1 reviews
Sales Rank: 244575

Media: Hardcover
Pages: 420
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.5

ISBN: 1844671046
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.951
EAN: 9781844671045
ASIN: 1844671046

Publication Date: February 4, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours

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Customer Reviews:

3 out of 5 stars

New hegemon or paper tiger? January 25, 2008
ldxar1 (UK)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

This long book (around 400 pages) continues the arguments of Arrighi and Silver's "Chaos and Governance" in a speculative discussion of the decline of American hegemony and what Arrighi expects next, a new hegemony centred on China and East Asia. The book is divided into three broad sections. The first is a theoretical discussion, covering Adam Smith, Karl Marx, David Harvey and Joseph Schumpeter, and critiquing Robert Brenner. This section draws a crucial distinction between market and capitalist societies, and introduces the idea of a distinct East Asian development path which was headed off by western militarism. The second part reproduces Arrighi's much-praised articles from New Left Review, "Hegemony Unravelling", and basically suggests that America is past its prime as a hegemon in both economic and geostrategic terms, viewing the "war on terror" as the swansong of American power. The third and final part sets out a view of modern China as a potential new hegemon offering the possibility of an egalitarian and ecological alternative to destructive western development models in the form of a non-capitalist market society run in the national interest.

One strength of the book is its critical perspective on American hegemony. It is interesting to see how apparent indicators of dominance may in fact suggest underlying structural decline. Its weakness is its uncritical treatment of China, and an account of Chinese ascendancy which covers over as much as it reveals. What, for instance, of the darker side of the Chinese system, its brutal biopolitical regime, its suppression of labour movements and national minorities, its appalling human rights record? What of the problem that its production system remains in many respects peripheral? Chinese ascendance is assumed rather than argued, and sceptical perspectives tend to be elided. One ends up with a Chinese development model without the contradictions which clearly arise in practice (for instance, the prediction of massive urbanisation suggests Arrighi is wrong in assuming a continuing prevalence of village enterprises). Arrighi's account isn't really plausible, and seems to give up on an alternative to global capitalism in effectively siding with one of its bearers as a "non-capitalist" society. Beijing becomes for Arrighi what Moscow was for an earlier generation of radicals, but whereas in that case one was at least dealing with systemic differences, in Arrighi's case the differences have to be invented. I find more plausible the idea put forward by Sassen, Hardt and Negri and others, that the world system is in transition to a hubs-and-spokes system focused on global systems, losing its previous association with a hegemonic state.

This is a fairly strong book nevertheless, particularly in its theoretical interweaving of world-systems analysis with Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession and a geopolitically-driven model of hegemony.