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Corporate Populism and Partyless Democracy
Are there more tensions in New Labour’s constitutional reforms than Peter Mair’s model of a ‘partyless democracy’ allows? Anthony Barnett argues that the style of Blair’s government is actually closer to that of a large media corporation—bound to come to grief on the variegated realities of modern Ukania.
Partyless Democracy
New Labour’s rule in the UK is often held to offer a paradox: devolution of power to regions and cities, concentration of power in the central executive and support structures. Peter Mair suggests there is no contradiction—Blair’s project is a ‘consensual’ system above politics, gutted of traditional parties.
The New Imperial State
Globalization is the watchword of the moment. Does it mean the irresistible sway of markets over states—or are welfare regimes in Europe or dirigiste governments in East Asia still potentially robust? Neither, Leo Panitch argues: the reality is an unprecedented dominance of the United States over world capital flows and allied political systems alike.
Ukania Under Blair
Great Britain has finally yielded a parliament to Scotland. But the Labour regime in London still clings convulsively to the totems of Ukania, in Tom Nairn’s savage updating of Robert Musil. New Labour’s eupeptic rhetoric of youth as a sure sign of a system being wheeled into the terminal ward.
When the Party Commits Suicide
“Finally, in the deluge of the conservative-liberal ‘Black Books’ on Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’, a work which not only meets the highest standards of historical research, but also enables us to grasp the unique social dynamics that culminated in the great purges of the 1930s: J. Arch Getty’s and Oleg . . .” read more
Seattle Diary: It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas
“Seattle has always struck me as a suspiciously clean city, manifesting a tidiness that verges on the compulsive. It is the Singapore of the United States: spitpolished, glossy, and eerily beautiful. Indeed, there is, perhaps, no more scenic setting for a city set next to Elliot Bay on . . .” read more
Europa and Utopia: How Cultural History Deals with the Paradox of Modernity
“In the light of Luisa Passerini’s new book on the cultural and political discourse on Europe in Britain in the 1930s, it is tempting to draw a number of parallels between that decade and our own. The inter-war years, Passerini shows, were a period of much speculation and . . .” read more
Social Theory Put to the Test of Practice: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens
“The 1990s have presented a particularly contradictory aspect to social theorists. On the one hand, the ideological climate was dominated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European extensions. While the most widely noticed intellectual trends took different forms—for example, Fukuyama’s announcement of the End . . .” read more
The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing
“The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of . . .” read more
Indonesian Nationalism Today and in the Future
“In my experience, nationalism is frequently misunderstood. For that reason, I will begin my remarks by discussing briefly two common kinds of misunderstanding, using Indonesia as an example of a phenomenon almost universal in this century which is now crawling to its end. The first is that nationalism . . .” read more
Why There Will Be No Revolution in the US: A Reply to Daniel Lazare
“In recent years, Daniel Lazare has emerged as one of the most provocative and insightful critics of the us federal constitution and the superstitious reverence for it which is cultivated by the American political establishment. In his brilliant polemic The Frozen Republic (1996), Lazare subjected American political . . .” read more
The Nature of the British-Irish Agreement
“It is an academic, personal and political honour to give the ninth John Whyte memorial lecture. It is an academic honour because John Whyte was the most dispassionate analyst of our conflict—and so is a hard act to follow. Interpreting Northern Ireland still conveys his marvellous gifts of . . .” read more
America the Undemocratic
“The United States, as every American schoolchild knows, is the oldest and still greatest political democracy on earth. Non(Un?)-Americans may disagree, but on one point there is complete unanimity: the United States is different. Just how different can be gleaned from two seemingly innocuous statements by the man . . .” read more
A Sense of the Left
“Norberto Bobbio’s book on the Right and Left marks a significant moment in the author’s long and distinguished career as a political thinker. Published during the Italian electoral campaign of 1994, Destra e Sinistrais one of his most topical and personal writings, whose popular success in Italy is . . .” read more
Tony Blair’s Warfare State
“Armaments have made a re-appearance in British politics. Under-the-counter sales to Sierra Leone have been revealed. The Saudis, major customers for British arms, have released two nurses held for murder. Jonathan Aitken, a former defence procurement minister, has been charged with perjury and other offences, following a libel . . .” read more
Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler
“Judith Butler’s essay is welcome on several counts. It returns us to deep and important questions in social theory that have gone undiscussed for some time. And it links a reflection on such questions to a diagnosis of the troubled state of the Left in the current political . . .” read more
The Thatcher Government’s Attack on Higher Education in Historical Perspective
“Some ten millennia separated the agricultural revolution from the emergence of Britain as the First Industrial Nation. A mere two centuries has seen the supersession of the first industrial revolution by the second. This has not yet acquired a definitive title. However, if we may denominate an era . . .” read more
A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism
“To the town of Ludwigshafen, its mayor, Mr Wolfgang Schulte, and the Ernst Bloch Institute, my warmest thanks for the honour I have been awarded, which associates my own name with that of one of the German philosophers whom I most admire. My thanks also to Mr Ulrich . . .” read more
Socialism by Any Other Name? Illusions and Renewal in the History of the Western European Left
“The 1990s are hard times for socialists. A dynamic capitalism is no longer much restrained by labour, or by the constraints imposed by socialism’s presence. Eric Hobsbawm, the most judicious of commentators from inside the socialist tradition, could only end his recent book, Age of Extremes, on a . . .” read more
Fin-de-Siecle Socialism: The United, Modest Left
“In his biography of Stalin, Isaac Deutscher asserted that the historian, inevitably, believes in inevitability: ‘The historian deals with fixed and irreversible patterns of events: all weapons have already been fired; all wills have been spent; all decisions have been achieved; and what is irreversible has assumed the . . .” read more
Merely Cultural
“I propose to consider two different kinds of claims that have circulated recently, representing a culmination of sentiment that has been building for some time. One has to do with an explicitly Marxist objection to the reduction of Marxist scholarship and activism to the study of culture, sometimes . . .” read more
The Future of German Social Democracy
“[. . .] Over the past few years, we have not only achieved greater unity in the party, we have also refocused the image of the Social Democrats. In recent times, throughout the years of Kohl’s government, something has gone missing from our society—something which is essential for . . .” read more
The Limits of Social Democratic Admirableness
“Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism is in physical form as well as in intellectual content very suitable to its actual object of study, Western European social democracy and labourism after World War ii. It is big (943 pages plus index), heavy, attractive—from the cover to . . .” read more
Secularism and the State: Towards Clarity and Global Comparison
“Debates about the process of secularization have, in recent years, centred on the work of a group of sociologists and historians, mostly British, who have put forth and debated what is known as ‘the secularization thesis’. This correlates modernization with secularization, and generally measures secularization primarily through declining . . .” read more
The Unbearable Lightness of Diana
“In the week after Princess Diana’s death I was baffled and deeply alienated by the public response to the horrifying accident, and its amplification by the mass media. I could neither understand nor share the apparent outpouring of grief, nor the explanations thought up by media commentators for . . .” read more
Confronting Neoliberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realipolitik
“The dominance of neoliberal policies in Anglo-American countries during the past two decades has not only had a profound impact on the character and programmes of major parties, but has also led to dramatic changes within the ranks of former Marxists and critical theorists. These former radicals now . . .” read more
'La Querelle des Femmes' in the Late Twentieth Century
“Although this essay is about feminist challenges to certain ideas of universal citizenship, it was provoked by anger: the intense anger being expressed by some Parisian intellectuals and journalists from across the political spectrum about American politics in general and American feminism in particular. And also my own . . .” read more
At the Limits of Political Possibility: The Cosmopolitan Democratic Project
“Liberal democracy, at its apparent moment of world historical triumph, is besieged. The ineffectiveness and timidity of economic policy in advanced capitalist states suggests a scission between the de jure sovereignty of those states (the legitimate right to rule in a demarcated territory) and their de facto autonomy . . .” read more
Towards an International Social Movement Unionism
“In the late 1990s, the structure of world capitalism has become clear. Capitalism is now global, but the world economy remains fragmented and highly uneven. The old North-South divide has widened in terms of the incomes of the majority. The South is locked into the role of low-wage . . .” read more
New Labour and its Discontents
“The week before the European Union summit in Amsterdam, Tony Blair delivered a Thatcher-style lecture at the Malmö gathering of European socialist parties. ‘As I said to the Labour Party a few years ago, we must modernize or die,’ he declared; there was no choice for the European . . .” read more
From Inequality to Difference: A Severe Case of Displacement?
“When considering the shifts in left thinking over the past fifteen years, it is hard to avoid some notion of displacement: the cultural displacing the material; identity politics displacing class; the politics of constitutional reform displacing the economics of equality. Difference, in particular, seems to have displaced inequality . . .” read more