New Left Review 83

New Left Review #83

by Perry Anderson, New Left Review (Editor)

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 divergent interests at work in the unfolding of American foreign policy, is a subject much debated and still obscure. In a fresh look at the topic, Anderson charts the intertwined historical development of America’s imperial reach and its role as the general guarantor of capital.

The internal tensions that have arisen are traced from the closing stages of the Second World War through the Cold War to the War on Terror. Despite the defeat and elimination of the USSR, the planetary structures for warfare and surveillance have not been retracted but extended. Anderson ends with a survey of the repertoire of US grand strategy, as its leading thinkers—Brzezinski, Mead, Kagan, Fukuyama, Mandelbaum, Ikenberry, Art and others—grapple with the tasks and predicaments of the American imperium today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

167 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Perry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson.

He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in New Left Review (January-February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_An...

Reviews

[cunningrocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Perry. One part intellectual history, one part potted history of twentieth century. Good footnotes and references for further reading as always

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

A different kind of NLR, Perry Anderson's intellectual history of American Empire is solid as expected. Especially pertinent to those still doubting whether Obama is rather similar like his predecessors in terms of foreign policy.

[Conrad Barwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant deconstruction of IR and foreign policy scholars from the US since the Cold War. An intellectual tour de force, this is a panoramic survey of the mainstream in American thinking on geopolitics, international relations and its own role in the world.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing analyis of US foreign policy and its thinkers.

[Bill Huizer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very intriguing passages, but I fear I found it over my head at times. The three stars is about where I'm at, not about the quality of the writing.