CONTENTS

1. Perry Anderson: Internationalism: a Breviary The metamorphoses of nationalism and internationalism, from the time of Kant to the ‘revolution in military affairs’. Social bases, ideological forms, geopolitical locations.
2. Tony Wood: Woe to the Victor Tony Wood on Laurence Kelly, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran. The strange career of Alexander Griboyedov, Russia’s satirist playwright and predator envoy to Persia.
3. Timothy Bewes: An Anatomy of Nostalgia Timothy Bewes on Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia. Are late modern longings for the past always second-rate sentiments, or are they redeemable by irony?
4. Robin Blackburn: The Enron Debacle and the Pension Crisis What does the collapse of America’s energy conglomerate reveal about the mechanisms of financial intermediation? Crooked accountancy and plundering of employee pensions as badges of the Anglo-Saxon model that is conquering the landscape of capital today.
5. Peter Lagerquist: Ramallah Days Social tensions explode on the main streets of Arafat’s seat of power as the Palestinian Authority elite turns its back on the deprivations of the refugees. The pressure-cooker of the West Bank under Israeli terror.
6. Pierre Bourdieu, Gunter Grass: The 'Progressive' Restoration A Franco-German exchange between novelist and sociologist on the success of neoliberalism in transforming political regression into the standard of social progress; and the fate of the Enlightenment in the two leading cultures of the European Union.
7. Wang Lixiong: Reflections on Tibet Breaking taboos on both sides of the conflict over Tibet, a Chinese writer within the PRC considers some of the bitter paradoxes of its history under Communist rule, and their roots in the confrontation of an alien bureaucracy and fear-stricken religion.
8. Michael Hardt: Porto Alegre: Today’s Bandung? The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre has become symbolic of the forces beginning to shape a front of common resistance to the pattern of imperial globalization. Yet its character and composition remain little understood. Michael Hardt analyses the debates within it, and their political potential.
9. Terry Eagleton: Capitalism and Form If bourgeois society requires both ceaseless economic dynamism and permanent ethical stability—disorder of invention and desire, order of labour and justification—what figures of the imagination offer a synthesis of these contradictory demands? The intertwining of routines and romances, virtues and villainies, in Scott and Goethe, Dickens and Balzac, Zola and Mann.
10. Jacques Ranciere: The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes Schiller’s conception of play, foundation at once of the art of the beautiful and the art of living, as the original scene of Western aesthetics, generating a set of recurrent emplotments of the relations between life and art, from the Juno Ludovisi to Jeff Koons.
11. Geoffrey Ingham: Shock Therapy in the City Geoffrey Ingham on Philip Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism. How the investment banks of the City of London were taken over by foreign capital, and whether their fate was avoidable.