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Time and Revolution
Stephen Hanson traces the influence of the Marxist conception of time in Soviet politics from Lenin to Gorbachev. He argues that the history of Marxism and Leninism reveals an unsuccessful revolutionary effort to reorder the human relationship with time and that this reorganization had a direct impact on the design of the central political, socioeconomic, and cultural institutions of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. According to Hanson, westerners tend to envision time as both rational and inexorable. In a system in which 'time is money,' the clock dominates workers. Marx, however, believed that communist workers would be freed of the artificial distinction between leisure time and work time. As a result, they would be able to surpass capitalist production levels and ultimately control time itself. Hanson reveals the distinctive imprint of this philosophy on the formation and development of Soviet institutions, arguing that the breakdown of Gorbachev's perestroika and the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate the failure of the idea.
The Assault on the State
What if the state as we know it didn’t exist? Our air would be poisonous, our votes uncounted, and our markets dysfunctional. Yet across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel, the U.K., and the U.S., attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. They are morphing into power grabs by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state once it is fatally undermined is not the free market and the flowering of personal liberty. Instead, the death of government agencies organized under the rule of law inevitably leads to the only realistic alternative: the rule of men. In the A...
Post-Imperial Democracies
This book examines the causal impact of ideology through a comparative-historical analysis of three cases of 'post-imperial democracy': the early Third Republic in France (1870–86); the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–34); and post-Soviet Russia (1992–2008). Hanson argues that political ideologies are typically necessary for the mobilization of enduring, independent national party organizations in uncertain democracies. By presenting an explicit and desirable picture of the political future, successful ideologues induce individuals to embrace a long-run strategy of cooperation with other converts. When enough new converts cooperate in this way, it enables sustained collective action to defend and extend party power. Successful party ideologies thus have the character of self-fulfilling prophecies: by portraying the future polity as one organized to serve the interests of those loyal to specific ideological principles, they help to bring political organizations centered on these principles into being.
Comparative Politics
Twelve in-depth country studies explore how the concepts of interests, identities and institutions shape the politics of nations and regions.
Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy
Why did the wave of democracy that swept the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe starting more than a decade ago develop in ways unexpected by observers who relied on existing theories of democracy? In Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, four distinguished scholars conduct the first major assessment of democratization theory in light of the experience of postcommunist states. Richard Anderson, Steven Fish, Stephen Hanson, and Philip Roeder not only apply theory to practice, but using a wealth of empirical evidence, draw together the elements of existing theory into new syntheses. The authors each highlight a development in postcommunist societies that reveals an anomaly or lacuna i...
Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe
This volume presents a shared effort to apply a general historical-institutionalist approach to the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe. It brings together a number of leading senior and junior scholars with outstanding reputations as specialists in postcommunism and comparative politics to address central theoretical and empirical issues involved in the study of postcommunism. The authors address such questions as how historical 'legacies' of the communist regime be defined, how their impact can be measured in methodologically rigorous ways, and how the effects of temporal and spatial context can be taken into account in empirical research on the region. Taken as a whole, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature by utilizing the comparative historical method to study key problems of world politics.
Crises of Democracy
Examines the economic, social, cultural, as well as purely political threats to democracy in the light of current knowledge.
Comparative Politics
This textbook provides students with the historical background needed to understand politics of today.
Patronal Politics
This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution. Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics - patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns.
Competitive Authoritarianism
Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
