Well, it's Time mag - what more can be expected? OTOH, it could be considered a small ideological victory - a result of the Seattle - Genoa sequence, that they even feel the need to put a "positive" gloss on Marx/Manifesto.
>What "problem" are you speaking about?
I don't have the text handy here at work, but just their interpretation of US constitutionalism. US historiography has always been a special interest of mine going way back, and I'm quite familiar with Pocock's intellectual histories of the sources of American republicanism, not only "Machiavellian Moment" but also his extensive commentary in the introduction to his reproduction of James Harrington's "Oceana", a 17th century English Revolutionary Era fictional projection of an English-speaking trans-North Atlantic republican empire, a state whose class basis was an armed yeomanry (in the agrarian farmer sense of the category). Pocock saw Harrington (who was familiar with Machiavelli) as the pivot in an ideological strand running from Machiavelli, through Harrington, to the American "Founding Fathers" (emerging in the context of actual republican revolutions: Florentine, Engilsh and American), a thread dedicated to the resolution of the "ancient Roman" dialectic of Republic and Empire, virtue and corruption (of a ruling class 'invisible' to the ideology, of course). The novelty of the 'solution' (IMO) lay in the conception of an 'invisible center' that operated in continuous counterbalance to a (necessarily atomized, atomized by its own individual 'self-arming') multitude. Indeed, James Madison put forward this arrangement (in a modified form later identified by Hofstadter and other as original American 'pluralism') before the Federal Convention, as best suited to "extensive empire". This is obviously radically opposed to the conceptions of Thomas Hobbes, who however, gazed upon the same object.
Thus the "decentered power" that the Times essayist gets all gooey and gushy over.
The problem is, that D & H hang their theory of the US in capitalist development a wee bit too much on what, after all, is only an (extraordinary, brilliant) intellectual or ideological history, adding to the mix (via Althusser, gratis the Dutch Revolution) Spinoza.This passage in particular needs to be fleshed out, given a much broader material basis for conception, than that provided by the shorthand of ideological history, regardless of its own real materiality.
When I first encountered this in "Empire" I was a bit miffed (you can search LBO archives to fish up my miffedness), but, as I mentioned to you elsewhere, I simply stepped back to flesh out my own understanding of this particular theoretical current of Marxism before proceeding, especially as their application of their conception of US constitutionalism was very valuable, particularly in its concept of the "extraterritorialization" of the (Imperial) constitution - Imperial Sovereignty.
-Brad Mayer
>Thomas