Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
Dreams of Empire
By Tony Judt
America's Inadvertent Empire
by William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric
Yale University Press, 285 pp., $30.00
The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire
edited by Andrew J. Bacevich
Ivan R. Dee, 271 pp., $28.95;$16.95 (paper)
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East
by Rashid Khalidi
Beacon, 192 pp., $23.00
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Penguin, 400 pp., $25.95
Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Harvard University Press, 478 pp., $45.00; $19.95 (paper)
Multitude
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Penguin, 427 pp., $27.95
The New Imperialism
by David Harvey
Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $22.00
Fear: The History of a Political Idea
by Corey Robin
Oxford University Press, 316 pp., $28.00
A New World Order
by Anne-Marie Slaughter
Princeton University Press, 341 pp., $29.95
Talk of 'empire' makes Americans distinctly uneasy. This is odd. In its westward course the young republic was not embarrassed to suck virgin land and indigenous peoples into the embrace of Thomas Jefferson's 'empire for liberty.' Millions of American immigrants made and still make their first acquaintance with the US through New York, 'the Empire State.' From Monroe to Bush, American presidents have not hesitated to pronounce doctrines whose extraterritorial implications define imperial authority and presume it: there is nothing self-effacing about that decidedly imperious bird on the Presidential Seal. And yet, though the rest of the world is under no illusion, in the United States today there is a sort of wishful denial. We don't want an empire, we aren't an empire—or else if we are an empire, then it is one of a kind.
Review, 5346 words
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