Contraventions

Since the turn of the century, New Left Review has published a score of editorials on contemporary world politics, each departing from conventional positions. This collection brings together a selection of NLR’s interventions in these years of US unipolarity and late-capitalist boom and bust, the War on Terror and the rise of China, the asymmetrical recovery from the financial crisis and the fraught politics of the energy transition.

Bookended by surveys reviewing the broader political-intellectual conjuncture in which the journal is publishing, they examine both the ideas and the on-the-ground operations of liberal-internationalist rule, from the Middle East peace process to the new cold war, analysing the character of the EU and the record of Obama, the meaning of Donald Trump and the explanation for Brexit – as well as tracking counter-movements from street to ballot box, the Arab Spring to Corbyn, Sanders and Podemos."The longue durée is an insistent presence in NLR’s collective editorial vision. It hints at the possibility that the defeat of the left is only ever localised and provisional"
—Jeremy Harding, London Review of BooksNew Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In sixty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world.