Corey Robin, who teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center—if “teach” and “science” are understood in their broadest senses— includes in this new collection of his works an article from The London Review of Books of 2005 titled “Protocols of Machismo.” In it, he does pretty much what he does in all the book’s other pieces: he applies an ideological template to familiar material in order to make it seem unfamiliar. Those of us without the benefit of this ideological template may think the world is one way but, by donning Professor Robin’s special 3-D glasses, we can see that it is quite different from what we have supposed. In the case of this essay, the extensive literature about war and the causes of war, together with the whole segment of human history which it takes as its field of study, are swept away at a stroke. The whole idea of “national security,” that “idée fixe of the twentieth century,” as he calls it, is a mere illusion, a false ideology dreamed up by testosterone-crazed leaders as an excuse for their romantic fantasies of violence.

What’s striking to me about this and similar operations, which are diligently and industriously carried out in piece after piece in this volume, is how naive the operator must be, how lacking in any sense of self-irony, not to see how condescending he is to his audience, as well as to those he characterizes, implicitly, as delusional. Or maybe