> And Mandel in particular should have known better than to put forward this
> (mis-) periodization, but announcing the "new new thing" is a good way to
> promote a book, as we've seen of late ("Empire").
Mandel was actually quite the visionary, it's just that sometimes he gets caught up in his own world-historicality, as it were. His book "Late Capitalism" (original title, Spaetkapitalismus, thus the whole "late capitalism" imbroglio) is still very interesting and worth reading, because it's one of the first real attempts to think through the post-WW II Golden Age of consumer capitalism from an immanent standpoint, trying to think through the thing as a coherent mode of production. He doesn't always come up with the right answers, but he does ask many of the right questions.
-- Dennis