NLR 104

articles
Wolfgang StreeckThe Return of the Repressed

Is the long reign of neo-liberalism coming to an end, struck by the untoward blows of Brexit, Trump and spread of populist insurgencies across Europe, as victims of its pattern of globalization start to find a voice? If so, with no radical alternative yet in sight, is a strange interregnum looming, where ‘everything is possible and nothing consequential’?

Gopal BalakrishnanCounterstrike West

Conceptions of a revolution from the right in the era of European fascism, and an activist overcoming of conservative dejection at the fate of the West. Political and philosophical imaginings of an alternate capitalist modernity, capable of settling accounts with decadence and Bolshevism.

Rohana KuddusThe Ghosts of 1965

Half a century after the massacres that wiped out Indonesian communism, and twenty years since the arrival of electoral democracy, how far does the legacy of Suharto’s New Order live on? Under a smothering canopy of reaction—and accommodations to it—seedlings of hope and progress in the world’s fourth-most populous society.

Jennifer QuistLaurelled Lives

What literary credentials are required for consecration by the Swedish Academy? How Western liberalism reproduces itself in a set of standardized ideological and cultural preferences underlying the ostensible cosmopolis of Nobelists.

Joshua RahtzThe Soul of the Eurozone

The character, career and intellectual output of Europe’s most consequential politician, Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble—longest-standing member of parliament in his country’s history, superintendent of national reunification and drill-master of continental austerity, obliged to serve in the shadow of a muddle-through mediocrity.

reviews
A New Economics

John Grahl on Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. An ambitious recasting of economic thought, from classical political economy to the mathematized present, in a synthesis aiming at realistic capture of the vicissitudes of contemporary capitalism.

An Aphorist of the Cinema

Emma Fajgenbaum on Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson. The lapidary sayings and injunctions to the self, admiring interviews and guarded replies, of the most auratic and least documented director of post-war French cinema.

Arakan Divided

Carlos Sardiña Galache on Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide and Khin Maung Saw, Behind the Mask: The Truth Behind the Name ‘Rohingya’. Two opposite versions of the identity and condition of the Muslim population of the province of Arakan.