The End of History and the Last Man

One dimensional man

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2004. New York. Penguin Books. 448 pages. ISBN: 0143035592 (paper).

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Critical Theories of Globalization is a highly accessible text that provides a comprehensive overview of globalization and its consequences Exploring the insights of a wide range of critical theorists, this book provides an introduction to globalization from the perspective of social and political critical theory Clearly organized around thematic chapters designed to provoke student inquiry, the book demonstrates how the views of critical theorists are crucial to understanding the global processes shaping the world today

Critical Theories of Globalization

Four decades have now passed since the 1974 publication of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy. In many ways, the startlingly ambitious project launched by this book, world-systems analysis, must surely be deemed a thoroughgoing success story. The Modern World-System I was instantly recognized as pressing, challenging, even game-changing — so that a critic as apparently resolute as Theda Skocpol (1977: 1075, 1089) still described it as ‘a splendid undertaking’, concluding that there was ‘no intellectual project in the social sciences … of greater interest and importance’. World-systems analysis was institutionalized as a section of the American Sociological Association, at Binghamton from 1976 with the establishment of the Fernand Braudel Centre, since the mid-1990s in the Journal of World-Systems Research and through the disciplined and creative work of a cohort of talented researchers, taking the world-systems approach in an array of new and interesting directions.1 On this score, Therborn (2008: 104) comments that Wallerstein’s ‘academic entrepreneurial acumen and achievements have had only one comparable Marxist parallel — Max Horkhiemer’. And Wallerstein was president of the International Sociological Association (ISA) from 1994 to 1998, has been senior research scholar at Yale since 2000 and is an altogether obvious inclusion in the recent Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists, Vol. II (Ritzer and Stepnisky, 2011), alongside the likes of Elias, Foucault, Bourdieu and Habermas.

Reflections on Wallerstein: The Modern World-System, Four Decades on:

Book review: The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today

It has been suggested that, today, with the growth of Right-populism and white nationalism, Western nations are haunted by the spectre of fascism. This article explores the consolidation of a ‘post...

Reflecting on Post-Fascism: Utopia and Fear

Mikhail Bakunin’s last few years — following his dynamic, productive anarchist phase, running from the mid-1860s to the early 1870s (Shatz in Bakunin, 1990) — were far from happy. In a letter to the Journal de Geneve in 1874, Bakunin wrote that he felt ‘neither the strength nor, perhaps, the confidence which are required to go on rolling Sisyphus’s stone against the triumphant forces of reaction … Henceforth I shall trouble no man’s repose; and I ask, in my turn, to be left in peace’ (in Woodcock, 1962: 169), explaining to Elisee Reclus the following year that ‘there is absolutely no revolutionary thought, hope, or passion left among the masses’ (in Dolgoff, 1972: 354). This gloom was materially well founded: the tragic end and reactionary aftermath of the Paris Commune; the acrimony and intrigue between the Bakuninites and the Marxists, culminating in Bakunin’s expulsion from the First International; the split with Carlo Cafiero (who ended his days in madness, obsessed with the idea that he might be consuming more than his fair share of sunshine), amidst charges Bakunin had mismanaged the Italian’s inheritance; the unfortunate entanglement with the nihilist Sergei Nechayev; the participation in the chaotic, doomed Bologna uprising of 1874, possibly in the hope of salvaging something with a heroic death (Joll, 1979; Marshall, 1992; Masters, 1974; Woodcock, 1962).

Chamsy el-Ojeili

Papers

Critical Theories of Globalization

Reflections on Wallerstein: The Modern World-System, Four Decades on:

Book review: The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today

Reflecting on Post-Fascism: Utopia and Fear

Anarchism as the Contemporary Spirit of Anti-Capitalism?: A Critical Survey of Recent Debates