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.

Gopal Balakrishnan did his PhD in modern European intellectual history at UCLA. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2000) and a Harper Schmidt Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago (2001-2005). While working towards his degree he co-edited a collection of essays with Benedict Anderson, entitled Mapping the Nation (1995). Balakrishnan subsequently joined the board of the New Left Review and has been a regular contributor of this journal since then. He is the author of The Enemy (2000), a comprehensive, critical reconstruction and contextualization of the entire oeuvre of Carl Schmitt, Debating Empire (2003), Antagonistics (2008) and is close to completing a two volume study on the writings of Marx from his dissertation on Greek philosophy to Capital. Balakrishnan teaches seminars in classical political thought, philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, history, historical sociology, Marxism and critical theory.