Gopal Balakrishnan on Sheldon Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. The first theorist of modern democracy in the twilight of what has become of it in his land of reference.
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN
THE ORACLE OF POST-DEMOCRACY
Sheldon Wolin’s magisterial study of Tocqueville is the culmination of a remarkable body of work on the history of political thought, the harvest of four decades of engaged reflection. Politics and Vision, published at the close of the Eisenhower era in 1960, was the landmark that defined this enterprise. In it, Wolin surveyed almost the entire history of political philosophy with the aim of probing the role its canonical texts had played in framing—or alternatively constricting—interpretations of what was at stake in civil wars, from the age of the classical polis to the heyday of Bolshevism. In the exhausted aftermath of these immense struggles, he argued, contemporary thought confronted a quite new situation: the near complete eclipse of the political, as a multifarious tradition of civic discourse, by a new order—the pseudo-consensual management of mass society. The main texts of the classical syllabus addressed only fitfully, if at all, the perils of this erasure of politics. It was now imperative to read them against the grain in order to bring the unprecedented problems of apathetic democracies—which he later more aptly dubbed post-democracies—into sharper focus.
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The Abolitionist—II
In the second part of a sweeping reconstruction of the development of Marx’s thought, the ways in which bourgeois society came to be replaced by capitalism as the cardinal object of investigation after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, and the political lessons of his passage across that watershed for rebellions in the new century.
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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.
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The Geopolitics of Separation
Contra Benno Teschke’s critique of Carl Schmitt in NLR 67, Gopal Balakrishnan argues that bourgeois society’s constitutive separation of the political and economic was a central problematic for the strategist of the intransigent right.
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The Coming Contradiction
Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic and its engagement with questions of historicity, narrative and time. Categories and concepts from Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Ricoeur, used to interrogate the impasses of the present—and to envision what lies beyond.
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Sermons on the Present Age
Gopal Balakrishnan on Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History. Consoling homilies for today’s liberal imperialists, from the theologian of the nuclear era.
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Speculations on the Stationary State
Will the present crisis issue in a new phase of accumulation, or a growthless ‘stationary state’? Gopal Balakrishnan charts epochal trends in world capitalism, and their imbrication with the debt-fuelled imbalances of the long downturn.
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News from Nowheresville
Gopal Balakrishnan on Parag Khanna, The Second World. Globe-trotting account from beyond the OECD, surveying the stakes in a coming battle between ascendant China and a West caught in imperial doldrums.
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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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States of War
Reflections on the challenge of Afflicted Powers, from the Retort collective. How is America’s forward policy since 9/11 best explained, and what does it tell us about the nature of the inter-state system today? Has the age of Great Power rivalry passed, and if so, what kind of geopolitical order is replacing it? Capital, spectacle and war in the vortex of the Middle East.
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Future Unknown: Machiavelli for the 21st Century
To which thinkers should we turn in a bid to ground a new conceptualization of political agency—or to determine whether such a move has been nullified by the transformations of the last decades? Gopal Balakrishnan on Machiavelli’s parables of innovation and readings of him from Rousseau to Schmitt, Strauss to Gramsci. The Florentine as strategist of beginning anew, in the context of historic defeat.
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The Age of Warring States
Gopal Balakrishnan on Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648. Recasting the origins of the modern state system within the matrix of emerging capitalist relations.
