Cultivating the Masses

Cultivating the Masses PDF Author: David L. Hoffmann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.

Cultivating the Masses

Cultivating the Masses PDF Author: David L. Hoffmann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.

Cultivating Global Citizens

Cultivating Global Citizens PDF Author: Susan Greenhalgh
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Current accounts of China’s global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of China’s people. Susan Greenhalgh, one of the foremost authorities on China’s one-child policy, places the governance of population squarely at the heart of China’s ascent. Focusing on the decade since 2000, and especially 2004–09, she argues that the vital politics of population has been central to the globalizing agenda of the reform state. By helping transform China’s rural masses into modern workers and citizens, by working to strengthen, techno-scientize, and legitimize the PRC regime, and by boosting China’s economic development and comprehensive national power, the governance of the population has been critically important to the rise of global China. After decades of viewing population as a hindrance to modernization, China’s leaders are now equating it with human capital and redefining it as a positive factor in the nation’s transition to a knowledge-based economy. In encouraging “human development,” the regime is trying to induce people to become self-governing, self-enterprising persons who will advance their own health, education, and welfare for the benefit of the nation. From an object of coercive restriction by the state, population is being refigured as a field of self-cultivation by China’s people themselves.

Stalinism

Stalinism PDF Author: David Hoffmann
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 0470758236
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book comprises 11 essays on Stalinism by both eminent historians and younger scholars who have conducted research in the newly opened Russian archives. They discuss both the origins and consequences of Stalinism, and illustrate recent scholarly trends in the field of Soviet history. A collection of essays on Stalinism by both eminent and younger scholars. Discusses both the origins and consequences of Stalinism. Provides an overview of the debates for students new to the subject. Includes the results of research in the newly opened Russian archives.

Emergent Strategy

Emergent Strategy PDF Author: adrienne maree brown
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849352615
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

The Stalinist Era

The Stalinist Era PDF Author: David L. Hoffmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107007089
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Placing Stalinism in its international context, The Stalinist Era explains the origins and consequences of Soviet state intervention and violence.

Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent PDF Author: Edward S. Herman
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307801624
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction. In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Stalinist Values

Stalinist Values PDF Author: David L. Hoffmann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150172567X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Soviet official culture underwent a dramatic shift in the mid-1930s, when Stalin and his fellow leaders began to promote conventional norms, patriarchal families, tsarist heroes, and Russian literary classics. For Leon Trotsky—and many later commentators—this apparent embrace of bourgeois values marked a betrayal of the October Revolution and a retreat from socialism. In the first book to address these developments fully, David L. Hoffmann argues that, far from reversing direction, the Stalinist leadership remained committed to remaking both individuals and society—and used selected elements of traditional culture to bolster the socialist order. Melding original archival research with new scholarship in the field, Hoffmann describes Soviet cultural and behavioral norms in such areas as leisure activities, social hygiene, family life, and sexuality. He demonstrates that the Soviet state's campaign to effect social improvement by intervening in the lives of its citizens was not unique but echoed the efforts of other European governments, both fascist and liberal, in the interwar period. Indeed, in Europe, America, and Stalin's Russia, governments sought to inculcate many of the same values—from order and efficiency to sobriety and literacy. For Hoffmann, what remains distinctive about the Soviet case is the collectivist orientation of official culture and the degree of coercion the state applied to pursue its goals.

The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia PDF Author: David L. Hoffmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000430294
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume showcases important new research on World War II memory, both in the Soviet Union and in Russia today. Through an examination of war remembrance in its various forms—official histories, school textbooks, museums, monuments, literature, films, and Victory Day parades—chapters illustrate how the heroic narrative of the war was established in Soviet times and how it continues to shape war memorialization under Putin. This war narrative resonates with the Russian population due to decades of Soviet commemoration, which continued virtually uninterrupted into the post-Soviet period. Major themes of the volume include the use of World War II memory for political legitimation and patriotic mobilization; the striking continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet commemorative practices; the place of Holocaust memorialization in contemporary Russia; Putin’s invocation of the war to bolster national pride and international prestige; and the relationship between individual memory and collective remembrance. Authored by an international group of distinguished specialists, this collection is ideal for scholars of Russia across a range of disciplines, including history, political science, sociology, and cultural studies.

Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated

Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated PDF Author: Robert D. Putnam
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1982130849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit PDF Author: Frank H. Knight
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1602060053
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.