islamist terror to feminist equal pay campaigns and the apparent Brexit hate crime epidemic, identity politics seems to be everywhere nowadays. This is not entirely an accident. The progressive liberal-left, which dominates our public life, has taken on the politics of race, gender, religion and sexuality as a key part of its own group identity – and has used its dominance to embed them into our state and society. In   The Tribe , Ben Cobley guides us around the 'system of diversity' which has resulted, exploring the consequences of offering favour and protection to some people but not others based on things like skin colour and gender. He looks at how this system has almost tota...

I have just finished writing a book. The title is ‘The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity’ and it will be published between August and November 2018 by Imprint Academic. [ Update: the publishing date is now scheduled for 1st July 2018 ] The Tribe picks up on many of the themes I have been exploring on this blog about the politics of identity. However, it reaches towards a wider understanding of what is going on: of how and why the politics of gender, skin colour and other forms of ‘fixed’ and quasi-fixed identity have come to dominate our public sphere in recent years. This is where the idea of ‘the system of diversity’ comes in. With this idea, I am not talking about the sort of social system which covers the whole of society like some accounts of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism do. Rather, the system of diversity appears as a system of relations , which offers possibilities – for involvement, inclusion, social approval and also material reward. ...