New Left Review, issue 113

In the latest issue:

Göran Therborn: Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy

Hailed with relief for fear of a bleaker outcome, the SAP’s poor performance in the September 2018 election underlines the malaise afflicting social democracy’s global flagship. Therborn charts the country’s SAP-led neoliberalization—and rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats—against the backdrop of recession and refugee arrivals.

Perry Anderson: 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.

David Kotz: End of the Neoliberal Era?

Prognosis for the US economy, after a decade of unprecedented monetary stimulus. Does the distempered character of the recovery—soaring profits, feverish asset prices, anaemic wage growth—signal a structural crisis in the existing regime of capitalist accumulation, and transition to a new institutional framework?

Richard Stallman: Talking to the Mailman

Growing domination of companies over users, malicious function­alities, tracking and widespread surveillance. The leading campaigner for software freedom discusses the present technological landscape and the political relevance of the campaign for free software.

Donald MacKenzie, Alice Bamford: Counterperformativity

If speech can—in the famous argument of J. L. Austin—not only be true or false, but also do things, what about economic models? And what about when models go wrong, or actually undermine their own assumptions? Black–Scholes, gamma traps and gaming—a typology of the perverse effects of some key financial tools.

Dylan Riley: Metaphysicking the West

Dylan Riley on Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe. ‘The West’ as normative construct—and narrative telos—in a moralizing account from Berlin of the 20th century’s wars and revolutions.

Zöe Sutherland: Artwork as Critique

Zöe Sutherland on Marcus Verhagen, Flows and Counterflows. Comparative survey of how contemporary artists have engaged with the invisible dynamics of globalization through their work.

John Grahl: Beyond Redistribution?

John Grahl on Philippe Askenazy, Tous rentiers! Contra Piketty’s fiscal prescriptions, a French economist’s recipe for reducing inequality through re-mobilization of labour and critique of ‘propertarian’ ideology.

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The H-Word

by Perry Anderson

Few terms are so widely used in the literature of international relations and political science, with so little agreement about their exact meaning, as hegemony.In the first full historical study o...

The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

by Perry Anderson

An explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in Gramsci’s thought, as revelatory today as on first publication in New Left Review in 1976. This landmark essay has been the subject of kee...

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

by Perry Anderson

Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the dive...

The Indian Ideology

by Perry Anderson

The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most pop...

Lineages of the Absolutist State

by Perry Anderson

Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiq...

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

by Perry Anderson

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of th...

The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origin...

Spectrum

by Perry Anderson

The focus of Spectrum is the range of contemporary ideas that runs from conservative to liberal to radical conceptions of state and society, rarely considered in the same optic. It looks at the the...

The Origins of Postmodernity

by Perry Anderson

Where does the idea of the postmodern come from? Who first conceived, and who developed it? How have its meanings changed? What purposes do they serve? These are the questions addressed in The Orig...

The Question of Europe

Contributions by Sam Aaronovitch, Timothy Garton Ash, Jacques Attali, Wynne Godley, John Grahl, Dieter Grimm, Jürgen Habermas, John Keegan, Karl Lamers, Edward Luttwak, Alan S. Milward, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, J.G.A. Pocock, Anthony D. Smith, Guy Standing, Göran Therborn, William Wallace and J.H.H. Weiler

Edited by Perry Anderson and Peter Gowan

Contemporary European politics seems to be gripped by a stifling conformism, an uninspiring uniformity of outlook which afflicts all the major parties. However, if there is one issue which does div...

A Zone of Engagement

by Perry Anderson

The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics....

English Questions

by Perry Anderson

A set of reflections on British society and culture, this volume falls into two principal parts. The first consists of a pair of essays published in New Left Review in the sixties; “Origins of the ...

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

by Perry Anderson

What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? I...

Arguments Within English Marxism

by Perry Anderson

The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working...

Considerations on Western Marxism

by Perry Anderson

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Ru...

From Marxism to Post-Marxism?

by Göran Therborn

A comprehensive history of the development of Marxist theory and the parameters of 21st-century politicsIn this pithy and panoramic work - both stimulating for the specialist and the accessible to ...

Cities of Power

by Göran Therborn

In this brilliant, very original survey of the politics and meanings of urban landscapes, leading sociologist Göran Therborn offers a tour of the world’s major capital cities, and the forces that h...

What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?

by Göran Therborn

In his new book, Göran Therborn – author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society – looks at successive state structures in...

Inequalities of the World

Contributions by Louis Chauvel, Michael Hout, Arne L. Kalleberg, Markku Kivinen, Michèle Lamont, Huang Ping, Elisa P. Reis, Denny Vågerö and Peter Weingart

Edited by Göran Therborn

Over the last century, global inequality has developed and continues to develop in unexpected and disturbing patterns. In this important new book, Therborn and his colleagues connect current world ...

The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology

by Göran Therborn

Few concepts have been so intensively discussed or so widely sponsored as that of “ideology.” Whether read as the expression of social classes or attributed a material independence and efficacy, wh...