See also: Ibn Khaldun • Adolf Hitler
RICHARD TAWNEY
1880–1962
The English social and economic historian Richard Tawney was a fierce critic of the acquisitiveness of capitalist society. He was the author of the classic historical analysis Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and also wrote several books of social criticism, in which he developed his ideas of Christian socialism and an egalitarian society. A reformist socialist and member of the Independent Labour Party, he worked alongside Sidney and Beatrice Webb campaigning for reforms in industry and education. He was a staunch advocate of adult education and was actively involved in the Workers’ Educational Association, becoming its president in 1928.
See also: Beatrice Webb • Robert Owen
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
1882–1945
The 32nd president of the United States, Roosevelt was elected to office in 1932 during the worst period of the Great Depression. He immediately instituted a programme of legislation known as the New Deal to promote economic growth, reduce unemployment, and regulate the financial institutions. At the same time, he introduced social reforms aimed at improving civil rights. His expansion of government social programmes and intervention in the financial markets set the standard for American liberal politics in the 20th century. His policies improved the economy and lifted the public mood, and with the advent of World War II, he cemented his popularity by taking the country from its isolationist stance to become a leading player in world affairs.
See also: Winston Churchill • Joseph Stalin
BENITO MUSSOLINI
1883–1945
As a young man, Mussolini left Italy for Switzerland, where he became a socialist activist and later a political journalist. He was also a fervent Italian nationalist, and was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for his support of intervention in World War I. After service in the Italian army, he renounced the orthodox socialist notion of a proletarian revolution and developed a blend of nationalist and socialist ideas in the Fascist Manifesto in 1921. He led his National Fascist Party in a coup d’état, the “March on Rome”, in 1922, and became prime minister of a coalition government the following year. Within a few years, he had assumed dictatorial power, using the title Il Duce (“The Leader”). He began a programme of public works and economic reforms. In World War II he sided with Hitler’s Germany. After the Allied invasion of Italy, he was imprisoned, then freed by German special forces. Eventually, he was caught by Italian partisans and executed in 1945.
See also: Giovanni Gentile • Adolf Hitler
ADOLF HITLER
1889–1945
Although born in Austria, Adolf Hitler moved to Germany as a young man and quickly became a fierce German nationalist. After serving in World War I, he joined the fledgling German Workers’ Party – which was later transformed into the Nazi Party – becoming its leader in 1921. He was imprisoned in 1923 after he staged an unsuccessful coup d’état, the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. While in jail, Hitler wrote the memoir Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). Freed the following year, he used his ideas of German nationalism, racial superiority, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism to whip up support, and was elected chancellor in 1933. He quickly established a dictatorial rule, replacing the Weimar Republic with the Third Reich, and proceeded to rearm Germany in preparation for seizing territory for the German people. His invasion of Poland in 1939 marked the start of World War II, during which he expanded the Reich across Europe, but he was eventually defeated in 1945. He committed suicide in his bunker as Allied forces closed in during the Battle of Berlin.
See also: Joseph Stalin • Benito Mussolini
HO CHI MINH
1890–1969
Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in French Indochina (present-day Vietnam), and educated at the French lycée in Hue. He worked for a while as a teacher before taking a job on a ship and travelling to the US, and then worked in menial jobs in London and Paris. While in France, he learned about communism and campaigned for the replacement of French rule in Vietnam with a nationalist government. He spent some years in the Soviet Union and China and was imprisoned by the British in Hong Kong. He returned to Vietnam in 1941 to lead the independence movement, using his assumed name of Ho Chi Minh. He successfully prevented occupation of the country by the Japanese in World War II, establishing the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) in 1945 with himself as president and prime minister, but continued to fight for a united Vietnam until ill health forced his retirement in 1955. He died in 1969, before the Vietnam War had come to an end, and remained a figurehead for the communist People’s Army and Viet Cong against South Vietnam and the US-led forces.
See also: Karl Marx • Mao Zedong • Che Guevara • Fidel Castro
JOSÉ CARLOS MARIÁTEGUI
1894–1930
Peruvian journalist Mariátegui left school at age 14 to work as an errand boy at a newspaper, and learned his trade at the dailies La Prensa and El Tiempo. In 1918 he set up his own left-wing paper, La Razón, and in 1920 was forced to leave the country for his support of socialist activists. He toured Europe, and was living in Italy and involved in socialist politics when Mussolini seized power. Mariátegui blamed the rise of fascism on the weakness of the left. He returned to Peru in 1923 and began to write about the situation in his home country in the light of his experiences in Italy. He allied himself with the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance and founded the magazine Amauta. A co-founder of the Communist Party of Peru in 1928, he wrote the Marxist analysis Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality, arguing for a return to the collectivism of the indigenous Peruvian people. His ideas remained influential in Peru after his early death in 1930, and were the inspiration for both the Shining Path and Túpac Revolutionary movements in the late 20th century.
See also: Simón Bolívar • Karl Marx • Che Guevara • Benito Mussolini
HERBERT MARCUSE
1898–1979
One of a number of German intellectuals who emigrated to the US in the 1930s, Marcuse studied philosophy and became associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research, with which he maintained ties even after becoming a US citizen in 1940. In his books One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, he presented a Marxist-inspired philosophy stressing the alienation of modern society. His interpretation of Marxism was tailored for US society, with less emphasis on class struggle. He was a critic of Soviet communism, which he believed had the same dehumanizing effect as capitalism. Popular with minority groups and students in the US, his ideas earned him the status of “Father of the New Left” in the 1960s and 70s.
See also: Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Karl Marx • Friedrich Nietzsche
LÉOPOLD SÉDAR SENGHOR
1906–2001
Born in French West Africa, Senghor won a scholarship to study in France, where he graduated and became a professor at the universities of Tours and Paris. He was actively involved in the resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. With other African émigrés, including Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, he developed the concept of négritude, asserting the positive values of African culture as opposed to the racist colonial attitudes prevalent in Europe. After World War II, he returned to Africa to continue his academic career, and became increasingly involved in politics. He was elected the first president of Senegal when the country achieved independence in 1960. He adopted a distinctly African socialist stance based on négritude rather than the Marxism of many post-colonial states, and maintained ties with France and the West.
See also: Mahatma Gandhi • Marcus Garvey • Martin Luther King
MIHAILO MARKOVIC
1923–2010
Born in Belgrade in what was then Yugoslavia, the Serbian philosopher Mihailo Markovic was a prominent member of the Marxist humanist movement known as the Praxis School. After fighting as a partisan in World War II, he made his name in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia with his fierce criticism of Soviet Stalinism, advocating a return to Marxist pri
nciples. He studied in Belgrade and London, and as a respected academic became a focus for the Praxis movement in the 1960s, calling for freedom of speech and a thoroughly Marxist social critique. In 1986, Markovic was a co-author of the SANU Memorandum, which outlined the position of Serbian nationalists, and as a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia was a supporter of Serbian nationalist leader Slobodan Miloševic.
See also: Karl Marx • Herbert Marcuse
JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD
1924–1998
A leading figure in the French postmodernist philosophical movement, Lyotard studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was a co-founder of the International College of Philosophy. Like many socialists in the 1950s, he was disillusioned by the excesses of Stalin’s Soviet Russia, and joined the Socialisme ou Barbarie organization, which had been set up in 1949 to oppose Stalin from a Marxist perspective. Later, he turned to other Marxist groups. He took part in the student and worker protests of May 1968 in Paris, but was disappointed by the lack of response from political thinkers. In 1974, Lyotard renounced his belief in Marxist revolution in his book Libidinal Economy. This and many of his political writings provided a postmodernist analysis of Marx and capitalism – and the work of Sigmund Freud – in terms of the politics of desire.
See also: Karl Marx • Herbert Marcuse
FIDEL CASTRO
1926–
A figurehead of anti-imperialist politics, Castro first became involved in Cuban politics while a law student in Havana, which he left to fight in rebellions against right-wing governments in Colombia and the Dominican Republic. In 1959, with his brother Raúl and friend Che Guevara, he led the movement to overthrow the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. As prime minister of the new Republic of Cuba, he established a one-party Marxist-Leninist state. Despite US attempts to overthrow and even assassinate him, he became president in 1976. Rather than aligning Cuba too closely with the Soviet Union, Castro took an internationalist stance as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, which advocated an anti-imperialist middle way between the West and East during the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he took Cuba into an alliance with other Latin American countries and passed measures to open the country up to foreign investment before retiring due to ill-health in 2008 and passing the presidency to his brother Raúl.
See also: Karl Marx • Vladimir Lenin • Che Guevara
JÜRGEN HABERMAS
1929–
The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas is known for his analyses of modern capitalist society and democracy from a broadly Marxist perspective. He emphasizes the rationalism of Marxist analysis, which he regards as a continuation of Enlightenment thinking. Influenced by his experiences during World War II, and particularly the subsequent Nuremberg trials, he sought to find a new political philosophy for post-war Germany. He studied at the Frankfurt School of Social Research, but disagreed with the institute’s anti-modernist stance. He later became director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. A prolific writer, Habermas has argued for a truly democratic socialism, and has been a frequent critic of postmodernism.
See also: Karl Marx • Max Weber
DAVID GAUTHIER
1932–
Born in Toronto, Canada, Gauthier studied philosophy at the Univeristy of Toronto, at Harvard, and at Oxford, then worked as a professor in Toronto until 1980, when he moved to the University of Pittsburgh. His main field of interest is in moral philosophy, and in particular the political theories of Hobbes and Rousseau. In numerous articles and books, Gauthier has developed a libertarian political philosophy based on rational Enlightenment moral theory. In his best-known book, Morals by Agreement, he applies modern theories about decision-making – such as games theory – to the idea of the social contract, and examines the moral basis for political and economic decision-making.
See also: Thomas Hobbes • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
ERNESTO LACLAU
1935–
The political theorist Ernesto Laclau was a socialist activist in his native Argentina and a member of the Socialist Party of the National Left until he was encouraged to follow an academic career in England in 1969. He studied at Essex University, where he is still professor of Political Theory. Laclau describes his stance as post-Marxist. He applies elements of thought derived from French philosophers, including Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, and the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, to an essentially Marxist political philosophy. However, he rejects Marxist ideas of class struggle and economic determinism in favour of a “radical plural democracy”.
See also: Karl Marx • Antonio Gramsci • Jean-Francois Lyotard
GLOSSARY
Absolutism The principle of complete and unrestricted power in government. Also known as totalism or totalitarianism.
Agrarianism A political philosophy that values rural society and the farmer as superior to urban society and the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape social values.
Anarchism The abolition of government authority, through violent means if necessary, and the adoption of a society that is based on voluntary cooperation.
Apartheid Meaning “separation” in Afrikaans, a policy of racial discrimination introduced in South Africa following the National Party’s election victory in 1948.
Apparatchik A member of the communist party machine. It has come to be used as a derogatory description of a political zealot.
Autocracy A community or state in which unlimited authority is exercised by a single individual.
Bipartisan An approach to a situation or issue agreed by political parties that are normally in opposition to one another.
Bolshevik Meaning “majority” in Russian, a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) that split from the Menshevik faction in 1903, becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after 1917.
Bourgeoisie In Marxism, the class that owns the means of production and whose income derives from that ownership rather than paid work.
Capitalism An economic system characterized by market forces, with private investment in, and ownership of, a country’s means of production and distribution.
Collectivism A political theory that advocates collective, rather than individual, control over social and economic institutions, especially the means of production.
Colonialism The claim of a state to sovereignty over new territories. It is characterized by an unequal power relation between the colonists who run the territories and their indigenous population.
Common law The law of the land, derived from neither the statute books nor the constitution, but from court law reports.
Communism An ideology that advocates the elimination of private property in favour of communal ownership, based on the 1848 political manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Conservatism A political position that opposes radical changes in society. Conservatives may advocate a wide range of policies, including the preservation of economic liberty, enterprise, free markets, private property, the privatization of business, and reduced government action.
Constitutionalism A system of government that adheres to a constitution – a written collection of the fundamental principles and laws of a nation.
Confucianism A system based on the teachings of Confucius, which stresses hierarchy and loyalty, but also the possibility of individual development and improvement.
Democracy A form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people or exercised by their elected representatives.
Dependency theory The notion that rich countries in the northern hemisphere have created a neocolonial relationship with those in the southern hemisphere, in which the less developed countries are dependent and disadvantaged.
Despot A ruler with absolute power who typically exercises it tyrannically and abusively.
Dictator An absolute ruler, especially one who assumes complete control without the free consent of the people
, and who may exercise power oppressively.
Direct democracy Government by the people in fact, rather than merely in principle – citizens vote on every issue affecting them – as practised in ancient Athens.
Divine right of kings A doctrine that holds that a monarch derives legitimacy from God, and is not subject to any earthly authority.
Dystopia A theoretical society characterized by a wretched, dysfunctional state. See Utopia.
Economic structuralism The belief that the conduct of world politics is based on the way that the world is organized economically.
Ecosophy In green politics, the ecological philosophy of Arne Naess, propounding ecological harmony or equilibrium.
Egalitarianism A philosophy that advocates social, political, and economic equality.
Elitism The belief that society should be governed by an elite group of individuals.
Enlightenment, The Also known as the Age of Reason, a period of intellectual advances in the 18th century that involved a questioning of religious understandings of the world and the application of reason.
Extremism Any political theory that favours uncompromising policies or actions.
Fabian Society A British movement that advocated that socialism should be introduced incrementally via education and gradual legislative changes.
Fascism A nationalist ideology typified by strong leadership, stress on a collective identity, and the use of violence or warfare to further the interests of the state. The term derives from the Italian fascio – a tied bundle of sticks – referring to collective identity, and was first applied to Mussolini’s regime.
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