NLR 46

articles
Régis DebraySocialism: A Life-Cycle

The ecosystem of socialism, seen through the material forms in which its principles were transmitted—books, newspapers, manifestos—and the parties, movements, schools and men who were its bearers. From Babeuf to Marx to Mao, the passage of printed ideas, and their inundation by images in the age of the spectacle.

Alexander CockburnWhatever happened to the Anti-War Movement?

Neither rising domestic opposition to the Iraq war, nor discussions of withdrawal in Congress, can be ascribed to pressure from mass mobilizations against the occupation. Alexander Cockburn investigates the disappearance of the anti-war movement: co-opted by the Democrats, captive to the logic of the War on Terror.

Daniel Buck & Richard WalkerThe Chinese Road

The PRC’s breakneck transition to capitalism seen through the prism of 19th-century Europe and America, as its cities rehearse the processes analysed by Marx: commodification of land and labour, formation of markets and capitalist elites. What lessons might the West’s past hold for China’s future?

Göran TherbornTranscaucasian Triptych

The dramatic trajectories of Tbilisi, Baku and Yerevan, and differing roles in the present. Göran Therborn tracks the fortunes of Georgia’s capital, seat of monarchs and Mensheviks, through alterations in its physical fabric, setting these alongside the metamorphoses of its Caucasian counterparts.

Hayden WhiteAgainst Historical Realism

Within the epic sweep of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hayden White argues, three genres are braided together: historical, novelistic and philosophical. If the former two—and the battles, loves and deaths they recount—continue the line of European realism, in the third Tolstoy presents history as a force beyond human control, in a bid to dismantle ideologies of progress.

Robert WadeA New Global Financial Architecture?

As the world economy shows growing signs of vulnerability, what mechanisms exist for averting repeats of the Asian or Mexican crises? Banking and regulatory regimes as instruments of standardization, pulling national economies into Anglo-American orbits.

reviews
In the Atlantic Mirror

Alistair Hennessy on J H Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 1492–1830. Conquistadors and indigenous peoples, colonists and slaves populate a continental canvas, in a magisterial comparison of British and Spanish imperialism in the Americas.

Resurrection of the Rentier

Robert Pollin on Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed. What have been the outcomes of neoliberalism in the advanced capitalist countries, and what possibilities exist for checking its momentum?

Conceptual Perspex

Marcus Verhagen on Liam Gillick, Proxemics. Writings of a graphomaniac artist, with bearings drawn from ‘relational aesthetics’ and a postdated modernism.