CONTENTS
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Susan Watkins: Shifting Sands
What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.
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Anders Stephanson: The Philosopher’s Island
Anders Stephanson on Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Did the Weltgeist drop anchor in revolutionary Saint-Domingue?
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Gopal Balakrishnan: 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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Aaron Benanav: Landscapes of Labour
Aaron Benanav on Jan Breman, The Poverty Regime in Village India. A sociologist explores the mechanisms of inequality shaping the life-world of informal labour.
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Mike Davis: Who Will Build the Ark?
Copenhagen’s charades dispel any illusion that world rulers intend to deal with the environmental damage industrialization has caused. Mike Davis argues that green urbanism’s twining of social equality and ecological sustainability could offer an alternative starting-point.
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Teri Reynolds: Dispatches from the Emergency Room
Dispatches from an Oakland Emergency Department, testifying to the stark inequalities between public and private, insured and unprotected, that Democrat proposals will enshrine.
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Perry Anderson: Two Revolutions
How to explain the opposed outcomes for communism in Russia and China, after 1989? Classes and leaders, anciens régimes and external settings, examined in comparative perspective.
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Tariq Ali: President of Cant
From declamations in Cairo to silence over Gaza, occupation of Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tariq Ali asks what has changed in us foreign policy since the departure of Bush.
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Franco Moretti: The Grey Area
Flexible morality and capitalist imperatives of the bourgeois fin-de-siècle, as captured in the obscure misdeeds of Ibsen’s protagonists.
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Eric Hobsbawm: World Distempers
The author of Age of Extremes discusses the major developments since the end of the Cold War. Amid the turbulence of capital’s advance, what larger problems should historians seek to understand?
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Robin Blackburn: State of the Union
The fate of post-bellum attempts to extend egalitarian impulses across race lines and factory floors, amid the sharpening class struggles of the Gilded Age.
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Stuart Hall: Life and Times of the First New Left
NLR’s founding editor recalls the emergence of the British New Left out of the double conjuncture of 1956—Hungary and Suez—and identifies the cross-currents, cultural and political, that nourished its initial cohort.
Articles:
-
Susan Watkins,
‘Shifting Sands’
What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.
-
Mike Davis,
‘Who Will Build the Ark?’
Copenhagen’s charades dispel any illusion that world rulers intend to deal with the environmental damage industrialization has caused. Mike Davis argues that green urbanism’s twining of social equality and ecological sustainability could offer an alternative starting-point.
-
Eric Hobsbawm,
‘World Distempers’
The author of Age of Extremes discusses the major developments since the end of the Cold War. Amid the turbulence of capital’s advance, what larger problems should historians seek to understand?
-
Robin Blackburn,
‘State of the Union’
The fate of post-bellum attempts to extend egalitarian impulses across race lines and factory floors, amid the sharpening class struggles of the Gilded Age.
-
Franco Moretti,
‘The Grey Area’
Flexible morality and capitalist imperatives of the bourgeois fin-de-siècle, as captured in the obscure misdeeds of Ibsen’s protagonists.
-
Aaron Benanav,
‘Landscapes of Labour’
Aaron Benanav on Jan Breman, The Poverty Regime in Village India. A sociologist explores the mechanisms of inequality shaping the life-world of informal labour.
Editorials:
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Wall Street Crisis,
Against mainstream accounts, Peter Gowan argues that the origins of the global financial crisis lie in the dynamics of the New Wall Street System that has emerged since the 1980s. Contours of the Atlantic model, and implications—geopolitical, ideological, economic—of its blow-out.
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NPT,
What are the geopolitical origins of the NPT, and what are its actual effects? Non-proliferation as nuclear privilege of the few, weapon of intimidation of the one, submission of the many—and its impact on the peace movement.
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Afghanistan,
Reasons for the West’s stalemate in Afghanistan sought neither in lack of troops and imperial treasure, nor in Pakistani obstruction, but in the very nature of the occupation regime. Tariq Ali on the actual results of ‘state-building’ in the Hindu Kush, as a broken country is subjected to the combined predations of NGOs and NATO.
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World 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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US Hegemony
As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
Articles:
-
Tariq Ali,
‘President of Cant’
From declamations in Cairo to silence over Gaza, occupation of Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tariq Ali asks what has changed in us foreign policy since the departure of Bush.
-
Teri Reynolds,
‘Dispatches from the Emergency Room’
Dispatches from an Oakland Emergency Department, testifying to the stark inequalities between public and private, insured and unprotected, that Democrat proposals will enshrine.
-
Stuart Hall,
‘Life and Times of the First New Left’
NLR’s founding editor recalls the emergence of the British New Left out of the double conjuncture of 1956—Hungary and Suez—and identifies the cross-currents, cultural and political, that nourished its initial cohort.
-
Gopal Balakrishnan,
‘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.
-
Anders Stephanson,
‘The Philosopher‘s Island’
Anders Stephanson on Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Did the Weltgeist drop anchor in revolutionary Saint-Domingue?
-
Nancy Fraser,
‘Feminism Co-opted?’
Do feminism and neoliberalism share a secret affinity? Nancy Fraser on the co-option of gender politics by the ‘new spirit’ of post-Fordist capitalism, and subordination of its radical critique to a World Bank agenda. Might a neo-Keynesian shift offer prospects for socialist-feminist renewal?
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Hung Ho-Fung,
‘America’s Head Servant?’
Against predictions that China will soon replace the US as the world’s dominant economic power, Hung Ho-fung argues that the PRC’s export-oriented growth and vast dollar reserves have trapped it in a subordinate role—to which much of its elite remains committed.
