Rethinking Capitalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Peter Martin

Deng Xiaoping’s domestic economic reforms and his outreach to the West marked the start of an extraordinary period of learning and experimentation in China. Diplomats were at the vanguard of this process. Far more exposed than even the most powerful Beijing officials to just how far China had fallen behind, they found themselves confronted with unsettling truths: the capitalist model they had long reviled had delivered greater prosperity and higher living standards than communism. Some even began to question the Party’s monopoly on power. As China pursued economic reforms at home, the country’s diplomatic corps also underwent a makeover: China professionalized its diplomats, ditched Mao suits for Western attire, retired many of the 1950s old guard, and expanded its diplomatic network.

Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser

The Jewish writings of these final years develop themes of the earlier years. Cohen continues to explore one of his favorite topics: the affinity of German and Jewish character. Despite his cosmopolitan conception of Judaism, Cohen still thought that the Jews were most at home in Germany. Yet, despite his belief in the special affinity between Germans and Jews, Cohen still shows his cosmopolitanism by his sympathy for the Ostjuden; he maintains that they should be freed from the many immigration controls imposed on them. Cohen continues to worry about the growing weakening of Jewish communities in Germany, and argues, as Socrates did in the Crito, that people have a special obligation to stay within the communities which nurtured them. In a remarkable 1916 lecture on Plato and the prophets Cohen argues that they are the two major ethical voices in the Western world: Plato gave the West a rational form while the prophets gave it moral content. Cohen now reduces his earlier striving for a unity of religions down to the demand for a unity of conscience.


Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sun-Joo Lee

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.


Muzikologija ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 53-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radina Vucetic

During the Cold War, jazz became a powerful propaganda weapon in the battle for ?hearts and minds?. As early as the 1950s, the American administration began its Cold War ?jazz campaign?, by broadcasting the popular jazz radio show Music USA over the Voice of America, and by sending its top jazz artists on world tours. In this specific cultural Cold War, Yugoslavia was, as in its overall politics, in a specific position between the East and the West. The postwar period in Yugoslavia, following the establishment of the new (socialist) government, was characterized by strong resistance towards jazz as ?decadent? music, until 1948 when ?no? to Stalin became ?yes? to jazz. From the 1950s, jazz entered Yugoslav institutions and media, and during the following two decades, completely conquered the radio, TV, and record industry, as well as the manifestations such as the Youth Day. On account of the openness of the regime during the 1950s and 1960s, Yugoslavia was frequently visited by the greatest jazz stars, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. In the context of the Cold War, the promotion of jazz in Yugoslavia proved to be beneficial for both sides - by exporting jazz, America also exported its freedom, culture and system of values, while Yugoslavia showed the West to what extent its political system was open and liberal, at least concerning this type of music.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Vilija Ragaišienė

The article analyses the dialectal material collected in the area of the West Aukštaitian of the Kaunas subdialect in the written sources of the 1950s and 1960s at the Dialect Archive of the Geolinguistic Centre of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language.        Based on the data in written sources the goal is to describe the peculiarities of the accentuation of the West Aukštaitian adjectives of this period and to discuss the tendencies of their accentuation.        The stress of the singular forms of the disyllabic u-stem adjectives of the masculine gender may have come down from old times. Maintaining the root accent of these forms is related to the forms the neuter gender of the stressed stem (suñku, šviẽsu) and the adjectives of the old o-stem (suñkas : suñkus).The pronunciation of polysyllabic adjectives in the West Aukštaitian subdialect of Kaunas is characterized by different accent tendencies. The accentuation of the derivatives with the suffix -inis, -ė varies most of the polysyllabic adjectives analysed in the article. More than a third of them are accented by two accentual paradigms – they have accentual parallel forms of the first and second accent paradigms. The accentuation of the derivatives with the suffixes -inis, -ė is only partly related to the accentuation of the root words. The accentuation of the adjectives discussed in the researched subdialects tends to be generalized by the second accent paradigm. The derivatives with the suffixes -ėtas, -a regardless of the accentuation of the root words, are usually accented by the second accent paradigm, cf. molétas, -a (: mólis 1), pūslétas, -a (: pūslẽ 4). Only the accent of the derivatives with the suffixes -uotas, -a can be linked to the accentuation status of the root words, cf. langúotas, -a (: lángas 3).The author of the article is of the opinion that the accentual variance of parallel derivatives with suffixes could have been determined not by one factor, but by a set of factors. The appearance of accentual variants is linked to semantics, the accentual and semantic model of two plurals and the accentual variance of the root words and is explained by the stress analogy of the same type of word formation.


1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
THOMAS R. CUSACK

The article focuses on citizens’ satisfaction with the German democratic political system. The empirical analysis reported supports the argument that the performance of the economy and the government affect popular satisfaction with the regime. In the East, satisfaction with the regime remains very low and dissatisfaction has spread into West Germany. In the West, the sources of this dissatisfaction are both economic developments and government performance; citizens modify their views on the system as a consequence of the government’s and the economy’s successes and failures. The dynamic is similar in the East. Economic strains, and the perception that the federal government is not making sufficient efforts to equalize living standards, have kept the Eastern population from committing themselves to the new unified political system.


Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell

Concentrating on the political and cultural capital that various elites have extracted from notions of the West, this chapter identifies four phases in the development of the most consistently articulated binary opposition in modern Russian culture: Russia’s entry into the European state system in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the era of national awakening from the Napoleonic wars to the 1860s; the era of mass national politics and decolonization from the 1860s to the 1950s; and the era of American hegemony, globalization and European peace from the 1950s onwards which has eventually caused the Russian nation to reinvent itself in a postcommunist guise.


2018 ◽  
pp. 376-386
Author(s):  
Robert E. Lerner

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's final years. Kantorowicz died of a ruptured aneurysm in September 1963. Before this, he worked on a succession of recondite articles, attended the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy and the Byzantine Institute at “Oakbarton Dumps,” vacationed on the West Coast and the Virgin Islands, and carried on earnestly with his dining and imbibing. His politics also became more leftward from the postwar years until the time of his death. For a decade and a half he was deeply worried about the possibility of nuclear war, and he held the United States responsible. During the 1950s, he was bitterly hostile to Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. On the day after Kennedy's inauguration, Kantorowicz wrote the he “couldn't be worse than Eisenhower, ” although he did change his mind.


2021 ◽  
pp. 92-122
Author(s):  
Jacob Darwin Hamblin

As with its overall foreign policy, the United States framed its atomic energy offerings as part of the global struggle between the “free world” and the communists, a division that masked the firm US military alignment with colonial powers. The United States continued that framing even as nations such as India and Ghana tried to forge a different path that associated atomic energy with the struggle for national or even racial liberation. The specter haunting Eisenhower and his successors was the emergence of a bloc of countries whose concerns were primarily racial and anti-colonial. Given the reality of racial segregation at home and the government’s close alliance with colonial powers of Europe, such a framing would put the United States on the side of the old colonial masters. American politicians utilized the promise of atomic energy to dim such perceptions amid numerous racially charged challenges in the 1950s and ’60s.


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