Christian CarylStrange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth fo the 21st Century

Basic Books, 2013

by marshall poe on May 20, 2013

Christian Caryl

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[Cross-posted from New Books in History] What do Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John Paul II have in common? At first thought, you wouldn’t think much. But according to Christian Caryl, they were all radicals who began to change the world in 1979. In Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (Basic Books, 2013), Caryl argues that these very different people from these very different places were brought together by one thing: a belief that the future would not be secular and socialist (as most of the old-line socialist and liberal establishment thought), but rather religious and capitalist. The Marxist project in all its forms, they said, had failed. People did not abandon their faiths, nor did they accept socialist economies. They wanted to worship and they wanted to be free. Thatcher, Khomeini, Xiaoping, and John Paul’s reactionary revolution, as it turned out, was successful. We live in the world they helped create.

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Muzammil Hussain and Phillip HowardDemocracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring

April 26, 2013

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook, and texting) have played in political activism in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon.  Hussain is a new Assistant Professor of Global Media Studies at the University of Michigan [...]

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Azar GatNations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism

April 9, 2013

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out.  Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without reading or at least hearing about his book Imagined Communities: Reflections [...]

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Elizabeth Cobbs HoffmanAmerican Umpire

March 12, 2013

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Is there an “American Empire?” A lot of people on the Left say “yes.” Actually, a lot of people on the Right say “yes” too. But Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman says “no.” In her stimulating new treatment of the history of American foreign policy American Umpire (Harvard UP, 2013), Hoffman lays out the case that [...]

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Ricardo DuchesneThe Uniqueness of Western Civilization

May 16, 2011

[Crossposted from New Books in History] One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, the rise of high culture, the industrial revolution–can, so most Western social scientists claim, be [...]

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Francis FukuyamaThe Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

May 3, 2011

[Crossposted from New Books in History] When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the [...]

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Robert GellatelyLenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe

March 15, 2011

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus on the Nazi period. He’s the author of a number of path-breaking books, including The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers [...]

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P. Bingham and J. SouzaDeath From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe

March 15, 2011

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible. Human history, they said, was chaos. The problem is that human [...]

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Gregory CochranThe 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

March 15, 2011

[Crossposted from New Books in History] First, the conventional wisdom. Because Homo sapiens are a young species and haven’t had time to genetically differentiate, we modern humans are all basically genetically identical. Because Homo sapiens figured out ways to use culture to overcome natural selection, human genetic evolution ceased ages ago. Because Homo sapiens are [...]

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Azar GatWar in Human Civilization

March 15, 2011

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact—and it is a fact—that we see [...]

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