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Pathbreakers High and Low
A decade ago, Christopher Clark upended conventional accounts of the origins of the First World War; he has now rewritten the history of the European revolutions of 1848–1849, and proposed a new way of considering their outcomes. Analytically, what differentiates and what connects these two outstanding achievements?
The Standard of Civilization
A world order governed by the rule of law is the mainstay of the West’s claim to leadership. A host of institutions, topped by the UN itself, lend this principle material form. But what is the juridical nature of international law? History, theory and practice of a powerful hegemonic instrument.
Giorgio Fanti
Portrait of the organizer of the 1963 issue of Il Contemporaneo on Britain, by way of his memoir, I distintivi all’occhiello. From the Resistance to the PCI to journalistic postings in Italy and beyond, a work marrying sentimental history and political retrospect, revealing a radical and independent-minded figure.
Two Great Losses
With the deaths of Mike Davis and Tom Nairn, the international left has lost two of its most original and far-sighted thinkers—and NLR, two outstanding contributors, whose signature theses profoundly enriched the thought-worlds of the journal. As prologue to fuller commemoration of each, Perry Anderson reflects on what both have meant for the Review.
Ukania Perpetua?
Beset by simultaneous crises of class, state and nation, is the UK once again haunted by the spectre of decline? Perry Anderson presents an analysis spanning economy, polity, ideology, territory and diplomacy, testing how far the successive theses offered by NLR can be brought to bear on the present moment.
Situationism à L’envers?
Building on the extended review by Cédric Durand in NLR 116/117, Perry Anderson seeks clues to the politics and method behind Adam Tooze’s Crashed in the author’s wider oeuvre. From the Peace of 1919 to the dollar swap-lines of 2008, the oft-heralded rise of a beneficent American hegemon.
The Missing Text
The debates of the English New Left in the summer of 1961 as backdrop to the memorable essay by Raymond Williams, printed below—and possible explanation for its first appearance in an obscure, formerly CIA-funded literary journal. Perry Anderson asks how knowledge of it would revise Edward Thompson’s critical assessment of The Long Revolution in NLR.
An Afternoon with Althusser
Notes on a conversation in the summer of 1977, when the philosopher made an impromptu visit to the NLR office. Wide-ranging discussion on Althusser’s relations with the PCF, the condition of Marxism, the Chinese and Russian revolutions compared; Trotsky, Sraffa and the problems with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
The Centre Can Hold
How did Emmanuel Macron become President of France virtually overnight? What are the likely consequences of his rule? The long epoch of collusive alternation between Centre-Left and Centre-Right, and its abrupt ending; the realities of Le Pen’s Front National, and the riposte of Mélenchon’s La France insoumise. Has neo-liberalism finally arrived in force in Paris, and if so what are the implications for Europe?
The Heirs of Gramsci
Transformations of the Prison Notebooks’ fertile problematic of hegemony by a quartet of thinkers—Hall, Laclau, Guha, Arrighi—from Jamaica, Buenos Aires, Bengal, Milan. Coercion and persuasion, ideology and economic interest, national and inter-state systems as means for thinking Thatcherism’s ascendancy, populist strategies, peasant rebellion, post-colonial rule and the geo-political logics of American power.
The House of Zion
The fate of the Palestinians and the fortunes of Israel, after fifty years of occupation, and American and European collusion with it. Realities behind the official tropes decorating a ‘two-state solution’, and hesitations of nascent debate over a single state in the territory once ruled as a mandate by Britain.
Incommensurate Russia
With the collisions over Ukraine, the contradictions in Russia’s relations with the West have been sharpened by sanctions and economic crisis. Perry Anderson on the spectre of Great Power status that still informs the post-multinational nation—and why, despite all the Kremlin’s attempts at integration with the US–EU, the country remains indigestible.
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.
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.
US Elections: Testing Formula Two
If the eighties were the decade of the Right in the West, the nineties saw a comparable sweep by the Centre-Left. Does the loss of the US Presidency by the Democrats presage another turn of the wheel in Atlantic politics? With Bush at the helm in the New World, what are the prospects for the Gores of the Old?
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
A Culture in Contraflow--II
“A movement from modes of production to those of communication, which marks the historical anthropology of Jack Goody was, of course, also one of the central themes of the work of Raymond Williams. The parallels in the development of an original cultural materialism in the two bodies of . . .” read more
A Culture in Contraflow--I
“Few subjects can be so elusive as a national culture. The term lends itself to any number of meanings, each presenting its own difficulties of definition or application. Towards the end of the sixties, I tried to explore what seemed one significant structure to fall under such a . . .” read more
Roberto Unger and the Politics of Empowerment
“The largest industrial power of the Southern hemisphere has recently completed one of the most protracted and divisive processes of constitution-making in modern history. The fruits of nineteen months of labour by the Constituent Assembly of Brazil have already aroused violent reactions. ‘Clauses on employment worthy of Cuba, . . .” read more
The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio
“In early 1848, within a few weeks of each other, two antithetical texts were published in London, on the eve of European revolution. One was The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The other was Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill. The former famously . . .” read more
The Figures of Descent
“The debates aroused by a number of theses on Britain, published in New Left Review some twenty years ago, had at their centre a dispute over the character of the dominant class in Hanoverian and Victorian England, and the nature of the state over which it presided. These . . .” read more
Modernity and Revolution
“The subject of our session this evening has been a focus of intellectual debate and political passion for at least six or seven decades now. It already has a long history, in other words. It so happens, however, that within the last year there has appeared a book . . .” read more
Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism
“Trotsky’s interpretation of the historical meaning of Stalinism, to this day the most coherent and developed theorization of the phenomenon within the Marxist tradition, was constructed in the course of twenty years of practical political struggle against it. His thought thus evolved in tension with the major conflicts . . .” read more
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci
“Today, no Marxist thinker after the classical epoch is so universally respected in the West as Antonio Gramsci. Nor is any term so freely or diversely invoked on the Left as that of hegemony, to which he gave currency. Gramsci’s reputation, still local and marginal outside his native . . .” read more
Components of the National Culture
“This fiftieth issue of New Left Review opens with a critique, by Perry Anderson, of the structures of bourgeois culture in Britain. The task of forging a revolutionary and internationalist political culture in this country has always been a central preoccupation of the Review. This involves attacking the . . .” read more
Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism
“In a voice choking with anger, Edward Thompson has denounced the historical and theoretical work on British society developed in this review. In twenty years of public life, no other group or individual has earned the kind of unprovoked attack he has launched over some fifty pages of . . .” read more
The Left in the Fifties
“For a decade in Britain, under Conservative rule, there was a recognizable and active Left. Now at last there is a Labour Government. But there is no longer, in the same sense, a Left. This paradox must be the starting-point of any consideration of the tasks confronting socialists . . .” read more
Critique of Wilsonism
“The relatively stable equilibrium, which defined British politics and society for a decade, has now broken down. The crisis of the traditional English hegemonic class, under whose rule British capitalism has in recent years so visibly declined, threatens the long supremacy of the Conservative Party. It would be . . .” read more