Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

Kissinger’s work, regardless of your opinion of him, has been invaluable to understanding international relations. He has largely been concerned with world order; from his doctoral thesis on the Congress of Vienna to his most recent book World Order, the focus has been constructing foreign policy that maintains our dynamism and primacy, but also some measure of stability. Diplomacy is a response to the whirlwind of the 90s: the disintegration of the USSR; America’s unipolar moment; the burgeoning powers in Europe and East Asia; and by exploring the history of diplomacy from Westphalia to the modern-day, Kissinger looks to suggest how America can craft a policy, maybe grand strategy, that fares the tumultuous years to come.

Those who wish to perpetuate American primacy by achieving and maintaining full-spectrum dominance are, in short, facing the wrong way. For the threat to America’s empire does not come from embryonic rival empires to the west or to the east. I regret to say that it may come from the vacuum of power–the absence of a will to power–within.

Interesting book, even if its arguments are not convincing on their own merit–ignoring the fact I fundamentally disagree with the premise that the United States should dedicate itself to the idea of a “liberal empire”. For Ferguson, the world is a much more dynamic place but that much more insecure: too many nation states to create a cohesive international community; too many non-state actors with access to destructive weapons; too many opportunities for diseases and financial crises to spread across borders. Going through the history of various empires and America itself, he insists that empires are best suited for the task–specifically the American empire.

Once upon a time, it was customary to speak of various possible apocalyptic final chapters of the story of our superweapons as “unimaginable.” But now we seem to be in an epoch where the only unimaginable end to the story is a planet liberated from these weapons.

Truly a fascinating book that manages to analyze American military, cultural, and political history, and masterfully weaves them all together to comment on our collective imagination as Americans and as human beings, more generally. How does our relationship with technology affect our idea of ourselves, our relationship with the world, and the policies that we carry out to support or undermine that relationship? Bruce Franklin makes the case, convincingly I think, that it has created a tendency to increasingly create weapons for their own sake, to constantly see existential threats that require divine wrath, and to build a sort of rhetoric or hubris that makes it hard to even be self-aware or critical of this.

The process of accumulation involved social conflict not only because workers and owners disputed over the division of the product between wages and profits but also because the social character of production clashed with the private nature of ownership.

The name betrays the ending–by 1925, the American labor movement is essentially dead. Paying attention to contemporary debates, you would have the impression that unions have never been stronger, bloating government expenditures and somehow negatively affecting the economy. The reality, however, is that the battles today are to fight what remains of labor’s hard-fought victories nearly 100 years ago. Montgomery’s account is incredibly detailed and perceptive, able to track constantly how advances in industry affected the nature of employment, work, the ideologies surrounding both, and how workers, governments, and corporations have struggled one another–and with themselves–leading to labor’s ultimate decline.