Most of my radical friends have expressed, at one point or another, the importance of reading Noam Chomsky in their political and philosophical development. But as a generation of radicals seeks to develop its own theorization of empire, it is critical to understand the limits of his approach in particular his rejection of historical materialism. To be sure, the power of Chomsky’s analysis derives in part from his disavowal of the search for “general laws” that has dominated so much of the Marxist scholarship. Rather than trying to identify mechanistic, structural “iron laws” that govern history, Chomsky adopts an agency-oriented method, based in a detailed empirical analysis of the decisions of state managers. In doing so, he seeks to distill a consistent rationality underlying state actions.

However, in their recent book The Making of Global Capitalism, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin likewise reject the search for a-historical “general laws,” and undertake a thorough empirical analysis of state institutions. Unlike Chomsky, in rejecting such theoretical dogmas, and issuing a strong challenge to earlier theories of empire, they nonetheless deploy a historical materialist methodology.

Despite the similarities between the two approaches, their differing theoretical foundations lead to often strikingly divergent conclusions about the nature of world order. Panitch and Gindin argue that in securing the interests of its MNCs abroad, the American state has also contributed to establishing the conditions for capital accumulation around the world. Disparate markets were integrated under the overall management of the American empire, which produced both tensions and synergies between the American state’s relation to its own social formation and its responsibility for managing capitalism globally. For them, American imperialism has helped establish a global order modeled on the US’ own internally evolved economic system of “free enterprise,” without discriminating in favor of its domestic capitalist class. It has, in other words, given rise to “a world after its own image.”