CONTENTS
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Perry Anderson: Jottings on the 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.
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Gabriel Piterberg: Zion's Rebel Daughter
Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt’s powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project, written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.
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Eric Hazan: Under New Management
Dispatches from France during Sarkozy’s first hundred days. In the Elysée, echoes of a Giscardian ‘change of style’; among the Socialists, a programmatic disarray compounding a long heritage of desertions; in the streets, immigration raids, counter-demonstrations, and hints of an embattled everyday resistance.
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Roberto Schwarz: Competing Readings
Roberto Schwarz discusses the cultural-political import of rival interpretations of Machado de Assis, within the critical space of world literature. Local versus international, specific versus universal, entangled within the ironies and dizzying narrative disjunctures of a Brazilian master.
BOOK REVIEWS
- Poulod Borojerdi on Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Magisterial summation of a lifetime’s engagement with Utopia as literary form and political programme.
- Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. A bold theoretical construction of causal relations between democratization and genocide, tested through detailed historical studies.
- Aaron Benanav on Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation. A Schumpeter for post-Keynesian times? Professional trajectory and personal tragedies of the theorist of creative destruction.
- Michael Hardt on Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Neoliberal transformations, from Chile to occupied Iraq, as instances of a ‘disaster capitalism’ enabled by socio-economic and ecological trauma.
Articles:
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Roberto Schwarz,
‘Readings as Rivals’
Roberto Schwarz discusses the cultural-political import of rival interpretations of Machado de Assis, within the critical space of world literature. Local versus international, specific versus universal, entangled within the ironies and dizzying narrative disjunctures of a Brazilian master.
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Robin Blackburn,
‘Plan for a
Global Pension’
On current projections, a fifth of the world’s population will be over 60 by 2050. With old-age poverty set to increase across the planet, Robin Blackburn presents a plan for funding a universal pension of a dollar a day.
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Malcolm Bull,
‘Vectors of the
Biopolitical’
Taking coordinates from Aristotle, Malcolm Bull finds in Agamben’s biopolitics and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach the disconnected fragments of a lost vision of society, adumbrated by Marx, glimpsed and rejected by Arendt. Strange meetings as the trajectories of the disenfranchised and the empowered, human and non-human, converge.
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Mike Davis,
‘The Democrats
before 2008’
With anti-war sentiment growing—if still passive—in the US, how will Democrats use their recapture of Congress? Mike Davis analyses likely outcomes on the questions—Iraq, corruption, economic insecurity—that confront a Party leadership hooked on corporate dollars, and myopically gazing towards 2008.
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Robert Brenner,
‘US Politics’
Robert Brenner reads the US mid-term results against deeper structural shifts in the American polity. The rise of the Republican right seen in the context of the long downturn and dismantling of the liberal compact: from New Deal and Great Society to the capitalist offensive under Reagan, Clinton and Bush.
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Gabriel Piterberg,
‘Zion’s Rebel Daughter’
Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt’s powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project, written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.
-
Eric Hazan,
‘Under New Management’
Dispatches from France during Sarkozy’s first hundred days. In the Elysée, echoes of a Giscardian ‘change of style’; among the Socialists, a programmatic disarray compounding a long heritage of desertions; in the streets, immigration raids, counter-demonstrations, and hints of an embattled everyday resistance.
Editorials:
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Tariq Ali,
‘War for the
Middle East’
As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.
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Chechnya,
Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.
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New Labour,
Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.
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Iraq,
With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.
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Europe
Europe’s political landscape, revealed by the protest votes in France and the Netherlands. Mutation and dilation of the EU in the age of liberal hegemony, and lessons to be drawn from the unprecedented irruptions of discontent against it.
Articles:
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Dylan Riley,
‘Democracy’s Graveyards?’
Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. A bold theoretical construction of causal relations between democratization and genocide, tested through detailed historical studies.
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Manuel Riesco,
‘Is Pinochet Dead?’
Central planks of the Chilean dictator’s state have been left untouched by successive elected governments. Tracking recent student and labour protests, Manuel Riesco asks whether the ‘Transition’ will now finally follow Pinochet into the grave.
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Gopal Balakrishnan,
‘Role of Force
in History’
Gopal Balakrishnan takes issue with an ambitious attempt to apply evolutionary paradigms to human history, which would locate the wellsprings of conflict in the combative make-up of the species. Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization as an instance of neo-social darwinism adapted to the multicultural spirit of the age.
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Göran Therborn,
‘After Dialectics’
Göran Therborn offers a panoramic survey of left social theory since the fall of Communism. The vicissitudes of modernity as contested temporal narrative, and the divergent thematic paths—religion, Utopia, class, sexuality, networks, world-systems—that are emerging in the new landscape.
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Peter Mair,
‘Ruling the Void’
The hollowing of democracies, as ruling elites retreat and voters abstain from mass electoral politics. Peter Mair on the paradoxes of its ‘third wave’ triumph and emergence of a governing class bereft of legitimacy, as parties become appendages of the state.
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Poulod Borojerdi,
‘The Ends of Utopia’
Poulod Borojerdi on Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. Magisterial summation of a lifetime’s engagement with Utopia as literary form and political programme.
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Wang Hui,
‘Depoliticized Politics’
Reflections on China’s ‘revolutionary century’, and roots of its state-party rigidification in the failures of the Cultural Revolution. What deeper dynamics of capitalist restoration link the contemporary neutralization of politics, east and west?
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John Frow,
‘Prose of the World’
John Frow on Franco Moretti, ed, The Novel. Landmark collection of essays tracing the history and geography of the novel, and relations between morphology, themes and social forms.
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Anders Stephanson,
‘Simplicissimus’
Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.
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Aaron Benanav,
‘Kali’s Prophet’
Aaron Benanav on Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation. A Schumpeter for post-Keynesian times? Professional trajectory and personal tragedies of the theorist of creative destruction.
