Perhaps more important, Frank has followed Barbara Ehrenreich in pulling back the curtains on the right’s trumped-up cultural populism, which functions as a distraction from economic policies that hardly favor the little guy. When Republicans can claim to be defending mainstream America families from threats like the “homosexual agenda” while repeatedly voting against the kind of minimum wage regulations that allow working families to buy shoes for their kids and put food on their tables, the right has managed to divorce the language of populism from any notions of economic equality. In illuminating the harsh economic realities underlying the late ’90s boom, Frank suggests the possibility of a left that stands for more than a cornucopia of lifestyle options, piercing through trendy jargon to reclaim the ideals of social justice.

Frank, editor of the legendary zine-cum-academic journal the Baffler, is a dazzling writer, with a wit that recalls H.L. Mencken’s. It’s hard to imagine any other work of business history that could make a reader embarrass herself by laughing out loud on the bus as I did while reading his new book, “One Market Under God.” Frank’s writing is caustic, but he’s nowhere near as cynical as those on the academic left who’ve abandoned the unfashionable poor for ever more baroquely irrelevant studies of pop culture’s “hidden loci of resistance.” As he wrote in the Baffler essay “When Class Disappears,” “We’ve got an entire academic pedagogy devoted to the notion that symbolic dissent — imagining, say, that the secret police don’t want us to go to the disco, but that we’re doing it anyway — is as real and meaningful, or, better yet, more real and more meaningful than the humdrum business of organizing and movement-building.” He’s inspired by the old labor left, and his writing burns with passionate outrage on working people’s behalf.

Yet despite the acuteness of his analysis, finishing “One Market Under God,” I felt nearly as frustrated as illuminated. This has partly to do with one of Frank’s only weak spots as a critic — he dismisses any causes that aren’t strictly economic as a result of his contempt for frivolous lifestyle politics. Beyond that, though, “One Market Under God,” like so much of Frank’s work, can be exasperating because it describes problems in intricate detail and then only obliquely points toward hazy solutions.

“One Market Under God” is both a persuasive attack on new economy rhetoric and a history of what Frank calls “market populism” — the theory, almost ubiquitous in the last few years, that markets are inherently democratic, even more so than democratically elected governments.

Once Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all — that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been overcome … Today, however, American opinion leaders seem generally convinced that democracy and the free market are simply identical — What is “new” is this idea’s triumph over all its rivals; the determination of American leaders to extend it to all the world; the general belief among opinion-makers that there is something natural, something divine, something inherently democratic about markets. A better term for the “New Economy” might simply be “consensus.”

By fetishizing groovy concepts like difference and change and “thinking outside the box,” Frank argues, the new economy’s consultants, PR firms and media organs neutralize old objections to capitalism that were based on the soul-sucking conformity of bygone decades. The ’90s consensus, he says, “was a struggle to establish the legitimacy of the free-market order by grounding it in something decidedly un-conservative; it was a consensus based not on obedience to God or deference to great men but on the volatile new idea that social conflict affirmed the principles of the market.” The new corporate ideology celebrates “change ” and “chaos.” As Frank notes, “One of the more disheartening commercial fads of the nineties was the tendency to compare a given company’s products to the civil rights movement.

Thus in the ’90s, unchecked capitalism became cool. At the same time, all those cutting-edge companies with their nonhierarchical management styles helped create an abyss between the rich and the poor unique in the First World. For those without stock portfolios and stuck in insecure jobs paying stagnant wages, it made little difference whether the new breed of CEOs wore gray flannel suits or hip-hop gear.

Unlike many other lefty critics of American capitalism, Frank actually studies the inner workings of the business world, and his research yields some of the book’s most astute insights and terrifying observations. The sections that focus on business literature and changing methods of corporate organization continue the project of Frank’s first book, “The Conquest of Cool.”

“The Conquest of Cool” is essentially about ’60s advertising men, but it’s also an argument about the role of the counterculture in contemporary capitalism. Frank rejects the notion that corporations simply co-opt the pure, authentic styles of the street. Instead, he maintains that while the ’60s counterculture flattered itself with the idea that its hipness undermined “square” mainstream society, its values actually dovetailed in many ways with those of the admen. Citing the historians Warren Susman, William Leach and Jackson Lears, Frank wrote in “The Conquest of Cool,” “[T]he prosperity of a consumer society depends not on a rigid control of people’s leisure-time behavior, but on exactly its opposite: unrestraint in spending, the willingness to enjoy formerly forbidden pleasures, an abandonment of the values of thrift and the suspicion of leisure that characterized an earlier variety of capitalism.”

Charting the “Creative Revolution” on Madison Avenue — in which marketing campaigns gave up embarrassing ’50s earnestness in favor of the irony and audacity we all know and love today — Frank said, “What happened in the ’60s is that hip became central to the way capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” That idea is at the core of almost everything else he’s written, and in 2000, with brand-name sneakers selling themselves as agents of self-actualization, insouciant young tech millionaires lionized in fawning magazine profiles and endless commercials set to au courant dance music or classic punk, it’s hard to doubt him.

A good part of “One Market Under God” has Frank explaining the way the digital economy has parlayed hipster cred into cultural legitimacy. “Business wanted us all to know: It had changed. It had become cool. It had become sensitive, youthful, soulful,” he writes. “Business was no longer wearing pinstripes or tuning in to the old boys’ network. In decades previous, perhaps, business had rewarded the well-born and pompous, but now everything was different. In the ’90s business was a truth-device; a friend of humanity; a powerful warrior for global democracy; a righteous enemy of pretense and falsehood.”

Everyone has seen business’ attempts to convince us of these notions through ads and journalism; Frank has had the infinite patience to wade through swamps of marketing literature to see how business convinces itself. This is one of the book’s great services — it’s incredibly jolting to come face to face with the awesome, almost Wagnerian idiocy of the writings of, say, Tom Peters and then realize that people with power over your life take this shit seriously. “Now,” he quotes Peters, “– the people who lift ‘things’ (the … rapidly … declining fraction) are the new parasites living off the carpal-tunnel syndrome of the computer programmers’ perpetually strained keyboard hands.”

Peters isn’t alone in trying to cast the working class as a new privileged elite while painting the real elite as somehow oppressed. Frank quotes a Wired manifesto stating, “The rich, the former leisure class, are becoming the new overworked. And those who used to be considered the working class are becoming the new leisure class.” It’s stunning to realize that would-be architects of our economy consider unemployment or underemployment “leisure.”

In addition to cheerleaders like Peters, business has also been helped, Frank writes, by its putative opponents, the self-described radicals of university cultural studies departments, where scholars devote themselves to analyzing the “subversive” elements in pop culture. Frank’s indictment of the way cultural studies reinforces the status quo mirrors the argument Russell Jacoby made in last year’s penetrating “The End of Utopia.” The cultural studies professors both writers reprove tend to regard any criticism of consumer society as elitist, since it questions the taste and intelligence of ordinary consumers. Jacoby quotes cultural studies professor Alan Wolfe: “[W]hatever the literati once denounced, cultural studies will uphold: romance novels, ‘Star Trek’, heavy metal, Disneyland, punk rock, wrestling, Muzak, ‘Dallas’ … If shopping centers were for an earlier generation of Marxists symbols of the fetishism of commodities, then contemporary advocates of cultural studies … find them “overwhelming and constitutively paradoxical.” These academics may regard themselves as latter-day Marxists, but this position ensures that they’ll forever be defending the market.

Surveying literature on the ostensible left and the business right, Frank paints a disturbing picture of a society that has neutralized most kinds of dissent through irony, fatuous theorizing and the transformation of alienation into a niche market. So if Frank’s analysis is so right on, why is “One Market Under God” occasionally maddening? Partly it’s because his master narrative of the symbiosis between hipsters and capitalists stamps out ideological nuance. Sure, if you believe that things like abortion rights, gay marriage and free speech online are simply distractions from economic issues, then there is no real difference between Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow and Newt Gingrich.

Yet the fact is that civil rights do remain under attack. In Frank’s preface, “Deadheads in Davos,” he faults Barlow and his ilk for objecting to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because of the Communications Decency Act and not because it ushered in an orgy of media mergers. The CDA attempted to criminalize the transmission of “indecent” material online. Frank dismisses the seriousness of this threat to free speech, writing that it was “destined from the get-go to be struck down by courts. But that hardly soothed Barlow … who proceeded to sound the tocsin of cyberlibertarianism.”

It seems strange, though, to suggest that a public outcry against the CDA was unwarranted. Even if a Supreme Court’s overturn was completely assured (which it wasn’t — moderate Sandra Day O’Connor and Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented), Congress’ blithe dismissal of elementary free speech rights surely merited anger. Besides, the issue of free speech on the Internet has only grown more serious. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Motion Picture Association of America succeeded in convincing a judge to ban Web sites from even linking to code for reverse-engineering DVDs. A clothing company has been sued for printing the code on T-shirts. Imagine being taken to court for making a shirt that big business finds threatening — that alone should prove free speech isn’t a moot issue. In their way, the cyberlibertarians are capable of challenging the culture industry — they’re not always simply stooges for capital.

But given the scope of Frank’s book, this is a relatively small point. The bigger problem is, in a way, not even Frank’s fault — it has to do with the decline of the left generally. Frank is right — there is a mainstream consensus that laissez-faire capitalism is inevitable. But this consensus results as much from the left’s failure to offer a coherent strategy for dealing with global economics as it does from big business’s PR savvy.

Frank’s chapter on cultural studies hints at the left’s lost bearings, but in other ways he skirts the issue. Surely, part of any challenge to a consensus should include an alternative vision, but on this Frank is uncharacteristically vague. “I believe that the key to reining in markets is to confront them from outside,” he writes. “What we must have are not more focus groups or a new space where people can express themselves or etiquette lessons for executives but some countervailing power, some force that resists the imperatives of profit in the name of economic democracy.”

The closest that Frank comes to identifying what this countervailing power might be is in the book’s last sentence, which says, “And on the streets of Seattle, just as on the prairies of Kansas a hundred years before, a truly eclectic coalition astonished the world with the power of the language of democracy.” This hardly solidifies Frank’s position, since the agenda of the protesters in Seattle, Washington and Prague has remained diffuse. As the Economist smugly notes, even Naomi Klein, author of the celebrated anti-corporate book “No Logo,” has called the protesters “a movement of meeting-stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead.” They may speak the language of democracy, but what are they saying?

Of course, some of the protesters champion issues that anyone with lefty sympathies would support — protection for the environment and debt relief, for example. But on the larger issue of globalization, the protest movement, like the left in general, has yet to come up with a workable scheme. Frank lambastes the pundit class for painting Seattle union protesters as “the deluded, racist foot soldiers of protectionism.” Yet old-fashioned protectionism is indeed what many of them are fighting for.

A liberal might wish to support them, but the globalizers targeted by these new activists can now claim to have one of the left’s most cherished ideals on their side — improving conditions in the Third World. In a recent issue of the Economist, an editorial states, “In terms of relieving want, ‘globalization’ is the difference between South Korea and North Korea, between Malaysia and Myanmar, even (switching timespan) between Europe and Africa.” Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn sound a similar note in a recent New York Times Magazine excerpt from their book “Thunder From the East.” “Fourteen years ago, we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops,” they write. “In time, though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians: that the campaign against sweatshops risks harming the very people it is intended to help.” Kristof and WuDunn are careful to decry brutal, abusive conditions in many sweatshops, but they insist “Asian workers would be aghast at the idea of American consumers boycotting certain toys or clothing in protest. The simplest way to help the poorest Asians would be to buy more from sweatshops, not less. For all the misery they can engender, sweatshops at least offer a precarious escape from the poverty that is the developing world’s greatest problem.”

The left must refute this idea, conceive a better economic policy that incorporates it, or risk devolving into a kind of ugly nativism. So far, it’s hard to find much evidence that contradicts Kristof and WuDunn’s view (Frank mocks it, but doesn’t offer anything to challenge it). Until the left devises a better plan for lifting people in the Third World out of poverty, it won’t be able to mount much of an ideological challenge to unfettered capitalism. A widespread loss of faith in socialism and other grandiose plans for economic reordering has robbed most left thinkers of any enthusiasm for that task.

Ultimately, “One Market Under God” exposes a profoundly depressing situation, whips up our righteous indignation and then leaves us with no real place to channel it. It recalls the conclusion of “The End of Utopia.” After bemoaning the demise of the left’s utopian fervor and the rise of both cynicism and reform-minded practicality, Jacoby writes on the last page, “What is to be done? The question, routinely addressed to all critics, insists on a practicality inimical to utopianism. Nothing is to be done. Yet that does not mean nothing is to be thought or imagined or dreamed.” If nothing can be done but dream, that brings us right back to the meaningless symbolic politics that he assails. The few sentences Frank devotes to solutions are less resigned, but equally amorphous.

Frank’s critics have called him on his refusal to offer answers to the problems he so deftly elucidates. In a Baffler debate between Frank and Jay Rosen over public journalism, Rosen asked what good comes of Frank’s talent for satire and corruption-spotting in the absence of a positive objective. To this, Frank responded, “Rosen’s most serious accusation is that I spend comparatively little time proposing real-world solutions to the problems I describe … It seems odd, to put the kindest spin on it, for a superjournalist like Rosen to assert that shaping opinions through well-reasoned argument, as I attempt to do, is somehow a less legitimate pursuit than shaping opinion through foundation-backed blueprints for the production of feel-good anti-argument.”

To a point, he’s right. “One Market Under God” is valuable simply because it points out the way a moneyed elite has enlisted the media and popular opinion in its cause. But until Frank or someone starts seriously grappling with how to save American jobs and curb corporate power without sacrificing Third World workers or dampening prosperity, the fury his book stirs up feels impotent.

Obviously, there are real things we can do to ameliorate inequality — increase the social safety net, improve education, raise taxes on the rich, end the wholesale imprisonment of young black men engendered by the drug war. But none of those reforms really challenges the consensus about globalization, hypercapitalism and an economy that benefits investors at the expense of workers, and Frank doesn’t propose anything that does. We’re left with the conviction that the current system is bad, but little clue about how to make a better one.

Sheesh. Saving the world hasn’t been this hard since Noah assembled his bestiary, and it just got a lot harder with the publication of Peter Huber’s “Hard Green,” a dreadfully irresponsible, though wildly engaging polemic that accuses the so-called “soft green” approach to environmental protection with doing much more harm than good. Were it not for the fact that we’re talking about the fate of the planet, Huber’s all-too-clever gutter-sniping and groan-inducing riffs would come off as mere trifles from the litterbug fringes of latter-day market Darwinism.

As it is, impatient capitalists and heads of industry, eager for a voice from the Teddy Roosevelt wilderness, are flocking to Huber like moths to a dim bulb. William F. Buckley says Huber’s manifesto is the “richest contribution ever made to the political mind”; former Citicorp chairman Walter Wriston claims that Huber’s goal, to “save the environment from the environmentalists,” is the only way to color the planet “truly green.” They, and for that matter, Huber’s publishers at Basic Books, should be ashamed of themselves for getting suckered into this Manichaean sump of bad faith and Potemkin science.

Huber’s recommended approach to most current, small-scale or localized environmental disasters is to do nothing. Too much money has been wasted, he says, on “trans-science”– “the study of phenomena too large, diffuse, rare or long-term to be resolved by scientific means.” There aren’t enough lab rats in the world to properly test it, so, he says, let sleeping dioxins lie. According to Huber, we don’t really know if toxic-waste dumping causes cancer, so we should just forget about it. We made the mess, let nature deal with it.

Huber calls for a harking back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, insisting that the only way we’ll save the planet — not that it’s in particular need of saving, he reminds us — is by refocusing our efforts on preserving and protecting national parks and other majestic tracts of land. Technology-fearing, scarcity crazed “soft greens,” he says, have been so wrong in the past about everything from global warming to solar power to the benefits of free-range chickens that we shouldn’t trust them on anything. Disasters like the Exxon Valdez spill and Love Canal are the exception. Most of the time, Huber argues, technology doesn’t blow up in our faces, so trust it, and trust it wholly — from bionic cows to nuclear veggies.

And he’s in your face about it; they say “scarcity,” he says “abundance.” They say organic tomatoes, he says supersize it. The markets will sift the good from the bad, and our wealth will save the forests: “It is the rich, not the poor, who pour their wealth into green. The richer we get, the farther the footprint of our wealth extends … to our lands, shores, rivers, lakes and oceans. Wealth solves the problem of scarcity with abundance.” It’s all nice and neat — way, way too neat.

Rather than dither about in the nether world of trans-science with the softs, Huber says, we should instead renew our faith in the conservation movement founded by Teddy Roosevelt around the turn of the last century. Glassy-eyed with awe at the God-given joys of the natural world, he asks that we soar like eagles with him over to the marketplace, offering it as the ultimate arbiter and salvation for the environment. Markets are inexact, chaotic; so is nature. Ipso facto … you get the reductionist point.

Unfortunately for Huber’s argument, the so-called softs never lost their faith in conservationism; they’ve been fighting the eco-war on two fronts for years. It is very easy to talk the conservationist talk, and Huber does it well, but the hike is a much more difficult proposition.

Sure, the self-righteous eco-lovers of the left certainly are not without their excesses. But Huber willfully and disdainfully ignores the progress the softs have made in the area of land conservation. Environmental groups have long been pushing that agenda in the rough-riding corridors of state and local legislatures and at the Environmental Protection Agency, locking horns with loggers, snowmobilers, hunters, farmers, snow boarders, ranchers, campers and squirrels — all scrambling for their share of the outdoors.

Meanwhile, the stonewalling Darwinists of big industrial capitalism have been fighting against any environmental regulations since, well, forever, flaunting their toxic output with such surreal vulgarities as “pollution rights” — a notion Huber heartily embraces. Of course he does: He trusts them to do the right thing by nature, if only those useless softs would stop interfering.

It’s too bad for Huber that his adversary isn’t the monolith he makes it out to be. When he’s not goofily and imprecisely mocking most environmentalists with dumb references to “Marx and Lennon (‘imagine no possessions’)” — I kid you not — he’s strongly implying that they’ve spent the past 20 years gorging on Not-Dogs in their eco-fascist bunkers and poring over dioxin data like it was the last will and testament of the Weather Underground.

His precise definition of a “soft green” is basically anyone he disagrees with, and that’s everyone from Phish-lovin’ granola-boys to the regulators at the EPA, from Al Gore to the co-opted editorial writers of the New York Times, who made the mistake of waxing on about Ted Kaczynski in a vaguely pro-Luddite manner during the Unabomber’s 15 minutes.

Huber is pigheaded in his refusal to acknowledge that you can be against bionic cows and for forest preservation, and that fighting the former doesn’t make you a sellout on the latter. The same conservationist environmentalists in New York who’ve been fighting to free up more land in the vast Adirondack Park are also concerned about PCBs in the Hudson, acid rain and community gardens; to Huber, that’s enough to put their “agenda” at hard odds with his.

But he should get his troops in line: T.R.-lovin’ Gov. George Pataki of New York hasn’t scorned the praise heaped on his conservationist efforts even though it came from those same recalcitrant, tofu-snorting softies Huber is so congenitally disposed to dismiss as eco-frauds.

Everyone who cares about saving the world knows full well the paradoxes and occasional zero-sum choices even the most devoted environmentalist must make on both the local and global level. But Huber offers no quarter: You’re a hypocrite if you criticize Exxon for the Valdez disaster and still drive a car.

Furthermore, contrary to Huber’s assertions, no “soft green” is saying that we should burn wood instead of oil as some kind of global back-to-the-garden strategy. No one is demanding that we rip that Big Mac out of the hands of the blue-collar burger-and-fries masses and force-feed them Fakin’ Bacon. That’s all a matter of personal choice, and the markets, Huber’s precious markets, have responded to consumers’ desires with healthier products.

McDonald’s didn’t start selling its McVeggie burger because some long-hair came to a board meeting threatening global chaos if they didn’t. You can beat on environmentalists with your baloney-stick for guilting McDonald’s into using paper over Styrofoam packaging, and you can even argue about which is better for Gaia in the long run — but does Huber distrust the instincts of McDonald’s? Mr. Leave It to the Wise Markets and Marketers?

And let’s put a little context to his up-with-Teddy sloganeering. In Roosevelt’s day, many dozens of species that now simply no longer exist crawled, crept and soared about this country. That was all pre-sprawl and pre-brownfield; the buffalo roamed (OK, barely), the Colorado River roared and uranium’s secrets were as-yet-undiscovered. It is an undeniable fact that the world was a simpler, less crowded place in Roosevelt’s time — and that his conservationist motives were pretty self-serving.

Roosevelt’s main objective in conserving nature was to arrange it so that he and a fellow privileged few could enjoy the scenery as they blew holes in as many wolves, bison and cougars as they could find. Now, Huber takes up the call, aims straight and declares, “Today, free-roaming game is an asset; the hunter pays dearly to capture it, and entire habitats are saved as a result. Put a trophy price on elephants or bighorn sheep, and animals on the brink of extinction are soon multiplying like Frank Perdue’s chickens.”

And if you’ve got a problem with that notion, for whatever reason — logic, morality or whatever — watch out. “Affirming and protecting our liberties is a civic duty, and an armed citizenry can play a role there.” So, nature-boy: Head to the hills with your crates of soy-bombs and green-algae camouflage face paint — the meat-eatin’ militiamen are comin’ to get you!

If Huber won’t drop his weapon and admit that the left environmental movement is already hot on the conservation trail, he also fails to acknowledge that science itself is an evolutionary process and that we sometimes get a bit ahead of ourselves. It’s a simple point, but one that bears stating: We’re dumb. We really don’t know jack about how badly we’re screwing up the environment with global warming because there’s no model to compare it with, and if there are hints in our flooded past, they’re vague and compromised.

There’s no handbook that says, “When your society reaches the point where you can simultaneously cook a chicken, wash your clothes, communicate with relatives on another continent and watch ‘The Sopranos,’ here’s what you do to keep the party going.”

So we try, we humans, to figure this out, and when we’re wrong, we learn from our mistakes. It’s messy, but that’s how science works. The technology advances, and we realize, hey, it’s not global cooling (the rage in the ’70s, as Huber points out), but global warming that menaces the Earth. Oops, back to the drawing board. It’s not the end of the world — yet.

But bad-faith Huber assumes all the money that’s gone into researching toxins and acid rains, mutated frogs and asthma rates in the Bronx, is really going to a purpose “dressed up as science, but it is irreducibly political … a system perfectly designed to fund and grow the critical establishment, the legions of academics and bureaucrats whose occupation it is to imagine, worry and prescribe.”

And for all his Winnebago-lovin’ family-values talk (Robert Mapplethorpe, gangsta rap and the “river of filth” on television are bigger environmental problems than dioxin, PCBs and BGH), Huber is blatantly and unapologetically concerned more with saving the present than with worrying about the future. Leave it to the markets, he advises, they’ll sort it all out: That which doesn’t kill me might kill my kids, but never mind, Junior, check out the view!

Further on, Huber points to God’s instructions to Noah to “subdue” nature, declaring the Judeo-Christian imperative that humanity shall ride herd over all species. When he invokes Darwin in the next breath, Huber’s relativistic moral universe allows him to have his creator and eat him too! (Yum. For us pagans, there are always those evil organic vegetables.)

Huber should consider the possibility, advanced by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, that the Bible’s just a big hubris-driven gloss on an event that may have wiped out the proto-civilizations of earth some 8,000 years ago. At any rate, that’s the argument in their recent book “The Coming Global Superstorm,” an updated “Chariots of the Gods” that takes the Martian goo-ga out of the equation and instead credits early human civilizations with being far, far smarter than Leonard Nimoy has ever suspected.

While Huber is busily stomping out organic farms, choking free-range chicken and building mile-high skyscrapers whence he shoots trophy game with his buddies, Strieber and Bell confront global-warming and say, in effect, that we’re risking a storm of biblical proportion if we don’t get our greenhouse gases in order. And Huber? “If it is semantically ridiculous to say that ‘trees pollute,’ that is simply because ‘pollution’ … has been defined to refer to humanity alone.” (And ketchup is a genetically enhanced vegetable.)

But what if — what if — that wishy-washy “trans-science” and Strieber and Bell are right and we’ve set ourselves up for a two-week-long mother of a storm that will leave a sheet of ice over the entire Northern Hemisphere, wiping out Western civilization in the process and proving once and for all that Mother Nature is one unforgiving battle ax? What then for Huber and his slap-happy hard greens, awash in e-cash and Wall Street go-go bucks? Boy will they look stupid. Frozen, and stupid. Given the possibility of a snowstorm to end all snowstorms, what’s wrong with a little precaution, not to mention a little humility?

I’ll freely admit that there’s a part of me that prays for the global superstorm, that wishes a thousand “Magnolia” frogs would come splatting down from the heavens, bouncing off of Huber’s suburban home, ruining his lunch and shattering his opinions. You can call me a Travis Bickle (with a hammer and sickle, no less) itching for that big rain that’ll cleanse the planet of the scum and scourge of the hard greens. I’ll take the rap. And if this baby goes out with the bath water, so be it. If that day of reckoning ever comes, I’d rather die hugging a tree than humping a stump.

Triangulating Democrats notwithstanding, the real home of anti-governmentalism remains the GOP — and the more right-wing the Republican, the more extreme the rhetoric. GOP front-runner George W. Bush must play to the middle, but the True Believers who run Congress — Dick Armey, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay — are under no such constraints. These worthies have scarcely pulled their legs out of their pajamas before they’ve given the corrupt, bureaucratic, meddling elites in Washington their first whacking of the day. Since the deliverers of these speeches are themselves career politicians whose own snouts have snuffled deeply in the loamy D.C. soil, this spectacle is oddly surreal — somewhat like the Reni Magritte painting of a pipe that declares, “This is not a pipe.”

Partly for this reason, but mostly because the endless flagellation of Big Government never seems to result in it getting any smaller (under Reagan, the high priest of government-bashing, the federal government grewenormously), the GOP’s anti-government screechings have begun to sound merely formulaic, scarcely taken seriously even by those who invoke them, like the warm-up patter of a used-car salesman. The intellectual flexibility, to use a charitable word, of the congressional anti-government ideologues does not inspire much respect, either: The same fire-breathers who treat state’s rights like Holy Writ when the issue is, say, restrictions on abortion found no problem in pulling on their federal jackboots last week to trample the “sovereign” state of Oregon, which had legalized physician-assisted suicide. (Even more farcical are those congressional Young Turks who piously promised to serve only one term, but after ascending the marble steps of power somehow changed their mind.)

But if the anti-government impulse is often incoherent, hypocritical or unevenly applied (often it is little more than a thin justification for anti-tax resentment), it has a deep appeal. Throughout American history it has flared up again and again. Its newest frontier is the Web, where libertarianism, its purest and most intellectually rigorous form, is the dominant ideology.

Garry Wills’ new book, “A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government,” is a penetrating but uneven look at the history and causes of American anti-governmentalism. Wills started writing the book in 1994, when Gingrich’s troops had taken Washington, and insofar as it has a goal, it is to undercut the historical arguments — in particular, the appeal to the Founders — employed by today’s anti-governmentalists, whether politicians, militia members, or anti-gun-control zealots.

To a large degree, Wills succeeds in stripping the mythical 1776 garb from anti-government arguments. Since the minutemen, Jefferson, Madison and other patriotic icons are a cornerstone of those arguments, Wills’ book is sure to stir up right-wing intellectual circles. (As Wills reminds us, anti-governmentalism is not confined to the right wing — ’60s New Left radicals also attacked government. But statistically, to paraphrase what Roland Barthes said of myth, anti-governmentalism is on the right.)

Unfortunately, Wills doesn’t explore specific examples of anti-governmentalism with the same depth he brings to his constitutional analysis. In place of a detailed examination of these varying issues and causes, he puts forward an abstract theoretical framework that, while thought-provoking, only seems to fit some of the cases he describes. The second half of the book, much weaker than the first, is a rather cursory survey of various movements, events and individuals that rejected government in a variety of ways. It’s a worthwhile historical roundup, but inevitably superficial; and the subjects he looks at are so wildly disparate — from “withdrawers” like Thoreau to “vigilantes” like the Ku Klux Klan to “insurrectionists” like John Brown — that it becomes difficult to see what they have in common.

This feels like an opportunity missed. The prolific Wills (he is the author of 22 books on subjects ranging from John Wayne to St. Augustine) is one of our leading polymaths, a scholar who is also a keen student of contemporary culture; but he’s not bringing everything he has to the subject. It would have been more stimulating to see him taking off his constitutional-scholar coat and taking on some hard contemporary cases, like gun control, affirmative action and abortion rights. With this caveat, “A Necessary Evil” is a stimulating and important analysis of a peculiarly American phenomenon.

The anti-governmental tradition in America, according to Wills, is due to a number of “confluent influences”: “the lack of a symbolic center (religious or political) at our origins; the air of compromise in our Constitution’s formation (which made it vulnerable to the reversal of Federalist and Anti-federalist values); the Jeffersonian suspicion of the Constitution (which Madison abetted at one stage); a jostling of competitive states’ claims (reaching a climax in the secession of the South); a frontier tradition; the Lockean individualism of our political theory; a fervent cult of the gun. All these were added, in overlapping layers, to the general anti-authoritarian instincts of mankind.”

Beneath all of these factors lie what Wills calls a “cluster of anti-governmental values,” which he lists in table form next to their opposites, “governmental values.” The anti-governmental values are “provincial, amateur, authentic, spontaneous, candid, homogenous, traditional, popular, organic, rights-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory, and rotational.” Their governmental counterparts are “cosmopolitan, expert, authoritative, efficient, confidential, articulated, progressive, elite, mechanical, duties-oriented, secular, regulatory, and delegative, with a division of labor.”

Wills argues that Americans have a “deep emotional engagement” in this “cluster” of anti-governmental values, both because of the “confluent influences” listed above and because of their innate worth: “No one can really challenge them as valuable parts of the human outlook.” In fact, so deep is our attachment to these values that we persistently rewrite history to make it accord with them. In particular, we distort the meaning of the Revolution, the Constitution and the views of the Founders, in particular James Madison.

The “national mythology” about the Revolution, Wills says, is that it was a “revolution against central authority in general. So great was the Americans’ impatience with being told what to do, according to this myth, that they won their war and set up their government without needing a counter-authority to direct them.” Government itself, no matter what its form, was seen as the enemy of the highest good, liberty. Accordingly, the Constitution was designed to be deliberately inefficient, intentionally made by a government “so distrustful of itself as to hamper itself.” Pessimistic about human nature and convinced that all power corrupts, the Founders conceived of government as what Thomas Paine called “a necessary evil.” “We are faced with a zero-sum game,” Wills writes. “Any power given to the government is necessarily subtracted from the liberty of the governed.”

This myth of the Founders, Wills writes, “is of continual service” to those opposed to a variety of governmental policies: “Are Americans less protected against threats to their health than other citizens of industrial democracies? Say that is so — but are we to purchase health at the price of liberty? … If the government has the power to take away guns, all our liberties are gone … Increasing the size of government inevitably decreases freedom.”

Considering the potency of this anti-governmental strain in American life, it is not surprising that terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, or members of right-wing militias, not to mention the government-slashing, Gingrich-led zealots of the House class of ’94, see themselves as patriots in the Jeffersonian tradition. (McVeigh had a T-shirt bearing a disturbingly gory quotation from Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”)

For Wills, however, the “real victims of our fear [of federal authority] are not … the 168
people killed (and many more injured) by McVeigh. The real victims are the millions of poor or shelterless or medically indigent who have been told, over the years, that they must lack care or life support in the name of their very own freedom. Better for them to starve than to be enslaved by ‘big government.’ That is the real cost of our anti-governmental values.”

Wills meticulously and methodically knocks down the myths that support those values, starting with those concerning the Revolution. The iconic figures of the Revolution are the minutemen, who “in a spontaneous and amateur way … fought as individuals united by love of hearth and locality, not by external discipline.” While this notion is not completely without historical foundation, Wills demonstrates that it is at variance with reality. The militias were supposedly democratic and universal; but in fact, the wealthy often bought their way out. Few Americans of the day even owned a gun — America didn’t become a gun culture until after the Civil War. Worst of all for those who appeal to the militias as evidence of the power of armed citizen resistance, the militias were bad soldiers, undisciplined and disorganized; their main contribution (a painful reality check for the black-helicopter crowd) was as an internal police force, a kind of original FBI.

Wills isn’t done with the militias. In a later chapter on the NRA that will probably prove the most controversial in the book, Wills argues that the “right to bear arms” language in the Second Amendment is a purely military right, intended to apply to the militias of the day. Contemporary readings of it as legitimizing private gun control, he argues convincingly, are anachronistic.

Another Revolutionary-era myth concerns term limits, which George Will and others have claimed were embraced by the Founders. In reality, Wills observes, mandated short-term governmental service proved so chaotic and inefficient during the Continental Congress period in the 1780s that it was abandoned.

The most telling chapters in the book, however, concern the Constitution. For Wills, the triumph of the ideas most of us hold about the Constitution — that federal authority was deliberately made inefficient, through a system of checks and balances, in order to weaken itself and preserve states’ sovereignty; that its branches are co-equal; and that the competition of factions is desirable — “is one of the most successful mythologizings of a large historical sequence that can be found in all of history.” In fact, Wills argues, the states are subordinate to the larger government in all essential matters and were intended to be so. Against President Reagan, who “liked to say that the states were more important than the federal government since they had preceded it and formed it,” he cites President Abraham Lincoln, who wrote, “Our states have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union — no one of them ever having been a state outof the Union.”

The crucial argument concerns the allegedly self-undercutting, deliberately inefficient nature of the Constitution. For Wills, those who subscribe to this theory fail to place the Constitution in its historical context as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation, a weak, anti-federalist blueprint that was a notorious failure. Wills argues that the Constitution was created precisely to removethe inefficiencies that resulted from the Articles’ federal weakness — not to perpetuate them. The words “checks and balances” appear nowhere in the Constitution, Wills points out; the branches of government were not designed to impede each other, but to increase efficiency by assigning to each its proper sphere. (They are not “co-equal,” either; the legislative function is dominant.)
As for the local power celebrated by anti-governmentalists from Jefferson to Reagan, Wills shows in a virtuoso discussion of Madison’s famous Federalist No. 10 that such dispersed power inevitably results in the tyranny of the local majority — as exemplified by white denial of black rights in the pre-Civil Rights South. Only an abstract, detached, cosmopolitan power, free of “local passions,” can justly rule on such matters.

In short, the anti-governmentalists, far from being true to the spirit of the Constitution, are really partisans of the flawed and derided document it superceded. But it’s probably too much to expect politicians to acknowledge this: “Mom, the Bible and the Articles of Confederation” just doesn’t have that good stump-speech ring.

Wills may not give enough due to the fear of despotic authority that motivated the Founders. But that doesn’t invalidate his larger point about constitutional efficiency: The two points aren’t mutually exclusive. The Founders were clearly conflicted, as Wills’ fascinating discussion of what he calls the constant “dos a dos reversing of positions” makes clear. It seems quite reasonable to believe that they held philosophical reservations about federal power while acting practically to ensure that their government actually worked. Indeed, Wills’ discussion of the issues confronted by the Founders as they tried to work the wrinkles out of their new government remind us that in the real world, anti-government attitudes are often not so much wrong as completely irrelevant: a hierarchical structure, laws, abstraction, elites, planning, etc. are integral to the very enterprise itself.

Following his discussion of constitutional issues, Wills launches into a survey of various anti-governmental movements and individuals. He starts with the “nullifiers,” those who denied federal jurisdiction, like slavery defender John C. Calhoun; moves into “secessionists” (the Confederacy); “insurrections” like Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion and the Oklahoma City bombing; “vigilantes” like San Francisco’s Vigilance Committee; “withdrawers” like Thoreau and H.L. Mencken; and “disobeyers” like Martin Luther King Jr. His historical survey doesn’t condemn all of these defiers of the law, but along the way, Wills stops to throw some sharp elbows: In a pointed swipe at gun worshippers, he derides the six-shooter duels of the West as mythical (the six-gun of the day was a completely inaccurate weapon, even at close range) and points out that the Wild West, far from being a shoot-’em-up utopia, was where gun control was born. In his critical discussion of the New Left, he asserts that anti-Vietnam protesters actually prolonged the war.

What these wildly disparate groups, events and individuals have in common, Wills argues, is that each of them is motivated by, and finds justification in, the familiar “cluster of values” associated with anti-government attitudes: spontaneity, localism, religion, amateurism and the like. Wills is surely right that these values are commonly invoked by people opposed to given governmental policies — but his apparent belief that this “cluster” is invariably the underlying cause of that opposition is questionable. This view fits intellectuals like Christopher Lasch (a leading critic of top-down morality and planned altruism) better than it does the man in the street.

People can be opposed to governmental policies simply because they disagree with them, and would disagree with them no matter who or what imposed them. Take affirmative action: Many opponents believe that it is unjust and discriminatory in and of itself, not because it is imposed from on high. After the fact, they may berate out-of-touch elites, since those are the people who imposed the policy on them, but their opposition does not derive from that. The inconsistency of anti-governmentalists is more often than not purely issue-driven, as in the case of the GOP legislators for whom “the sanctity of life” trumps the rights of the state of Oregon. Wills’ theoretical framework is provocative but too abstract: A more nuanced look at specific instances of anti-governmentalism would have revealed a more complex story.

In his final chapters, Wills regains momentum in an eloquent defense of government as not a necessary evil but a “necessary good.” Against what he believes is a vulgar reading of Locke, which sees him as having regarded all government as an infringement on the primordially self-sufficient individual (Wills argues not just that this reading is reductive, but that Locke’s social contract theory is itself a “latecomer” to political theory and should not be taken as the last word on the subject), Wills puts forward the Aristotelian notion that man is inherently a social animal, and that the stability government provides “makes love itself possible.” Implicitly arguing that government is not different in kind from human relationships in general, he writes, “The arbitrary and petty acts of government are enough to make anyone grumble. But all human relationships grate or gall at times — which does not make us call the parent-child relationship, or the husband-wife bond, or friendship, mere necessary evils.”

This stimulating, if too brief, discussion makes one wish that Wills had taken up the contradictions inherent in conservative anti-governmentalism. The libertarian, free-market conservatives, following the classic liberalism of Adam Smith, are at least consistent — but the moral conservatives, who assert that authority and tradition are needed to prop up fallen man, collapse into utter confusion. Insofar as government is the mediated representation of society, rejection of it implies a selfish, me-first atomism that deviates from Christian theology and the higher group values celebrated by moral conservatives. By failing to address either libertarianism or moral conservatism, Wills leaves his theoretical discussion comparatively undeveloped.

In similar fashion, one wishes he had gone more deeply into the Manichaean psychology characteristic of some anti-governmentalists: Many of those who denounce government most strongly seem to have an almost infantile aversion to any limits on their freedom at all, suggesting not so much a noble yearning for freedom as improper toilet-training.

But these are minor objections to a book that succeeds in its main purpose, that of removing the prop of the Founders and the Constitution from anti-governmentalists. The impulse to bash authority will never die — nor, as Wills acknowledges, should it — but at least in the future it may have to march forward without tricorner hat and musket.

It takes a clever writer to pull off this kind of neo-socialist/libertarian science fiction legerdemain. But that’s MacLeod — a fiercely intelligent, prodigiously well-read author who manages to fill his books with big issues without weighing them down. A former computer programmer who has read his Marx carefully, MacLeod helps his own cause with an unremitting wit that makes poetry out of a happy confluence of technological and socialist jargon. War, then, becomes “the state’s killer app.” Even better, when a wild artificially intelligent computer program mangles the computers at a company at which the staff is busy betting on the stock market, the overseer is alarmed, but notes that it’s not quite “the terminal crisis of capitalism” — alluding to both Marx’s belief that capitalism is doomed to spectacular failure, and the drone-like fixation of all these nerds on their computer terminals.

Maybe we should be glad that no one else in science fiction is concocting puns that mix dialectical materialism with nerd culture; there’s no doubt that such jokes can get old fast. But in MacLeod’s fiction, they never do — there’s too much else happening. If it’s not the anarchic warfare among fundamentalist Christians, libertarian “space movement” fans, Green environmentalist barbarians and the ominous Men in Black, then it’s the posthumans, smart guns and autonomous artificial intelligences who are pushing the story forward at breakneck speed.

“The Cassini Division” is the third in a series of four loosely linked novels — “The Star Fraction,” “The Stone Canal,” The Cassini Division” and “The Sky Road” — all of which postulate different possibilities for future political organization against a backdrop of personal intrigue, exploding technological change and good old sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. In the extraordinary “The Star Fraction, the hero is Moh Kohn — “a yid kid with an AK and an attitude” whose communist mercenary defense agency contracts out services to clients in a United Kingdom fragmented into hundreds of mini-states. In the equally ambitious “The Stone Canal,” an “individualist anarchist” named Jonathan Wilde battles the lapsed socialist David Reid across a time span that starts in the early 1970s and ends in the 24th century.

How can that be? Well, one of the fixtures of Macleod’s fiction is the fact that technology has advanced to the point where humans can perpetually rejuvenate their bodies. Characters stick around for hundreds of years, and there are often multiple versions of the same “person” causing trouble throughout the novels. So it’s not much of a surprise when both Reid and Wilde turn up in “The Cassini Division.” This time around, however, the hero is 200-year-old Ellen May Ngwethu, whose job, in the vaguely socialist Union that now spans most of the solar system, is to do the “dirty work” that no one else wants to soil their hands with. In this case, that means defending the solar system from the Jovians, malign descendents of humans who uploaded their brains into computers and colonized Jupiter.

The Earth is still recovering from the Green Death — a combination of deadly plagues, out-of-control nanotechnology and fanatic environmentalists (MacLeod regularly enjoys poking fun at the Greens and their “evil goddess Gaia”). And now the “fast folk” on Jupiter are threatening to break free from their giant planet and wreak havoc. There’s also the problem of the libertarian anarchists who live on the other end of the wormhole — they could return any day now and disrupt the Union with their rock ‘n’ roll and primitive, archaic affection for capitalism. (These kooks still use money, for crying out loud.)

The scene is set for plenty of action, but Ngwethu is a tricky protagonist to identify with — and not just because, like most male science fiction writers, MacLeod has a hard time creating believable women characters. Ngwethu is also a racist — she doesn’t believe that conscious machines are people. She also swears by the “true knowledge” — the unvarnished idea that might makes right. She’s quite happy to be personally responsible for smashing a string of comets into the surface of Jupiter and wiping out every trace of Jovian life, if there’s even a chance that the Jovians are a threat to real humans. Moh Kohn, the idealist from “The Star Fraction,” is a lot more fun and so is Jonathan Wilde — even when his libertarianism is unabashedly self-serving. Ngwethu is a tougher call.

But “The Cassini Division” is the first of MacLeod’s novels to be published in the United States, so Ngwethu will have to bear the burden of introducing MacLeod to American audiences. Tor Books, his publisher, is starting with “The Cassini Division” on the assumption that the British-flavored politics of “The Star Fraction” might baffle some readers. This is unfortunate — not only is it a bit odd to start a tetralogy in mid-stream, but “The Cassini Division” is also a simpler, less psychologically rich work than Macleod’s first two books. Plans are afoot to release “The Stone Canal” early next year, however, and if the first two books do well, “The Star Fraction” will follow.

If so, American readers have cause to be gleeful. MacLeod is a breath of fresh air blowing through the all-too-formulaic genre niches of science fiction. Cyberpunk is far from dead — likewise class struggle. As MacLeod points out in “The Star Fraction,” the “space movement” is an opportunity for workers on (and off) the world to unite. And, as even Ngwethu comes around to realizing near the end of “The Cassini Division,” those workers don’t even have to be human to have a right to decent working conditions.

MacLeod’s political fiction is no pose. He’s a former Communist Party member who has won two Prometheus awards for best libertarian science fiction novel. After his American editor told me that MacLeod was a regular “trenchant” contributor to Internet-based discussion groups, I decided to do some cyberspace stalking. Where does he hang out? The bulk of his contributions are in the Usenet newsgroup “rec.arts.sf.written.” No surprise there — r.a.s.w. is one of the oldest watering holes on the Net — quite a few authors congregate there with their fans, critics and peers. But his next most favored spot is “alt.politics.socialism.trotsky” — and after that, a little down the list, “talk.politics.libertarianism.” One of MacLeod’s hobbies, it seems, when he’s between books, is plunging into the Internet fray to argue about what Marx and Engels really intended, and to engage in the endless hair-splitting dear to libertarians.

Working out a left-wing theory of libertarianism might strike some observers as a headlong dive into a thicket of ultra-thorny contradictions. Can’t be done, you might think. And certainly, there are no ultimate answers contained in the four-book arc — “The Star Fraction,” “The Stone Canal,” “The Cassini Division” and “The Sky Road” — that MacLeod has constructed since 1995. But MacLeod’s keen intelligence and sharp sense of humor make the journey more than worthwhile — and definitely beg the question: Who is this guy? Where did these politics come from? MacLeod agreed to answer some of these questions via e-mail.

Here’s a wild guess. The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is famous for boasting a left-wing tradition as proud as that of any city in Europe. So I’ll assume you come from a family of Glasgow Trotskyists who worked in the Glasgow shipyards. Your knowledge of left-wing factional infighting is simply too intimate not to be drawn from real life.

Not at all! My parents were quite conservative and deeply religious Scottish Highlanders. There’s a certain amount of radicalism scattered among my relatives that goes all the way back to the crofters’ [small farmers] struggles of the 19th century and the experience of two world wars. My parents were staunch supporters of the welfare state and equally staunch opponents of socialism. They strongly disapproved of my interest in Trotskyism. Naturally I thought they were terrible reactionaries but this was far from the case. They were of the generation that defeated fascism and established the welfare state — they never moved forward from that but they never retreated.

Anyway, I became a left-winger not through any influence from my family or even the Clydeside [Glasgow shipyards] labor movement but through the same process as a lot of my friends did at high school, via our rather marginal involvement in youth counterculture. It may seem ridiculous that a bunch of teenagers in Greenock, Scotland, should be reading Marcuse and Malcolm X and George Jackson, R.D. Laing and Timothy Leary and of course the so-called underground press and smoking the occasional joint, but that’s how it was. The context of Britain in the early ’70s, and big struggles like the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in and the war in Ireland, were part of the scene in that we took workers’ power for granted. France 1968 wasn’t that long ago, Poland 1970 was even more recent, and big strikes were fairly frequent. As one of the characters in “The Star Fraction” says, “I’ve seen the working class making days into history, and that isn’t something you forget.”

But how did a Trotskyist get interested in libertarianism?

After I graduated [from Glasgow University] I went as a post-grad to Brunel University in Uxbridge, just outside London, and immediately got stuck into political activity. I joined the International Marxist Group and was involved in a lot of campaigning on all kinds of issues, on campus and off. There were a lot of big struggles in London in the second half of the ’70s. I lived in a sort of licensed squat with people from England and Ireland and Kurdistan and life became much more intense. After that I lived in Finsbury Park in North London, and fell out with the International Marxist Group and later joined the Communist Party in the mid-’80s, just as it began to tear itself apart. I have to say I enjoyed being in the Communist Party more than I did being in the Trotskyist groups — it was much more open, and I think it was there that I lost my fanatical dogmatism. Because meanwhile, I’d been checking out other political ideas, I’d encountered the Libertarian Alliance and it and the debates in the Communist Party and the crisis of the Eastern Bloc stimulated me to think much longer and harder about socialism than I’d ever done before.

It wasn’t until after I read “The Star Fraction,” your first novel, that I’d learned you’d won two awards from the Prometheus Society for best libertarian science fiction novel. I found this pretty amusing because the hero of “The Star Fraction” is Moh Kohn, a communist mercenary who leads the Felix Dzerzhinsky Worker’s Defense collective. (Dzerzhinsky was the creator of the Soviet secret police.) Have you actually synthesized some kind of leftist libertarian world-view? Or are you just fooling around?

I’m not fooling around, but if I’ve synthesized a leftist libertarian world view I’d be very interested to know what it is! I do in fact agree with a lot of libertarian ideas and positions, like I’m against gun control and the war on some drugs and so forth, and I’m very proud of the two Prometheus awards. I think classical liberalism — what’s now called libertarianism — and classical Marxism have a lot more in common than many people think. Classical Marxism is very different from Trotskyism or any of the other varieties of Leninism, and I think even they have gone a long way downhill since the ’70s. The left is now more associated with repression and regulation than rebellion and liberation.

Wouldn’t the first difficulty inherent in merging leftism and libertarianism be trying to deal with the tension concerning individual rights and social justice? In “The Star Fraction,” your portrayal of a Britain fractured into countless tiny states, each with its own rules, is a libertarian utopia in the sense that all kinds of different approaches to ordering society are possible, but at the same time, life is hell within the confines of many of those mini-states.

Oh, absolutely, that’s part of the point. The politics of “The Star Fraction” — leaving aside the leftist element — is really trying to exacerbate a tension within libertarianism itself. If cultural minorities, religions and so on have their own little closed communities, they’re oppressive but if they aren’t closed, if they’re part of the wider society, they are themselves subtly altered. The libertarians aren’t really accepting the other world-views and lifestyles as having their own validity, they’re quietly banking on the notion that they’ll be assimilated. Whether this is a problem is left as an exercise for the reader.

Sitting here in front of my computer in Silicon Valley, it’s amazing how rarely one even hears the term “working class.” Sure, there are huge disparities of wealth, and plenty of temp worker exploitation and all that. But around here, receptionists and secretaries are as likely to have stock in a new start-up company as not. The so-called new economy that everyone talks about here almost tries to pretend that the working class is passi. That’s not quite the case in your books, is it?

I agree with the old Socialist Party of Great Britain argument that anyone who has to work for someone else for a living is a member of the working class. You may have stock options, but could you retire and live off them? If not, you’re still in the working class! It’s certainly true that there are big areas of overlap, fuzzy boundaries, and Silicon Valley is currently the El Niqo of class mobility in the U.S. … For the purposes of my stories, I assume that even if a lot of the heavy and dirty work continues to be off-loaded onto machines or onto the so-called third world, we’ll continue to see a growing proportion of the population dependent on a wage or salary, supplemented perhaps by self-employment and speculation. Even in “The Star Fraction” there are suggestions that things have moved on a bit — almost everyone in that book is a bit of a capitalist.

[But] the resurgence and the revolutions in my stories are not necessarily working-class even in the most generous sense, and they’re certainly not socialist. They’re presented in the stories as popular revolts against the New World Order, but which themselves only lead to further social breakdown: “What we thought was the revolution was only a moment in the fall.”

Your third novel, “The Cassini Division” struck me on first reading as less overtly political than your first two. Your American publisher has said that he thinks that the politics of your earlier novels may be a little too insidery for an American audience. But I’d hate to think you were watering down your politics to broaden your appeal.

I’d hate to think that, too. “The Cassini Division” is simpler than the other two because it has a less complicated structure and because it doesn’t have any bloody Trots! But I hope the conflicts over machine intelligence, morality versus might-is-right, and so on are just as satisfyingly unresolved as the more political conflicts in the other books.

American cyberpunks mostly seem to avoid really thinking about politics in any kind of organized way. Bruce Sterling’s most recent novel, “Distraction,” takes a whack at the topic, but the William Gibsons and the Neal Stephensons offer us societies in which critical thinking about politics seems to me to be absent. The cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan told me a few months ago that one could explain American cyberpunk obsessions from the fact that they were all the same generation of suburban-bred, TV-reared, baby boomers who grew up listening to rock ‘n’ roll and getting stoned. Marxist revolution doesn’t really fit in there, does it?

You’ve just named four of the writers I most admire! Bringing in the politics may be partly a British thing … From the North American cyberpunk side, it’s not just how they grew up but what they grew into; what they saw, correctly, as the bleeding edge of what was going on. And it was pretty prescient. They in a sense conjured up the Net and the Web, at least as much as Golden Age science fiction conjured up the space program. Long before I became a programmer, and indeed long before the Internet took off, I noticed that programmers talked like their minds were going into a virtual space, into something in their heads that was like Gibson’s cyberspace. And that was just respectable, commercial programmers. The hackers must have sounded much wilder.

The point being, they knew they were changing the world, and they were doing an end run around politics, as they thought. Politics did nothing but put obstacles in their way. The hacker ethos was to work around it. The Internet is an engine of anarchy even without anarchists, just because it’s there in a state of nature straight out of Locke or even Hobbes, and it works … As Murray Rothbard is supposed to have said of New York: “We already have the war of all against all, and it works fine!”

Looking at William Gibson’s more recent fiction, one of the things that struck me is how his villains have changed — they used to be transnational corporations and evil artificial intelligences, but now it’s media itself — tabloid TV, the endless fascination with celebrity. Do you think this is a reflection of the current economic boom in the U.S.? It seems to be hard for science fiction writers, especially out here on the West Coast, to think about the immediate future in the same kind of dystopian, shanty-town, drugs-and-AIDS catastrophe way that was so popular in the late ’80s. Instead, the new focus is on the media manipulators who specialize in operating in the new economy.

Funnily enough, the latest situationist-type rant, “Two Hundred Pharaohs, Five Billion Slaves …,” that I’ve stumbled across — massively researched, staggeringly erudite and apparently written by a complete unknown on an office PC — makes the very point that the two aspects, celebrity and poverty, software and sweatshops, are increasingly intertwined by the information industry and the industrialization of information. I haven’t checked this, but it credibly claims that 5 percent of the British work force is employed in 24-hour banking/credit telephone call centers — low-paid, unorganized, and working constantly on keyboards and phones, with a very high level of physical and nervous stress. There’s a lot going on there — the possible link-up between celebrity and surveillance, for example. We’ll all be on the telly, but most of us get our 15 minutes of fame on closed-circuit television.

Even so, there is a sense of hope running through all your novels, an essentially optimistic belief that, as suggested at the end of your second novel, “The Stone Canal,” there are no limits. In some ways, that’s the most Marxist thing about your writing — this idea that progress really exists.

I do think that progress exists, in fact I can dig up one of my favorite quotes from a Marxist, V. Gordon Childe’s conclusion to “What Happened In History”:

“These hints must suffice. Progress is real if discontinuous. The upward curve resolves itself into a series of troughs and crests. But in these domains that archaeology as well as written history can survey, no trough ever declines to the low level of the preceding one; each crest out-tops its last precursor.”