For those of us in the academy who have been urging people for twenty years or more to take popular culture seriously, Jim McGuigan’s Cultural Populism footnote 1 is a sombre read. A lucid account of ...

Three factors define the functioning, stability and representative capacity of a state. The first is the overall framework of social forces: the correlation between the different coalitions, both ...

On the surface, the situation in the Balkans may look rather optimistic at the moment: the Croats and Muslims have ceased fighting; some sense of normality has been restored to Sarajevo; and the ...

What is ‘the anti-globalization movement’?footnote 1 I put the phrase in quote-marks because I immediately have two doubts about it. Is it really a movement? If it is a movement, is it ...

Opening a symposium on Robin Blackburn’s The Reckoning, a probing examination of political agents and structuring conditions behind the late overthrow of slavery in the American South, Cuba and Brazil ...

What weight should be given to the role of ideas in moments of radical change, as opposed to that of material interests and forces? From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, rise of Marxism and ...

Responding to his interlocutors in NLR’s symposium, Blackburn foregrounds the contradictions of capital and political rule in the Atlantic slave systems that opened space for class struggle.

What questions for critical social theory are posed by the capitalist slave regimes of the Americas? An inquiry into the political, economic and social-reproductive dimensions of enslaved and ‘doubly ...

New Left Review analyses world politics, the global economy, state powers and protest movements; contemporary social theory, history, philosophy and culture.

To the victors, the spoils. A hundred years ago, after the conclusion of the First World War, the British Empire and its French ally broke up the old Ottoman-dominated Arab world and created new ...

The publication of Robin Blackburn’s The Reckoning, concluding his quintet on the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery over four centuries, offers an opportunity to reassess the current state of ...