This piece also appears in New Left Project’s excellent symposium, “Global Capitalism and the State.”

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s The Making of Global Capitalism is a landmark study of the construction and the evolution of the American capitalist empire. To my knowledge, it is the best in existence, wide-ranging in time as well as in space, perceptive, deeply informed, and sophisticatedly nuanced in its analyses.

Its analytical focus is “globalization and the state,” and its main general theoretical argument is that “states need to be placed at the center of the search for an explanation of the making of global capitalism.” This is, of course, a deliberately provocative statement, thrown into the face of the mainstream globalization discourse of the past quarter of a century, on the left as well as on the right. It is a very welcome re-focusing of our lenses, which I basically sympathize with. Apart from trying to convey to my Cambridge students the still crucial importance of nation-states in current world society, I have found reason to take issue with the “global cities” conception of a few cities “commanding” the world economy, increasingly detached from their state hinterlands.