More than three decades after the fall of the communist bloc, world politics seems to lack a global horizon that can orient transformative action. With “the end of grand narratives,” as Jean-François Lyotard famously described “the postmodern condition,” no universalist ideal seems capable of inspiring the formation of social movements large and durable enough to effectively confront the pressing challenges of our time: economic inequality, racism, misogyny, global warming, and many others. Political struggles have proliferated across Western societies in recent years, but for the moment, they have not crystalized into an organized political project that can contest the hegemony of contemporary capitalism.1 This fragmentation signals a political impasse characteristic of our current, postmodern time: on the one hand, political actors tend to distrust universalist political ideals inherited from the past because of their potential complicity in longstanding forms of domination such as racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and misogyny, and...

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