Political History

Pity the poor nation-state. It is mentioned only to be abused. The nation-state, we are told, is too small -- too tiny to be competitive in the global economy, too feeble to deal on its own with "global issues" like climate change. At the same time, the nation-state is too big. Its centralised bureaucracies are too remote from the real centres of innovation, which are cities and neighbourhoods. National cultures cannot compete with global pop culture or with sub-national ethnic and regional cultures.

According to conventional wisdom, Japan's Emperor Hirohito was a man of peace, forced by Japan's militarist elites to support his country's wartime aggression. In his provocative new book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, historian Herbert Bix offers a dramatic reappraisal of the emperor's wartime role, arguing that Hirohito was in fact far more hawkish and closely involved in Japan's war plans than has been previously acknowledged.

Selected reviews of The Coming Anarchy are featured below:

If there is one thing that most everybody agrees upon regarding the ideological legacy of the Clinton presidency, it is that there is none. President Clinton, left and right typically concur, is a man of polling and expediency, and almost infinite flexibility of viewpoint. A subset of this thinking, indigenous to the left, holds that Clinton does stand for something, sort of, but it's really nothing more than warmed-over Republicanism.

Selected reviews of Vietnam: The Necessary War are featured below:

As the 2000 election campaign approaches, it appears that the 30 Years' War in American politics is over and the spirit of the '60s has won--not the radical '60s, now broadly condemned by the right, but the liberal early '60s. The belated triumph of the tradition of '60s liberalism is one of the remarkable political phenomena of our time. All the more remarkable, perhaps, because it has not been pointed out.

Everett Carll Ladd, a political scientist, once remarked, "Social analysis and commentary has many shortcomings, but few of its chapters are as persistently wrong-headed as those on the generations and generational change. This literature abounds with hyperbole and unsubstantiated leaps from available data." Many of the media's grand pronouncements about America's post-Baby Boom generation -- alternatively called Generation X, Baby Busters, and twentysomethings -- would seem to illustrate this point.