Endlessly interesting—reminiscent at turns of Oswald Spengler, Stanislaw Andreski and Samuel Huntington, though less...
Sweeping, provocative big-picture study of humankind’s political impulses.
Fukuyama (Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States, 2008, etc.) is best known for the post-Hegelian end-of-history thesis he advanced at the conclusion of the Cold War, a thesis often quoted and caricatured but not widely understood. Then as now, he defied easy categorization: Some were inclined to view him as a hard-right conservative, but Edmund Burke probably would have called him a liberal. Just so, his latest study—the first volume, he advertises, of two—describes, in the widest terms, the evolution of the political order that led to the widespread democratization of the globe at the end of the 20th century. With evolution comes the possibility of devolution, though, and Fukuyama opens with the sobering observation that even though that democratization did in fact occur, much trumpeted by neonconservatives certain that the spread of capitalism had everything to do with that victory, we’re witnessing much back-sliding: “a ‘democratic recession’ emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” Given that so much of the international dealings of the United States has concerned the putative spread of democracy and nation-building, and given that the U.S. seems to be one place where this recession is in full swing—as witness the “Left-Right polarization of Congress” and the collapse of “intergenerational social mobility”—Fukuyama offers a broad thesis for what constitutes a healthy modern state. Having looked at such various and sometimes arcane matters as tribal organization on the plains of Central Asia, the Yellow Turban revolt, “the persistent pattern of oligarchic dominance” in medieval Hungary and the rise of English common law, the author isolates three qualities: a strong state, the rule of law and accountability. If all three seem to be waning in this country, then Fukuyama has even more alarming news, the denouement of which will have to await a history that has yet to come to an end, to say nothing of volume two.
Endlessly interesting—reminiscent at turns of Oswald Spengler, Stanislaw Andreski and Samuel Huntington, though less pessimistic and much better written.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-22734-0
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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