American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Perry Anderson
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Название: American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers

Автор: Perry Anderson

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Политика, политология

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isbn: 9781781687024

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СКАЧАТЬ is from any such sober stocktaking forms the subject of the second part of this book, ‘Consilium’, which looks at the current thinking of its strategists. This forms a system of discourse about which relatively little has been written. The survey of it here offers a first synoptic account. To this I have added, in an annexe, an earlier consideration of one of the best known of all its contemporary minds.

      I owe composition of ‘Imperium’ and ‘Consilium’ to a year at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, finishing the last in October 2013; they first appeared in New Left Review in the following month. In the time that has elapsed since, the international scene has been dominated by a number of developments, in the extended Middle East, the former Soviet Union and the Far East, that have renewed debate about the condition of American power. A brief postscript considers these and their upshots, still ongoing.

       Perry AndersonOctober 2014

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      I owe special thanks to the Institut d’Etudes Avancées of Nantes, in whose ideal environment the major part of the research and writing of this book was done; to Anders Stephanson, for his critical comments; and to Susan Watkins, the editor of New Left Review, where the text was first published in October 2013, whose injunctions were essential to its completion.

       IMPERIUM

      ___________________

       1

       PRODROMES

      The US imperium that came into being after 1945 had a long pre-history. In North America, uniquely, the originating coordinates of empire were coeval with the nation. These lay in the combination of a settler economy free of any of the feudal residues or impediments of the Old World, and a continental territory protected by two oceans: producing the purest form of nascent capitalism, in the largest nation-state, anywhere on earth. That remained the enduring material matrix of the country’s ascent in the century after independence. To the objective privileges of an economy and geography without parallel were added two potent subjective legacies, of culture and politics: the idea—derived from initial Puritan settlement—of a nation enjoying divine favour, imbued with a sacred calling; and the belief—derived from the War of Independence—that a republic endowed with a constitution of liberty for all times had arisen in the New World. Out of these four ingredients emerged, very early, the ideological repertoire of an American nationalism that afforded seamless passage to an American imperialism, characterized by a complexio oppositorum of exceptionalism and universalism. The United States was unique among nations, yet at the same time a lodestar for the world: an order at once historically unexampled and ultimately a compelling example to all.