New Left Review, Issue 152, March/April 2025

Περιεχόμενα

Ross DouthatCondition of America
Nick Burns quizzes the New York Times columnist on the contradictory ideological forces and factions driving the second Trump Administration, the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism and the state of the country that he's described as sinking into economic and cultural stagnation.
Articles
Wolfgang StreeckThe Road Right
A high-turnout election, sharply polarized around immigration, has brought another centrist coalition to power in Berlin. Wolfgang Streeck offers an unsparing analysis of Germany's political situation as its hardline incoming Chancellor rams through an expansive fiscal revolution and the far-right AfD doubles its seats.
Wang XiaomingOn Civilization and Its Barbarisms
Lessons from the history of Chinese thought on the tension between the liberal-democratic internal order of great powers and the imperial 'law of the jungle' to which they subject weaker countries. How to resist their barbarity-how to civilize oneself-without barbarizing others?
Lola SeatonTrusting Art?
Replying to Malcolm Bull's hypotheses in NLR 151 on the balance of trust in the artworld and cryptocurrency, Lola Seaton asks what distinguishes readymade works, like Cattelan's banana, from everyday commodities-and what exactly buyers of conceptual art get to own.
David HarveyOn Sraffa's Trail
David Harvey recalls a lifetime of encounters, actual and intellectual, with the enigmatic Piero Sraffa. Interlocutor of Wittgenstein, Keynes and Robinson; devastating critic of neoclassical economics; helpmeet of Gramsci and rescuer of his Prison Notebooks. Reflections on an ?minence grise of twentieth-century intellectual life.
Loic WacquantPunish to Rule
If punishment was central to colonial statecraft-police, courts and prisons forming a 'penal triad'-how has this logic mutated since? A comparative survey of the forms of official violence that upheld empires past sheds light on techniques for domesticating today's hyperghettos and banlieues.
reviews
Instruments of Empire
Ed McNally on Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History. Antidote to apologias for the US intelligence agency, a periodization from the Truman Doctrine to the 'war on terror'.
China's Worker Artists
Jiwei Xiao on Margaret Hillenbrand, On the Edge. Analysis of working-class precarity as a structure of feeling, manifest in Chinese literary and visual culture