CONTENTS

1. Gavan McCormack: Koizumi’s Coup How and why Japanese voters rallied to a plebiscite on privatization, downing the first strong cocktail of neoliberalism and chauvinism—laced with submission to the United States—in East Asia. The make-over of the LDP, the eclipse of opposition, and the implications of handing Japan Post to global finance.
2. Malcolm Bull: The Limits of Multitude What, if any, agencies of political change exist today—and how should they be conceived? Tracing the long tradition of contrasts between a ‘people’ and a ‘multitude’, Malcolm Bull argues that the differing resolutions of them by Hobbes and Spinoza have descended to the twenty-first century, issuing into a contemporary stand-off between market globalization and populist reactions to it.
3. Forrest Hylton, Sinclair Thomson: The Chequered Rainbow As tensions mount on the eve of national elections in Bolivia, a study of the longest insurrectionary cycle of any Latin American country, stretching from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The explosive fusion of ethnic and class aspirations in the newest round of risings, overthrowing two presidents in as many years.
4. Alain Badiou: The Adventure of French Philosophy French philosophy from the 1940s to the 1990s viewed as a third exceptional moment in the history of the discipline, after classical Greece and enlightenment Germany. Alain Badiou takes four coordinates for a tour de force of terse analysis: the antecedents of this moment, the enterprises it launched, the links it forged with literature, and the relations it developed with psychoanalysis.
5. Nicky Hart: Of Procreation and Power Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.
6. Göran Therborn: A Liberal Provoked? Is patriarchy a structure of power in the family or something wider? Is it largely a pre-capitalist phenomenon? What have been the principal forces dissolving it—commodity relations, liberal ideas, or radical political action? Where are negative rates of reproduction in advanced societies likely to lead? A sharp exchange of ideas beween Nicky Hart and Göran Therborn.
7. Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin: Superintending Global Capital The end of US hegemony has been announced more often even than that of neoliberalism. Yet American power persists, with little resistance so far from rival centres of accumulation. Rationales and indices of the continuing role of the United States as overlord of world capital.
8. Robin Blackburn: Imperial Margarine Robin Blackburn on Niall Ferguson, Colossus and Empire. Rehabilitations of colonial rule for today’s proconsuls in Baghdad and Kabul.
9. Tami Sarfatti: Napoleon the Double Tami Sarfatti on Steven Englund, Napoleon: a Political Life. Ambiguities of the citizen-emperor, and the twists of his career in France.
10. Ronald Suny: Soviet Ice-Breaker Ronald Suny on Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century. The stubborn heterodoxy of a former officer of the Red Army and leading scholar of the USSR.