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It would be impossible to read the correspondence from an Intendent of the  Ancien Régime  to both his superiors and his subordinates without being struck by how the similarity of institutions made the administrators of that era like those of our own day. They seem to reach out to each other across the chasm of the Revolution which separates them . . . Let us cease to be surprised at the marvelous ease with which centralization was re-established in France at the beginning of this century. The men of ’89 had overturned the building but its foundations had stayed in the very hearts of its destroyers and, upon these foundations, were they able to rebuild it, constructing it more stoutly than it had ever been before. Alexis de Tocqueville,  The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution T he collapse of  the Soviet Union had a profound impact on China’s thinking about political ideology, institutions and development. footnote 1  The disastrous consequences f...

theoretical frame for analysing cities over the last two decades has been the notion of the ‘Global City’—an urban studies paradigm which runs in tandem with official, pseudo-scientific rankings of where is the most Global (is yours an Alpha or Beta Global City?). These cities, which usually grew out of imperial entrepôts—London, New York, Shanghai, Barcelona, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Lagos—are the spokes of global networks of media, tourism, ‘creativity’, property development and, most importantly, finance capital. Of that list, only one—London—is the capital city of a nation-state, although Rio is an ex-capital and Barcelona a devolved one. Göran Therborn’s Cities of Power, although it doesn’t let itself get bogged down in the issue, is explicitly a riposte to the idea of the Global City, and the peculiar Monocle-magazine vision of trans-national, interconnected, intangible (yet always apparently locally specific) capitalism that it serves to alternately describe and vindicate...