New Books in history is een website waar historici worden uitgenodigt om hun werk te bespreken. Hieronder zal ik de geschreven reviews plaatsen die op de website aanbod gekomen zijn. De geschreven reviews zijn alleen een inleiding voor voor het interview dat in mp3 formaat op de website staat. Deze zijn op de website te beluisteren maar ook down te loaden.
Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism
Cambridge University Press, 2013
by marshall poe on April 9, 2013
When I went to college long ago, everyone had to read Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848). I think I read it in half-a-dozen classes. Today Marx is out. Benedict Anderson, however, is in. You’d be hard-pressed to get a college degree without reading or at least hearing about his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). That book says, in a phrase, that nations were invented, and quite recently at that.
The trouble is that according to Azar Gat, Anderson is wrong. In his new book Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Gat musters a significant amount of evidence suggesting that humans are more-or-less hardwired for kin and ethnic preference–we’ve always liked people who look, talk and act like “us” more than “strangers” because we are built to do so. We didn’t “invent” the nation; it was–and remains–in us. Moreover, he shows that the historical record itself makes clear that something like nations have been with us since the state appeared 5,000 years ago. To be sure, their form has; but they were always around. This is important for the way we think about the world today. Marx thought classes were going to disappear They didn’t. Anderson and those who follow him seem to think that nations are going to disappear. They aren’t.
Ricardo DuchesneThe Uniqueness of Western Civilization
One of the standard assumptions of modern Western social science (history included) is that material conditions drive historical development. All of the “Great Transitions” in world history–the origins of agriculture, the birth of cities, the rise of high culture, the industrial revolution–can, so most Western social scientists claim, be associated with some condition that compelled otherwise conservative humans to act in new ways. This premise is of course most closely linked to Marx, but it is found throughout post-Marxist big picture scholarship,
Ricardo Duchesne argues in his new The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Brill, 2011) that we have it all wrong. History, he claims, is driven by creative people and their ideas, not by the conditions they find themselves in. If you see a bit of Hegel and Nietzsche here, you are not wrong: Duchesne embraces them both (and throws in a considerable amount of Weber to boot). But he goes much further. He trys to demonstrate using the best literature available on a wide variety of topics that the Hegelian-Nietzschian view of historical development is correct. This is not a book of theory alone; it’s an attempt to empirically demonstrate a theory. Even more radically, Duchesne uses the Hegelian-Nietzschian view to argue that since the invasion of the Indo-Europeans, a pastoral people who were imbued with unique aristocratic-warrior ethos, the West has been more creative than other world historical civilizations, and that this creativity explains in large measure the “Great Divergence” that we have seen in modern time.
This is a challenging book, and one that requires study. It is not light reading. But anyone who is brave enough to try to understand what it says will be greatly rewarded. I know I was.
Prijs: Rond de 50 euro voor de paperback
Rond de 100 euro voor de hardcover.
"There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.
