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Editorial
Critical projects that seek to sustain themselves over a long stretch of time have to change if
they are to avoid becoming part of an establishment. And if they are prepared to change, they
have to change more than once. Radical Philosophy emerged out of the long 1960s, framed polit-
ically by the student movement and the New Left, and intellectually by a rebellion against what
the first issue of the journal termed ‘the poverty of so much that now passes for philosophy’.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this was refashioned by a more profound engagement with feminism,
ecology and the new social movements, as well as by an attempt to get to grips with both the
changing forms of what was then called ‘continental philosophy’ and the consequences of the
Thatcherite and Reaganite counter-revolutions. From the early 2000s, when the first version
of the radicalphilosophy.com website went live, the journal sought consistently to expand its
geopolitical horizons, with contributions from Latin America, Africa and East Asia - albeit never
enough - while publishing important articles that brought philosophical perspectives to a range
of new disciplinary and cross-disciplinary areas from media theory, geography and film studies
to architecture, literary and art theory. Throughout this history, we have tried to remain true
to our founding ambition to ‘free ourselves from the restricting institutions and orthodoxies of
the academic world, and thereby to encourage important philosophical work to develop’.