Étiquette : book

Catégories
presse

Pat Flanagan : The God that Failed

Article de Pat Flanagan paru dans Freedom, 10 July 1982, Vol. 43, No 13, p. 15

Iain Hamilton, Koestler: A Biography. Secker and Warburg, 1982. 398pp. £12

MOST on the left today are too young to know of Arthur Koestler’s life and work. Those who do—this is especially true of Marxists—tend to dismiss the 76 year old Hungarian as an ex-Communist supporter of capitalism who abandoned politics for speculative-mystical philosophy and psychology when his God—Stalinist Communism—failed. Koestler is, after all, the leading contributor to the ‘God That Failed’ essay-collection by ex-Communists edited by Richard Crossman and published in the early 1950s.

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Catégories
revues

Karl Korsch: Revolution for what? A critical comment on Jan Valtin’s « Out of the Night »

Article de Karl Korsch signé L. H. paru dans Living Marxism, Vol. V., No. 4, Spring 1941, p. 21-29

« Soiled with mire from top to toe, and oozing blood from every pore », a seafaring man emerges on this side of the Atlantic to tell a weird story of intrigue and conspiracy, of spying and counter-spying, of treason, torture, and murder. It is a true story, a reliable record of tangible facts, albeit mostly of facts that remind one of the « stranger than fiction » columns. Yet there is the difference that they are not isolated facts which seem unbelievable only because they do not fit into the common assumptions derived from everyday experience. Valtin’s book reveals a whole world of well-connected facts that retain their intrinsic quality of unreality even after their non-fictitious character has been established. It is a veritable underworld that lies below the surface of present-day society; yet unlike the various disconnected underworlds of crime, it is a coherent world with its own type of human actions and sufferings, situations and personalities, allegiances and apostasies, upheavals and cataclysms.

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Catégories
livres revues

Algérie, une autre histoire de l’indépendance : recension dans “The Journal of North African Studies”

J’ai le plaisir d’informer mes amis et lecteurs de la parution d’une nouvelle recension de mon second livre Algérie, une autre histoire de l’indépendance (PUF, 2019) et parue cette semaine dans The Journal of North African Studies.

Voici les premières lignes de ce compte-rendu rédigé par l’historien Andrea Brazzoduro et intitulé “Reconsidering the history of Algerian independence: a book review essay” :

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livres

Adolph L. Reed, Jr. : The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon

Extrait du livre d’Adolph L. Reed, Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986, p. 41-60

4
Mythology of the Church in Contemporary Afro-American Politics

Exceptionalist approaches to black politics typically are fed by the mystique of black churchliness and religiosity, which postulates a peculiarly racial basis of participation and representation. According to this view, which assumes the organic leadership model, the church is the elemental unit of political mobilization in the black community. Because its structures are decentralized and operate at the « grass roots, » the black church can be construed as an authentically popular institution. Moreover, because this view also assumes a pandemic black religiosity, the church can be understood to be prior and superior to electoral or otherwise procedural institutions as a source of popular legitimations.

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