Movements Books - Page 2

Nationalism (Oxford Readers)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Achieving prevalence as an ideology in the political and social ferment of late 18th-century Europe and America, nationalism first found expression during the course of such historical upheavals as the American and French Revolutions. Its founders and early sponsors--Rousseau, Herder, Fichte, Korais, and Mazzini--looked to nationalism as the manifestation of modern humanity's most essential aspirations: autonomy, unity, identity. Born of notions regarding popular freedom and sovereignty that had been gathering momentum for generations, it conjured up images of a modernizing West at once hungry for change and yearning for a return to age-old concepts of fraternity and ancient heritage. Since that time nationalism, having taken on countless different dimensions, remains a vital and dynamic force for change--whether for good or otherwise.
Despite only recently becoming the subject of scholarly debate, nationalism has been the focus of a truly prodigious amount of writing. This important Oxford Reader makes the topic more accessible by offering a broad, authoritative treatment of the key contributions to the subject, while giving unprecedented depth to recent debates and issues. Edited by two of the field's most influential scholars, the readings are representative of the vast array of experience and scholarship that have shaped the concept of nationalism for over two centuries. From Ernest Renan's What is a Nation?, written in the 1880s, to the more current views of the 1990s, Nationalism gathers under one cover an impressive array of writing on everything from imagined communities to ethno-regional movements. In no other volume will students of politics, history, sociology, anthropology, international relations, and cultural studies have access to such a definitive appraisal of one of the modern world's most influential--and explosive--ideas.

Freedom From Fear and Other Writings

Aung San Suu Kyi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The eloquent voice of an often forgotten but mighty land 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

I re-read this book shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi was placed, once again, under house arrest in 2003. The daughter of the man who is referred as the founding father of Burma(today called Myanmar) - Aung San - is herself a major political figure in her country. The chapter about her father - who was assassinated when the author was two years old - is an impressive, informative, and dispassionate account of Aung San's days as a student leader and his leadership of the independence movement that established modern Burma as a nation. My own father was a foreign correspondent in Burma in the late 1940s and had covered the assassination of Aung San and his colleagues. This left me since my childhood with a deep curiosity about this period of Burmese history - and Aung San's daughter's account does not leave curious readers like myself disappointed. Most of the book is devoted to the life and times of Suu Kyi herself. It includes several articles by other writers who help readers understand how a Burmese woman rises to national prominence in a country which has known but unbroken military dictatorship for decades. This book is also about Burmese culture, religion, and language, and should be on the bookshelf on anyone who has a serious interest in this curious, wretched country of tremendous unfulfilled potential.

If you have an interest in Burmese or Southeast Asian history, you might also consider reading Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, a historical novel which I have also reviewed on this website.

Editorial Review:

A new collection of writings by the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner includes her acceptance speech as delivered by her son during her six-year incarceration and numerous reminiscences on her role in politics and her fear for her people.

Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines (Oxford World's Classics)

Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Henry Neville

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With the publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More provided a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of Utopia.
This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. New Atlantis (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period. Bringing together these three New World texts, and situating them in a wider Renaissance context, this edition--which includes letters, maps, and alphabets that accompanied early editions--illustrates the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put.

The Promise Of American Life

Herbert Croly

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Stunning Statement of How We might Effect Change for the Better 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I first read Herbert Croly's 1909 book, "The Promise of American Life" while in graduate school in 1980. I recognized then that it offered a powerful, seminal, and motivating statement for the Progressive movement then dominating the United States. It presented a manifesto for change in a time when Americans felt keenly that the nation had "run off the rails" and set on course a liberal tradition that reached fruition in the "New Deal" of the 1930s and the "Great Society" of the 1960s. On recently rereading it I find it speaks to the America of the early twenty-first century as well, for his statement of the problems of the nation remain valid and his prescriptions for resolving them still offer hope for the future.

For Croly the individualistic, libertarian America of the agrarian eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was gone, swept away by the forces of the industrial revolution, urbanization, centralization, and modernity. He advocated a new political consensus that included as its core a form of Hamiltonian nationalism, but with a sense of social responsibility and care for the less fortunate. Since the power of big business, trusts, interest groups, and economic specialization had transformed the nation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, only the embracing of a counterbalance to this power would serve the society of the future. Croly pressed for the centralization of power in the Federal Government to ensure democracy, a "New Nationalism." As Croly wrote, "the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth" (p. 22). He argued for a national government that was more rather than less powerful than it had been, as a bulwark against overbearing self-interest, greed, corruption, and unchecked power. At the same time, Croly valued the individual motivated by civic virtue and "constructive individualism" and urged all to pursue this objective.

In sum, despite his emphasis on state power for good, Croly's public philosophy is as much a plea for preserving and cultivating individuality in a time of consolidation as it is a call for a renewed American nationalism. Croly's ideas seem even more appropriate for the early twenty-first century than they were for when first written a century ago. Corporatism, greed, and self-interest currently offer no less a threat than in Croly's time. His prescriptions still hold: collective action through a strong, democratic government.

"The Promise of American Life" is a powerful, evocative statement of the potential of humanity to remake the world into a much better place through cooperative action. Its lessons are still useful a century after its publication.

Editorial Review:

One of the most important books to emerge from the Progressive era, The Promise of American Life offered a blueprint for a modern activist government that had enormous impact on intellectuals coming of age before World War I.

Nationalism and Modernism

Prof Anth Smith

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

excellent overview of theories of nationalism 5 out of 5 stars.
34 of 34 people found this review helpful.

This book by Anthony D. Smith, Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics, is perhaps the best overview of the many theories of nationalism in one volume. As a sort of sequel to his first book, _Theories of Nationalism_, Smith summarizes each major theory and offers his critique. He spends a good amount of time on the seminal theories of Ernest Gellner and Elie Kedourie plus has significant sections on John Armstrong, Benedict Anderson, Michael Hechter, EJ Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn and many others, including himself. Each chapter is organized by theme, starting with the grand old men of sociology, Durkheim and Weber, moving through the modernists, primordalists, perennialists and ethno-symbolists before ending with the postmodernists. (If you've never heard of some of these distinctions before, Smith spells them out quite clearly and succintly in the conclusion.)

This book is thus valuable for all students of nationalism, even if you don't agree with Smith's critiques: his summaries alone make the book worthwhile.

Editorial Review:

This book represents a much-needed analytical survey of current theories of nationalism by one of the leading authorities in the field. It contextualizes the new insights into nationalism and its relationship with states and state-building on one hand, and ethnicity and ethnic revival on the other. Anthony Smith assesses the contributions of key figures in the field. Given the extent of nationalist and ethnic phenomena and the diversity of approaches which have been put forward, Smith's accessible account will prove an indispensable guide.

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939

Albert Hourani

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The genesis of Arab modern thought 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This book is an extensive version of Hisham Sharabi's Arab Intellectuals. It highlights the reaction of the Arab intellectual circles to the expanding European influence that had reached the Arab world by the early 19th century.
Hourani, however, presents a more thorough description of the life and thought of the most prominent Arab thinkers of the time including Jamaluddine Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdo among others as opposed to Sharabi's brief account on the life and works of these people.
Despite the academic nature of this work, grasping what's in it is easy and not at all complicated. Hourani's narration is well-researched and elegant while his translation of the original texts is also remarkable. The end result is an accurate account that invites the admiration of the readers.
This book is so much needed for those who are interested to understand the evolution of Arab thought over the past two centuries and how this evolution was interrupted with the discovery of oil and the advent of imperialism.

Editorial Review:

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age is the most comprehensive study of the modernizing trend of political and social thought in the Arab Middle East. Albert Hourani studies the way in which ideas about politics and society changed during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, in response to the expanding influence of Europe. His main attention is given to the movement of ideas in Egypt and Lebanon. He shows how two streams of thought, the one aiming to restate the social principles of Islam, and the other to justify the separation of religion from politics, flowed into each other to create the Egyptian and Arab nationalisms of the present century. The last chapter of the book surveys the main tendencies of thought in the post-war years. Since its publication in 1962, this book has been regarded as a modern classic of interpretation. It was reissued by the Cambridge University Press in 1983 and has subsequently sold over 8000 copies.

Dream Palace of the Arabs, The

Fouad Ajami

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Obituary for a modernizing generation 5 out of 5 stars.
25 of 25 people found this review helpful.

The extremism that seems to pervade the Middle East is neither the region's predestined endpoint nor is it a historical inevitability-rather, it is a condition that sprung out from the failure of a great generation of reformers and free-thinkers that lived in the middle of the twentieth century, and whose passing away by the 1990s marked the triumph of theocracy and backwardness in the Middle East.

"The Dream Palace of the Arabs" is the sequel to the "Arab Predicament," which Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese professor at Johns Hopkins, published in 1980; back then, Mr. Ajami was younger and "approached [his] material more eager to judge." In the "Arab Predicament," he bemoaned the Arab political experience; in "The Dream Place of the Arabs" he tries to "appreciate what had gone into the edifice that Arabs had built."

This literary journey chronicles the birth of a generation of modernizing Arabs that fought and lost the case for modernity. The history of the past seventy years is narrated through the life of authors and their works-what they wrote, how the societies around them reacted, and how the political condition merged with their literary expression, only to suppress it and silence it.

As a parallel history, "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" could accompany any book. But in looking at the literary interplay between modernizing authors and their surroundings, Mr. Ajami has not only dug deeper in his probe of what brought about the present Arab political condition, but has analyzed the issue on a whole other level.

The reader who is familiar with Middle Eastern history will not feel burdened by the material. The refreshing tone and approach allows Mr. Ajami to deal with such issues as the Iranian revolution, the Egyptian peace with Israel, the Palestinian battle with Israel, or the Iran-Iraq with refreshing erudition and acumen that always excites and never bores.

"The Dream Palace of the Arabs" cannot serve as an introduction to the Middle East; it is too subtle and perceptive for that; but for anyone who is tired of reading about oil politics, religious fundamentalism and elusive peace deals, and who is actually interested in the underlying intellectual currents upon which the Arab political storm thrives, "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" is a sure bet.

Editorial Review:

A celebrated author on the Middle East gives readers an elegiac account of a group of intellectuals who created a new vision of Arab culture and nationalism, and of the impact of that vision on the fiery political and cultural conflicts in the Middle East during the past 25 years. "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" tells the story of the Arabs through their own fiction, prose and poetry National media appearances .

Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity

Liah Greenfeld

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Editorial Review:

Nationalism is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities. It accomplished the great transformation from the old order to modernity; it placed imagination above production, distribution, and exchange; and it altered the nature of power over people and territories that shapes and directs the social and political world. A five-country study that spans five hundred years, this historically oriented work in sociology bids well to replace all previous works on the subject. The theme, simple yet complex, suggests that England was the front-runner, with its earliest sense of selfconscious nationalism and its pragmatic ways; it utilized existing institutions while transforming itself. The Americans followed, with no formed institutions to impede them. France, Germany, and Russia took the same, now marked, path, modifying nationalism in the process.

Nationalism/title> is based on empirical data in four languages--legal documents; period dictionaries; memoirs; correspondence; literary works; theological, political, and philosophical writings; biographies; statistics; and histories. Nowhere else is the complex interaction of structural, cultural, and psychological factors so thoroughly explained. Nowhere else are concepts like identity, anomie, and elites brought so refreshingly to life.