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Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of . . . set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the. . .

Triumph : Jacques Khalip

In a passage early on in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, the narrator pauses to observe the novel’s young protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, deep inside a performance of a Beethoven piano sonata. Apparently fascinated by her low-grade grasp at passion, the narrator administers a deflating blow to Lucy’s triumph of life: She was no dazzling exécutante; her runs . . .

University : Anat Matar

The modern university is undoubtedly heir to the Platonic academia and the universities of the Middle Ages. But it is the dramatic development of this institution from its pre-modern phase to its modern and then post-modern stages that motivate this essay’s focus on the liberal university, as it was shaped in the eighteenth century and then crystallized over the nineteenth. . .

Usury : Peter Szendy

Usury is certainly not a thing of the past. It even invited itself recently into the American presidential campaign, when Bernie Sanders delivered a major speech in New York City Town Hall on January 5th, 2016, turning the word into one of his battle cries: We have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and. . .

Violence : Richard Bernstein

There is a disturbing paradox about violence. We are overwhelmed by talk and images of violence, and there is now a vast literature about the different types, ranging from child abuse, domestic violence, rape, serial murder, suicide bombing to the use of the new sophisticated robotics and drones as weapons for killing. The paradox is that although (or perhaps because). . .

Violence : Uday S. Mehta

Violence challenges analytical focus because of its ubiquity and multifarious forms. We are longer embedded within an extant framework of meaning in which violence can claim virtuosity as an act to be identified and judged by itself—in the manner of the Homeric world. Violence today is embedded in a world of reasons. It must have or be. . .

Editorial Statement

Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon is a multidisciplinary, web-based journal that seeks to be a forum for engaged scholarship. Each lexical entry will focus on a single concept with the express intention of resituating it in the field of political discourse by addressing what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept. Each entry will. . .