Customer Reviews

Road from Paradise

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is, among other things, an interesting and at times commendable effort to introduce, or re-introduce, the thought of Durkheim, Schopenauer, Freud and Fromm, among others, to contemporary analysis of world events. They also try to revive appreciation for the late Croatian sociologist Dinko Tomasic, who had already analyzed Soviet and communist Europe's society in terms of social character, rather than ideology, during the 1950s (which did not fit into the accepted Cold War mentality of the time). Much of the argument offered by the authors is intended to serve as a counter to the widely-proclaimed "end of history" optimism so widespread in the Western during the early 1990s (as personified by Francis Fukuyama). In this, the authors follow Durkheim's methods and definitions to explain political and social events, i.e. by pointing out that people cannot be expected to behave according to thought theories and economic models, but that much of their behavior has to do with traditions, rooted in culturally determined factors and morality. Here the most interesting aspect is that the authors note the modernity of nationalism, as opposed to the general view by both Western liberals and Marxists that it is essentially a primitive or tribal anachronism. However, this leads to one of the book's primary contradictions, which the authors never quite resolve: on the one hand, they say, following Durkheim's lead, that the nation is a positive social force which "offsets the power of the State," while simultaneously observing that many of the problems in former communist countries are related to a resurgence of nationalism, particularism and a return to tradition after the failure of the grand modernist State-driven socialist project, i.e. problems that would seem to call for some kind of new State intervention. This book is very interesting and original in terms of the new ways it proposes for viewing politics and society, but the authors fail to develop and refine their arguments sufficiently.