Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai, The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology, London and New York: Routledge, 2020, ISBN: 978-1-138-31214-2

The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology, by Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai, is a compelling critique of a type of thinking which pervades modern society; one which sees both people and objects as infinitely malleable and interchangeable, capable of being deconstructed and reconstructed according to the dictates of a universalistic knowledge deployed by uninvolved ‘experts’. It focuses our attention on a type of logic which is dominant alike in economics, technology, and bureaucratic administration: a logic naturalised by its ubiquity, but inherently destructive and far from inevitable. Tricksterology uses the anthropological figure of the trickster to develop a distinctive and original diagnosis of the modern world.