In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire

by Mike Davis

The author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums attacks the current fashion for empires and white men’s burdens in this blistering collection of radical essays. He skewers contemporary idols such as Mel Gibson, Niall Ferguson, and Howard Dean; unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system; visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the border; predicts ethnic cleansing in New Orleans more than a year before Katrina; recalls the anarchist avengers of the 1890s and “teeny-bopper” riots on the Sunset Strip in the 1960s; discusses the moral bankruptcy of the Democrats in Kansas and West Virginia; remembers “Private Ivan,” who defeated fascism; and looks at the future of capitalism from the top of Hubbert’s Peak.

No writer in the United States today brings together analysis and history as comprehensively and elegantly as Mike Davis. In these contemporary, interventionist essays, Davis goes beyond critique to offer real solutions and concrete possibilities for change.



"Davis remains our penman of lost souls and lost scenarios: He culls nuggets of avarice and depredation the way miners chisel coal."
--The Nation

“A rare combination of an author, Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in one.”
--Susan Faludi, author, Backlash

"Davis' work is the cruel and perpetual folly of the ruling elites."
--New York Times

Mike Davis is the author many books, including City of Quartz, The Ecology of Fear, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in San Diego.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Essays, Journalism, United States, Education

340 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Mike Davis was a social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lived in San Diego.

Reviews

[Maya Hartman · Rating 4 out of 5]

My man was cooking!

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Praise of Barbarians is a collection of articles written by Mike Davis, most for the journal Socialist Review. Davis is a socialist writer living in San Diego. He's been an activist since his high school days, once serving as southern California organizer for the SDS in the mid 1960s.

He writes in a very engaging style - slightly ironic, seldom doctrinaire. Even if you don't share his socialist viewpoint you might still enjoy many of his articles. His perspective is that of an engaged political activist, with a deep skepticism and contempt for the mass media lies and distortions that we are daily subjected to. For those of us who are disgusted with the current lack of journalistic integrity in the mainstream media, Davis reminds us that this is not a new phenomenon. He writes at length about the Sunset Strip protests from 1966-1968, and quotes the LA Times at length: even then, the Times was a tool of the conservative business interests in LA, and journalistic integrity was never allowed to get in the way of pushing their viewpoint. By the way, the Buffalo Springfield song, "For What It's Worth" ("There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear, ...") was based on the Sunset Strip protests / police riots.

The unifying theme running through these articles is that of America as an imperialist nation in decline. Objectively that seems incontrovertible. The illegal conquest of Iraq, US troops stationed in over a hundred countries worldwide, worldwide support for dictatorships and right-wing oligarchies, refusal to be bound by international law - any one of these would be sufficient proof of imperialism. And that the US is in decline is evident to us all. Our economy has been built on a foundation of sand for the past 25 years as one administration after another has sought to export jobs and import cheap goods, converting our country into a nation of consumers rather than producers.

Strangely, though, I found that Davis' articles were cause for hope. We can change our country for the better. We need to look objectively at what works and at what hasn't worked and make the right decisions. The electoral process will probably not do us much good. Little progress has ever been achieved in America via the ballot box. The vote for women, civil rights, improvements in labor conditions, and environmental protections have all come from mass movements and pressure from masses of ordinary people. It can happen again.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mike Davis is an old-school, die-hard US socialist who has been causing trouble for over 40 years now, this book is a great collection of his work since late 2001 though it is not anywhere as much about the Roman Empire or barbarians (in the classical sense) as I thought. Davis titles and a few epigraphs evocative of Roman history-- Romans at Home, Legions at War, The Unease in Gaul, Dark Water Rising, and Old Flames -- to discuss US politics, the US war machine, the hell that is home for David- California, catastrophic climate change, and brief histories of inspiring workers, activists, and revolutionaries of the past.

The book moves quickly from essay-to-essay, since most were written for his regular column in Socialist Review or newspapers in California and France, so it is easy to stay committed. Some of the first section is a bit out-dated, it would have been great to read in-the-moment but yesterday's reporting is just that; the books gets better and better as it goes, though, so I speak highly of it.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW!!! Davis continues to be the most eloquent leftist writer of the day! I generally don't follow radical works but the analysis of the 2006 midterm elections alone is worth the price. The analogies to Imperial Rome are sublime and the phantasmogoric, vertigo-inducing leaping from New Orleans to the Mexican border to Puerto Vallarta to 1930s Chicago, to 1840s Paris. Bravo!

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read several things by Mike Davis, mostly Urban Theory, but lately I have been branching out. He is an incredible writer, thinker and social critic. Leave it to say, nothing I read here surprised me, believing completely that America is an empire on the decline. But I still got really pissed when I read the essays. He skewers a lot of "sacred American stuff" and leaves you with an ugly taste in your mouth for America and her ruling class. Here is the final paragraph from the Afterword: In De Ste. Croix's opinion, those vampires," the Roman and Byzantine upper classes, not the maligned "barbarians" (Goths, Vandals, Huns and Arabs), were the true looters and destroyer of Classical civilization. "As I see it, the Roman political system (especially when Geek democracy had been wiped out ) facilitated a most intense and ultimately destructive economic exploitation of the great mass of the people, whether slave or free, and it made radical reform impossible. The result was that the propertied class, the men of real wealth, who had deliberately created this system for their own benefit, drained the life-blood from their world and thus destroyed Graeco-Roman civilization over a large part of the empire....." It remains to be seen who will cry for the new Rome on the Potomac. It is a great book, now back to William Faulkner.

[Simon Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ROBUST AND WIDE RANGING WRITER

Theres few in the same league as Mike Davis - he has all the attributes of a good essayist, he can write well, with humour and wit, and can make the inexplicable comprehensible in a relatively short space.

He writes on a wide range of topics in this collection of essays - from the post hurricane Katrina ethnic cleansing of New Orleans to figures past and present in the American Union movement. His speciality is California, his home state, and his point of view is that of the underdog: the Latinos, blacks and the working and underclass. America isnt the sole subject of the essays either, a short essay celebrates the efforts of "Private Ivan" - the ordinary russian soldier who bore the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany. Many of the other essays are informed by an awareness of history and the world beyond Americas borders.

The essays are easily comprehensible to a non American and offer a fascinating take on America that stands in stark contrast to pretty much anything you'll see in the mainstream media, or a month of sundays worth of cable/satellite reality tv slush. Read it - and laugh and weep and be informed. America will never look the same.

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 1 out of 5]

About 80% of this book focuses on the failures of certain American political parties/politicians with a nod towards how the other guys could do it better. Or if not that, how real democracy would fix such-and-such issue. I have no interest in this. A majority of these pieces were written for Socialist magazines, which creates a rather detestable orientation to an otherwise reasonable historian.

There is one stand-out piece (interview, really) in which Davis discuses a project he seems to at one point have been working on, called Heroes of Hell. This project of his was (is?) looking to create a broad history of late 19th and early 20th century attentats and anarchist assassinations. Despite the poor turnout of most projects like this, Davis' looks like it might have been worthwhile. Unfortunately, the interview took place in 2003, and this book has never received any other mention. It seems possible that some of the research was absorbed into Buda's Wagon, but the rest may never appear.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really just got this because I like the title so much....Well, and Davis is one of the left's premier historians. Anarchists may not be fond of him, but he digs up the history of the working class like no other.
Those were the best parts of this collection--the IWW, the anarchist assassins from around the world at the turn of the last century, and so on. A lot of this deals with the election in 2004, the start of the Iraq war, and the devestation in the aftermath of the government's calculated failure to prepare before and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The election stuff isn't worth your time, but the stuff on New Orleans is a good reminder.
I would recommend skimming these essays and picking out the parts that sound interesting.

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's depressing and frustrating enough to keep up with current events, there's no joy in reading and re-living the events, the corruptions and the moral cowardice of the years of the Bush presidency. And yet here we are. It's a great read, Davis is a solid writer and his analyses of Iraq, Katrina, the Minutemen and the California recall look more spot-on than ever. Sharp, barbed, accurate critiques. Worthwhile collection, but a downer considering how meager our progress has been in the intervening years. I actually finished the book last week but didn't even want to deal with writing a review and thinking about it any further

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these essays are a bit past shelf-date (the book comprises his journalism pieces since 2001), but Davis is consistent, and if you liked his longer, quirky social/historical books (City of Quartz, the disaster book I can't recall the name of...) the short pieces give you a context on his socialist pedigree and current political outlook, keeps yer bullshit detector nicely tuned. Good subway read--each piece is about one bus-to-train transfer long.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good book to get a sense of the range of Mike Davis's subject matter. Despite the abundant quantity of quantitative sources giving his writing a fact sandwich flavor, his polemics are deliciously digestible. The chapters on Left politics in Greenland & Upton Sinclare's EPIC campaign(End Poverty In California) are the mustard and sauerkraut.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of essays from the Bush era from the author of City of Quartz. A good reminder that I'm not crazy when I'm remembering those years. Depressing in that none of the issues covered by the essays (militarism, environmental destruction, inequality, corporatization, legal political corruption, etc) have been addressed in the course of the 11-18 years since they were written.

[Erica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mike Davis can be very hit and miss. This book consists of lots of 5-page rants for Socialist magazines. I should have known this wouldn't be one of his better books, but I was excited to read his take-down of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" It was alright.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

a bit sloppy. more substantive comments to come.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite sloppy editing and a somewhat idiosyncratic use of words like "antinomy," the substance of these essays makes for provocative reading.

[Philip Demers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just awesome. Puts the beltway opinion-makers to shame.

[Rayroy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the Essays are available on-line.

[enter_schweiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Davis' takes and analyses about the 2000s feels at times wild: the US election of 2024 stares back at the reader when the author describes the 2004 election. It's refreshing, somewhat eye-opening and comforting to see a socialist historian and activist understand his time and its trends and dynamics this accurately. It shows that paying attention and being involved while having the right tools to grasp what's going on leads to corrects assessments even in the moment. Being used to seeing pundits and politicians largely clueless ir confused, this book and its author give hope... despite the fact that the world seemingly only got worse since it was written.

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leftish political essays from the Bush II era. God those years sucked only being eclipsed by the Suckier Trump/Biden era. We forget just how bad Bush II was with the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, and his "compassionate conservatism" as a placeholder for American Theocracy ending in the Housing Bubble and Wall street Bailout. He was bad now we are in a worse place in part thanks to his actions.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first Mike Davis I have read. I didn't know it was a collection of older essays from the Bush years. It's not directly topical, but it certainly has bearing on our current moment. There's at times a bit too much 00's liberalism rhetoric (e.g. slagging on the South, "Dubya") but it still is a good contemporary analysis of the world then (and what it wrought).

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always struggle with essay collections, but Mike Davis more than any writer has given me clarity and perspective in this difficult year. I appreciate so much his writing and memories of a time with plenty of lessons for our own.

[KT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable, interesting and wide-ranging collection of anti-imperialist essays in the author's imitable style

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mike Davis is a treasure, and a proud (adopted?) California son. He's a leftist's leftist; and even though those seem to have gone out of style, it's hard to argue that his trenchant, doctrinaire, and dot-connecting screeds aren't spellbinding, if not persuasive. He's also a writer's writer, but unlike most modern writers on the left--does a true left still exist in the United States?--he uses plain language, avoids acronyms like the gutless vampires of meaning that they are, and always talks about people and places and events, not about vapid, shadowy, mean-whatever-you-want-them-to-mean movements and tendencies and isms.

In Praise of Barbarians collects many of his essays published between 2001 and 2007, and while I didn't understand the structure of the book at first, it started to make sense by the third section. The essays range from comically short to middling in length. None of them are terribly long, which is a double-edged sword because he goes into such depth so quickly that I often wanted to learn more, but I also liked the pace of the book.

The essays were written over the time period when I would have called myself a leftist, so I remember many of the events, people, and arguments he makes, especially in the first section. There are some spectacular historical essays whose subjects are new to me, and there's even an actual comic essay about why Davis drives the car he does, although it would be easy to take it too seriously, especially by the current young generation, with its inability to tell the difference among irony, the generation's own "unified" political philosophy, and an Onion article.

Speaking of young generations, one of my favorite essays is the last one, "Riot Nights on Sunset Strip," which taught me a lot about a heretofore unknown-to-me movement from Greater Los Angeles, where I grew up. (I never knew Stephen Stills's "For What It's Worth [Stop, Hey What's That Sound]" was about L.A. teenagers protesting against ten p.m. county and city curfews!) There are some other gems too--in fact, there are only a couple of essays that I don't like, but they're well written; they're just not up to my notion of Mike Davis's standards.

Criticize Davis for his righteous socialism, unwavering class consciousness, and anti-imperialist anarcho-syndicalist tendencies all you want. He may be wrong about some of his interpretations of history (I don't always agree with him); but he's pretty good, sadly, at predicting the future, as when he wrote originally in 2007 that

"The bloodbath in Iraq has opened every sarcophagus on the Potomac, disgorging a palsied army of ancient secretaries of state and national security advisers . . . [including], of course, the chief mummy, Kissinger himself, eager to lecture Congress on 'rational' approaches to imposing American will on the rest of the world. Hillary Clinton, of course, is the Queen of the Realists (except when it conflicts with Israeli interests), and the new Democratic majority in the House is unlikely to stray very far from the already manifest script of her 2008 campaign. In future debates with Rudy Giuliani or John McCain . . . , Hillary is poised to be a hard-muscled G.I. Jane, parrying every macho gesture with even tougher stances on al-Qaeda, Iran, Palestine, and Cuba."

If Davis's most pugnacious, stridently anti-capitalist essays don't interest you, you can probably skip some of the ones that originally appeared in Socialist Review, but I caution you against ignoring Davis too much. Even if you disagree with him, you're bound to learn a great deal from his research and scholarship. He could have been a muckraking journalist in a different era, and that's exactly why I wanted to continue to read about people I had never heard of in places I didn't know I cared about. I knew, for example, that Cary McWilliams almost single-handedly saved The Nation magazine from financial collapse and certain death in the 1950s--oh how I wish even The Nation of the late '90s and early 2000s still existed, rather than its current iteration, with its lockstep (or, more accurately, finger-snapping) acceptance of and reverence for every single academic indentitarian fad--but I had no idea that McWilliams had such a long and storied history of agitating for workers' and poor people's rights in California before he moved to Manhattan. It was necessary to save the magazine, but at what cost to the future of California? Davis asks.

I do too, which is why I'm glad that Davis himself never left California, at least not for too long. He's a Mensch of the highest order, and someone who challenges the way I think. Thank God for the true believers, even if they don't believe in God, and thank God for Mike Davis.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master of his craft and a voice sadly missing from the moral rot of today’s politics.

[Eileen F]

In a January 2008 interview, Alex Green asked Noam Chomsky, "What was your favorite book of last year?" Chomsky could not name only one favorite nor could he name them all.
Chomsky suggested, among others "In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire" by Mike Davis.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of essays on the American political-economic system.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between 2003 and 2007, Mike Davis wrote a lot of short articles for the Socialist Review. He also wrote for the Guardian occasionally, and here and there another article appeared. Together, they form this book. It has been given a (very alluring) premise in the praise of barbarians, but only a few epigraphs and a page-long afterward serve to address that premise. It is hardly an organized, purpose-written text, but a good collection of Davis' incidental targets.

The book is separated into four sections:
1) "Romans at Home": musings on the then-running US elections, wherein Davis captures the popular mood and the collapse of the Democratic party's capture on working class and African-American politics
2) "Legions at War": discussions of the US imperial machine's wars and violence across the globe. Short, but very charged.
3) "The Unease in Gaul": essays focused on California and its politics. Much about Governor Schwarzenegger; more, and this is very perceptive, about the corrosive hate spewed by radio shows that most Californian commuters are predisposed to fall into.
4) "Dark Water Rising": climate change and the USA's absolute inability - and calculated vulnerability - to the destruction of that change. Lots here about Louisiana and New Orleans.
5) "Old Flames": the voices of opposition and change that Davis believes in, from Malcolm X and the socialists of America at the turn of the century (the 19th century, that is) to the teenagers in California and the Russian soldiers of World War II. Includes a fascinating interview about anarchists and terrorists that gestures to a project that I would hope Davis is continuing to work on, in whatever spare time he has.

Davis is highly readable, eminiently learned, and always principled. He is now always right, as these essays show (his dismissal of Barack Obama as a wildcard is a case in point), but he is always thoughtful and informed. And he is sharply attuned to the violence and the hope that forms our world. It's often not that he says something no one else knows; it's that he writes with conviction and brings together a range of too-often unheard voices, together with a pragmatic focus on socialism as a the chief solution to many current societal problems engendered by capitalist capture of governance and sociality (not to mention the US Democratic Party's long disdain for the working class and its abstraction from the concerns of the American people, having given in to corporate finance's money and politics). Here he is on climate change in 2005:

The demon in me wants to say: party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when we'll soon be debating how many hunter-gatherers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon. The good parent in me, however, screams: how is it possible that we can now contemplate with scientific seriousness whether our children's children will themselves have children? Let Exxon answer that in one of their sanctimonious ads.

If there is revolutionary thought here, it is motivated by that concern for the future: for children and the world they will inherit.