Towards a book

Some ideas as I prepare to turn a bunch of articles I have written over the past few years into a book (or actually two books).

The beginning of an introduction
This book describes moments in the institutional history of literary culture, if we understand that culture to include the academic humanities. But it is motivated by a particular political fear— that the current globally hegemonic regime of democratic capitalist nation-states is impossible to replace and yet is systemically, pathologically flawed. We are stuck with national-democratic capitalism for the foreseeable future since it and it alone is the political system that rationality (as we know it) legitimates and since it provides so many goods and is so open to reform. But for all that it is destructive of human capacities. It would still be destructive were able to create a just society within its framework , since what it destroys is autonomy and the will to think and (though less so), happiness, none of which concern justice. I realize that this is an extraordinarily contentious assertion whose various premises elide a library of debate. But for me, here, it’s a question not of truth but of fear.
And that fear has led me to break with the main currents of cultural studies which, as we shall see, are embedded not in exit from the system (revolution, mysticism, quietism for instance) but in reformism. This is not to say that reformism is to be rejected in practice. That would in effect to be return to classical communism or to varieties of anti-worldly Christianity. It is to say that reformism is a secondary and profoundly limited game, which lies at the heart of our intellectual life only as a sign of the system's pathologizing march. And yet it has not led me into the arms of those who are indeed enemies of national-democratic capitalism and who do have a vital presence in the academic humanities




1. the relation between Perry Anderson's argument about the aristocracy/bourgeoisie alliance in Britain and its creation of a 'corporate' working class not able to gain hegemony and the Hopkins/Cain 'gentlemanly capitalism' account of British imperialism?
2. the strange connection between neo-Maoists like Badiou and conservatives like Leo Strauss in so far as both reject historicism in their attempt to imagine an other to or exit from democratic capitalism. Of course their form of anti-historicism differs considerably, although there's a sense in which Badiou's ontological nominalism is not so different from Strauss's embrace of ancient wisdom as might appear from their relative placing on the political map.