From 1995 to 2017, Balakrishnan wrote a series of essays for the New Left Review from 1995 to 2017 on the history of political thought, the long-term prospects of liberal-democracy, the origins of identity politics, the changing nature of war, and the development of Marx’s economic thought. The first was a review of Benedict Anderson’s work on modern nationalism, entitled “The National Imagination,” arguing that the mobilizing power of the nation was being put into question by longer-term cultural, political and military trends. In “Two on the Marble Cliffs,” Balakrishnan examined the highlights of an 800-page correspondence in German between Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger, the two leading thinkers of the twentieth century German Right. In “From Florence to Moscow,” he analyzed the French philosopher Louis Althusser’s various reflections on Machiavelli as the original theorist of the revolutionary foundation of new states. The ambitious and influential theorization of a new de-centered, post-national capitalist empire by Hardt and Negri was the subject of a critical review, “Virgilian Visions,” which argued that the defining characteristic of the contemporary international system was, in fact, the financial and military primacy of the American state.

In his review of Bhikhu Parekh’s philosophical defense of multi-culturalism, “The Politics of Piety,” Balakrishnan offered a scathing indictment of the politically neutralizing effects of this new discourse of inclusion. Sheldon Wolin’s celebrated study of Alexis de Tocqueville as a theorist of the rise of democracy and the decline of the European Old Regime is appraised in “The Oracle of Post-Democracy,” where the great French liberal is situated in a lineage of counterrevolutionary thinkers. In another essay on the perils of identity politics, “The Age of Identity,” Balakrishnan contends with Lutz Niethammer’s account of the European origins of this ever more influential ideology of collective being. “The Algorithms of War” takes on Phillip Bobbit’s conception of the last five centuries of Western geopolitics as a succession of inter-state treaty regimes all the way up to the ‘rules-based international order’ imposed by the U.S. and its allies after their victory in the Cold War. In “The Age of Warring States,” Balakrishnan disputes a Marxist historian’s contention that international relations became more peaceful with the onset of modern capitalism. In “The Geopolitics of Separation,” Balakrishnan demonstrates the significance of Carl Schmitt’s conception of war and the state and proposes an interpretation of the latter that underscores its congruence with a Marxist problematic hinging on the separation of the political from the economic.

In “Future Unknown: Machiavelli for the 21st Century,” Balakrishnan revisits the legacy of the Florentine thinker, scanning interpretations of his thought from across the political spectrum and offered a bold and disturbing take on his contemporary significance. In “States of War,” the world theaters of media staged military conflict with asymmetrical enemies are brought into focus in an arresting account of the dialectics driving U.S. ‘forever wars.’ In another tour-de-force on the history of war and strategy, Balakrishnan takes issue with Azar Gat’s account of the rise and fall of the Clausewitzian cult of the offensive.

In his overview of the work of the literary and cultural critic Frederic Jameson, “The Coming Contradiction,” he explores with the latter’s voluminous reflections on the forms of historical time, reframing the periodization of the present as postmodernity. “Speculations on the Stationary State” advances what would become an influential conception of the onset of an era of the permanent stagnation of the capitalist system. This account on the predicament of capitalism led to research on the economics of Karl Marx, divided into an early and late period whose distinguishing characteristics are reconstructed systematically, revealing previously undetected unities of his thought. This original reconstruction of Marx’s economic thought is laid out in a two-part essay entitled “The Abolitionist.”

After the fateful election of 2016, Balakrishnan situated the rise of the contemporary radical right in a lineage of twentieth century reactionary and counter-revolutionary thought, arguing in “Counterstrike West” that its contemporary successor was a weak reminiscence of the original. Balakrishnan went on to write two pieces for Sublation Magazine. The first disputed an anarchist conception of the catastrophic impact of automation in employment. In the second, he examined Vivek Chibber’s account of the mechanisms of class conflict in modern capitalist democracies and argued that it failed to identify the ideological conditions of a consequential workers’ movement.