CONTENTS

1. Tony Wood: The Case for 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.
2. Tom Mertes: A Republican Proletariat Why did cultural bogeys trump economic distress as working-class voters went to the polls in the US? Can the case of Kansas stand in for proletarian America at large, as Thomas Frank suggests? Billionaire Democrats and blue-collar Republicans in the twisting shapes of the 21st-century political system.
3. Radhika Desai: Forward March of Hindutva Halted? Ambiguous reasons for the unexpected relief of the BJP’s ouster in New Delhi: less a clear-cut verdict on Hindutva or neoliberalism than vicissitudes of regional power-broking and first-past-the-post electoral lottery? Congress caught between loyalty to the stock market and pressures of the poor, as it seeks to recover its position as the mainstream reference of Indian capital.
4. David Simpson: Politics as Such? In a wide-ranging debate, discussion of Francis Mulhern’s Metaculture has so far focused principally on its view of the substitutions of culture for politics in the tradition of Kulturkritik. David Simpson considers the other side of Mulhern’s argument, its critical assessment of Cultural Studies. Does a too Anglophone reading of its origins risk reproducing a resistance to the foreign in the discipline itself?
5. Sven Lütticken: After the Gods Mythology as the ‘condition and subject of all art’ in the varying conceptions of the early German Romantics and neoclassicism: from Schelling and Schlegel to Winckelmann and Goethe, meditations on Laocoon and anticipations of the Gesamtkunstwerk—issuing into the uncanny mythopoeias of modernity in Melville’s Confidence Man and the White Whale.
6. Gerard Dumenil, Dominique Levy: Neoliberal Income Trends A dramatic shift in the distribution of property and income to the very richest layers of US society has been a notorious trend of the past quarter-century, reaching dizzying peaks in the Clinton years. But these Himalayan heights of wealth and power are now surrounded by lower ridges of enrichment, with the formation of a new upper salariat stabilizing the post-Keynesian social order.
7. Dylan Riley: Enigmas of Fascism Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, Fascists and Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism. Alternative versions of the rise of a paramilitary Right in interwar Europe: were fascist movements ideologically coherent or inchoate, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?
8. Blake Stimson: The Crowd in the Machine Blake Stimson on Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce. Possibilities of a new avant-garde in a global fraternity of electronic upstarts, armed with web-based provocations and virtual détournements.
9. Peter Gowan: American Lebensraum Peter Gowan on Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. The neglected career of a key thinker of American expansionism, and his scenarios for a world order after the age of European imperial dominance.