Beneficiary

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author and editor of several books, including Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, also published by Duke University Press, and Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Robbins has written for The Nation, n+1, and other publications.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. The Starving Child  152. You Acquiesce In It: George Orwell on the System  333. A Short History of Commodity Recognition  514. The Nation-State as Agent of Cosmopolitanism  755. Naomi Klein's Love Story  936. Life Will Win  117Conclusion: You Can't Handle the Truth  139Notes  155Bibliography  169Index  177

"In The Beneficiary, Bruce Robbins wants to make room for the note of guilt in our songs of gratitude. Who is a beneficiary? Robbins’s answer is that it is probably you. . . . Perhaps in the future tallying up the planetary cost of national happiness will become so painful we’ll give up that thought experiment altogether. But if Robbins has his way, we’ll not only still be thinking globally - we’ll live in a world that makes doing so tolerable." - Christina Lupton (Los Angeles Review of Books) "The Beneficiary succeeds brilliantly in focusing its readers on the urgencies of our time." - Michael Rothberg (Contemporary Literature)