Resurgence of the warfare state

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Ron Suskind

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of "The Price of Loyalty" and "The One Percent Doctrine" returns with an election year account of the looming national security crisis that America faces right now.

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Maxime Rodinson

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Maxime Rodinson's Marxist analyses of contemporary politics and economics in the Muslim world are more salient than ever. In this collection, Rodinson emphasizes the economic and political, rather than religious, characteristics of Islam, covering topics like the history of the Marxist movement in the Islamic Middle East; the dialogue between socialism and Islam, and Marxism and Arab nationalism; the relationship between national conflicts and class struggle, and the history of communism in Arab states such as Syria and Egypt. Unashamedly political and polemical, Rodinson offers an insightful picture of political Islam and Marxism, and their profound implications for the Arab working class and the future of the region.--

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Johan Östling

"As a nominally neutral power during the Second World War, Sweden in the early postwar era has received comparatively little attention from historians. Nonetheless, as this definitive study shows, the war--and particularly the specter of Nazism--changed Swedish society profoundly. Prior to 1939, many Swedes shared an unmistakable affinity for German culture, and even after the outbreak of hostilities there remained prominent apologists for the Third Reich. After the Allied victory, however, Swedish intellectuals reframed Nazism as a discredited, distinctively German phenomenon rooted in militarism and Romanticism. Accordingly, Swedes' self-conception underwent a dramatic reformulation. From this interplay of suppressed traditions and bright dreams for the future, postwar Sweden emerged"--From publisher's website.

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Michael Coppedge

This bold and comprehensive reassessment of democracy in Venezuela explains why one of the oldest and most admired democracies in Latin America has become fragile after more than three decades of apparent stability. The Venezuelan crisis is puzzling because Venezuela has held competitive elections since 1958; it has the fastest-growing economy in the region and a declining inflation rate; the military has not meddled in politics since 1962; there is no guerrilla insurgency; and drug trafficking has only begun to make an appearance. The author locates the causes of Venezuela's current problems in two political institutions. The first is partidocracia, or partyarchy. Venezuelan political parties monopolize the electoral process, dominate the legislative process, and block many of the informal channels of representation, such as interest groups, the media, the courts, and independent opinion leaders. The second cause is presidentialism, a system marked by frequent standoffs between the executive and the legislature that severely limit the president's ability to function effectively and that encourage opposition parties to frustrate the president in an effort to improve their own chances in future elections. Highlighting parallels and contrasts with other countries in Latin America and the industrialized world, the author places Venezuelan democracy in a truly comparative context for the first time, in the process revealing that Venezuela has had the most extreme partyarchy in the non-communist world. The combination of partyarchy and presidentialism has induced a cyclical pattern of factional struggles within the governing parties that has rendered them incapable of channeling popular demands between elections and has tarnished their image during campaigns. The author shows that though partyarchy initially helped democracy survive in Venezuela by giving a handful of party leaders great authority to manage crises and prevent mass disturbances, it also limited accountability and stifled meaningful popular participation, which ultimately eroded the legitimacy of the democratic regime. Partyarchy also made the executive-legislative stalemates and constitutional crises typical of presidential systems more likely and more intractable. The author supports his conclusions with evidence from his rigorous survey of 80 top leaders of the governing party, as well as from historical analysis, a multivariate model of Venezuelan elections, and more than a year of personal observation of party activities.