“At the heart of law is not justice but the will to punish. And it is when this will to punish becomes a pervasive political impulse, a mass phenomenon, that we leave democracy and enter what we call neodemocracy: the idea that the law is here not to protect the vulnerable, or be responsible to those who are outnumbered. When punishment becomes the guiding force in and of law, we have left the realm of human freedom. We have entered into what liberals call the rule of law.”
What, Mutant asks, does the law yield? What does the law make of us — and what does the law break in us?
“There is nothing mere about symbols”, says the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. And “there is nothing mere about the struggle for architecture, about the strife...
When we began Mutant, we set ourselves the task of entering ordinary language. Not the magisterial or prophetic, but words, ideas and concepts so...
Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it...
