All credit to the compiler of Political Theory Daily Review where I got some of these links - I don't know how he does it but it's a site I visit daily and pick up all sorts of interesting stuff. Rick Perlstein, author of the brilliant Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, has a review of the latest book by another first rate American writer and former Clinton aide, Sidney Blumenthal, entitled How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime. Perlstein argues that journalistic compilations of the kind that Blumenthal offers are truly deserving of being called "the first draft of history". The book is described as being full of insights and not at all dated. I'm looking forward to Perlstein's latest offering next year with the intriguing title Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk 1965 to 1972.
There's a timely article by Todd Gitlin in Dissent called "Democratic Dilemmas: The Party and the Movements". The topic is whether progressives and liberals can make the Democratic Party as successful a vehicle for their goals as movement conservatives have been in the Republican Party. The mid-term elections this week have shown that the middle ground has shifted towards the Democrats, probably more due to dismay at the way the war in Iraq has gone and general disgust with the Bush Administration than any positive surge towards a more liberal or progressive. That said, there appears to be a burgeoning economic populism below the radar and it may help Democratic presidential aspirants like John Edwards. Gitlin's article is timely in that those centrist votes may be only on loan and could be won back by a different type of Republican such as John McCain. The question is whether there can be a better relationship between insurgent progressives and the Democratic Party itself.
"Contemporary history is useless unless it allows emotion to be recollected in tranquillity". Thus begins Eric Hobsbawm's review in the LRB of recent books on the Hungarian uprising if 1956. Fifty years ago this event was foundational in the birth of what became the New Left after many intellectuals as well as rank and file members broke with the communist parties in western Europe. Hobsbawm himself was one of the comparatively few who opted to remain a party member unlike his fellow Marxist historians Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson. The fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising is an event far worthier of commemoration than the Suez fiasco about which the British are so obsessed. Some Hungarians today are trying to replay the the drama of 1956 as they protest about the recently re-elected socialist party government. Only this time it's more like a postmodern farce.
The central question Hobsbawm addresses is whether things could have been different and one of the books he reviews arguse that if Imre Nagy had been a better leader, the reform project could have succeeded. History is littered with alternative political choices but, as Hobsbawm puts it, "counterfactual history can tell us in principle that history has no predetermined outcomes, but nothing about the likelihood of any other than the actual ones". He concludes that in the end there was an inevitability about the flow of events.
After eighty years the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 continues to attract debate but at least the issues can be recollected in greater tranquillity than in the early decades of Irish independence. Bill Kissane's book The Politics of the Irish Civil War is reviewed on the H-Net website by Patrick Maume of Queen's University. Like his earlier work Explaining Irish Democracy Kissane's work seems to be determinedly comparative and engages at the conceptual and theoretical level. Maume is critical of aspects of the book but praises it as a major achievement. One sentence that caught my eye; " a fondness for localism is not tested against the full force of Garvin's right-wing Progressivist argument that a strong centralized state, with a core of expert administrators, is a necessary condition for social and economic progress through the defeat of corrupt and short-sighted localist and populist vested interests".
As it was payday last Tuesday I visited the local Dubray books during lunch break and picked up a copy of Richard English's new book Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland. I'm a bit puzzled as it won't be officially published until next January but yet I got it at a special price of €30. His previous book Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA is easily the best book of its kind and I have high hopes for his latest.
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