For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist t

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited

The idea that society, or civilisation, is predicated on the "state" is a projection of present-day political ideology into the past. Nothing akin to what we ca

Debates about the role and nature of the state are at the heart of modern politics. However, the state itself remains notoriously difficult to define, and the t