Noam Chomsky Saw Empire's Playbook Early
Share
- Noam Chomsky published Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There in 1982, critiquing U.S. interventionism in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
- Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics, published by W.W. Norton in 1999, predicted that financial deregulation would cause Japan-style liquidity traps globally.
- Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998) exposed postmodern misuse of scientific terminology in critical theory, triggering the "Science Wars" debate.
- Loretta Napoleoni's Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror is Bankrupting the World (2008) argued that counterterrorism spending dwarfed the economic damage of terrorism itself.
- Francis Fukuyama's Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (2018) traced modern identity movements back to Platonic thymos, the human need for dignity.
Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There — Noam Chomsky
The pre-9/11 blueprint for understanding how empires justify violence while calling it peacekeeping.
Chomsky wrote this collection in 1982, during Reagan's dirty wars in Central America, and every essay feels like it was filed yesterday. He methodically dismantles the idea that U.S. foreign policy operates on humanitarian principles, showing instead how media narratives manufacture consent for intervention. The Vietnam and Indonesia chapters are especially brutal — Chomsky uses declassified cables and newspaper archives to prove that policymakers knew they were backing genocidal regimes and did it anyway. If you've ever felt gaslit by official explanations of "spreading democracy," this book is the receipts. Explore our current copy of Towards a New Cold War or browse more Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina.
The Return of Depression Economics — Paul Krugman
A Nobel economist calling the 2008 crash in 1999, with footnotes.
Krugman saw the subprime mortgage disaster coming because he'd watched Japan's bubble economy implode in the '90s and recognised the pattern: deregulated finance + asset speculation = liquidity trap. This paperback walks through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Russia's 1998 default, and Japan's lost decade, then warns that the U.S. is building the same house of cards. Reading it now, post-GFC, is eerie — he names the mechanisms (securitised debt, shadow banking) that would break the global economy nine years later. It's written for general readers but doesn't dumb down the economics; Krugman respects your intelligence enough to explain why central banks can't always fix recessions by lowering interest rates. Explore our current copy of The Return of Depression Economics or browse more Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina.
Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror is Bankrupting the World — Loretta Napoleoni
Follow the money, not the fear — and it leads straight to defence contractors.
Napoleoni, an economist who spent years interviewing militants and tracking terror financing, flips the script: she argues that post-9/11 military spending (trillions) caused more economic damage than any terrorist attack ever could. Published in 2008 as the War on Terror hit its most expensive phase, this book tallies the cost — not just in dollars but in destabilised regions, collapsed currencies, and the surveillance infrastructure that became permanent. She's not dismissing terrorism as a threat; she's pointing out that blowing up your own economy to prevent future attacks is exactly what the attackers wanted. As of July 2026, her thesis that counterterrorism is a racket feels grimly vindicated by Afghanistan's withdrawal. Explore our current copy of Terrorism and the Economy or browse more Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina.
Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science — Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Physicists declare war on bad metaphors disguised as theory.
Sokal (the physicist who famously punked Social Text with a hoax paper in 1996) and Bricmont take on Lacan, Deleuze, Irigaray, and other French postmodernists for citing quantum mechanics, topology, and Gödel's theorem in ways that make no mathematical sense. This isn't a right-wing culture-war screed — both authors are leftists annoyed that sloppy thinking undermines legitimate critiques of power. The chapter on Lacan's use of mathematical "mathemes" is particularly savage: Sokal shows that Lacan's equations are gibberish, not profound insights into the unconscious. If you've ever sat through a seminar where someone claimed "the subject is a Möbius strip" and wanted to flip the table, this book is cathartic revenge. Explore our current copy of Intellectual Impostures or browse more Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina.
Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition — Francis Fukuyama
Why everyone's furious all the time, traced back to Plato's theory of the soul.
Fukuyama — yes, the "end of history" guy — pivots hard here, arguing that liberal democracy is failing not because capitalism collapsed but because it can't satisfy thymos, the human hunger for respect and dignity. He traces contemporary identity movements (nationalism, Trumpism, left identitarianism) back to this ancient Greek concept: people would rather be recognised than prosperous. It's a conservative-leaning book (Fukuyama worries that identity politics fragments the left) but he takes movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter seriously as responses to real indignities, not cultural posturing. The chapter comparing ISIS recruitment to populist nationalism is uncomfortably sharp. Explore our current copy of Identity or browse more Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina.
Media and Culture — Ekstrom & Reynolds
The academic primer on how information systems shape reality before "fake news" became a slogan.
This textbook (yes, a textbook, but a readable one) covers media theory from the Frankfurt School through to early-2000s digital culture, giving you the conceptual tools to dissect propaganda without sounding like a conspiracist. Ekstrom and Reynolds walk through Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model, Baudrillard's simulacra, and Hall's encoding/decoding theory, then apply them to case studies — Iraq War coverage, reality TV, early social media. It's dry in places but invaluable if you want the theoretical scaffolding behind why your uncle believes QAnon or how Netflix algorithms nudge behaviour. The margins in preloved copies are often full of angry student annotations, which adds to the charm. Explore our current copy of Media and Culture or browse more Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina.
These books weren't written to predict the future — they were written by people who understood that capitalism, empire, and media don't change their playbook, just their marketing. If 2008, Iraq, and the misinformation wars caught you off guard, these titles explain why they didn't have to. Shop all Politics & Current Affairs books at Patina Paperbacks →
Where can I buy secondhand copies of Noam Chomsky's political books in Australia?
Patina Paperbacks stocks rotating preloved Chomsky titles, including Towards a New Cold War and other media critique essays, with Australia-wide shipping from Sydney. Our Politics & Current Affairs collection gets regular drops of his work — early editions pick up foxing and margin notes from previous readers, which honestly adds to the experience of reading someone who's been proved right for forty years.
What's the best Paul Krugman book for understanding the 2008 financial crisis?
The Return of Depression Economics (1999) is the one — written nearly a decade before the crash, it walks through the mechanics of asset bubbles and liquidity traps using Japan and the Asian financial crisis as case studies. Krugman's later books address 2008 directly, but this one's eerie because he calls the pattern before it breaks. Our preloved copies ship from Sydney with free postage over $29.
Is Intellectual Impostures just anti-postmodernism culture war stuff?
No — Sokal and Bricmont are leftists annoyed that bad science metaphors undermine legitimate critiques of power. They're not dismissing postmodernism wholesale; they're specifically targeting Lacan, Deleuze, and Irigaray for citing quantum mechanics and topology in ways that make no mathematical sense. If you've ever rolled your eyes at "the subject is a Klein bottle" in a theory seminar, this book articulates why that's not depth, it's confusion dressed up as insight.
Why read pre-2008 political economy books when newer ones cover the same ground?
Because Chomsky in 1982 and Krugman in 1999 weren't reacting to crises — they were identifying patterns while everyone else was still calling them fringe. Reading them now proves their critiques weren't prophetic, just attentive. Honestly, the fact that Towards a New Cold War still describes U.S. foreign policy forty years later is damning, not dated.
Does Patina Paperbacks ship political theory books Australia-wide?
Yes — we're Sydney-based but ship preloved politics, economics, and media critique titles across Australia. Orders over $29 get free postage, and as of July 2026, our Politics & Current Affairs collection includes Chomsky, Krugman, Sokal, Napoleoni, and Fukuyama, plus rotating stock of Naomi Klein, David Harvey, and other structural critics. Check the collection link for what's live now.