Tony Wood
‘Good Riddance to New Labour’ As the British general election approaches, a balance-sheet of New Labour’s thirteen years in office. The record of Blair and Brown—imperial wars abroad, subservience to the City at home—as so many reasons to cheer their downfall.

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NLR 62 was mailed to subscribers on 14th April

CONTENTS

  1. Tony Wood: Good Riddance to New Labour As the British general election approaches, a balance-sheet of New Labour’s thirteen years in office. The record of Blair and Brown—imperial wars abroad, subservience to the City at home—as so many reasons to cheer their downfall.
  2. Eric Hazan: Faces of Paris The changing face of Paris, seen through the eyes of its leading radical publisher. Geographies of growth and resistance, from medieval walled city to alienated banlieue, via German occupation and végétalisation.
  3. Yongle Zhang: The Future of the Past Assessment of Wang Hui’s landmark Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. Can the seeds of an alternative, non-Western modernity be located in the worldviews of earlier thinkers? Zhang Yongle observes constellations within a millennial philosophical firmament.
  4. Malcolm Bull: Green Cabinet, White Cube The necessity of Arcadia, as fabular vantage-point for clear vision of the world we inhabit. Malcolm Bull follows a wooded path leading from the mythological parallels of Renaissance art to the modern gallery space.
  5. Zeev Sternhell: In Defence of Liberal Zionism In a critical engagement with Gabriel Piterberg’s Returns of Zionism, Zeev Sternhell questions its account of Jewish nationalism’s origins and trajectory, offering a different picture rooted in the turbulent contingencies of 19th-century Europe and the war of 1947–49.
  6. Gabriel Piterberg: Settlers and their States Responding to Sternhell, Gabriel Piterberg insists on Israel’s comparability to other settler-colonial projects—as well as on the specificities, historical and ideological, of the Zionist enterprise.
  7. Rob Lucas: Dreaming in Code The working life of a web developer, between the contending pressures of capital’s needs and the programmer’s craft ethic. What forms of solidarity are available within the horizons of ‘immaterial labour’?
  8. Immanuel Wallerstein: Structural Crises A world-systems perspective on the post-2008 crash, seeing in present imbalances a conjunction of cyclical downturn and secular trends, and highlighting the nature of coming struggles for another, better order.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Peter Lawrence on Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion and War, Guns and Votes. Number-crunching solutions for global poverty from a former World Bank denizen.
  2. Paolo Flores d’Arcais on Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion. The philosopher of communicative action attempts to reconcile democratic principles with faith-based reason.
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Articles:

  1. Eric Hazan,
    ‘Faces of Paris’ The changing face of Paris, seen through the eyes of its leading radical publisher. Geographies of growth and resistance, from medieval walled city to alienated banlieue, via German occupation and végétalisation.

Editorials:

  1. NLR at 50, What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.
  2. Afghanistan, Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.
  3. World Conjuncture, A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.
  4. Wall Street Crisis, Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.
  5. NPT, What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.
  6. US Hegemony As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
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