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Counterstrike 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.

The Abolitionist—II

In the second part of a sweeping reconstruction of the development of Marx’s thought, the ways in which bourgeois society came to be replaced by capitalism as the cardinal object of investigation after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, and the political lessons of his passage across that watershed for rebellions in the new century.

The Abolitionist—1

Opening salvo of a two-part reconstruction of Marx’s intellectual passage through the Hegelian—then Ricardian—conceptual landscape of his early years, taking him to the threshold of his mature architectonics of capitalism as a mode of production. From a starting-point in the philosophical empyrean of the 1830s to a turning-point with the economic upturn of the early 1850s, the development of one sketch of an historical materialism to the brink of another.

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.

The Coming Contradiction

Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic and its engagement with questions of historicity, narrative and time. Categories and concepts from Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Ricoeur, used to interrogate the impasses of the present—and to envision what lies beyond.

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.

Speculations on the Stationary State

Will the present crisis issue in a new phase of accumulation, or a growthless ‘stationary state’? Gopal Balakrishnan charts epochal trends in world capitalism, and their imbrication with the debt-fuelled imbalances of the long downturn.

News from Nowheresville

Gopal Balakrishnan on Parag Khanna, The Second World. Globe-trotting account from beyond the OECD, surveying the stakes in a coming battle between ascendant China and a West caught in imperial doldrums.

Role of Force in History

Gopal Balakrishnan takes issue with an ambitious attempt to apply evolutionary paradigms to human history, which would locate the wellsprings of conflict in the combative make-up of the species. Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization as an instance of neo-social darwinism adapted to the multicultural spirit of the age.

States of War

Reflections on the challenge of Afflicted Powers, from the Retort collective. How is America’s forward policy since 9/11 best explained, and what does it tell us about the nature of the inter-state system today? Has the age of Great Power rivalry passed, and if so, what kind of geopolitical order is replacing it? Capital, spectacle and war in the vortex of the Middle East.

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.

The Age of Warring States

Gopal Balakrishnan on Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648. Recasting the origins of the modern state system within the matrix of emerging capitalist relations.

Algorithms of War

The theoretical structure of the most ambitious projection of the American empire to date, and its political attachment to the Clinton Presidency. History and strategy, rhetoric and realities, in Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles.

Overcoming Emancipation

Gopal Balakrishnan on Martin Beck Matuštík, Jürgen Habermas: a Philosophical-Political Profile. Bends in the thought of Germany’s leading philosopher, and its engagement with history, across half a century.

The Age of Identity?

Gopal Balakrishnan on Lutz Niethammer, Kollektive Identität. How rooted are current conceptions of collective identity in an ominous inter-war history, and what substitutes are on offer?

The Oracle of Post-Democracy

Gopal Balakrishnan on Sheldon Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. The first theorist of modern democracy in the twilight of what has become of it in his land of reference.

The Politics of Piety

Gopal Balakrishnan on Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. How radical is the new discourse of concern with race and religion?

Hardt and Negri’s Empire

Gopal Balakrishnan on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Globalization as a new Roman order, awaiting its early Christians.

From Florence to Moscow

Gopal Balakrishnan on Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us. The French philosopher on the Italian consigliere: a Parisian Marxism in the mirror of the Medici.

Two on the Marble Cliffs

Gopal Balakrishnan on Ernst Jünger–Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel. Correspondence between two of Germany's most important thinkers of the radical Right.

The National Imagination

“Eric Hobsbawm, in the final chapter of a comprehensive survey on the history of nationalism, claimed that as a historical phenomenon, it had passed its heyday. Employing a Hegelian idiom he suggested that the nation-state was now on a declining curve of historical viability, the beginnings of its . . .” read more