History of Consciousness
Gopal Balakrishnan
ACADEMIC INTERESTS | COURSES | PUBLICATIONS
Classics of political thought from Plato to Rousseau; early modern and modern European intellectual history; historical sociology; the history and future of capitalism, nationalism, geopolitics.
Gopal Balakrishnan studied European intellectual history and historical sociology at UCLA during the 1990s with Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Rogers Brubaker, and Michael Mann. 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. His most recent work on the future of war and capitalism further develops the central concerns of his book: the decline of the classical state form, the dialectics of the state of emergency, the advent of asymmetrical warfare and the supersession of popular sovereignty by the spectacle. He is the editor of a recently published collection of essays on these themes entitled Debating Empire (2003). Balakrishnan teaches seminars in classical political thought, philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, history, historical sociology, Marxism and critical theory.
