Conservative columnist Mark Steyn has mocked modern progressives for having no enemies, just friends whose grievances are yet to be accommodated. The decision as to whether grievances are best accommodated or confronted is one safely made only if informed by a deep understanding of the particular discontent. Brendon O’Connor (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University) and Martin Griffiths (Associate Professor of International Relations at the same institution) have edited a collection of thoughtful and lively essays aimed at increasing our understanding of the assortment of grievances, anxieties and criticisms known as anti-Americanism. This timely volume, comprising a dozen contributions by respected scholars from the US, Britain and Australia, largely succeeds in this aim.

In their comprehensive introduction, itself a tightly wrought summation of the chapters that follow, O’Connor and Griffiths characterise anti-Americanism as ‘a disposition or sensibility rather than a substantive set of beliefs or arguments’, endorsing earlier diagnoses of a phenomenon so divorced from rationality as to be pathological: ‘a sort of allergic reaction to America as a whole.’