Reedsy Discovery
Reviewed by Ashley Roby ·
“A book that offers a new language to understand contemporary politics.”
“Conley succeeds in discussing systems theory, geopolitical strategy, the complexity of modern society, and ideological multiplication while remaining accessible to readers and not drifting into jargon and rhetorical idealism.”
Roby reads Beyond Synthesis as an attempt to change the language of international politics itself — to retire the nineteenth- and twentieth-century tools we still use to describe a twenty-first-century world. She follows the book’s opening challenge to the “End of History” thesis through its evidence: a China that became more capitalist without becoming liberal, a Europe that integrated economically while fragmenting politically, and a world of sustaining contradictions in which adaptation outperforms resolution. She also picks up the book’s argument, in the company of Baudrillard and Virilio, that narrative has stopped shaping opinion and become infrastructure — the foundation on which reality now operates.
“The author has proven his points and expanded his thesis by not just calling the 21st century complex, but rather defining and defending the grounds on which complexity became the defining condition.”
“The author centers his chapters on vivid political scenarios before drawing out theoretical discussions rooted in contemporary schools of political thought.”