About Gopal Balakrishnan

Gopal Balakrishnan is a prolific writer and independent scholar who has authored numerous books, essays, chapters, and articles covering a broad range of his intellectual interests. He received a College Scholar B.A. from Cornell University in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Modern European History from UCLA in 1998 and has been the recipient of distinguished fellowships, including the Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence, and the Harper Schmidt Fellowship at the University of Chicago.

Books

His dissertation on Carl Schmitt, later published as The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt by Verso in 2000, remains the definitive analysis of Schmitt’s political thought, constitutional theories, and views on inter-state order.

“The Enemy is one of the most brilliant and systematic studies of Schmitt’s extremely difficult intellectual contribution. Gopal Balakrishnan never forgets Schmitt’s hateful political choices. Yet one cannot deny that people of diametrically opposite political allegiances have been influenced by Schmitt’s thought. I think that The Enemy will be acclaimed not only by ‘Schmittians,’ right and left, but also by decided critics of the German thinker as the most important recent contribution to the understanding of his work.”

–Saul Friedlander, Professor of History, UCLA

Antagonistic addresses central political and theoretical questions: how should we conceive the relations between neo-imperial warfare and neoliberalism, or American hegemony and capitalist globalization?  This collection of his essays combines intellectual history, political philosophy, and historical sociology to produce a highly distinctive portrait of an age of capital and war.

“This collection is an intellectual feast and a dazzling commentary on political thinking, contemporary and classical. Here, an intelligence honed on Schmitt and Machiavelli reviews a range of theoretical texts with courteous sarcasm and radical interrogation; the results are witty, devastating, and full of suggestive speculation, culminating in the horizon of an astounding new vision of Machiavelli, well beyond the stereotypical discourse of conventional political science or journalistic commentary.”

–Fredric Jameson

Edited Collections

Mapping the Nation presents some of the most influential reflections on nationalism by the leading scholars in the field: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan’s critique of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and Jürgen Habermas.

“Representative of serious left-of-center thinking on the subject of nationalism, and of great use as a general introduction to the topic.”

–Francis Fukuyama

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. In Debating Empire, a number of prominent political theorists subject the work to criticism and Hardt and Negri respond in a striking conclusion.

Essays

From 1995 to 2017, Balakrishnan wrote a series of essays for the New Left Review from 1995 to 2017 on the history of political thought, the long-term prospects of liberal democracy, the origins of identity politics, the changing nature of war, and the development of Marx’s economic thought. The first was a review of Benedict Anderson’s work on modern nationalism, entitled “The National Imagination,” arguing that the mobilizing power of the Nation was being put into question by longer-term cultural, political, and military trends. In “Two on the Marble Cliffs,” Balakrishnan examined the highlights of an 800-page correspondence in German between Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, the two leading thinkers of the twentieth-century German Right. In “From Florence to Moscow,” he analyzed the French philosopher Louis Althusser’s various reflections on Machiavelli as the original theorist of the revolutionary foundation of new states. The ambitious and influential theorization of a new de-centered, post-national capitalist empire by Hardt and Negri was the subject of a critical review, “Virgilian Visions,” which argued that the defining characteristic of the contemporary international system was, in fact, the financial and military primacy of the American state.

In his review of Bhikhu Parekh’s philosophical defense of multi-culturalism, “The Politics of Piety,” Balakrishnan offered a scathing indictment of the politically neutralizing effects of this new discourse of inclusion. Sheldon Wolin’s celebrated study of Alexis de Tocqueville as a theorist of the rise of democracy and the decline of the European Old Regime is appraised in “The Oracle of Post-Democracy,” where the great French liberal is situated in a lineage of counterrevolutionary thinkers. In another essay on the perils of identity politics, “The Age of Identity,” Balakrishnan contends with Lutz Niethammer’s account of the European origins of this ever more influential ideology of collective being.

“The Algorithms of War” takes on Phillip Bobbit’s conception of the last five centuries of Western geopolitics as a succession of inter-state treaty regimes all the way up to the ‘rules-based international order’ imposed by the U.S. and its allies after their victory in the Cold War. In “The Age of Warring States,” Balakrishnan disputes a Marxist historian’s contention that international relations became more peaceful with the onset of modern capitalism. In “The Geopolitics of Separation,” Balakrishnan demonstrates the significance of Carl Schmitt’s conception of war and the state and proposes an interpretation of the latter that underscores its congruence with a Marxist problematic hinging on the separation of the political from the economic.

In “Future Unknown: Machiavelli for the 21st Century,” Balakrishnan revisits the legacy of the Florentine thinker, scanning interpretations of his thoughts from across the political spectrum and offering a bold and disturbing take on his contemporary significance. In “States of War,” the world theaters of media staged military conflict with asymmetrical enemies are brought into focus in an arresting account of the dialectics driving U.S. ‘forever wars.’ In another tour-de-force on the history of war and strategy, Balakrishnan takes issue with Azar Gat’s account of the rise and fall of the Clausewitzian cult of the offensive.

In his overview of the work of the literary and cultural critic Frederic Jameson, “The Coming Contradiction,” he explores the latter’s voluminous reflections on the forms of historical time, reframing the periodization of the present as postmodernity. “Speculations on the Stationary State” advances what would become an influential conception of the onset of an era of the permanent stagnation of the capitalist system. This account of the predicament of capitalism led to research on the economics of Karl Marx, divided into an early and late period whose distinguishing characteristics are reconstructed systematically, revealing previously undetected unities of his thought. This original reconstruction of Marx’s economic thought is laid out in a two-part essay entitled “The Abolitionist.” 

After the fateful election of 2016, Balakrishnan situated the rise of the contemporary radical right in a lineage of twentieth-century reactionary and counterrevolutionary thought, arguing in “Counterstrike West” that its contemporary successor was a weak reminiscence of the original. Balakrishnan went on to write two pieces for Sublation Magazine. The first disputed an anarchist conception of the catastrophic impact of automation in employment. In the second, he examined Vivek Chibber’s account of the mechanisms of class conflict in modern capitalist democracies and argued that it failed to identify the ideological conditions of a consequential workers’ movement.

Current Work

Over the last few years, Gopal Balakrishnan has developed an original interpretation of Marx’s later economic thought and is in the process of distilling his findings into a cogent and politically impactful form. He has begun to collaborate with the editors of a new journal, SS African Mercury, which offers bold theorizations and criticism of the political and cultural scene from across the political spectrum. This journal will be where he will publish most of his coming work.