The New Old World, by Perry Anderson. @ Amazon

* Pub. Date: December 2009
* Publisher: Verso
* Format: Hardcover, 364 pages
* ISBN-13: 9781844673124
* ISBN: 184467312X

Magisterial analysis of Europe’s development since the end of the Cold War

A major work of modern history and political analysis, The New Old World punctures both domestic and American myths about continental Europe. Surveying the post-Cold War trajectory of European power and the halting progress towards social and economic integration, Perry Anderson draws out the connections between the EU’s eastward expansion, a foreign policy largely subservient to America’s, and the popular rejection of the European Constitution.

As a neoliberal economic project, pushed forward by a succession of centrist governments, the European Union cannot afford to allow its peoples a free choice that might dash elite schemes of a post-national democracy. Anderson explores Hayek’s suggestion that protecting a market economy might require exactly this kind of inter-state structure, out of reach of popular opposition. With landmark chapters on France, Germany, Italy and Turkey, and a wide-ranging survey of current theories of the Union, The New Old World offers an iconoclastic portrait of a continent that is now being increasingly hailed as a moral and political exemplar for the world at large.

Praise for Perry Anderson:

“Sheer pleasure … one of the best political, historical and literary essayists of the age.” — Times Literary Supplement

“The breath-taking range of conception and the architectural skill with which it has been executed make his work a formidable intellectual achievement.” — New York Review of Books

“A powerful and lucid intelligence.” Eric Hobsbawm, New Statesman

Perry Anderson is the author of Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, Arguments in English Marxism, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, A Zone of Engagement and The Origins of Postmodernity; he teaches history at UCLA, and serves on the editorial board of New Left Review.