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The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's 20th Century Sheri Berman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. This is being written. A summary of a Crooked Timber seminar on this book is available here. More... 2/9/2009 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity Slavoj Zizek. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. I am taking a look at this book again because I want to dig into Walter Benjamin`s essay "On the Concept of History" where he tells a story of a puppet and a dwarf playing chess. That is, the dwarf is under the table pulling the strings of the puppet. The puppet is historical materialism and pulling its strings is the small and ugly dwarf under the table called theology. But, according to the first pages, Zizek is turning the tables on the dwarf and wants to make theology the puppet and materi More... 2/5/2009 On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau. London: Verso, 2005. In this book Laclau is creating a political theory not on the basis of any claim of univesal knowledge (Plato) nor on any social structure but on the basis of populist demands. He is interested in how political identities are formed and how the "people" can be constituted as a political actor. These are, indeed, central concerns of a political project for social democracy. More... 2/5/2009 The Theory of Social Democracy Thomas Meyer. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. This appears to be a comprehensive theory of social democracy, a sort of summary of social democracy as a theory of governance more than a theory of politics. It talks about "social citizenship" and takes off from the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The latter has been signed by the United States in 1979 but it has never been ratified. Meyer sees in this covenant "the core of social democracy`s" n More... 2/5/2009 |