CONTENTS
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Susan Watkins: The Political State of the Union
Debt, deflation and stagnation have now become the familiar economic stigmata of the EU. But what of its political distortions? A survey of the three principal—and steadily worsening—imbalances in the outcome of European integration: the oligarchic cast of its governors, the lop-sided rise of Germany, and the declining autonomy of the Union as a whole in the North Atlantic universe.
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Bhaskar Sunkara: Project Jacobin
Opening a series on new radical media, the founder of the most imaginative, and successful, US socialist journal of the new century explains how it was created, what its editorial and political strategy has been, and why it has met such a warm response.
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Daniel Finn: Rethinking the Republic
Nowhere else in the West does a single figure occupy the same position in national life as the political writer Fintan O’Toole in Ireland. The first full consideration of the cursus and corpus of this powerful critic of the island’s establishment, and the society over which it has presided. Merits and limitations of another understanding of ‘republicanism’ in Ireland.
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Francesco Fiorentino: Ambition
How and when did ambition cease to be a moral fault in the European mind and acquire the trappings of ambiguous virtue it possesses in modern times? The ardent hero of Stendhal’s novel of Restoration France as cynosure of the change, and its implications for the social order.
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Enrica Villari: Duty
In diametric contrast, a sense of duty as the condition of an ethical life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. No longer, however, dictated by tradition or convention, but designed as individual choice—in illusion or fulfillment—through the modest routines of daily life.
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Gopal Balakrishnan: The Abolitionist—1
Opening salvo of a two-part reconstruction of Marx’s intellectual passage through the Hegelian—then Ricardian—conceptual landscape of his early years, taking him to the threshold of his mature architectonics of capitalism as a mode of production. From a starting-point in the philosophical empyrean of the 1830s to a turning-point with the economic upturn of the early 1850s, the development of one sketch of an historical materialism to the brink of another.
BOOK REVIEWS
- Vivek Chibber on Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. Sombre balance-sheet of the failures of Indian development, and remedies insufficient for them.
- Michael Denning on Nikil Saval, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace. Transitions from counting-house to typing-pool to playpen, as capital’s designers sought to contain the discontents of labour.
- Blair Ogden on Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. The lost wanderer of legend in new and more searching biographical light.
Articles:
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Daniel Finn,
‘Rethinking the Republic’
Nowhere else in the West does a single figure occupy the same position in national life as the political writer Fintan O’Toole in Ireland. The first full consideration of the cursus and corpus of this powerful critic of the island’s establishment, and the society over which it has presided. Merits and limitations of another understanding of ‘republicanism’ in Ireland.
-
Francesco Fiorentino,
‘Ambition’
How and when did ambition cease to be a moral fault in the European mind and acquire the trappings of ambiguous virtue it possesses in modern times? The ardent hero of Stendhal’s novel of Restoration France as cynosure of the change, and its implications for the social order.
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Michael Denning,
‘Design and Discontent’
Michael Denning on Nikil Saval, Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace. Transitions from counting-house to typing-pool to playpen, as capital’s designers sought to contain the discontents of labour.
Editorials:
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Annexations,
After decades of connivance with territorial seizures from Palestine to East Timor, the West rediscovers the principle of state sovereignty in Crimea. The actual record of 20th-century land grabs, and the cross-cutting geopolitical pressures bearing down on Ukraine.
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2011,
Echoes of past rebellions in 2011’s global upsurge of protest. Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers?
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Arab Concatenation,
From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.
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Concert of Powers,
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Force and Consent
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.
Articles:
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Bhaskar Sunkara,
‘Project Jacobin’
Opening a series on new radical media, the founder of the most imaginative, and successful, US socialist journal of the new century explains how it was created, what its editorial and political strategy has been, and why it has met such a warm response.
-
Enrica Villari,
‘Duty’
In diametric contrast, a sense of duty as the condition of an ethical life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. No longer, however, dictated by tradition or convention, but designed as individual choice—in illusion or fulfillment—through the modest routines of daily life.
-
Gopal Balakrishnan,
‘The Abolitionist—1’
Opening salvo of a two-part reconstruction of Marx’s intellectual passage through the Hegelian—then Ricardian—conceptual landscape of his early years, taking him to the threshold of his mature architectonics of capitalism as a mode of production. From a starting-point in the philosophical empyrean of the 1830s to a turning-point with the economic upturn of the early 1850s, the development of one sketch of an historical materialism to the brink of another.
-
Vivek Chibber,
‘Audit Bleak: Comfort Weak’
Vivek Chibber on Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions. Sombre balance-sheet of the failures of Indian development, and remedies insufficient for them.
-
Blair Ogden,
‘A Revolutionary Mobile’
Blair Ogden on Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. The lost wanderer of legend in new and more searching biographical light.
