Marxisme et monde musulman

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June Tuefel Dreyer

"This text demonstrates how the government of China has been significantly affected by attempts to harmonize the unique nature of its indigenous culture with a variety of influences and ideas from the outside world." "China faces many challenges to its traditional economic, legal, social, and cultural structures. China's Political System: Modernization and Tradition provides students with a clear sense of how this transition is taking place, what its effects on current leaders and policies are, and how the system might evolve in the future."--Jacket.

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Debra Sabia

Contradiction and Conflict explores the rich history, ideology, and development of the popular church in Nicaragua. From careful assessments within the context of Nicaragua's revolutionary period (1970s-1990), this book explores the historical conditions that worked to unify members of the Christian faith and the subsequent factors that fragmented the Christian community into at least four identifiable groups with religious and political differences, contradictions, and conflicts. Based on research and interview fieldwork conducted in Nicaragua, this groundbreaking volume, primarily focused on three Christian base communities in Managua, records disparate voices that recount the development and character of the popular church. Together, these eloquent voices contradict a fundamental and widely held opinion on the nature of the popular church. Debra Sabia establishes that, contrary to what has been thought, the popular church was neither homogeneous nor unified and that divergent notions of the popular church exist in Nicaragua. Using the work of Max Weber as a model in developing a theoretical framework for examining the popular church in Nicaragua, Sabia divides the popular church community into four ideal types: the Marxist, the Christian Revolutionary, the Reformist, and the Alienated Christian. Each ideal type is differentiated by its members' general orientation to spiritual and political beliefs and practices. Sabia provides important details about the origins and impact of these divisions, and she is especially sensitive to the groups' and individuals' own perceptions of their particular blend of religion and politics. By examining the impact of the popular church on the revolution and, conversely, the effect that Nicaraguan politics has had on the popular church, the study offers original conclusions for assessing the future viability of the popular church in the counterrevolutionary state.

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Michael Kazin

Our Constitution promises a government of the people, by the people, and for the people - but who are "the people"? And who can honestly claim to speak for "the people"? Here, in the first comprehensive history of populism in our nation, Michael Kazin examines the strange career of populist politics from the era of Thomas Jefferson to the era of William Jefferson Clinton. Once identified with the dispossessed, the poor and exploited workers from farm and factory, populism in recent years has been brought to the forefront of the political landscape, embraced by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Jesse Jackson and glibly applied to figures ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Rush Limbaugh. Kazin calls populism an impulse rather than an ideology. He defines it as a mode of political persuasion that combines anti-elitism, adoration of the common people (usually defined as hardworking, pious, and, until quite recently, white), and a belief in the American ideal of democracy that the power brokers in business, government, and academia have betrayed. Kazin argues that populism has undergone two major transformations since the defeat of the People's Party, the original Populists, in the mid-1890s. The first was a split between those who viewed "the people" as a group belonging above all to God and those who viewed ordinary Americans in primarily economic terms. The second, an ongoing shift to the Right, began in the McCarthy era. The movement was transformed by the onset of the Cold War, the ideological mellowing of the labor movement, and the New Left's self-imposed alienation from the American mainstream. In the 1960s, George Wallace showed how to attract blue-collar Democrats with populist rhetoric. Then Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan captured and refined populist themes for the benefit of the Republican Party. Kazin shows that the Right's conception of a struggling middle class beset by an inept, immoral state remains vigorous and limits what Bill Clinton or anyone to his left can accomplish. The Populist Persuasion unrolls a fascinating narrative of our country's history, richly endowed with examples demonstrating the flexibility of populist rhetoric. Bringing to life the powerful voices of past leaders, Kazin shows how they both inform the political debates of our own time and point with hope toward a future in which the country will live up to its original democratic ideals.

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James P. Young

In a survey of American political thought unrivaled in its breadth, Young gives voice not just to Locke, Jefferson, and Madison but also to Rawls, Shklar, Kateb, Wolin, and Walzer. To the problems facing Lincoln and Dewey, he brings modern feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, and the current conservative backlash. Broadly informed, scrupulously fair, and marvelously clear, Reconsidering American Liberalism is a tour de force of historical exposition and contemporary analysis as well as significant contribution to the future of liberal thought.