Hey, youz there! Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party, Verso, London and New York, 2016. 288 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 694 2.

Jodi Dean’s book Crowds and Party is poised to ruffle some feathers among theoreticians and activists on the left who seek a mode of doing politics in ways that downplay or denounce the apparatus of the party and the vocabulary of collective emancipation. Dean sets out to ‘intervene’ politically – in a way akin to the party that calls for a degree of discipline and clear delineation of shortand mid-term goals – into the current state of affairs marked by haphazard challenges to the existing order. However, Dean’s prose is free of the counterproductive, worn-out jargon of consciousness-raising and party-building that often features among groups with missionary pretensions. Instead, Dean’s analysis departs from the challenges and exigencies that she has observed within social movements, providing a distinct angle into the debate and revealing how political strategy can draw imaginatively from a variety of unexplored fields.