A prolific writer and independent scholar, Gopal Balakrishnan has authored numerous books, essays, chapters, and articles covering a broad range of intellectual interests, including modern European intellectual history, economic history, philosophy, religious studies, political theory, international relations, and the future of capitalism among other topics. He received a College Scholar B.A. from Cornell University in 1989, and his Ph.D. in Modern European History from UCLA in 1998, and has been the recipient of distinguished fellowships, including the Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence, and the Harper Schmidt Fellowship at the University of Chicago.
His published books include The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt and Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War. His edited volumes include Mapping the Nation and Debating Empire. He is the author of numerous essays and book chapters, and his work has been translated into multiple languages.
In recent years, Balakrishnan has developed a distinctive interpretation of Karl Marx’s later economic thought and is working to refine his findings into a cohesive and politically resonating form. He has also begun collaborating with the editors of SS African Mercury. This journal delivers bold theoretical analyses and critiques of the political and cultural landscape across the ideological spectrum. He will be publishing most of his future work with SS African Mercury.
His dissertation on Carl Schmitt, later published as The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt by Verso in 2000, remains the definitive analysis of Schmitt’s political thought, constitutional theories, and views on inter-state order.
The book distills Schmitt’s arguments while embedding them within the broader crisis of the German state, from the First World War through the fall of the Third Reich. During its brief existence, the Weimar Republic teetered on the brink of collapse—a fragile liberal democracy built on an unstable system of corporatist bargaining, at odds with traditional parliamentary governance. Weimar’s geopolitical standing was equally precarious: a defeated great power, trapped in a new world order designed to curb the sovereignty of rogue states through reparations, sanctions, and military interventions, all enforced in the name of the international community.
“The Enemy is one of the most brilliant and systematic studies of Schmitt’s extremely difficult intellectual contribution. Gopal Balakrishnan never forgets Schmitt’s hateful political choices. Yet one cannot deny that people of diametrically opposite political allegiances have been influenced by Schmitt’s thought. I think that The Enemy will be acclaimed not only by ‘Schmittians’, right and left, but also by decided critics of the German thinker as the most important recent contribution to the understanding of his work.”
–Saul Friedlander, Professor of History, UCLA
Antagonistics addresses central political and theoretical questions: how should we conceive the relations between neo-imperial warfare and neoliberalism, or American hegemony and capitalist globalization? Reflections on the major issues of the new international order are set within a larger framework, tracing the intertwined evolution of the modern state system and the capitalist mode of production, from the Treaty of Westphalia to the Occupation of Iraq. Gopal Balakrishnan interrogates three key political perspectives—including Tocqueville’s liberalism, Althusser’s Marxism and Schmitt on the radical right—for their insights on state power and civil society, democracy, and class. Antagonistics combines intellectual history, political philosophy, and historical sociology to produce a highly distinctive portrait of an age of capital and war.
“This collection is an intellectual feast and a dazzling commentary on political thinking, contemporary and classical. Here an intelligence honed on Schmitt and Machiavelli reviews a range of theoretical texts with courteous sarcasm and radical interrogation; the results are witty, devastating and full of suggestive speculation, culminating in the horizon of an astounding new vision of Machiavelli, well beyond the stereotypical discourse of conventional political science or journalistic commentary.”
–Fredric Jameson
Part of Verso’s classic Mapping series that collects the most important writings on key topics in a changing world, Mapping the Nation presents a wealth of thought on this issue: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan’s critique of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and Jürgen Habermas.
“Representative of serious left-of-center thinking on the subject of nationalism, and of great use as a general introduction to the topic.”
–Francis Fukuyama
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. In Debating Empire, a series of some of the most acute international theorists and commentators of our times subject the book to trenchant and probing analysis from political, economic and philosophical perspectives, and Hardt and Negri respond to their questions and criticisms.
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.
Over the last few years, Gopal Balakrishnan has developed an original interpretation of Marx’s later economic thought and is in the process of distilling his findings into a cogent and politically impactful form. He has begun to collaborate with the editors of a new journal, SS African Mercury, which offers bold theorizations and criticism of the political and cultural scene from across the political spectrum. This journal will be where he will publish most of his coming work.
Balakrishnan’s hobbies and interests align with his scholarly work. He enjoys reading the works of various authors, including Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, and The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell.