In the West, "the Left," understood as a loose conglomeration of interests centered around the goal of a fairer and more equal society, still struggles to make its voice heard and its influence felt, even amid an overwhelming global recession. In Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that only by broadening the domain of what is considered political and what can be made into politics will the Left be able to respond forcefully to injustice and inequality. In particular, the Left requires a more imaginative and experimental approach to the politics of creating a better society. The authors propose three political arts that they consider crucial to transforming the Left: boosting invention, leveraging organization, and mobilizing affect. They maintain that successful Left political movements tend to surpass traditional notions of politics and open up political agency to these kinds of considerations. In other words, rather than providing another blueprint for the future, Amin and Thrift concentrate their attention on a more modest examination of the conduct of politics itself and the ways that it can be made more effective.

“This is a fine and rousing book, and required reading for Messrs Miliband and Cruddas. What its heroic authors say is true, timely and damned difficult. But to outface the monster of corporate capitalism, protean, international but nonetheless fissiparous, often cowardly, always corrupt, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift have contrived this novel and vigorous weapon of dissent, so much required to fight the rough beast of a new epoch now slouching towards Wall Street to be born." - Fred Inglis (Times Higher Education) “This book makes a much-needed attempt to revamp the Left’s struggle to ‘voice a politics of social equality and justice’. Problematizing the Left’s ongoing failure to capture and cohere people’s aspirations, to organize politically and to secure achievements, they focus on an essential and, as they rightly claim, neglected aspect of Left politics: the art of doing politics." - Jessica Schmidt (Radical Philosophy) "This book is about what the Left should be proud of, what it can do to recapture the imagination of peoples to energize them into social action, and what horizons lay ahead in terms of actionable strategies. . . . [M]any of us interested in tipping the scales of justice on the side of integrity and dignity should be reading this wonderful and very useful book.”  - Eduardo Mendieta (City) "The authors of this provocative and insightful book promote an attitude of innovation and experimentation as a means to revive the fortunes of the western Left." - James Martin (European Political Science)

Ash Amin is Professor of Geography at Cambridge University. He is the author of Land of Strangers and coauthor (with Patrick Cohendet) of Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities.

Nigel Thrift is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick. He is the author of Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect and Knowing Capitalism. Amin and Thrift are the authors of Cities: Reimagining the Urban.