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Shards and Specters of the New World Order: Casting Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies as Critique
by Timothy W. Luke
From ideological dynamics in revolutionary Russia, cultural stagnation in the USSR, and ineffective Soviet governance in the 1980s to the USSR’s institutional collapse in 1991, the emergence of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin’s wars in Ukraine since 2014, Timothy W. Luke’s Shards and Specters of the New World Order investigates how the geopolitical clout of the United States has worked to contain, but at other times sustain, the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. Luke’s critical studies also examine how Moscow’s strategies provoked radical Islamic resistance movements in Afghanistan and aided anti-Western client states, like Iraq and Syria, that threatened the New World Order envisioned in Washington after 1991.
This article’s general thesis is that, shortly after World War II, some leading Western intellectuals started to work to build a new world order based upon a modified understanding of national sovereignty and a notion of justice that rejected Machiavellianism. It claims that during the 1960s, this project became hijacked by Western socialists and was turned toward undermining the authority of national constitutions and legal traditions and promoting Machiavellianism on a global scale. Socialists effected this transformation by wedding Nietzsche’s Machiavellianism to Rousseau’s teaching about morality. From Rousseau they adopted the notion of “tolerance”—having the right feelings and right way of reading history about an exploited, sinless, innocent class (the proletariat under communism)—to replace the classical notion of justice as a moral, behavioral, quality (habitually behaving rightly toward other people) in human affairs. Of crucial significance is that, in the process, they changed the West’s understanding of justice from a classical moral category related to behaving rightly toward others into a hermeneutical category of having the right political reading of history. 
