Melville House Books

A recent essay by Jacob Heilbrunn in The Chronicle of Higher Education (not available online) considers the titles in Metropolitan Books‘ American Empire Project, which, according to Heilbrunn, is “devoted to showing that the United States is about to receive its long overdue comeuppance.” The series includes bestsellers by Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, and Michael Klare. Johnson, as Heilbrunn sees it, is arguing that “American foreign policy has been entirely consistent since World War II. From that time on, a new professional caste of militarist has been transforming America into an Empire.” While Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival shares this opinion by adding that, in such a predicament, “the very survival of the world [is] at stake.” The series also includes Peter Irons‘ War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution, which argues that the framers of the constitution “almost surely did not intend for presidents to send forces into combat anywhere in the world without the approval of congress.” Heilbrunn concludes by saying that the series fails to recognize the democratic aims and “spirit of reform” that he finds in the neoconservative movement. A flaw, Heilbrunn thinks, that “may reveal less about the decline of America than about the decline of the left.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.