In nearly two decades since Samuel P. Huntington proposed his influential and troubling 'clash of civilizations' thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis or future. Are we reverting to the petty nationalisms of the nineteenth century or evolving into a globalized, supranational world? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and emancipatory role? Opening with powerful statements by Lord Acton and Otto Bauer - the classic liberal and socialist positions, respectively - Mapping the Nation presents a wealth of thought on this issue: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan's critique of Benedict Anderson's seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and Jurgen Habermas.

Antagonistics addresses central political and theoretical questions: how should we conceive the relations between neo-imperial warfare and neoliberalism, or American hegemony and capitalist globalization? Reflections on the major issues of the new international order are set within a larger framework, tracing the intertwined evolution of the modern state system and the capitalist mode of production, from the Treaty of Westphalia to the Occupation of Iraq. Gopal Balakrishnan interrogates three key political perspectives-including Tocqueville's liberalism, Althusser's Marxism and Schmitt on the radical right-for their insights on state power and civil society, democracy, and class. Antagonistics combines intellectual history, political philosophy, and historical sociology to produce a highly distinctive portrait of an age of capital and war.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. Its ability to develop a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neo-liberalism and international capitalism captured the imagination of the growing anti-capitalist movement and has been claimed as a turning point for the left. As much as it has seduced and delighted some, however, it has enraged and frustrated others. In this collection, a series of some of the most acute international theorists and commentators of our times subject the book to trenchant and probing analysis from political, economic and philosophical perspectives, and Hardt and Negri respond to their questions and criticisms.