"Nothing will be the same after September 11th 2001". This is the wisdom offered and widely received since the announcement of the war on terrorism, a permanent war declared on both an unknown enemy and an abstract noun. But in this book, Lewis Lapham shows that the imperial behaviour of the US government is perfectly consistent with the practice of past administrations. Finding sceptics in the "battle against evil" is a hard task: unpopular opinions seldom make an appearance in the US press or on the TV news, and during the months since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the voices of dissent in America have been few and far between. Lewis Lapham is an exception.