Gopal Balakrishnan

Gopal Balakrishnan writes on modern European intellectual history, political theory, philosophy, and economic history. He began his intellectual career as an undergraduate at Cornell University where he received a College Scholar B.A. in 1989. He continued his course of studies, where he completed a Ph.D. in Modern European History in 1998 Subsequently he was honored with prestigious awards, including the Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence and the Harper Schmidt Fellowship at the University of Chicago.

His interdisciplinary formation laid the groundwork for his first major publication, "The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt." This study reconstructed the trajectory of Schmitt’s intellectual and political evolution across the Weimar and Nazi periods. Many of the themes of this study were addressed in "Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War," a collection of his essays that offered original perspectives on geopolitics, capitalism, and democracy. As an editor, Balakrishnan assembled influential collections of contributions from leading scholars on nationalism and the new world order of globalization entitled "Mapping the Nation" and "Debating Empire." In recent years, Balakrishnan’s focus has shifted toward an in-depth analysis of Karl Marx's economic thought, its logical organization, and historical premises. His goal is to uncover concealed dimensions of Marx’s system in order to examine its fundamental assumptions and assess its contemporary adequacy as a theory of the structure and history of capitalism.