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Charting Radical Theory

Gregor McLennan on Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?. A balance-sheet of the legacies of radical social theory, and its prospects in the new century.

Order Reigns in The Hague

Daniel Finn reports on September’s Dutch election, where the Liberal and Labour parties rallied to prevent Holland following the Greek example. Origins and orientations of the Socialist Party that briefly threatened the Pax Bruxelliana, and strategic lessons for the left from its campaign.

Ecuador’s Path

The Andean republic’s president discusses his formation and his government’s record in office, across a range of spheres: economy, environment, education, freedom of the press. How would he respond to critics, and what are the main challenges the country faces?

Bernstein’s Heirs

Dylan Riley on Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics and Ashley Lavelle, The Death of Social Democracy. Conflicting assessments of Bernstein’s legatees and the future of a reformist left.

For a Left With No Future

An epistle to capitalism’s immobilized opponents from the author of Farewell to an Idea. Drawing on sources from Bruegel to Nietzsche, Hazlitt to Benjamin, T. J. Clark supplies notes for a rethinking of left politics that would recognize the impasses of the present and the horrific legacies of the past, while abandoning the mirages of futurity.

A Metaphysics of Democracy

Jacob Collins on Marcel Gauchet, L’avènement de la démocratie, t. III. Europe’s age of catastrophe as struggle between religious and secular political logics, in the vision of a sotto voce liberal.

Presentism? Reply to T.J. Clark

Responding to Clark, Susan Watkins questions the adequacy of a perspective built upon man’s propensity for violence, and defends a historicized politics of social transformation against the cramped horizon of the present.

The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

The roots of today’s Great Recession are usually located in the financial excesses of the 1990s. Wolfgang Streeck traces a much longer arc, from 1945 onwards, of tensions between the logic of markets and the wishes of voters—culminating, he argues, in the international tempest of debt that now threatens to submerge democratic accountability altogether beneath the storm-waves of capital.

Levelling Out

Beyond existing arguments about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualize a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.

Subcontinental Strategies

Achin Vanaik explores the specificities of India’s social formation and its lefts, in the only country where both Stalinism and Maoism remain significant political actors. In the wake of recent electoral reverses, what are the prospects for radical renewal?

Red Bengal’s Rise and Fall

After the CPM’s ejection from office in Calcutta, how to explain the remarkable longevity of its rule and causes of its eventual downfall? Kheya Bag surveys the record of its three decades in power, and the mechanisms that sustained—and subverted—the party’s hold on the state.

Reclaiming Human Rights

Robin Blackburn on Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Demystifying the origins and ideological ascendancy of human-rights discourse.

Fetish of Geopolitics

Responding to Gopal Balakrishnan in NLR 68, Teschke underscores the problematic nature of Carl Schmitt’s accounts of colonial expansion and the inter-state system. Against these, a programme for a revised Marxist geopolitics.

The Geopolitics of Separation

Contra Benno Teschke’s critique of Carl Schmitt in NLR 67, Gopal Balakrishnan argues that bourgeois society’s constitutive separation of the political and economic was a central problematic for the strategist of the intransigent right.

Continental Laboratory

Michael Löwy on Emir Sader, A Nova Toupeira. Cycles of revolution in Latin America—laboratory both of neoliberalism and its challengers.

On the Concatenation in the Arab World

From Tunis to Manama, 2011 has brought a chain-reaction of popular upheavals, in a region where imperial domination and domestic despotism have long been entwined. A call for political liberty to reconnect with social equality and Arab fraternity, in a radical new internationalism.

Decisions and Indecisions

Where liberal thought has tried to quarantine the ‘dangerous mind’ of Carl Schmitt, recent revisions have found portents of contemporary imperial hubris in his analysis of victors’ justice. Warning against such 'rehabilitations', Benno Teschke detects a unifying set of preoccupations that render the thinker's transition from hyper-authoritarianism to fascism logical.

Uncertainty in the Enclave

Portrait of Hong Kong’s contested political scene. With democratizing reforms blocked by an entrenched alliance of CCP and local magnates, an increasingly radical populace seeks to break the deadlock. Might the PRC’s hyper-capitalist region be its weakest link?

The Ways of the World

In an interview recorded earlier this year, Peter Gowan recalls his political and intellectual trajectory, from the end of empires to Marxist militancy, from Eastern Bloc shipyards to the rise of the Dollar–Wall Street Regime.

Death of a Comrade

Tariq Ali pays tribute to Peter Gowan, long-standing friend and mainstay of NLR’s editorial board, and his unique combination of analytical acuity, appetite for debate and generosity of spirit.

How to Begin from the Beginning

Mountaineering lessons from the Bolsheviks’ master strategist provide a metaphor for regroupment in hard times. Slavoj Žižek identifies the principal antagonisms within contemporary capitalism, as the basis for positing anew the ‘communist hypothesis’.

Freedom’s Triumph?

Reviving its classical definition, ‘rule of the propertyless’, Luciano Canfora recasts the story of democracy in Europe as one of successive defeats, with lessons from Louis Napoleon on the use of suffrage as legitimation for oligarchic rule. Dylan Riley assesses a remarkable historical polemic from the Italian philologist.

Obama at Manassas

Does Obama’s victory signal a political turning point comparable to 1980 or 1932? Mike Davis maps county-level changes, from below—minority-majority demographics, subprime suburbs, white-collar financial worries—catalysed by the 2008 campaign. From above, realignment of American capital behind the Silicon President.

NATO’s Demographer

Göran Therborn on Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht. Political demography of the Mid-East youth bulge as threat to Western power.

The Philosopher and his Blacks

Robin Blackburn on Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light. Polemical assault on the French Enlightenment’s record on slavery—Condorcet’s contradictions, Diderot’s compromises, Montesquieu’s motivations.

The Weakest Link? Neoliberalism in Latin America

The continent that once served as laboratory for the Washington Consensus now represents the most substantial challenge to its prescriptions. A survey of left strategies, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, and prospects for counter-hegemonic regional integration.

Against Diversity

Tears and triumphs for race and gender have dominated discussion of the 2008 US election. Walter Benn Michaels argues that the Obama and Clinton campaigns are victories for neoliberalism, not over it—serving only to camouflage inequality.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

Repeatedly invoked to choke off emergent nuclear powers in East Asia and the Middle East, the NPT’s actual content has remained largely undiscussed. Norman Dombey itemizes the Treaty’s provisions, and the asymmetrical burdens imposed on signatories, the better to gauge its successes and limitations.

Twilight of the NPT?

Responding to Dombey, Peter Gowan asks why such an unequal treaty has attracted so many adherents—and why its superpower beneficiary has sought to undermine it. Do impasses around the NPT signal failures for US dominance?

American Duopoly

Tom Mertes on Jerry Hough, Changing Party Coalitions. Ethnic and confessional divisions as the origins of America’s political alignments, and the elite strategies that have culminated in today’s red–blue polarization.

Simplicissimus

Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.

Democracy’s Graveyards?

Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. A bold theoretical construction of causal relations between democratization and genocide, tested through detailed historical studies.

Jottings on the 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.

Light from the Fens?

Christopher Brooke on Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought. Enlightenment thinking in France, Germany, England, Scotland and America, as seen by the heirs of Pocock and Skinner.

Structure vs Conjuncture

Robert Brenner reads the US mid-term results against deeper structural shifts in the American polity. The rise of the Republican right seen in the context of the long downturn and dismantling of the liberal compact: from New Deal and Great Society to the capitalist offensive under Reagan, Clinton and Bush.

The Democrats After November

With anti-war sentiment growing—if still passive—in the US, how will Democrats use their recapture of Congress? Mike Davis analyses likely outcomes on the questions—Iraq, corruption, economic insecurity—that confront a Party leadership hooked on corporate dollars, and myopically gazing towards 2008.

Ruling the Void

The hollowing of democracies, as ruling elites retreat and voters abstain from mass electoral politics. Peter Mair on the paradoxes of its ‘third wave’ triumph and emergence of a governing class bereft of legitimacy, as parties become appendages of the state.

Depoliticized Politics, From East to West

Reflections on China’s ‘revolutionary century’, and roots of its state-party rigidification in the failures of the Cultural Revolution. What deeper dynamics of capitalist restoration link the contemporary neutralization of politics, east and west?

States of Failure

The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on ‘The Limits of Multitude’ in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?

Toryism After Blair

Susan Watkins on Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Strange Death of Tory England. Roles of déclassement, decolonization and Thatcherite revolution in the Conservative decline.

State Crisis and Popular Power

Bolivia’s new vice-president analyses the dual crisis of his country’s state. Exhaustion of the neoliberal primary-export model, and bankruptcy of a ‘colonial’ republican order founded on mestizo superiority.

Machiavellis for Postmoderns

Georgi Derluguian on Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics. Techniques of political legerdemain in the former Soviet states, and the swerving trajectories of its intelligentsia practitioners

The Landslide in Bolivia

The Left owes its December victory in Bolivia to the popular movements that have stymied water and gas privatizations since 2000. Forrest Hylton surveys the landscape ahead, and the militant formation of Morales’s running mate Álvaro García Linera.

Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World

Theorists of political justice have long taken the nation-state to be the relevant unit for their proposals. Nancy Fraser argues that the time for this is past. The necessary interconnection between struggles for economic redistribution and social recognition now requires that issues of political representation be re-tabled at a global rather than national level—where decisions affecting the fate of all are increasingly taken, or not taken.

The Limits of Multitude

What, if any, agencies of political change exist today—and how should they be conceived? Tracing the long tradition of contrasts between a ‘people’ and a ‘multitude’, Malcolm Bull argues that the differing resolutions of them by Hobbes and Spinoza have descended to the twenty-first century, issuing into a contemporary stand-off between market globalization and populist reactions to it.

Pax Europæa

Peter Gowan on Mark Leonard, Why Europe will Run the 21st Century. Panglossian manifesto for a Blairite Europeanism as model for the new Atlanticist world order.

Against Human Rights

Alibi for militarist interventions, sacralization for the tyranny of the market, ideological foundation for the fundamentalism of the politically correct: can the ‘symbolic fiction’ of universal rights be recuperated for the progressive politicization of actual socio-economic relations?

Future Unknown: Machiavelli for the 21st Century

To which thinkers should we turn in a bid to ground a new conceptualization of political agency—or to determine whether such a move has been nullified by the transformations of the last decades? Gopal Balakrishnan on Machiavelli’s parables of innovation and readings of him from Rousseau to Schmitt, Strauss to Gramsci. The Florentine as strategist of beginning anew, in the context of historic defeat.

Palestinian Defiance

The Ramallah doctor and activist, general secretary of the Al Mubadara coalition, on struggles against the Israeli Occupation, from the popular movement of the first Intifada to the tactical errors of the second, via the disaster of Oslo. As Abu Mazen is levered into place, what alternatives can combat both IDF stranglehold and the flyblown Palestinian Authority?

Arms and Rights

In an era of serial war, Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio as theorists of a perpetual peace. Jurisprudence and force in three parallel philosophical constructions of the present international order, and the unsettled afterthoughts—American, German, Italian—that accompanied them.