Gopal Balakrishnan is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, and editor of Debating "Empire" and (with Benedict Anderson) Mapping the Nation. A member of the New Left Review editorial board, he teaches Contemporary Theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This collection is an intellectual feast and a dazzling commentary on political thinking, contemporary and classical. Here an intelligence honed on Schmitt and Machiavelli reviews a range of theoretical texts with courteous sarcasm and radical interrogation; the results are wityy, devastating and full of suggestive speculation, culminating in the horizon of an astounding new vision of Machiavelli, well beyond the stereotypical discourse of conventional political science or journalistic commentary.

Gopal Balakrishnan is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, and editor of Debating "Empire" and (with Benedict Anderson) Mapping the Nation. A member of the New Left Review editorial board, he teaches Contemporary Theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This collection is an intellectual feast and a dazzling commentary on political thinking, contemporary and classical. Here an intelligence honed on Schmitt and Machiavelli reviews a range of theoretical texts with courteous sarcasm and radical interrogation; the results are wityy, devastating and full of suggestive speculation, culminating in the horizon of an astounding new vision of Machiavelli, well beyond the stereotypical discourse of conventional political science or journalistic commentary.

Gopal Balakrishnan is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, and editor of Debating "Empire" and (with Benedict Anderson) Mapping the Nation. A member of the New Left Review editorial board, he teaches Contemporary Theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This collection is an intellectual feast and a dazzling commentary on political thinking, contemporary and classical. Here an intelligence honed on Schmitt and Machiavelli reviews a range of theoretical texts with courteous sarcasm and radical interrogation; the results are wityy, devastating and full of suggestive speculation, culminating in the horizon of an astounding new vision of Machiavelli, well beyond the stereotypical discourse of conventional political science or journalistic commentary.