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This is a revised and expanded edition of Woodcock's accessible study, now including detailed readings of Carey's latest novels, 'Jack Maggs' and 'True History of the Kelly Gang'.

Eastern Europe has become an ideological battleground since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with liberals and authoritarians struggling to seize the ground lost by Marxism. InFantasies of Salvation, Vladimir Tismaneanu traces the intellectual history of this struggle and warns that authoritarian nationalists pose a serious threat to democratic forces. A leading observer of the often baffling world of post-Communist Europe, Tismaneanu shows that extreme nationalistic and authoritarian thought has been influential in Eastern Europe for much of this century, while liberalism has only shallow historical roots. Despite democratic successes in places such as the Czech Republic and Poland, he argues, it would be a mistake for the West to assume that liberalism will always triumph. He backs this argument by showing how nationalist intellectuals have encouraged ethnic hatred in such countries as Russia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia by reviving patriotic myths of heroes, scapegoats, and historical injustices. And he shows how enthusiastically these myths have been welcomed by people desperate for some form of \"salvation\" from political and economic uncertainty. On a theoretical level, Tismaneanu challenges the common ideas that the ideological struggle is between \"right\" and \"left\" or between \"nationalists\" and \"internationalists.\" In a careful analysis of the conflict's ideological roots, he argues that it is more useful and historically accurate to view the struggle as between those who embrace the individualist traditions of the Enlightenment and those who reject them. Tismaneanu himself has been active in the intellectual battles he describes, particularly in his native Romania, and makes insightful use of interviews with key members of the dissident movements of the 1970s and 1980s. He offers original observations of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea and expresses his ideas in a vivid and forceful style.Fantasies of Salvationis an indispensable book for both academic and nonacademic readers who wish to understand the forces shaping one of the world's most important and unpredictable regions.

America has a long tradition of middle-class radicalism, albeit one that intellectual orthodoxy has tended to obscure.The Radical Middle Classseeks to uncover the democratic, populist, and even anticapitalist legacy of the middle class. By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived. This book is a powerful combination of intellectual, business, labor, medical, and, above all, political history. Its author also humanizes the middle class by describing the lives of four small business owners: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren, and Lora Little. Lane was Portland's reform mayor before becoming one of only six senators to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. Daly was Oregon's most prominent labor leader and a onetime Socialist. U'Ren was the national architect of the direct democracy movement. Little was a leading antivaccinationist. The Radical Middle Classfurther explores the Portland Ku Klux Klan and concludes with a national overview of the American middle class from the Progressive Era to the present. With its engaging narrative, conceptual richness, and daring argumentation, it will be welcomed by all who understand that reexamining the middle class can yield not only better scholarship but firmer grounds for democratic hope.

This book represents the first systematic research by a social scientist on the radical right-wing movements in Italy since 1945. During the heyday of right-wing violence between 1969 and 1980, street aggressions, attacks, and murders were commonplace. These bloody episodes were assumed to be the work of fanatical bands of \"political soldiers\" and urban warriors loosely controlled by secret services and other covert groups, which used them as part of a \"strategy of tension\" pursued in domestic and international circles. Franco Ferraresi here acknowledges that these rightist groups were in fact permitted a certain amount of freedom, and even in some cases actually aided, in the hope that revulsion at terrorist tactics would have the effect of mobilizing public opinion in favor of existing political arrangements. However, he also studies the extent to which they operated as autonomous units, while he carefully considers the political heritage, the doctrines, and the ideology that motivated them. With the decline of violent activity on both extremes of the political spectrum in the early 1980s, the theory and practice so comprehensively discussed by Ferraresi seemed to have entered a dormant stage. Ferraresi, however, places in context the recent resurgence of neo-fascist forces in Italy, and of the so-called New Right throughout Europe, together with the rise of fundamentalism in many parts of the world.

Why did Hungary, a country that shared much of the religious and institutional heritage of western Europe, fail to replicate the social and political experiences of the latter in the nineteenth and early twenties centuries? The answer, the author argues, lies not with cultural idiosyncracies or historical accident, but with the internal dynamics of the modern world system that stimulated aspirations not easily realizable within the confines of backward economics in peripheral national states. The author develops his theme by examining a century of Hungarian economic, social, and political history. During the period under consideration, the country witnessed attempts to transplant liberal institutions from the West, the corruption of these institutions into a \"neo-corporatist\" bureaucratic state, and finally, the rise of diverse Left and Right radical movements as much in protest against this institutional corruption as against the prevailing global division of labor and economic inequality. Pointing to significant analogies between the Hungarian past and the plight of the countries of the Third World today, this work should be of interest not only to the specialist on East European politics, but also to students of development, dependency, and center-periphery relations in the contemporary world.

This book examines the causes and consequences of a major transformation in both domestic and international politics: the shift from dynastically legitimated monarchical sovereignty to popularly legitimated national sovereignty. It analyzes the impact of Enlightenment discourse on politics in eighteenth-century Europe and the United States, showing how that discourse facilitated new authority struggles in Old Regime Europe, shaped the American and French Revolutions, and influenced the relationships between the revolutionary regimes and the international system. The interaction between traditional and democratic ideas of legitimacy transformed the international system by the early nineteenth century, when people began to take for granted the desirability of equality, individual rights, and restraint of power. Using an interpretive, historically sensitive approach to international relations, the author considers the complex interplay between elite discourses about political legitimacy and strategic power struggles within and among states. She shows how culture, power, and interests interacted to produce a crucial yet poorly understood case of international change. The book not only shows the limits of liberal and realist theories of international relations, but also demonstrates how aspects of these theories can be integrated with insights derived from a constructivist perspective that takes culture and legitimacy seriously. The author finds that cultural contests over the terms of political legitimacy constitute one of the central mechanisms by which the character of sovereignty is transformed in the international system--a conclusion as true today as it was in the eighteenth century.

The triumphant rise of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte over his Republican opponents has been the central theme of most narrative accounts of mid-nineteenth-century France, while resistance to the coup d'état generally has been neglected. By placing the insurrection of December 1851 in a broad perspective of socioeconomic and political development, Ted Margadant displays its full significance as a turning point in modern French history. He argues that, as the first expression of a new form of political participation on the part of the peasants, resistance to the coup was of greater importance than previously supposed. Furthermore, it provides and appropriate testing ground for more general theories of peasant movements and popular revolts. Using manuscript materials in French national and departmental archives that cover all the major areas of revolt, the author examines the insurrection in depth on a national scale. After a brief discussion of the main characteristics of the insurrection, he analyzes its economic and social foundations; the dialectic of repression and conspiracy that fostered the political crisis; and the armed mobilizations, violence, and massive arrests that exploded as the result. A final chapter considers the implications of the insurrection for larger issues in the social and political history of modern France.

One of the most devastating periods in twentieth-century history was the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge over Cambodia. From April 1975 to the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation in late December 1978, the country underwent perhaps the most violent and far-reaching of all modern revolutions. These six essays search for what can be explained in the ultimately inexplicable evils perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Accompanying them is a photo essay that provides shocking visual evidence of the tragedy of Cambodia's autogenocide. \"The most important examination of the subject so far... Without in any way denying the horror and brutality of the Khmers Rouges, the essays adopt a principle of detached analysis which makes their conclusion far more significant and convincing than the superficial images emanating from the television or cinema screen.\" --Ralph Smith, The Times Literary Supplement \"A book that belongs on the shelf of every scholar interested in Cambodia, revolution, or communism... Answers to questions such as `What effect did Khmer society have on the reign of the Khmer Rouge?' focus on understanding, rather than merely describing.\" --Randall Scott Clemons, Perspectives on Political Science

Antimodernizam se, u pravilu, tumači ili kao protumoderni resantiman karakterističan ‎za djela apodiktički modernih mislilaca i umjetnika s kraja 19. i ‎početka 20. stoljeća ili kao tradicija filozofskopovijesne, političkofilozofske‎ i političkoteološke kritike progresa, sekularizacije, procesa modernizacije ili,‎ uopćeno govoreći, patologijâ i neuralgijâ egzistiranja u modernom svijetu. U ‎ovom se članku nastoji ponuditi teorija konzervativnog antimodernizma koja ‎potonji shvaća kao specifičnu tradiciju kulturnopesimističke teorije i kritike‎ moderniteta i moderne utemeljenu na suštinskim pojmovima konzervativizma, ‎proizašlu iz kontrarevolucionarne političke misli, a koja epohu moderne ‎tumači kao duhovnopovijesni stadij dekadencije nekoć zdrave i organičke‎ kulture, dok modernitet konceptualizira kao metapolitički projekt prevrednovanja ‎konstitutivnih vrijednosti predmodernog poretka smisla, pri čemu se nihilizam ‎shvaća kao bit i usud moderniteta. Nasuprot tako mišljenoj epohi moderne‎ i projektu moderniteta, konzervativni antimodernizam razvija viziju ili‎ kulturne palingeneze onkraj moderne ili dovođenja moderniteta do ekstrema ‎inherentnog nihilizma, a time i do samodokinuća moderne. Analizom političke ‎misli trojice katoličkih kontrarevolucionarnih političkih filozofa – Josepha‎de Maistrea, Louisa de Bonalda i Juana Donosa Cortésa – prikazat će se temeljne‎ odrednice konzervativnog antimodernizma.‎ Antimodernism has generally been interpreted either as an antimodern resentment‎ characteristic of the works of apodictically modern thinkers and artists ‎from the late 19th and early 20th century, or as a tradition of philosophical historical,‎ political-philosophical, and political-theological critique of progress,‎ secularization, modernization processes, or, more broadly speaking, of‎ the pathologies and neuralgias of existence in the modern world. This article‎ seeks to offer a theory of conservative antimodernism, comprehending the latter ‎as a specific tradition of cultural-pessimistic theory and critique of modernity‎ and the modern era, grounded in the essential concepts of conservatism ‎and stemming from counter-revolutionary political thought. Conservative antimodernism‎ conceives the modern era as a spiritual and historical stage of‎ decadence of an enfeebled and previously organic culture, while at the same ‎time imagining modernity as a metapolitical project of transvaluation of the‎ constitutive values of the pre-modern order of meaning, whereby nihilism is‎ understood as the essence and fate of modernity. In contrast to this conception‎ of the modern era and the project of modernity, conservative antimodernism ‎develops a vision either of a cultural palingenesis beyond modernity, or of‎ bringing modernity to the extremes of its inherent nihilism, thereby leading ‎to the self-abolition of the modern era. The essential features of conservative‎ antimodernism will be presented through an analysis of the political thought‎ of three Catholic counter-revolutionary political philosophers: Joseph de Maistre,‎ Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortés.‎

As each power vies for its national interests on the world stage, how do its own citizens' democratic interests fare at home? Alan Gilbert speaks to an issue at the heart of current international-relations debate. He contends that, in spite of neo-realists' assumptions, a vocal citizen democracy can and must have a role in global politics. Further, he shows that all the major versions of realism and neo-realism, if properly stated with a view of the national interest as a common good, surprisingly lead to democracy. His most striking example focuses on realist criticisms of the Vietnam War. Democratic internationalism, as Gilbert terms it, is really the linking of citizens' interests across national boundaries to overcome the antidemocratic actions of their own governments. Realist misinterpretations have overlooked Thucydides' theme about how a democracy corrupts itself through imperial expansion as well as Karl Marx's observations about the positive effects of democratic movements in one country on events in others. Gilbert also explodes the democratic peace myth that democratic states do not wage war on one another. He suggests instead policies to accord with the interests of ordinary citizens whose shared bond is a desire for peace. Gilbert shows, through such successes as recent treaties on land mines and policies to slow global warming that citizen movements can have salutary effects. His theory of \"deliberative democracy\" proposes institutional changes that would give the voice of ordinary citizens a greater influence on the international actions of their own government.