.~`~.
I
I
Η παρακμή της γεωπολιτικής ισχύος των ΗΠΑ αποτελεί τη βασική πρόβλεψη της ανάλυσης του ιστορικού και συμβούλου του γάλλου Προέδρου Ζακ Σιράκ (Jacques Chirac), Emmanuel Todd, στο βιβλίο του Μετά την Αυτοκρατορία (2003) [το οποίο θεωρείται και το λιγότερο σημαντικό και λιγότερο ρηξικέλευθο έργο του]. Το βιβλίο έγινε best seller και σχολιάστηκε πολύ και από τις δυο πλευρές του Ατλαντικού (άλλωστε ο Todd είχε προβλέψει σε μια προηγούμενη μελέτη του που είχε εκδοθεί το 1976 την κατάρρευση της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης - The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere). Λέγεται μάλιστα ότι το Μετά την Αυτοκρατορία επηρέασε και την αρνητική στάση της Γαλλίας στην απόφαση της αμερικανικής κυβέρνησης να εισβάλλει στο Ιράκ. Οι ΗΠΑ, υποστηρίζει ο γάλλος διανοούμενος, έχουν παρακμάσει ως οικονομική, στρατιωτική και ιδεολογική δύναμη, και κατά συνέπεια δεν είναι σε θέση να ελέγξουν έναν κόσμο που «έχει γίνει πολύ μεγάλος, πολύ πυκνοκατοικημένος, με λιγότερους αναλφάβητους και περισσότερο δημοκρατικός»... Έτσι η Ουάσινγκτον αναπτύσσει ένα «θεατρικό μιλιταρισμό» που επικεντρώνεται στην ανάπτυξη νέων όπλων και στην επιβολή σε μικρές δυνάμεις (π.χ. Ιράκ, Συρία, Λιβύη, Βόρεια Κορέα κλπ). Ωστόσο αυτό δεν είναι σημάδι ισχύος, αλλά ένδειξη αδυναμίας. Η υποτιθέμενη «αμερικανική αυτοκρατορία», υποστηρίζει ο γάλλος διανοούμενος, «είναι σε κατάσταση αποσύνθεσης»... Η ανάλυση του κλείνει με μια βεβαιότητα: «δεν θα υπάρχει», γράφει, «αμερικανική αυτοκρατορία γύρω στο 2050».
Ωστόσο στην κάτωθι ομιλία του, ο Emmanuel Todd δεν ασχολείται με τις Η.Π.Α αλλά με την παρακμάζουσα «Ευρώπη» και την Γερμανία (όπως γράφει ο ίδιος, «αν θα είχα την επιλογή μεταξύ της γερμανικής ηγεμονίας και της αμερικανικής ηγεμονίας, θα επέλεγα την αμερικανική ηγεμονία χωρίς δισταγμό»). Emmanuel Todd attracted attention in 1976 when he predicted, at 25 years old, the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates. In the late 1970s Todd was widely pronounced "anti-communist", just as, following the publication of "After the Empire", he has been attacked as "anti-American" [λόγω της ομιλίας (video) ίσως κάποιοι τον θεωρήσουν "αντι-Γερμανό" - βέβαια όσοι ισχυριστούν κάτι τέτοιο δεν θα γνωρίζουν, για παράδειγμα, πως παλαιότερα είχε προτείνει η Γαλλία να μοιραστεί την μόνιμη θέση της στο Συμβούλιο Ασφαλείας του Ο.Η.Ε με την Γερμανία]. He challenges these labels and describes himself as a historian and anthropologist first, and it was his concern as a historian rather than political passion that motivated him to write After the Empire. In late 2002 he believed that the world was about to repeat the same mistake that it had made in regards to the Soviet Union during the 1970s—misinterpreting an expansion in US military activity as a sign of its increasing power, when in fact this aggression masks a decline.
Can the European Union survive — and should it? Does a united Europe represent the transcendence of the continent's bloody twentieth century, or its continuation by other means? Has a project begun in a spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity turned authoritarian, hierarchical, and antagonistic? If the union is as bad as its critics claim, why does it remain so popular in many member nations? And what does all of this mean for the United States?
The clip is an excerpt of a panel discussion organised by Harper’s magazine (partial transcript). The panelists were James K. Galbraith, from the University of Texas, Austin; Ulrike Guérot, from the European Council on Foreign Relations; John N. Gray, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics; Christiane Lemke, Max Weber Chair in German and European Studies at New York University; and Emmanuel Todd, a social anthropologist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in Paris (Εδώ όλες οι ομιλίες).
Ο κορμός της ανάρτησης -και η αφορμή γι'αυτήν- είναι το βίντεο. Απλά παρακάτω (II), για όποια και όποιον ενδιαφέρεται, υπάρχουν έξι (6) διαδικτυακες αναφορές από και για τον Emmanuel Todd (το έργο του οποίου είναι σημαντικό). Ο προβληματισμός που εκφράζεται στην ομιλία του είναι γονίμος κυρίως για μια ουσιαστική προσέγγιση των κοινωνικών και πολιτικών εξελίξεων και των βαθύτερων φόβων που αναδύονται στο εσωτερικό της Γαλλίας. Η ανάρτηση, στο πρώτο μέρος της, λοιπόν, αφορά περισσότερο τη Γαλλία παρα την «Ευρώπη» ή το €uro.
Χαρακτηριστικές στιγμές από την ομιλία του:
"The French ruling class are the first responsible for this massive blunder.""The euro, from a French point of view, is one of the most extraordinary mistake in the history of France""I'm just taking the very fact that people think that it is unthinkable to get out of a human creation (euro)... This is basically a religious problem.""Why no decision can be taken? Why nothing happens in the face of massive cultural, social and economic disasters?""France was the great promoter of the euro and now the key element in the system. The day France decides, the game is over. The euro is dead.""When you think about the euro please in America stop thinking about the euro as an economic problem""There 's no link between the demographic map of Europe and the euro""Look at the differences in birth rate or fertility rate throughout Europe, you ll see that there is no such thing as Europe""I sympathize with the British dilemma... Britain's position is horrible... they 're very close and very dependent in terms of trade from a dying continent... continental Europe is an ageing continent""Do you realize that perhaps ten years from now you 'll have more inhabitants in the anglo-american world, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand than in continental Europe... not including the Ukraine and Russia.""We have this political discourse... We are supposed to imitate Germany, as if the French could become Germans!""The truth... is that at the heart of Europe we now have a very impressive national project. The German Project""In France, we are not so keen on having the Germans tell us to lose our sovereignty!" (Joke!)"Good luck to America with the new German problem!"
.~`~.
II
II
1. Todd applies his family structure analytic model [The eight family systems] to explain why the Euro is doomed to fail. He notes that the French and the Germans, for example, have little in common. He expressly says that the French individualism is much closer to the Anglo-American individualistic culture, distinct from the German authoritarian style. He says that the French elite caused the problem and they cannot admit their mistake or the entire foundation of the French political structure would collapse. The European idea of a union of free and equal states has been destroyed by the Euro, and it is now an economic hierarchy, with the Germans at the top. Further, democracy itself is incompatible with the Euro. Todd notes that the very low birth rates in Europe have a positive benefit: There will be no open or violent conflict to resolve the current political conflicts. Rather, contentious issues are kicked up to the “European level” — which means nothing whatsoever will happen. He sympathizes with the British position. Britain is dependent on a dying content, Europe. “It is committing suicide under German leadership.” But Britain is part of a much larger Anglo-American world, which in ten years, on current trends, will have more people than all of Europe.
2. The French anthropologist-demographer Emmanuel Todd, who is becoming increasingly fashionable in the Anglosphere, is also a scathing critic of the euro. Perhaps the most prominent French critic of the euro, Todd is an anthropologist-demographer who has documented the family structures of the world and their relation to political systems and ideologies. His very best book, L’invention de l’Europe, which has yet to be translated into English, reinterprets the whole of European history in terms of diverse family systems. (See Craig Willy’s masterly summary of the book.)
In an interview in Marianne, Todd compared Germany with China:
But the policy carried out by Germany in Europe, or by China in Asia, shows that globalisation does not, uniquely or even principally, pit the emerging markets against the developed countries. Globalisation leads to confrontation between neighbours. When the Germans conduct a policy of wage reduction in order to lower labour costs, the impact is non-existent on the Chinese economy, but is considerable for its partners in the Euro zone. When the Chinese manipulate the yuan, it’s against Thailand, Indonesia or Brazil, its competitors in low-wage labour. What we notice is a tendency of the emerging markets to fight amongst themselves and the developed countries to exterminate one another industrially, with the objective of being the last to go down with the ship. This mechanism has turned the Euro zone into a trap, with Germany, whose economy is the most powerful, in the role of fox in the henhouse.
The core problem, in Todd’s eyes, is a deep-seated chauvinistic quest across the Rhine for economic hegemony. According to himself, much of Todd’s analysis is a direct implication of his academic work. In Willy’s summary of Todd, the “stem family” that is characteristic of Germany is… «authoritarian and inegalitarian. Several generations may live under one roof, notably the first-born, who will inherit the entirety of property and family headship (and thus perpetuate the family line)».
In L’origine des systèmes familiaux, Todd’s magnum opus (also yet untranslated), the “stem family combines authority and inequality, essential bureaucratic values, and its ideal of continuity was one of the roads toward the modern state”. This implies:
Whether on the left, on the right or in the centre, German ideological forces always end up creating enormous agglomeration machines [“vastes machines intégratrices”]. The mass political parties — SDP, the Centre, NSDAP — are surrounded by a constellation of professional or cultural satellite organisations. Spontaneously, party loyalty produces in Germany vertically integrated “subsocieties” which realise, within the context of modern society and economy, the ideal of the “estates” system of the Ancien Régime. The social-democratic estate of workers, the Christian democratic estate of Catholics, the Nazi order of Protestant middle classes in 1930. [From L’invention de l’Europe, my translation.]
The book which discusses some actual economics is the untranslated L’illusion économique. It argues that globalisation is defined by the interaction of two opposite yet complementary systems of capitalism – the Anglo-American or individualistic capitalism ; and the “integrated” capitalism exemplified by Germany and Japan. (The book also contains a whole chapter bitching about the lack of anthropological perspectives in economic analysis.)
I paraphrase Todd: Anglo-Saxon capitalism is focused on short-term profits and consumption, resulting in, simultaneously, high turnover amongst workers, frequent creative destruction of businesses, a low savings rate and high external deficits. This system requires for its perpetuation the existence of its “double negative”, the “integrated capitalism” of Germany and Japan where
…the true objective of the firm is not the optimisation of profit, the satisfaction of the shareholder, but the conquest of market shares, through the perfection and expansion of production. From an ideological point of view, the producer is king : the attention to technological progress and the training of labour are intensive. You have to excel in quality. The consumer is but a modest subject and one is tempted to assert that the deep logic of the system is to treat consumption as a necessary evil… Germany and Japan are viscerally incapable of consuming the totality of goods produced by their industrial systems. Like Anglo-Saxon capitalism, the Germano-Nippon type is simultaneously coherent and unbalanced. Exports are a condition of survival, which presuppose the existence of its double negative, the capitalism of the importers.
3. One of this blog's constant themes is that Britain is shackled to a corpse: the EU is the only trade bloc on the planet that is not growing economically.
It's important to understand that this decline is not a temporary blip. Although the euro crisis has accelerated Europe's slide, the underlying problem is demographic... However, as Emmanuel Todd explains (in English) in the clip above, these figures gloss over the variations within the EU. Britain and Scandinavia enjoy better demographic prospects than do most Continental countries.
Emmanuel Todd, incidentally, has a pretty good claim to being France's leading anthropologist. Among other things, he has developed the idea that Anglosphere exceptionalism – our peculiar emphasis on liberty and property, our elevation of the individual over the collective – has its roots in different family structures. The family, he avers, is understood in much narrower terms in English-speaking societies (plus Normandy, Scandinavia and the Netherlands). To us, it means parents, children and siblings. Elsewhere, families are considered more than the sum of their individuals, and have a measure of collective personality in law as well as in custom.
In their seminal book America 3.0, James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus draw heavily on Todd's researches to explain why free-market capitalism developed in places where families are nuclear and limited. But that's another story. For now, take a couple of minutes to listen to Todd's eminently reasonable analysis.
4. SPIEGEL: Where do you draw the boundary of the West?
Todd: In fact, only Great Britain, France and the United States, in that historic order, constitute the core of the West. But not Germany.
SPIEGEL: Are you serious?
Todd: Oh, it's fun to provoke a representative of "the German news magazine." What I'm saying is that Germany contributed nothing to the liberal democratic movement in Europe.
SPIEGEL: What about the Hambach Festival in 1832, the March Revolution in 1848, the national assembly in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, the 1918 November Revolution, the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, (former Chancellor Konrad) Adenauer's integration with the West and the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 brought about peacefully by the people?
Todd: Okay, the postwar history is all very well and good, but it had to be put into motion by the Western Allies. Everything that happened earlier failed. Authoritarian government systems consistently prevailed, while democratic conditions had already predominated in England, America and France for a long time. Germany produced the two worst totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Even the greatest philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, were, unlike David Hume in England or Voltaire in France, not exactly beacons of political liberalism. No, Germany's immense contribution to European cultural history is something completely different.
SPIEGEL: And now you're going to say something nice?
Todd: The Reformation -- and, with it, the strengthening of the individual, supported by his knowledge -- and the spread of reading through the printing press -- that's the German contribution. The fight over the Reformation was waged in a journalistic manner, with pamphlets and flyers. The spread of literacy among the masses was invented in Germany. Prussia, and even the small Catholic states, had a higher literacy rate than France early on. Literacy came to France from the east, that is, from Germany. Germany was a nation of education and a constitutional state long before it became a democracy. But Martin Luther also proved that religious reforms did not by any means require the support of a spirit of liberalism.
SPIEGEL: But Germany's Sonderweg, or "special path," [Η γερμανική «ιδιαίτερη πορεία»] has now come to an end.
Todd: Well, I believe that the Germans still feel a secret and, at the same time, slightly narcissistic fear, as if they sensed that they are not quite part of the West [How Western Is Germany? Russia Crisis Spurs Identity Conflict]. It seems to me that their preferred form of government is the grand coalition, not the abrupt change of power that occurs in France and the Anglo-Saxon countries. Perhaps Germany would rather be like a large Switzerland or a large Sweden, a consensus democracy in which the ideological camps come to resemble one another and the political extended family in the government takes care of everything.
SPIEGEL: What's wrong with that?
Todd: Nothing. The cultural difference between Germany and France shouldn't be buried under avowals of friendship. France is individualistic and egalitarian, at least far more so than Germany, where the tradition of the unequal, authoritarian tribal family still has an impact today, as in the debate over the right maternal image. Perhaps this also explains why Germany, despite its catastrophic birth rate, has so much trouble with immigration, and yet vastly outpaces France with its technical and industrial capabilities.
SPIEGEL: Does that mean that the German-French friendship is merely an illusion?
Todd: No, but the relationship is certainly shaped by an unspoken rivalry. However, if the European Union recognizes its diversity, even its anthropological differences, instead of trying to force everyone into the same mold with the false incantation of a shared European civilization [Γιατί η «Ευρώπη» αποτυγχάνει - μέρος α´.], then Europe will also be able to treat the pluralism of cultures in the world in a reasonable and enlightened way. I'm not sure that the United States can do that.
5. Le Figaro: Would such a crisis be the consequence of Bush Administration policy, which you stigmatize for its paternalistic and social Darwinism aspects? Or would its causes be more structural?
American neo-conservatism is not alone to blame. What seems to me more striking is the way this America that incarnates the absolute opposite of the Soviet Union is on the point of producing the same catastrophe by the opposite route. Communism, in its madness, supposed that society was everything and that the individual was nothing, an ideological basis that caused its own ruin. Today, the United States assures us, with a blind faith as intense as Stalin's, that the individual is everything, that the market is enough and that the state is hateful. The intensity of the ideological fixation is altogether comparable to the Communist delirium. This individualist and inequalitarian posture disorganizes American capacity for action. The real mystery to me is situated there: how can a society renounce common sense and pragmatism to such an extent and enter into such a process of ideological self-destruction? It's a historical aporia to which I have no answer and the problem with which cannot be abstracted from the present administration's policies alone. It's all of American society that seems to be launched into a scorpion policy, a sick system that ends up injecting itself with its own venom. Such behavior is not rational, but it does not all the same contradict the logic of history. The post-war generations have lost acquaintance with the tragic and with the spectacle of self-destroying systems. But the empirical reality of human history is that it is not rational.
6. The question posed in The Explanation of Ideology concerned the spread of modern ideologies across the globe. I set out to explain why communism has come to dominate certain regions, liberalism others, and social democracy yet others; likewise to explain the predominance, elsewhere, of the Catholic Right, or of ideologies that from the European point of view are unclassifiable, such as Muslim fundamentalism, Buddhist socialism or the Indian caste system. In The Explanation of Ideology the analysis of relationships between parents and their children - authoritarian or liberal - and of relationships between brothers - egalitarian or inegalitarian - led to a typology of family types which geographically coincided fairly closely with the mapped distribution of adherence to the great ideologies...
Below are a couple of chunks from the introduction, entitled “democracy and anthropology”, to The Explanation of Ideology, translated into English by David Garrioch.
First, the first few pages of that introduction (pp. 1-6 in my 1985 Blackwell hardback edition):
No theory has so far succeeded in explaining the distribution of political ideologies, systems and forces on our planet. No one knows why certain regions of the world are dominated by liberal doctrines, others by social democracy or Catholicism, by Islam or by the Indian caste system, and others again by concepts which defy classification or description, like Buddhist socialism.No one knows why communism has triumphed after a revolutionary struggle in Russia, China and Yugoslavia, in Vietnam and Cuba. No one knows why in other places it has failed - sometimes honourably, for in certain countries it plays an important although not dominant role in political life. In France, Italy, Finland and Portugal, in Chile before the coup in 1974, in the Sudan before the elimination of the communists by the army in 1971, and in certain Indian states such as West Bengal or Kerala, communism has a stable electoral position and traditionally enjoys the interest and support of many intellectuals.In some areas of the world communism has made a brief but conspicuous appearance. In Indonesia it once seemed set for a brilliant future but evaporated after a military take-over and a brutal massacre. In Cambodia, a near neighbour in global terms, its performance was still more striking, rapidly developing to such murderous intensity that it destroyed itself within a very few years. One suspects, however, that these last two examples, spectacular in their power and instability, are not representative of conventional types of communism.Elsewhere we find that Marxist-Leninist organization, while not entirely absent, is very weak and of almost no political importance: for example, in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Greece. Throughout much of the world the conquering and would-be universal ideology of the twentieth century has no real influence and is represented only by tiny fringe groups. Communism, which in Russia and China has produced Titans, in the Arab world has given birth to no more than a few martyrs and in the English-speaking world to a number of eccentrics. In most of Latin America - if we exclude Cuba and Chile – in Africa, Thailand, Burma and the Philippines, Marxist-Leninist influence is insignificant.The history of communism is similar to that of other universal creeds: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam. It has proved rapidly successful in certain societies with which it has a mysterious affinity, only to be stopped after this initial expansion by barriers which remain invisible.
The failure of political science
A simple enumeration, worthy of lonesco, of the regions and countries where communism is strong illustrates the failure of a political science at present largely dominated by utilitarian and materialist ideas. Liberals and Marxists alike now agree on the importance of economic factors in history: the public or private nature of the means of production and exchange, the level of industrial development, the efficiency of agriculture, the numerical importance of different socio-professional groups. But could one hope to find any economic characteristic which was shared by all the regions where Marxism-Leninism is strong: by Finland and Kerala, Vietnam and Cuba, Tuscany and the Chilean province or Arauco, Limousin and West Bengal, Serbia and southern Portugal, or even for that matter by Russia and China before their revolutions?
On the eve of 1917, Russia was overwhelmingly rural but had sufficient agricultural surplus and enough mineral resources to finance rapid industrial growth. China in the first half of the twentieth century was even more strongly rural, but would have had the greatest difficulty in producing any agricultural surplus at all. Even in good years she could hardly feed her population. So sparse was her industrial development that even the most hard-line Marxist would not dare to accord responsibility for the 1949 Revolution to the proletariat of the Celestial Empire. From a Marxist point of view, the China of 1949 differed from the Russia of 1917 in one vital respect: the peasants had a much clearer idea of private property than did their Russian counterparts, among whom a sort of agrarian communism, the periodical redistribution of land according to family size, was widely practised. But this difference does not really help explain these events because it invalidates the most convincing of the ‘economic’ interpretations of communism: that which portrays it as a more modern industrial version of a traditional agricultural system.
For we find Russia and China, entirely different countries, from an economic point of view, plunging with similar enthusiasm into the same political adventure only thirty years apart and with surprisingly similar results. They shared, to begin with, a single characteristic - their rural economy - which explains nothing: in 1848 when Marx called on the workers of the world to break their chains, 95 per cent of the inhabitants of the world were peasants. Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Japan, Thailand, Turkey, Mexico, all nations where communism was to remain weak, were no more developed industrially than Russia or China. The one major exception was Britain, whose working class was to remain impermeable to communist ideology for 200 years.
Theories of class struggle explain nothing. Some working classes are attracted by Marxism-Leninism and others are not. The same applies to the rural population which in some countries is open to communism, in others not. Even normally conservative bourgeois intellectuals in many countries betray the most elementary rules of class warfare and allow themselves to be seduced by Bolshevism.
Social democracy, Islam, Hinduism, and the rest
As the most crucial ideology of the twentieth century, communism has been widely studied. Traditional political science, although unable to explain its appearance in a particular country, has nevertheless managed to give a good description of it, one which also serves to define, negatively but with equal precision, its economic and political antithesis and its world-wide enemy, Anglo-Saxon liberalism. The characteristics of communism are therefore absence of elementary political, religious and economic freedoms; egalitarian subjection of the individual to the state; and a single permanent ruling party. The features of liberalism, on the other hand, are seen to be free exercise of political, economic and religious rights by the individual; abhorrence of the state, which is perceived as an administrative necessity but also as a threat; and rapid changes of the party in power as a result of the workings of an electoral system.
Anything beyond these two poles is heresy. Yet the nations which subscribe to one or other of these ideologies, to liberalism or to communism, account for only 40 per cent of the world’s population. The remaining 60 per cent have not received nearly the same attention from political scientists, and are considered conceptually irrelevant. Their ideologies and political systems are at best treated as imperfect forms, somewhere in between communism and liberalism according to the degree of economic, religious or political authoritarianism. At worst, they appear to social scientists as legal or religious monstrosities, aberrations of the human imagination that cannot be registered on the scale dictated by European political conventions whose linear structure is like a thermometer, capable of measuring only hot or cold, the degree of liberty or of totalitarianism.
Putting together all these misfits, all the ideologies which are neither ‘communist’ nor ‘liberal’, gives another of those comical lists which political science is capable of producing: social democracy, libertarian socialism, Christian democracy, Latin-American, Thai or Indonesian military regimes, the Buddhist socialism of Burma or of Sri Lanka, Japanese parliamentarianism, technically perfect but with the sole flaw of never changing its ruling party, Islamic fundamentalism and socialism, Ethiopian militarist Marxism, and the Indian regime which combines parliamentary and caste systems and whose 700 million subjects have in one swoop been disqualified by ‘modern’ political science.
Social science has found a justification for refusing to fit these exotic systems and ways of thinking into its conceptual framework: is it reasonable to hope to understand them when the principal mystery, that of the liberal/communist conflict, has yet to be resolved? But this argument is easily refuted: it is precisely because of the refusal to look on all political forms – whether European or not - as normal and theoretically significant that communism has never been fully understood, and nor, as a direct result, has its liberal ‘antithesis’.
Furthermore, if we move from a politico-economic definition of ideological systems to a religious one, the opposite of communism is no longer liberalism but the whole group of doctrines which proclaim the existence of a spiritual realm. For communism alone declares that God does not exist and is prepared to impose this belief on humanity. Here the liberal, pluralist systems, tolerant or agnostic on religious questions, are out of the picture. They cannot provide a conceptual framework for the increasingly violent conflict between communism and Islam in Afghanistan, or between communism and the Catholic church in Poland.
Is it, then, too much to allow that the range of political and religious ideologies spread around the world does not divide into two camps, but forms a system with many poles, and that all these poles - communist, liberal, Catholic, social democratic, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist - are equally normal, legitimate and worthy of analysis?
A satisfactory explanation of communism must also provide the key to other world-wide ideologies. The situation is precisely that which is encountered in the natural sciences: one cannot partly understand the principle of the attractive force of matter, that of the circulation of the blood or of the classification of the elements in chemistry. To take the whole world as the field of study, therefore, is simply to apply to social science the minimum of intellectual rigour which the natural sciences take for granted. Any hypothesis must take all the forms observed into account.
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Πηγές αναδημοσίευσης:
1. America 3.0 2. Pseudoerasmus 3. The Telegraph 4. Der Spiegel 5. Interview Le Figaro 6. Brian Micklethwait's Blog
.~`~.
Για περαιτέρω ιχνηλάτηση και πληρέστερη προοπτική
Για περαιτέρω ιχνηλάτηση και πληρέστερη προοπτική
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- Το ιστορικό υπόβαθρο της Ε.Ε ως νεοπαραδοσιακή αντίδραση και η μεταστροφή στην έννοια της «Ευρώπης».
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- Γαλλία.