Public Power in the Age of Empire

by Arundhati Roy

Book Overview

In her major address to the 99th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association on August 16, 2004, "Public Power in the Age of Empire," broadcast nationally on C-Span Book TV and on Democracy Now and Alternative Radio, writer Arundhati Roy brilliantly examines the limits to democracy in the world today. Bringing the same care to her prose that she brought to her Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things, Roy discusses the need...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583226826
• ISBN13: 9781583226827
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 4.4" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Justice

Nobody expressed better the existence of an Empire than a president who said `I don't care what the facts are'. In other words, `I (can) always do what I want without any justification.' In this violent pamphlet, Arundhati Roy attacks the existent world order and the policies of terror under the helm of the one and only hegemon: `the most powerful nation in the world with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs is peopled by a terrified citizenry. This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for further aggression.' Legislation, like the Patriot Act, curbs freedom in the name of protecting freedom. Antiterrorism laws are used to intimidate civil society. On the economic front, Western countries which together spend more than one billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries withdraw all agricultural subsidies. In the era of neo-liberalism, poverty is a crime and protesting against it is being defined as terrorism. But, for those who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation is becoming unbearable. For some, there is no alternative but terrorism, albeit vicious, ugly and dehumanizing. But so is war waged by the hegemon and its allies. The alternative to terrorism is justice. For Arundhati Roy, `no amount of nuclear weapons or full-spectrum-dominance can buy peace at the cost of justice.' With her sharp pen, Arundhati Roy defends violently the mass of the wretched. Her text is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in.

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