Download or read book Inventing a Socialist Nation written by Jan Palmowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it. Jan Palmowski argues that it was hard for individuals to identify with the GDR amid the threat of Stasi informants and with the accelerating urban and environmental decay of the 1970s and 1980s. Since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity and environmental care, citizens developed rival meanings of nationhood and identities and learned to mask their growing distance from socialism beneath regular public assertions of socialist belonging. This stabilized the party's rule until 1989. However, when the revolution came, the alternative identifications citizens had developed for decades allowed them to abandon their 'nation', the GDR, with remarkable ease.

Download or read book Inventing a Socialist Nation written by Jan Palmowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it. Jan Palmowski argues that it was hard for individuals to identify with the GDR amid the threat of Stasi informants and with the accelerating urban and environmental decay of the 1970s and 1980s. Since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity and environmental care, citizens developed rival meanings of nationhood and identities and learned to mask their growing distance from socialism beneath regular public assertions of socialist belonging. This stabilized the party's rule until 1989. However, when the revolution came, the alternative identifications citizens had developed for decades allowed them to abandon their 'nation', the GDR, with remarkable ease.

Download or read book Inventing the Socialist Child in China 1949 1966 written by Melissa A. Brzycki and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Inventing the Socialist Child" illustrates the thinking, institution-building, and daily practices by which childhood was reformulated and shaped in the context of socialist nation-building in urban China from 1949 to 1966. This project draws on archival and published documents, mostly from the cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, to demonstrate that, despite numerous and overlapping political campaigns, unstable foreign relations, and rapid policy changes during the decades following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, one area in which the state had a remarkably consistent policy was its efforts to foster a specific kind of socialist childhood. Although the officials of the Maoist state believed children should be reared by their families, their goal of producing cooperative, revolutionary citizens required efforts to constrain non-state "bad influences." State officials' wariness about the values imparted by family and community members was compounded by the mobilization of women for production, which took many adult women out of the home and had the potential to leave children unsupervised for long periods. The desire to supplement or supplant inadequate supervision of children caused the state to intrude in family structure and child-rearing in new and important ways. "Inventing the Socialist Child" helps scholars understand how the shift to socialism brought major changes to every area of life, including gender roles, family life and child rearing, and the everyday experience of childhood during a time of revolutionary change. "Inventing the Socialist Child" enters broader conversations about childrearing and family-state relations in the postwar era around the world, and demonstrates that China used children in a tool of its postwar stabilization and nation-building efforts, deploying images of children in domestic and international propaganda, as well as actual children as agents of state-directed change---both ideological and practical---within families and society.

Download or read book The Invention of a Nation written by Alain Dieckhoff and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of the various ideologies that constitute Zionism, ranging from Marxist-Zionism to National Religious Zionism to that of the far-right Abba Achimeir. This book makes explicit the debt the Zionists owed to French thinkers and European ideologues, notably those associated with the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Download or read book Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany written by Elizabeth Harvey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights the surprising ways in which the Nazi regime permitted or even fostered aspirations of privacy.

Download or read book Inventing the Future written by Nick Srnicek and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new manifesto offers a “clear and compelling vision of a postcapitalist society” and shows how left-wing politics can be rebuilt for the 21st century (Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism) Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms. This new edition includes a new chapter where they respond to their various critics.

Download or read book Creating Social Trust in Post Socialist Transition written by J. Kornai and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-06-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneficial social and economic exchange relies on a certain level of trust. But trust is a delicate matter, not least in the former socialist countries where illegitimate behaviour by governments made distrust a habit. The chapters in this volume analyze the causes and the effects of the lack of social trust in post-socialist countries. The contributions originated in the Collegium Budapest project on Honesty and Trust: Theory and Experience in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition. A second volume entitled, Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition , is being published simultaneously.

Download or read book Creating German Communism 1890 1990 written by Eric D. Weitz and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Weitz presents a social and political history of German communism from its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1990. In the first book in English or in German to explore this entire period, Weitz describes the emergence of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) against the background of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and clearly explains how the legacy of these periods shaped the character of the GDR to the very end of its existence. In Weimar Germany, social democrats and Germany's old elites tried frantically to discipline a disordered society. Their strategies drove communists out of the workplace and into the streets, where the party gathered supporters in confrontations with the police, fascist organizations, and even socialists and employed workers. In the streets the party forged a politics of display and spectacle, which encouraged ideological pronouncements and harsh physical engagements rather than the mediation of practical political issues. Male physical prowess came to be venerated as the ultimate revolutionary quality. The KPD's gendered political culture then contributed to the intransigence that characterized the German Democratic Republic throughout its history. The communist leaders of the GDR remained imprisoned in policies forged in the Weimar Republic and became tragically removed from the desires and interests of their own populace.

Download or read book Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia written by Hilde Katrine Haug and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Yugoslav communist leaders aspired to create a socialist Yugoslavia, and when they came into power in 1945, they claimed to have introduced a socialist solution to the Yugoslav national question. But what did it imply to 'solve a national question' and what did introducing a 'socialist solution' to a national question entail? 'Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question' charts how the Yugoslav Communist leaders approached the national question, and what influence the complex national relations in the multinational state of Yugoslavia had on the development of the Yugoslav communists' policies, and on their post-war socialist project. From 1935 to 1990, tremendous changes took place in the Yugoslav approach to the national question, and in the institutions they devised as part of this solution. There were also significant changes to the role of the republics and the relations between the different national groups within the Yugoslav state. Discussions on the national question were not absent during this period, despite the communists claim to have solved it. Debates over what kind of Yugoslav unity was the most desirable continued to be a question of contention and different groups had different visions of this. A struggle over resources also developed between different republics. This book identifies and examines four particular phases in the communists' strategies towards the national question; each marked by particular processes, issues and challenges. The claim to have solved the national question often meant that this issue could not be discussed openly and had to be expressed in a particular rhetoric approved by the Party. 'Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia' provides an authoritative account of the Yugoslav communist leaders' national policy and attempts to deal with the challenges encountered by the communists in reconciling their aspiration to create a socialist Yugoslavia with the need to regulate national conflict within the federation.

Download or read book Ideologies and National Identities written by John R. Lampe and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century. A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping today's ideology and national identity.

Download or read book The Human Rights Dictatorship written by Ned Richardson-Little and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.

Download or read book Socialism as a Secular Creed written by Andrei Znamenski and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen people” that were to redeem the world from oppression. Focusing on the fractions between social democracy and communism, Znamenski explores why, historically, socialism became associated with social engineering and centralized planning. He explains the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and its role in fostering the cultural left that came to privilege race and identity over class. Exploring the global retreat of the left in the 1980s–1990s and the “great neoliberalism scare,” Znamenski also analyzes the subsequent renaissance of socialism in wake of the 2007–2008 crisis.

Download or read book The New Politics of Numbers written by Andrea Mennicken and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers.

Download or read book United States of Socialism written by Dinesh D'Souza and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Wall Street Journal Bestseller For those who witnessed the global collapse of socialism, its resurrection in the twenty-first century comes as a surprise, even a shock. How can socialism work now when it has never worked before? In this pathbreaking book, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza argues that the socialism advanced today by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar and Elizabeth Warren is very different from the socialism of Lenin, Mao and Castro. It is “identity socialism,” a marriage between classic socialism and identity politics. Today’s socialists claim to model themselves not on Mao’s Great Leap Forward or even Venezuelan socialism but rather on the “socialism that works” in Scandinavian countries like Norway and Sweden. This is the new face of socialism that D’Souza confronts and decisively refutes with his trademark incisiveness, wit and originality. He shows how socialism abandoned the working class and found new recruits by drawing on the resentments of race, gender and sexual orientation. He reveals how it uses the Venezuelan, not the Scandinavian, formula. D’Souza chillingly documents the full range of lawless, gangster, and authoritarian tendencies that they have adopted. United States of Socialism is an informative, provocative and thrilling exposé not merely of the ideas but also the tactics of the socialist Left. In making the moral case for entrepreneurs and the free market, the author portrays President Trump as the exemplar of capitalism and also the most effective political leader of the battle against socialism. He shows how we can help Trump defeat the socialist menace.

Download or read book Envisioning Socialism written by Heather Gumbert and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.

Download or read book German Division as Shared Experience written by Erica Carter and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers everyday life across the two Germanies, using perspectives from history, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and art history to explore how interconnections as well as fractures between East and West Germany after 1945 were experienced, lived and felt. Through its novel approach to historical method, the volume points to new understandings of the place of narrative, form and lived sensibility in shaping Germans’ simultaneously shared and separate experiences of belonging during forty years of division from 1945 to 1990.

Download or read book Inventing a Republic written by Sean Kelsey and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The character and appearance of English governance were changed utterly in 1649, when Charles I was executed and the monarchy abolished. At a stroke, legitimate authority in the nation was stripped of the charismatic focus from whence it had derived much of its apparently ageless dignity. This volume provides a study of how England's political culture was reinvented by the new parliamentary republic. It describes how government members colonized and revived the abandoned royal palace at Whitehall, and describes the imaginative and consistently iconographic and ceremonial languages with which they replaced the imagery and spectacle of the monarchy. It makes a case for the comprehensive revision of the historio-graphical preconceptions surrounding England's only lengthy period of kinglessness.