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Consilium

“This issue of the journal is devoted to a two-part study of American foreign policy by Perry Anderson. ‘Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of us world power; ‘Consilium’, the thinking of its policy elite. nlr has run three special numbers before: Tom Nairn . . .” read more

Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947

Recently discovered diaries of the exiled novelist, with portraits of associates past and present, reflections on the Second World War, and vivid descriptions of the country where Serge lived out his final years.

Third World and After

Ian Birchall on Christoph Kalter, Die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt. The French left’s discovery of the Third World.

Delhi’s Dynasts

Kheya Bag on Rani Singh, Sonia Gandhi: An Extraordinary Life, An Indian Destiny. Flacking for the world’s longest-running electoral dynasty.

The Setting Sun

In one of the last interviews before his death in 2009, the author of Tristes Tropiques discusses his early literary ambitions, the relation between field work and theory, and the future of anthropology as a discipline.

Dialectic of Dionysus

Sven Lütticken on Asger Jorn, Fraternité Avant Tout. The Danish artist and Situationist wrestles with Engels and Nietzsche.

Alexander Cockburn, 1941–2012

A tribute to Alexander Cockburn—director of CounterPunch, Marxian environmentalist, long-standing editor of New Left Review. Robin Blackburn traces his path from County Cork to Soho, Havana to Manhattan, the Florida Keys to California’s Lost Coast.

The Family Firm

Tom Hazeldine on D R Thorpe, Supermac. Lengthy apologia for Harold Macmillan from a serial Tory biographer.

Ronald Fraser, 1930–2012

Tribute to the author of Blood of Spain, locating the impulse behind his oeuvre in a commitment to explore lived experience. Reconstructions of work, war, politics and subjectivity, from Napoleonic era to post-Fordist present.

Digital Partisans

A tonic for cyber-babble from the pages of Mute magazine, assessing the real impact of new technology on politics and cultural life. Can this valuable source of critique survive in a cold recessionary landscape?

Celebrity Thaumaturge

Marco D’Eramo on Sergio Luzzatto, Padre Pio. A scholarly view of Italy’s most famous cleric and the cult he inspired.

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.

An Odd Couple

Anders Stephanson on Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin. McKinley meets his nemesis amid labour crackdowns at the dawn of the US imperial age.

Our Operaismo

Reflections on the historical experience, core friendships and culture of operaismo from one of its intellectual figureheads. Workerism as a perspective and a politics now lost to decades of defeat.

Peter Campbell

Remembering the watercolourist, typographer and writer—resident art critic at the London Review of Books—who redesigned NLR.

Lucio Magri

Homage to an outstanding figure of the European Left, who fought to preserve the link between radical thought and mass politics as Italy’s Communist tradition dissolved around him.

Tony Judt: A Cooler Look

Few Anglophone intellectuals have received such posthumous acclaim as the Director of the Remarque Institute, leading contributor to the New York Review of Books, and late champion of social-democracy. Regularly compared to George Orwell, if not Isaiah Berlin, does any careful examination of his oeuvre sustain such panegyrics?

The Gadfly

Steven Lukes on John Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography. Heterodoxies, philosophical and sociological, of England’s outstanding post-war emigré.

Leaving Shabazz

Tariq Ali on Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. The political formation of one of America’s most gifted black orators.

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 Mage of Lake Geneva

Emilie Bickerton on Antoine de Baecque, Godard, biographie. Life and work of Europe’s greatest living visual artist.

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.

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.

On Mao’s Contradictions

Tariq Ali on Rebecca E Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World. Level-headed exploration of the Great Helmsman’s life and legacies.

Towards a New Manifesto?

Record of 1956 conversations between the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ranging across themes of work and time, utopianism and change, and the relation between radical theory and practice in the absence of a party.

Islam’s Land of Ideas

Kevan Harris on Mehran Kamrava, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. Partial mapping of the Islamic Republic’s ferment of ideas, from theocratic jurisprudence to liberal anxieties over ‘modernization’.

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.

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.

Capital’s Cartographer

A former pupil recalls Giovanni Arrighi’s world-spanning trajectory, landmark intellectual contributions and great personal generosity. Geographies of power, histories of inequality in the work of one of the leading analysts of our times.

Althusser and the Rue d'Ulm

Retrospective look at the life and work of Althusser, seen within the structures—personal, political, institutional—of the École Normale Supérieure. Teaching, thinking and writing at the intersection of private and public realms.

Reading Fanon in the 21st Century

Immanuel Wallerstein draws on The Wretched of the Earth to set out three central dilemmas for today’s anti-systemic movements. Questions of violence, identity and class seen through an anti-colonial lens.

The Winding Paths of Capital

The author of Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing, interviewed by David Harvey, on dispossession and development, capitalist crises, China’s future. The political education of a teenage factory-manager, via African liberation struggles and autonomia operaia; and influences—Braudel, Gramsci, Smith, Marx—in Arrighi’s work.

Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face

The interweaving of literary affinities and cross-cultural influences, occluded by postcolonialist discourse, that characterized a vanished cosmopolitan modernism. Amit Chaudhuri explores paradoxes of belonging and defamiliarization in Bloomsbury and Bombay.

Caring for the Nation

Henry Zhao on Gloria Davies, Worrying about China. The range of contemporary disputes among Chinese intellectuals, and what they characteristically have in common.

Roads to Renegacy

A philosophe engagé discusses the ‘wrong turn’ taken by so many erstwhile French Maoists, locating its sources within the landscape of 1970s militancy. The perils of politics as ambition, as fashion, as absolute—paving a mediatized path from 68 to Sarkozy.

The Great Divider

Alexander Cockburn on Rick Perlstein, Nixonland. Whatever happened to the Great Society? A Democratic breviary on the late 60s as supposed crucible of today’s partisan dissensus.

Sadrist Stratagems

Vijay Prashad on Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq. Perceptive portrait of the Occupation’s single most elusive foe, and of the traditions of Shia militancy from which he descends.

The Tailor of Ulm

How should the Left think about the Communist experience today? A founding theorist of Il Manifesto reflects on the need for critical examination of the past—and the lessons to be drawn for the future from the PCI’s trajectory.

The Comrade from Milan

Memories of war-time resistance work and the political culture of the million-strong PCI in liberated Milan, from one of the founding editors of Il Manifesto. Questions and doubts, in this portrait of an unsentimental education.

No Forbidden Zone in Reading?

For a decade, the monthly review Dushu has published some of China’s most incisive debates on the country’s culture and economy. Zhang Yongle’s survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia.

Kali’s Prophet

Aaron Benanav on Thomas McCraw, Prophet of Innovation. A Schumpeter for post-Keynesian times? Professional trajectory and personal tragedies of the theorist of creative destruction.

Zion’s Rebel Daughter

Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt’s powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project, written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.

From Arras to Thermidor

Christopher Prendergast on Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity. The life, career and death of Robespierre, permeated by tensions between ends and means, terror and virtue; and the polemical furies that have clouded his legacy.

A Hollow Crown

Duncan McCargo on Paul Handley, The King Never Smiles. Taboo-breaking biography of the world’s longest-serving monarch, Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej. Is the throne’s mystique, carefully reconsolidated in the 20th century, now threatened by the lottery of primogeniture?

Whitewashing Jackson

Tom Mertes on Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson. A retouched portrait of the Democrat founding father—minus Indian massacres, slave exploitation and financial bubble.

Being Max Weber

Peter Thomas on Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: die Leidenschaft des Denkens. The first full biography for 80 years, with new details of the thinker’s life seen through Green spectacles.

The Life and Times of Simón B

Tariq Ali on John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: a Life. The Liberator as pragmatist, and his legacy from the colonial Andes to the Caracas of today—a prophylactic portrait for the times?

Necessary Love

Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren.

An Arabian Master

The remarkable life and literary career of Abd al-Rahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet. Sabry Hafez charts the emergence of Munif’s searing fictions. Evocations of desert traditions, foreign interference, the deformities of despotism and lessons of resistance.

Napoleon the Double

Tami Sarfatti on Steven Englund, Napoleon: a Political Life. Ambiguities of the citizen-emperor, and the twists of his career in France.