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In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire

mike davis

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The author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums attacks the current fashion for empires and white men’s burdens in this blistering collection of radical essays. He skewers contemporary idols such as Mel Gibson, Niall Ferguson, and Howard Dean; unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system; visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the border; predicts ethnic cleansing in New Orleans more than a year before Katrina; recalls the anarchist avengers of the 1890s and “teeny-bopper” riots on the Sunset Strip in the 1960s; discusses the moral bankruptcy of the Democrats in Kansas and West Virginia; remembers “Private Ivan,” who defeated fascism; and looks at the future of capitalism from the top of Hubbert’s Peak.

No writer in the United States today brings together analysis and history as comprehensively and elegantly as Mike Davis. In these contemporary, interventionist essays, Davis goes beyond critique to offer real solutions and concrete possibilities for change.



"Davis remains our penman of lost souls and lost scenarios: He culls nuggets of avarice and depredation the way miners chisel coal."
--The Nation

“A rare combination of an author, Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in one.”
--Susan Faludi, author, Backlash

"Davis' work is the cruel and perpetual folly of the ruling elites."
--New York Times

Mike Davis is the author many books, including City of Quartz, The Ecology of Fear, The Monster at Our Door, and Planet of Slums. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in San Diego.


340 pages, Paperback

First published August 1,2007

This edition

Format
340 pages, Paperback
Published
September 1, 2007 by Haymarket Books
ISBN
9781931859424
ASIN
1931859426
Language
English

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About the author

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mike davis

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Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 26 votes)
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26 reviews All reviews
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Cotaweb
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Mike Davis can be very hit and miss. This book consists of lots of 5-page rants for Socialist magazines. I should have known this wouldn't be one of his better books, but I was excited to read his take-down of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" It was alright.
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cr4son
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A great collection of essays on the American political-economic system.
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jiegonator
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I have read several things by Mike Davis, mostly Urban Theory, but lately I have been branching out. He is an incredible writer, thinker and social critic. Leave it to say, nothing I read here surprised me, believing completely that America is an empire on the decline. But I still got really pissed when I read the essays. He skewers a lot of "sacred American stuff" and leaves you with an ugly taste in your mouth for America and her ruling class. Here is the final paragraph from the Afterword: In De Ste. Croix's opinion, those vampires," the Roman and Byzantine upper classes, not the maligned "barbarians" (Goths, Vandals, Huns and Arabs), were the true looters and destroyer of Classical civilization. "As I see it, the Roman political system (especially when Geek democracy had been wiped out ) facilitated a most intense and ultimately destructive economic exploitation of the great mass of the people, whether slave or free, and it made radical reform impossible. The result was that the propertied class, the men of real wealth, who had deliberately created this system for their own benefit, drained the life-blood from their world and thus destroyed Graeco-Roman civilization over a large part of the empire....." It remains to be seen who will cry for the new Rome on the Potomac. It is a great book, now back to William Faulkner.
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NinaLove9
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Despite sloppy editing and a somewhat idiosyncratic use of words like "antinomy," the substance of these essays makes for provocative reading.
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FUNKePills
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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WOW!!! Davis continues to be the most eloquent leftist writer of the day! I generally don't follow radical works but the analysis of the 2006 midterm elections alone is worth the price. The analogies to Imperial Rome are sublime and the phantasmogoric, vertigo-inducing leaping from New Orleans to the Mexican border to Puerto Vallarta to 1930s Chicago, to 1840s Paris. Bravo!
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TheAnimeniac
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Reading Davis' takes and analyses about the 2000s feels at times wild: the US election of 2024 stares back at the reader when the author describes the 2004 election. It's refreshing, somewhat eye-opening and comforting to see a socialist historian and activist understand his time and its trends and dynamics this accurately. It shows that paying attention and being involved while having the right tools to grasp what's going on leads to corrects assessments even in the moment. Being used to seeing pundits and politicians largely clueless ir confused, this book and its author give hope... despite the fact that the world seemingly only got worse since it was written.
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Turambar5
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A ROBUST AND WIDE RANGING WRITER

Theres few in the same league as Mike Davis - he has all the attributes of a good essayist, he can write well, with humour and wit, and can make the inexplicable comprehensible in a relatively short space.

He writes on a wide range of topics in this collection of essays - from the post hurricane Katrina ethnic cleansing of New Orleans to figures past and present in the American Union movement. His speciality is California, his home state, and his point of view is that of the underdog: the Latinos, blacks and the working and underclass. America isnt the sole subject of the essays either, a short essay celebrates the efforts of "Private Ivan" - the ordinary russian soldier who bore the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany. Many of the other essays are informed by an awareness of history and the world beyond Americas borders.

The essays are easily comprehensible to a non American and offer a fascinating take on America that stands in stark contrast to pretty much anything you'll see in the mainstream media, or a month of sundays worth of cable/satellite reality tv slush. Read it - and laugh and weep and be informed. America will never look the same.
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