front cover of The Radiant Past
The Radiant Past
Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism
Michael Burawoy and János Lukács
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Communism, once heralded as the "radiant future" of all humanity, has now become part of Eastern Europe's past. What does the record say about the legacy of communism as an organizational system?

Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs consider this question from the standpoint of the Hungarian working class. Between 1983 and 1990 the authors carried out intensive studies in two core Hungarian industries, machine building and steel production, to produce the first extended participant-observation study of work and politics in state socialism.

"A fascinating and engagingly written eyewitness report on proletarian life in the waning years of goulash communism. . . . A richly rewarding book, one that should interest political scientists in a variety of subfields, from area specialists and comparativists to political economists, as well as those interested in Marxist and post-Marxist theory."—Elizabeth Kiss, American Political Science Review

"A very rich book. . . . It does not merely offer another theory of transition, but also presents a clear interpretive scheme, combined with sociological theory and vivid ethnographic description."—Ireneusz Bialecki, Contemporary Sociology

"Its informed skepticism of post-Communist liberal euphoria, its concern for workers, and its fine ethnographic details make this work valuable."—"àkos Róna-Tas, American Journal of Sociology
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Radical Tragedy
Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Jonathan Dollimore
Duke University Press, 2004
When it was first published, Radical Tragedy was hailed as a groundbreaking reassessment of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An engaged reading of the past with compelling contemporary significance, Radical Tragedy remains a landmark study of Renaissance drama. The third edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a new foreword by Terry Eagleton and an extensive new introduction by the author.
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Rain Without Thunder
The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement
Gary L. Francione
Temple University Press, 1996

Are "animal welfare" supporters indistinguishable from the animal exploiters they oppose? Do reformist measures reaffirm the underlying principles that make animal exploitation possible in the first place? In this provocative book, Gary L. Francione argues that the modern animal rights movement has become indistinguishable from a century-old concern with the welfare of animals that in no way prevents them from being exploited.

Francione maintains that advocating humane treatment of animals retains a sense of them as instrumental to human ends. When they are considered dispensable property, he says, they are left fundamentally without "rights." Until the seventies, Francione claims, this was the paradigm within which the Animal Rights Movement operated, as demonstrated by laws such as the Federal Humane Slaughter Act of 1958.

In this wide-ranging book, Francione takes the reader through the philosophical and intellectual debates surrounding animal welfare to make clear the difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Through case studies such as campaigns against animal shelters, animal laboratories, and the wearing of fur, Francione demonstrates the selectiveness and confusion inherent in reformist programs that target fur, for example, but leave wool and leather alone.

The solution to this dilemma, Francione argues, is not in a liberal position that espouses the humane treatment of animals, but in a more radical acceptance of the fundamental inalienability of animal rights.

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The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma (1968-1973)
Volume I, Ideology and Politics
Daniel Fairfax
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote.
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Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bolognese Painting
Ideology, Practice, and Criticism
Daniel M. Unger
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bolognese Painting. Ideology, Practice, and Criticism focuses on the unique nature of early modern Bolognese painting that found its expression in stylistic diversity. The flourishing of different stylistic approaches in the Mannerist paintings of the previous generation evolved, at the turn the seventeenth century, in the work of the Bolognese painters into an approach best described as eclecticism, characterized by the combination of two or more styles in a single work of art. Eclectism was a major innovation and major contribution to the history of art. But it then also became a critical term that suffered much negative press. The book therefore also traces the role of ecclecticism as a concept in the evolution of criticism and scholarship about the Bolognese school of painting over 250 years, showing how the dramatically vacillating attitudes towards this concept shaped the historical view of the Bolognese painters, ultimately having a tremendous dampening impact on our understanding of seventeenth-century art.
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Restraining Rage
The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity
William V. Harris
Harvard University Press, 2004

The angry emotions, and the problems they presented, were an ancient Greek preoccupation from Homer to late antiquity. From the first lines of the Iliad to the church fathers of the fourth century A.D., the control or elimination of rage was an obsessive concern. From the Greek world it passed to the Romans.

Drawing on a wide range of ancient texts, and on recent work in anthropology and psychology, Restraining Rage explains the rise and persistence of this concern. W. V. Harris shows that the discourse of anger-control was of crucial importance in several different spheres, in politics--both republican and monarchical--in the family, and in the slave economy. He suggests that it played a special role in maintaining male domination over women. He explores the working out of these themes in Attic tragedy, in the great Greek historians, in Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers, and in many other kinds of texts.

From the time of Plato onward, educated Greeks developed a strong conscious interest in their own psychic health. Emotional control was part of this. Harris offers a new theory to explain this interest, and a history of the anger-therapy that derived from it. He ends by suggesting some contemporary lessons that can be drawn from the Greek and Roman experience.

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The Return of Ideology
The Search for Regime Identities in Postcommunist Russia and China
Cheng Chen
University of Michigan Press, 2016

As a nation makes the transition from communism to democracy or another form of authoritarianism, its regime must construct not only new political institutions, but also a new political ideology that can guide policy and provide a sense of mission. The new ideology is crucial for legitimacy at home and abroad, as well as the regime’s long-term viability. In The Return of Ideology, Cheng Chen compares post-communist regimes, with a focus on Russia under Putin and post-Deng China, investigating the factors that affect the success of an ideology-building project and identifies the implications for international affairs.

Successful ideology-building requires two necessary—but not sufficient—conditions. The regime must establish a coherent ideological repertoire that takes into account the nation’s ideological heritage and fresh surges of nationalism. Also, the regime must attract and maintain a strong commitment to the emerging ideology among the political elite.

Drawing on rich primary sources, including interviews, surveys, political speeches, writings of political leaders, and a variety of publications, Chen identifies the major obstacles to ideology-building in modern Russia and China and assesses their respective long-term prospects. Whereas creating a new regime ideology has been a protracted and difficult process in China, it has been even more so in Russia. The ability to forge an ideology is not merely a domestic concern for these two nations, but a matter of international import as these two great powers move to assert and extend their influence in the world.

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A Revolution in Fragments
Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia
Mark Goodale
Duke University Press, 2019
The years between 2006 and 2015, during which Evo Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president, have been described as a time of democratic and cultural revolution, world renewal (Pachakuti), reconstituted neoliberalism, or simply “the process of change.” In A Revolution in Fragments Mark Goodale unpacks these various analytical and ideological frameworks to reveal the fragmentary and contested nature of Bolivia's radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socioeconomic planning. Privileging the voices of social movement leaders, students, indigenous intellectuals, women's rights activists, and many others, Goodale uses contemporary Bolivia as an ideal case study with which to theorize the role that political agency, identity, and economic equality play within movements for justice and structural change.
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Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology
W. Wesley McDonald
University of Missouri Press, 2004
Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and A Program for Conservatives, has been regarded as one of the foremost figures of the post–World War II revival in conservative thought. While numerous commentators on contemporary political thought have acknowledged his considerable influence on the substance and direction of American conservatism, no analysis of his social and political writing has dealt extensively with the philosophical foundations of his work.
            In this provocative study, W. Wesley McDonald examines those foundations and demonstrates their impact on the conservative intellectual movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk played a pivotal role in drawing conservatism away from the laissez-faireprinciplesoflibertarianism and toward those of a traditional community grounded in a renewed appreciation of man’s social and spiritual nature and the moral prerequisites of genuine liberty. In a humane social order, a community of spirit is fostered in which generations are bound together. According to Kirk, this link is achieved through moral and social norms that transcend the particularities of time and place and, because they form the basis of genuine civilized existence, can only be neglected at great peril. These norms, reflected in religious dogmas, traditions, humane letters, social habit and custom, and prescriptive institutions, create the sources of the true community that is the final end of politics.
            Although this study does not challenge Kirk’s debts to a predominantly Catholic and Anglo-Catholic tradition of natural law, its focus is on his appeal to historical experience as the test of sound institutions. This aspect of his thought was essential to Kirk’s understanding of moral, cultural, and aesthetic norms and can be seen in his responses to American humanists Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt and to English and American romantic literature.
Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology is particularly relevant because of the growing interest in Kirk’s legacy and the current debate over the meaning of conservatism. McDonald addresses both of those developments in the context of examining Kirk’s thought, attempting to correct some of the inadequacies contained in earlier studies that assess Kirk as a political thinker. This book will serve as a significant contribution to the commentary on this fascinating figure.
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