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Book Review: A Janus-faced World
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, November 17, 2003
The Breaking of Nations: order and chaos in the 21st century
by Robert Cooper
Atlantic Books, 180pp, £14.99
International relations may or may not be in a mess; the theory of international relations certainly is. The old theory was that the world consists of "states" which exist in an "international anarchy". It was an "anarchy" because there was no world government. But there was, nevertheless, a principle of order, or rather two: empire and the balance of power. These coexisted in uneasy juxtaposition. By the end of the 19th century, the balance of power in Europe had become a world balance as the United States and Japan took their place as "great powers" alongside the empires of the main European states. After 1945, there was a
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Book Review: Inside the Bubble
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, October 27, 2003
The Roaring Nineties: seeds of destruction
Joseph Stiglitz Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 389pp, £18.99
This book is the story of the forces that drove the American economy to frenzy in the 1990s and collapse in 2000. It is much better than Professor Stiglitz's last offering, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), which was largely a rant against the IMF and the World Bank. Diatribe is not absent from this book. But it is much more solidly rooted in his own path-breaking work on the economics of risk and information, for which he won a Nobel prize in 2001. Stiglitz is not an elegant, nor even a punchy writer. But when he relates the politics of the 1990s to the economics he knows well, the discussion becomes exciting.
In
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Book Review: The Last Serious Politician
Robert Skidelsky
published in the New Statesman
| Monday, May 05, 2003
God and Caesar
by Shirley Williams
Continuum, 156pp, £12.99
To what political attitudes might Christian belief point? Can the decline of Christianity in rich western countries be reversed, and, if so, how? These are the main questions discussed in Shirley Williams's arrestingly titled essay "God and Caesar", based on lectures delivered at Notre Dame University in the United States in 2001. Currently the Liberal Democratic leader in the House of Lords, Shirley Williams is the most sympathetic figure in British politics today. She is also a practising Roman Catholic. But despite its grandiloquent title, God and Caesar is not about the relationship, historical or contemporary, between theology and politics. Rather it is the work of a
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