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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies
The German-Austrian social theorist and philosopher Leo Kofler
(1907-1995) represents what Oskar Negt once called 'unmutilated,
living Marxism'. Throughout his life he dealt with issues of
history and modernity, Marxist philosophy and the critique of
ideology, philosophical anthropology and aesthetics. In this
volume, author and Kofler biographer Christoph Junke elucidates the
contours of his philosophy of praxis, traces an arc from the
socialist classics to postmodernism, and outlines the socialist
humanist thinker's enduring relevance. The book also includes six
essays by Leo Kofler published in English for the first time. The
main work was first published in German as Leo Koflers Philosophie
der Praxis: Eine Einfuhrung in sein Denken by Laika Verlag, 2015,
ISBN 978-944233-33-8. Copyright by Laika Verlag.
The year is 1932. In Rome, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini
unveils a giant obelisk of white marble, bearing the Latin
inscription MVSSOLINI DVX. Invisible to the cheering crowds, a
metal box lies immured in the obelisk's base. It contains a few
gold coins and, written on a piece of parchment, a Latin text: the
Codex fori Mussolini. What does this text say? Why was it buried
there? And why was it written in Latin? The Codex, composed by the
classical scholar Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci (1867-1960), presents a
carefully constructed account of the rise of Italian Fascism and
its leader, Benito Mussolini. Though written in the language of
Roman antiquity, the Codex was supposed to reach audiences in the
distant future. Placed under the obelisk with future excavation and
rediscovery in mind, the Latin text was an attempt at directing the
future reception of Italian Fascism. This book renders the Codex
accessible to scholars and students of different disciplines,
offering a thorough and wide-ranging introduction, a clear
translation, and a commentary elucidating the text's rhetorical
strategies, historical background, and specifics of phrasing and
reference. As the first detailed study of a Fascist Latin text, it
also throws new light on the important role of the Latin language
in Italian Fascist culture.
According to renowned Marxist economist Samir Amin, the recent Arab
Spring uprisings comprise an integral part of a massive "second
awakening" of the Global South. From the self-immolation in
December 2010 of a Tunisian street vendor, to the consequent
outcries in Cairo's Tahrir Square against poverty and corruption,
to the ongoing upheavals across the Middle East and Northern
Africa, the Arab world is shaping what may become of Western
imperialism - an already tottering and overextended system.The
Reawakening of the Arab World examines the complex interplay of
nations regarding the Arab Spring and its continuing, turbulent
seasons. Beginning with Amin's compelling interpretation of the
2011 popular Arab explosions, the book is comprised of five
chapters - including a new chapter analyzing U.S. geo-strategy.
Amin sees the United States, in an increasingly multi-polar world,
as a victim of overreach, caught in its own web of attempts to
contain the challenge of China, while confronting the staying power
of nations such as Syria and Iran. The growing, deeply-felt need of
the Arab people for independent, popular democracy is the cause of
their awakening, says Amin. It is this awakening to democracy that
the United States fears most, since real self-government by
independent nations would necessarily mean the end of U.S. empire,
and the economic liberalism that has kept it in place. The way
forward for the Arab world, Amin argues, is to take on, not just
Western imperialism, but also capitalism itself.
The Franklin Book Programs (FBP) was a private not-for-profit U.S.
organization founded in 1952 during the Cold War and was subsidized
by the United States' government agencies as well as private
corporations. The FBP was initially intended to promote U.S.
liberal values, combat Soviet influence and to create appropriate
markets for U.S. books in 'Third World' of which the Middle East
was an important part, but evolved into an international
educational program publishing university textbooks, schoolbooks,
and supplementary readings. In Iran, working closely with the
Pahlavi regime, its activities included the development of
printing, publishing, book distribution, and bookselling
institutions. This book uses archival sources from the FBP, US
intelligence agencies and in Iran, to piece together this
relationship. Put in the context of wider cultural diplomacy
projects operated by the US, it reveals the extent to which the
programme shaped Iran's educational system. Together the history of
the FBP, its complex network of state and private sector, the role
of U.S. librarians, publishers, and academics, and the joint
projects the FBP organized in several countries with the help of
national ministries of education, financed by U.S. Department of
State and U.S. foundations, sheds new light on the long history of
education in imperialist social orders, in the context here of the
ongoing struggle for influence in the Cold War.
This book is a valuable resource for understanding the character,
development, and consequences of fascist dictatorships.
Approximately 60 million lives were taken during World War II. This
book serves to explore the ultimate cause of it-fascism-and to
educate readers on the history and motivation behind this complex
political movement. This historical exploration includes many
helpful educational tools, including a timeline, an encyclopedia,
and excerpts from primary source documents. Using primary document
sources, the author provides a direct account of the origin and
evolution of fascism. This text analyzes the rise of fascism in
Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain from 1919 through
1945. Readers in high school and college will not only learn the
facts surrounding World War II but also understand the cultural
environment and events that led up to the devastation of the
Holocaust. This text is crucial for educating students about the
beginnings and extension of the fascist movement in Europe in the
early 20th century. Analyzes the rise of fascism in different
countries and settings Serves as an ideal reference for high school
students and undergraduates Includes original argumentative essays
that investigate some of the enduring issues surrounding fascism
Examines excerpts from primary source documents Provides a timeline
that serves as a quick reference tool for students
Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained
interest in recent decades as Britain's imperial past. What
accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on
the historical imagination? How has it endured even as its subject
slips further into the past? In seeking to answer these questions,
the proposed volume brings together some of the leading figures in
the field, historians of different generations, different
nationalities, different methodological and theoretical
perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses
the relationship between their personal development as historians
of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape
their careers. The result is a book that investigates the
connections between the past and the present, the private and the
public, the professional practices of historians and the political
environments within which they take shape. This intellectual
genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great
value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial
history.
Between 1918 and 1968, the forces of revolution and
counter-revolution fought a ceaseless battle over Europe's history.
In Germany and Spain, the Moscow-led communist parties led the
revolutionary movements to disaster. In the decades after the
Second World War, democracy was regularly threatened by right-wing
movements which aimed to dramatically constrict democratic rights.
This 'Bonapartism' continually threatened democracy in France until
the 1968 worker- and student-revolt destroyed the foundations of
Gaullism.In this book a participant and political leader within the
revolutionary movement gives his perspectives on those struggles. A
biographical note by Ernest Mandel, which introduces this volume,
explains how over six decades in the workers movement Pierre Frank
became perhaps the best-known anti-Stalinist revolutionary in
France. He was one of the first to be arrested during the crisis of
1968, when the French section of the Fourth International was
banned.Frank was secretary to Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, a central
leader of the Fourth International from the 1940s and, until his
death in 1984, editor of its French-language theoretical journal,
"Quatri me Internationale." His best-known books are "The Long
March of the Trotskyists" and "Histoire de l'Internationale
Communiste," a chapter of which has been specially translated for
this volume.
Confronting Capital and Empire inquires into the relationship
between philosophy, politics and capitalism by rethinking Kyoto
School philosophy in relation to history. The Kyoto School was an
influential group of Japanese philosophers loosely related to Kyoto
Imperial University's philosophy department, including such diverse
thinkers as Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Nakai Masakazu and
Tosaka Jun. Confronting Capital and Empire presents a new
perspective on the Kyoto School by bringing the school into
dialogue with Marx and the underlying questions of Marxist theory.
The volume brings together essays that analyse Kyoto School
thinkers through a Marxian and/or critical theoretical perspective,
asking: in what ways did Kyoto School thinkers engage with their
historical moment? What were the political possibilities immanent
in their thought? And how does Kyoto School philosophy speak to the
pressing historical and political questions of our own moment?
The Russian revolution in October 1917 gave the workers', soldiers'
and peasants' soviets full state power. It swept away the bourgeois
state. Subsequent successful seizures of power in the name of the
workers have involved either peasant armies led by working class
political nuclei or, disastrously, the occupation of countries by
the forces of the Russian workers' state.The bureaucratic leaders
of European workers thwarted the spread of the revolution. The
isolated Stalinist bureaucracy produced a consolatory myth: that
Russia did not need such foreign victories because it would achieve
'Socialism in one Country'.To defy this myth, this book brings
together documents by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky illustrating
the real history of the strategy that won the Russian revolution
and can win future working class seizures of power. Inside, readers
will find Marx and Engels' "Address to the Communist League,"
Lenin's "April Theses" and "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the
Present Revolution," Trotsky's "The Character of the Russian
Revolution" and Mandel's "What is Trotskyism?"
One of the British Empire's most troubling colonial exports in the
19th-century, James Busby is known as the father of the Australian
wine industry, the author of New Zealand's Declaration of
Independence and a central figure in the early history of
independent New Zealand as its British Resident from 1833 to 1840.
Officially the man on the ground for the British government in the
volatile society of New Zealand in the 1830s, Busby endeavoured to
create his own parliament and act independently of his superiors in
London. This put him on a collision course with the British
Government, and ultimately destroyed his career. With a reputation
as an inept, conceited and increasingly embittered person, this
caricature of Busby's character has slipped into the historical
bloodstream where it remains to the present day. This book draws on
an extensive range of previously-unused archival records to
reconstruct Busby's life in much more intimate form, and exposes
the back-room plotting that ultimately destroyed his plans for New
Zealand. It will alter the way that Britain's colonisation of New
Zealand is understood, and will leave readers with an appreciation
of how individuals, more than policies, shaped the Empire and its
rule.
Suvin's 'X-Ray' of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable
overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century
socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary
self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that
between 1965- 72 there was a confused and hidden but still
open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was
closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of
this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political
history, which points beyond Yugoslavia - including its
achievements and degeneration - to show how political and economic
democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist
Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical
and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party,
sociological debates about classes, and Marx's great foray against
a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question.
Robert Knight's book examines how the 60,000 strong Slovene
community in the Austrian borderland province of Carinthia
continued to suffer in the wake of Nazism's fall. It explores how
and why Nazi values continued to be influential in a post-Nazi era
in postwar Central Europe and provides valuable insights into the
Cold War as a point of interaction of local, national and
international politics. Though Austria was re-established in 1945
as Hitler's 'first victim', many Austrians continued to share
principles which had underpinned the Third Reich. Long treated as
both inferior and threatening prior to the rise of Hitler and then
persecuted during his time in power, the Slovenes of Carinthia were
prevented from equality of schooling by local Nazis in the years
that followed World War Two, behavior that was tolerated in Vienna
and largely ignored by the rest of the world. Slavs in Post-Nazi
Austria uses this vital case study to discuss wider issues relating
to the stubborn legacy of Nazism in postwar Europe and to instill a
deeper understanding of the interplay between collective and
individual (liberal) rights in Central Europe. This is a
fascinating study for anyone interested in knowing more about the
disturbing imprint that Nazism left in some parts of Europe in the
postwar years.
This edited volume examines the experience of World War I of small
nations, defined here in terms of their relative weakness vis-a-vis
the major actors in European diplomacy, and colonial peripheries,
encompassing areas that were subject to colonial rule by European
empires and thus located far from the heartland of these empires.
The chapters address subject nations within Europe, such as Ireland
and Poland; neutral states, such as Sweden and Spain; and overseas
colonies like Tunisia, Algeria and German East Africa. By combining
analyses of both European and extra-European experiences of war,
this collection of essays provides a unique comparative perspective
on World War I and points the way towards an integrated history of
small nations and colonial peripheries. Contributors are Steven
Balbirnie, Gearoid Barry, Jens Boysen, Ingrid Bruhwiler, William
Buck, AUde Chanson, Enrico Dal Lago, Matias Gardin, Richard Gow,
Florian Grafl, Donal Hassett, Guido Hausmann, Roisin Healy, Conor
Morrissey, Michael Neiberg, David Noack, Chris Rominger, Danielle
Ross and Christine Strotmann.
Turkey's Difficult Journey to Democracy provides a thorough
examination of the evolution of Turkey's democracy to the present
day. After the Second World War, Turkey was considered to have made
a highly successful transition from a single party authoritarian
state to political competition. Yet, within ten years, Turkey had
experienced its first military intervention. During the next forty
years, the country vacillated between democratic openings and
direct or indirect military interventions. The ascendance in the
importance of questions of economic prosperity has helped the
deepening and maturing of Turkish democracy, but some impediments
persist to produce malfunctions in the operation of a fully
democratic system. Through studying the Turkish experience of
democratization, Turkey's Difficult Journey to Democracy seeks to
provide understanding of the challenges countries that are trying
to become democracies encounter in this process. Oxford Studies in
Democratization is a series for scholars and students of
comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate
on the comparative study of the democratization process that
accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The
geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the
Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in
Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior
Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Ideology is a ubiquitous, continuously innovating dimension of
human experience, but its character and impact are notoriously
difficult to pinpoint within political and social life. Political
Ideology in Parties, Policy, and Civil Society demonstrates that
the reach and significance of political ideology can be most
effectively understood by employing a multidisciplinary approach.
Offering analyses that are simultaneously empirical and
interpretive - in fields as diverse as development assistance
policy and game theory - the contributors to this volume reveal
ideology's penetration in varied spheres, including government
activity, party competition, agricultural and working-class
communities, and academic life.
The Cold War began almost immediately after the end of World War II
and the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As images of the Nazis'
atrocities became part of American culture's common store, the evil
of their old enemy, beyond the Nazis as a wartime opponent, became
increasingly important. As America tried to describe the danger
represented by the spread of Communism, it fell back on
descriptions of Nazism to make the threat plain through comparison.
At the heart of the tensions of that era lay the inconsistency of
using one kind of evil to describe another. The book addresses this
tension in regards to McCarthyism, campaigns to educate the public
about Communism, attempts to raise support for wars in Asia, and
the rhetoric of civil rights. Each of these political arenas is
examined through their use of Nazi analogies in popular, political,
and literary culture. The Nazi Card is an invaluable look at the
way comparisons to Nazis are used in American culture, the history
of those comparisons, and the repercussions of establishing a
political definition of evil.
This book is situated at the cutting edge of the political-ethical
dimension of history writing. Henkes investigates various
responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, as well
as other major ethical obligations towards society and humanity
when historical subjects have to deal with a repressive political
regime. In the first section we follow pre-war German immigrants in
the Netherlands and their German affiliation during the era of
National Socialism. The second section explores the positions of
Dutch emigrants who settled after the Second World War in Apartheid
South Africa. The narratives of these transnational agents and
their relatives provide a lens through which changing constructions
of national identities, and the acceptance or rejection of a
nationalist policy on racial grounds, can be observed in everyday
practice.
Kevin Keating is a trade union activist, a long-standing opponent
of social partnership in the Irish Trade Union movement and
advocate of rank and file organisation. Jonathan Morrison is a
researcher with a wide knowledge of the political development of
emerging economies.Joe Corrigan is an accountant with a background
in economics and author of "Prisoners of Social Partnership," an
analysis of the corrosive effects of collaboration between the
Irish government and Trade Union leadership.In Ireland's Credit
Crunch they discuss the roots of the current crisis in Ireland, the
unprecedented scale of the threat to workers in Ireland and Europe
and details of the programme that workers should advance to build a
real alternative to the economic famine they are facing.Further
analysis of the Irish Crisis is available at:
www.socialistdemocracy.org
This book presents a historical overview of colonial Mexico City
and the important role it played in the creation of the early
modern Hispanic world. Organized into five sections, an
interdisciplinary and international team of twenty scholars
scrutinize the nature and character of Mexico City through the
study of its history and society, religious practices,
institutions, arts, and scientific, cartographic, and environmental
endeavors. The Companion ultimately shows how viceregal Mexico City
had a deep sense of history, drawing from all that the ancient
Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa offered but where history,
culture, and identity twisted and turned in extraordinary fashion
to forge a new society. Contributors are: Matthew Restall, Luis
Fernando Granados, Joan C. Bristol, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Frances
L. Ramos, Antonio Rubial Garcia, Alejandro Caneque, Cristina Cruz
Gonzalez, Ivan Escamilla Gonzalez, Maria del Pilar Martinez
Lopez-Cano, Enrique Gonzalez Gonzalez, Paula S. De Vos, Barbara E.
Mundy, John F. Lopez, Miruna Achim, Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Martha
Lilia Tenorio, Jesus A. Ramos-Kitrell, Amy C. Hamman, and Stacie G.
Widdifield. See inside the book.
This innovative edited collection brings together leading scholars
from the USA, the UK and mainland Europe to examine how European
identity and institutions have been fashioned though interactions
with the southern periphery since 1945. It highlights the role
played by North African actors in shaping European conceptions of
governance, culture and development, considering the construction
of Europe as an ideological and politico-economic entity in the
process. Split up into three sections that investigate the
influence of colonialism on the shaping of post-WWII Europe, the
nature of co-operation, dependence and interdependence in the
region, and the impact of the Arab Spring, North Africa and the
Making of Europe investigates the Mediterranean space using a
transnational, interdisciplinary approach. This, in turn, allows
for historical analysis to be fruitfully put into conversation with
contemporary politics. The book also discusses such timely issues
such as the development of European institutions, the evolution of
legal frameworks in the name of antiterrorism, the rise of
Islamophobia, immigration, and political co-operation. Students and
scholars focusing on the development of postwar Europe or the EU's
current relationship with North Africa will benefit immensely from
this invaluable new study.
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