Ideological Convictions Research Articles

Evolutionary biology and beliefs: How ideology can draw different social stances from science

Agreeing that there are often strong connections between fields of science and the ideological convictions of those producing the science, this essay shows that the connections are often complex and rarely straightforward. Taking the example of evolutionary biology, by looking at three key figures – Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace – it is shown how very different social beliefs can lead to very different social conclusions being drawn from one’s science. It is argued that this message should be kept firmly in mind by those who today would draw social conclusions from science, for instance suggesting that Darwinian evolutionary biology leads straight to the social philosophy of the Third Reich. The truth is always far more complex.

‘Filling the void’: Turkish settlement in Northern Cyprus, 1974–1980

ABSTRACTFollowing Turkey’s intervention in and invasion of Cyprus in July and August 1974, the island was split into two. In the north, a Turkish Cypriot political entity was established that was only recognized by Turkey. Turkey played a crucial role in the settlement process of between 30 and 45 thousand settlers from Turkey in Northern Cyprus during the first wave of settlement, from 1974 to 1980. The settlers were largely needed to create and consolidate a viable Turkish Cypriot state. In order to successfully carry out this settlement process, which was characterized by a rapid installation of a large group of settlers, Turkish and Turkish Cypriot authorities had to prepare land and housing for the arriving settlers. This was made possible by the large void left behind by the Greek Cypriots that fled and were transferred to South-Cyprus following the 1974 War. The settlement process was thus carried out through an organized, state-controlled demographic engineering, in which housing, land and resources were promised and given to arriving settlers. A lack of settler agency was a distinguishable characteristic of the settlers from Turkey, and ideological conviction played little, or no, role. Due to the historic conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots, the first settlers from Turkey were largely viewed as saviours crucial to the political and economic independence of the Turkish Cypriots from the Greek Cypriots. Good settler-native relations were thus largely a characteristic of this first wave of settlement.

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

Transnational Nationalism and Idealistic Science: The Alcohol Question between the Wars: Table 1.

This article studies the interwar international conferences on the alcohol problem. How did they view the alcohol problem and its causes; what were the consequences for the individual and the society as a whole; and which solutions merited discussion? The first post-war conferences enjoyed an optimistic and internationalistic atmosphere, added to by American prohibition, which had given the temperance movement plenty to be hopeful about. But when the 1920s turned to the 1930s, the conferences were transformed into arenas for national solutions and into outright propaganda pieces. The responses to the alcohol problem debated in the interwar conferences built on a combination of scientifically masked ideological conviction and ideologically inspired passion for science. The apparently neutral ethics of such thinking was manifested in various radical measures to combat alcohol abuse.

INTERCONFESSIONAL COOPERATION IN COMBATING EXTREMISM AND TERRORISM

Unfortunately, terrorism is at the forefront in the political history from the late nineteenth century to the present day as the principal means of achieving political goals. The characteristic features of terrorism are violent, brutal, widespread use in relation to the general public. It is necessary to establish the fact that the feature of modernity was the process of merging political terrorism with terrorism, criminal. This is only because the organizers of the terrorist groups and leaders have the primary purpose of obtaining material benefits or access to power, which also takes place by means of enrichment at the expense of criminal activity. In recent years, there is an increasing number of extreme internal and external threats. Knowing the mechanism of action of terrorists into certain groups, law enforcement agencies and special services have the ability to predict tactical moves organizers and terrorist activity performers and, together with the authorities and the public to take measures to apply the appropriate pre-emptive strikes as the activities of the state aimed at protecting public relations from any infringement. It is necessary to explore and strive for the development of knowledge of the ideologies promoted by terrorists to determine the real motivation of the method of terror. You must learn to understand the falsity of the alleged terrorists’ slogans, to monitor the situation in the social networks. It is necessary to carry out preventive work among persons of different social status, support the ideological convictions of terrorists.

The role of personal and professional skills of teacher in professional activity

In the article the personal qualities of the teacher, characterizing the professional pedagogical orientation of the teacher, are considered. It explores how, in the activity of the teacher, ideological conviction determines his social and moral orientation, which is expressed in social needs, moral and value orientations, a sense of public duty and civil responsibility. It is noted that the development of cognitive, emotional-strong-willed, moral, communicative qualities will contribute to the successful performance of professional activities, the effective solution of professional tasks, personal improvement.

Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief.

People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies. We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by downregulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation. The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for further research characterizing the cognitive and affective mechanisms at play.

F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

Established in 1908 as the investigative division of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon moved beyond law enforcement to include monitoring of radical activists and organizations and then after 1936 to conducting “intelligence” investigations. The purpose of the latter was not simply to anticipate planned espionage and sabotage threats but also to monitor those who could influence the political culture. The targets included Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors; German émigré writers and playwrights; prominent writers (including prominent sociologists); and liberal and radical journals of opinion (The Nation; I. F. Stone's Weekly). In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized a special index, the Reserve Index, to list for possible detention any individuals who “are in a position to influence others against the national interest or are likely to furnish financial or other material aid to subversive elements due to their subversive associations or ideology.” Hoover specified that the Index should include “writers, lecturers, news men and others in the mass media field,” and, as one example, he cited the author Norman Mailer. Two responses by senior FBI officials highlight the capriciousness of the FBI's surveillance operations. First, after Hoover learned that he himself was allegedly the model for one of the characters in Walt Kelley's comic strip Pogo, her ordered his aides to conduct a content analysis of the strip to ascertain whether the portrayal was positive or negative. Second, after learning that Hollywood actor Rock Hudson was gay, FBI officials worried that Hudson might play an FBI agent in a movie.In this vein, William Maxwell's recently published monograph F. B. Eyes offers the promise of expanding our understanding of FBI surveillance operations and the role that race played in determining the targets of FBI investigations. To research this issue, Maxwell filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking all FBI files on “Afro-modernist writers” (his characterization) listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He eventually obtained 51 files while discovering that the FBI had no records on 53 other writers and that the records on an additional six either had been destroyed or were “missing” when transferred to the National Archives. In the introduction, Maxwell posits that during the years 1919 through 1972 “a who's who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted by Hoover's FBI” (p. 3).As it turns out, Maxwell's principal contribution to FBI scholarship is his decision to post 49 of the accessible FBI files online at http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes. Unfortunately, his own analysis of these files is disappointingly thin. For one, his cursory account of the contents of the FBI files on these 51 African American writers resembles the contents of FBI files on other writers and political activists: namely, information on their personal conduct and political beliefs and associations and at times a close analysis of their published writing. Second, these files confirm that they were compiled because of FBI officials’ ideological conviction that “subversive” writers could possibly influence their readers and not because the writer violated federal laws (including espionage and sabotage). Maxwell, however, does not fully develop this theme, which is not the central focus of his at times rambling, impressionistic assessment of African-American literature and the FBI's response.

Reading the Ideological Contradictions in Time of The Butcherbird

SummaryThis paper focuses on Alex La Guma's last published novel, Time of the Butcherbird. Starting with the critical reception of this work, in which it becomes clear that the bulk of the critics have reservations about the aesthetic quality of the work, the paper attempts to locate Time of the Butcherbird within La Guma's literary oeuvre of social realism by employing George Lukács's theory. Although I share with other critics the sentiment that this novel seems to be somewhat different from La Guma's previous work in terms of its focus and ideological orientation I argue that this does not diminish the aesthetic validity of the novel in any way. The central thrust of this paper, however, is that, unlike other La Guma novels, not only is this novel somewhat inconsistent with La Guma's own ideological convictions, but the text itself is characterised by ideological contradictions which may, arguably, be attributed to La Guma's attempt to deal in fictional terms with the (still) unresolvable South African national question at the time of the text's composition.

The Idea of a University: A Sociological Study of a National University in India

What is the role and relevance of universities in the contemporary Indian society is the fundamental question that bothers students, intellectuals and policy makers. A brief review of literature on university education reveals that universities are in a transition phase and undergoing a crisis across the nation states including India. The primary aim of the paper is to analyse to what extent the universities in India reflect the centre of universal teaching and research. It also aims to map the expectations and experiences of students in a university. This paper is broadly divided into two parts. The first part presents the broader debates on the idea of a university, critically examining the current status of university education in India. The second part captures the demographic composition, personal experiences and ideological convictions of students on the role of a university in nation building, social transformation and social and economic mobility.

Regards sur l'autonomisation religieuse dans le processus d'indépendance du Vietnam au milieu du vingtième siècle

Indochina played a pioneering role during the decolonization of the French empire, and the religious issue proved important to the process. Even to this day, state-church relations bear signs of this contentious and painful past. The historiography of the Indochina War, as well as that of the Vietnam War, clearly call attention to the activism of religious leaders and religious communities, especially Buddhists and Catholics, who fought for independence, peace, and the needs and rights of the Third World. And religion was put to the service of shaping public opinion both in Vietnam and internationally. Naturally, ideological convictions during the era of decolonialization account for the dominance of political analysis of this subject. But with the passage of time we can now develop a more sociological understanding of people's religious motivations and practices and the role they played in the conflict between communism and nationalism. The historian can also re-examine the secularization process in decolonized societies by analyzing, on the one hand, the supposed loss of ascendancy of religions in society and, on the other hand, the appearance of new religious movements that tended to adapt to modernity. This essay explores these politico-religious dynamics in the context of the decolonization of Vietnam.

Saddam and the Islamists: The Ba'thist Regime's Instrumentalization of Religion in Foreign Affairs

Based on extensive archival research with newly available Iraqi state and Ba'th Party documents, this article attempts to shed light on the Saddam Husayn regime's relationship with Islamists and Islamism, arguing that it instrumentalized Islam in its foreign policy to an unprecedented extent, but not out of ideological conviction. This article, therefore, clarifies an important issue in the historiography of Saddam's Iraq and suggests that religion can play a concrete role in international relations.In 1990, with war between Iraq and a Western-led coalition looming, Iraqi president Saddam Husayn wrote God is greater on the Iraqi flag and called for jihad against his enemies. After the war, and throughout the last decade of his rule, the Ba'thist regime declared a faith campaign (hamla imaniyya) in which it built mosques, required in- creased religious education in Iraq, and consistently allied with Islamists abroad. As a result, some observers of Iraq have questioned whether Saddam took a strategic shift toward Islamism.1 After September 11, 2001, and especially during the run-up to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, this debate moved beyond the confines of academia. Pol- icy makers, public intellectuals, and various government agencies argued about Sad- dam's support of Islamist terrorism. These debates attempted often to either associate or disassociate Saddam with Islamism as a means of proving whether or not Saddam supported Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida.2This article attempts to move beyond that debate. It relies on newly released Iraqi state and Ba'th Party archives from the period of Saddam's rule (1979-2003),3 and argues that viewing Saddam's relationship with Islamists abroad through the prism of a shift toward Islamism in Iraq is a misunderstanding of how the regime formed alliances and carried out foreign policy. Thus, while Iraqi Ba'thists did indeed begin to cooperate with Islamist organizations abroad, this was largely unrelated to the regime's domestic policies or ideological convictions. Another explanation is warranted. This article will demonstrate that the regime was able to cooperate with Islamists as a result of a calcu- lated policy of instrumentalizing Islam to neutralize Islamist opposition, and convince some Islamists to support Saddam's strategic objectives. Thus Islam did not guide Iraqi policy; rather, it was a tool to achieve policy goals. Yet, the regime's use of religion was also more than a mere rhetorical shift. It was a long, detailed process of building insti- tutions and networks to carry out policy and realize Iraq's strategic aims. In doing so, Iraq worked toward shaping the regional religio-political landscape to meet its needs.Moving beyond the question of Saddam's supposed turn to Islamism is also helpful in that the question has obscured a far more interesting debate about the man- ner in which religion can be employed in international affairs. In that sense, this ar- ticle should interest not only those concerned with how an authoritarian Arab regime co-opted religion, but also scholars of international relations and diplomatic history more broadly. Scholars in the latter fields often view senior statesmen, traditional dip- lomats, and the military as the primary practitioners of foreign policy. When they do discuss religion, they classify it as an aspect of ideology or identity. Yet, as this article will demonstrate, Islamic scholars and religious institutions can sometimes be just as important as traditional diplomats or the military in the practice of foreign policy. Therefore, this article suggests that more than a mere aspect of ideology or identity, religion can play an active and concrete role in international relations.4 In doing so, it will detail the considerable extent to which Saddam's regime was able to instrumen- talize religion in its foreign affairs, as well as how and why it did so.THE QUESTION OF SADDAM'S SECULARISMAs mentioned above, there has been some debate recently over whether Saddam abandoned his previously secular ideology and embraced Islamism in the last decade of his rule. …

Joining the Party for a More Powerful Left

Joining the Party for a More Powerful Left

The tragedy of a generation: the rise and fall of Jewish nationalism in eastern Europe

The Tragedy of a Generation is the story of the rise and fall of an ideal: an autonomous Jewish nation in Europe. It traces the origins of two influential but overlooked strains of Jewish thought--Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism--and documents the waning hopes and painful reassessments of their leading representatives against the rising tide of Nazism and, later, the Holocaust. Joshua M. Karlip presents three figures--Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Kalmanovitch--seen through the lens of Imperial Russia on the brink of revolution. Leaders in the struggle for recognition of the Jewish people as a national entity, these men would prove instrumental in formulating the politics of Diaspora Nationalism, a middle path that rejected both the Zionist emphasis on Palestine and the Marxist faith in class struggle. Closely allied with this ideology was Yiddishism, a movement whose adherents envisioned the Yiddish language and culture, not religious tradition, as the unifying force of Jewish identity. We follow Tcherikower, Efroikin, and Kalmanovitch as they navigate the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century in pursuit of a Jewish national renaissance in Eastern Europe. Correcting the misconception of Yiddishism as a radically secular movement, Karlip uncovers surprising confluences between Judaism and the avowedly nonreligious forms of Jewish nationalism. An essential contribution to Jewish historiography, The Tragedy of a Generation is a probing and poignant chronicle of lives shaped by ideological conviction and tested to the limits by historical crisis.

Vietnam. Le communisme vietnamien (1919–1991): Construction d'un État-nation entre Moscou et Pékin. By Céline Marangé. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2012. Pp. 567. Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Chronology, Index.

Le communisme vietnamien (1919-1991.): Construction d'un Etat-nation entre Moscou et Pekin By CELINE MARANGE Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2012. Pp. 567. Appendices, Notes, Bibliography, Chronology, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000799 Celine Marange's study of Vietnamese communism (in French) is an ambitious, largely successful work that demonstrates familiarity with a broad range of sources. Using documents and memoirs from Vietnam, China, Russia, and France, she presents a long-term analysis of Vietnam's unique brand of communism. She sets out to avoid the cliches and Manichean view that have often marked our picture of this phenomenon. Her stated goal is to examine the problem of the export and adoption of communist political models, as well as the sources of political hegemony. Overall she succeeds in demonstrating 'the limits of Soviet and Chinese influence in Vietnam' (p. 30). Marange warns against the temptation to view Vietnamese communism as simply 'a foreign graft' or to 'exaggerate the possibilities for action of the Comintern and the Soviet authorities' (p. 33). This warning applies to both the early days of party building and the period when the communists held power, after 1945. The distance from Moscow, the slowness of communications and the secrecy of the Vietnamese comrades meant that there was room for improvisation for a leader such as Ho Chi Minh, willing to combine aspects of Confucianism with Leninist theory. Decades after Ho's early training of cadres, the Vietnamese took advantage of the competition between the Soviets and Chinese, who were wing for leadership of the world revolution, to make their own decisions on the conduct of their war. This is not to claim that the communist system developed in Hanoi was uninfluenced by Soviet or Chinese models--but as Marange explains, the 'appropriation of the Soviet model grew out of the desire of the new political elite' (p. 33). Starting with Ho Chi Minh in 1923-4, and moving on to the more fully indoctrinated Western-educated communists of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the leftist anticolonialists viewed the role of international communism as the provision of funds and organising methods to create an independent socialist state. Ideological purity and faithfulness to the current party line became the yardstick by which party leaders were measured by their own countrymen; battles for power from the 1930s to at least the 1980s were waged on the pretext that the opposing faction was deviating too far from orthodox Marxism-Leninism. In the 1950s-60s, with large numbers of Vietnamese studying in both the PRC and the Soviet Union, the military, police, cultural, and political institutions all were closely patterned on Chinese and Soviet models. After 1985, however, as the party elite grew larger and began to accumulate wealth, their promotion of the Soviet-style state, with a communist monopoly on power enshrined in the constitution, became as much a matter of self-interest as ideological conviction. The drawback of such a lengthy compendium of information from different periods and sources (the style of the French Ph.D. dissertation) is that the research is likely to be uneven. The reader in this case is presented with a large amount of detail; some political theory, some international history; without much indication as to what the major arguments are in the historiography, either Vietnamese or foreign. What might have helped to create a more coherent book would have been an introduction to explain how the author approached her sources and what her major challenges were. Which of the available sources did she find most reliable, where did she find gaps or contradictions in the picture; why did she make certain choices (e. …

Mid-twentieth-century Guatemalan modernism and the anesthetic of progress

This article uses Guatemala City’s Centro Cívico as a point of departure to consider the wider implications of shared Western epistemological assumptions during the Cold War. It argues that an “esthetic of progress”, based on notions of economic development as well as teleological beliefs about historical change, became a dominant artistic motif in mid-twentieth-century Guatemalan modernism, emblematic of the artists belonging to the Generation of 1940. Owing to the homogenizing tendencies of the idea of progress and its universality within Guatemalan politics, however, the article suggests that the esthetic of progress also possessed anesthetic qualities that muted its political importance. In so doing, the work of the Generation of 1940 appealed to a wide variety of political actors and the “anesthetic of progress” helps to explain why the Centro Cívico project was conceived and constructed by governments of opposing ideological convictions.

Argumentation integrity in intercultural education: a teaching project about a religious-ideological dialogue as challenge for school

In this article, we describe the multiple phases of a teaching project that was constructed around an actual request by a Muslim community in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to establish an Islamic cultural centre. The request provoked a sometimes heated discussion among politicians and citizens that was published in daily newspapers. A large number of the arguments that appeared in the newspapers failed to meet fair argumentation standards and strategies. The teaching project described here therefore aimed to sensitize future teachers to issues of argumentation integrity in dialogues, especially between persons with different religious and ideological convictions. The project was subdivided into three main phases, which treated the topic from different perspectives and with different methods: a simulation game dealing with the request by the Muslim community, a theory-based phase in which participants became acquainted with a construct of argumentation integrity and from this deduced standards and strategies relating to unfair argumentation, and an application phase in which the participants had to examine published arguments by politicians relating to the request by the Muslim community in order to identify rule violations in argumentations. The empirical results suggest that the project promoted insight into unfair argumentation. Such insight can improve interreligious and intercultural communication processes at school.

Traversées de la parole dans Panneaux-Réclame de Michèle Lalonde

Poetry, more than any other literary genre, has been both celebrated as the purest expression of human feeling and thought, and at the same time banished from the social and political realms. This article argues that works written from a minoritarian perspective intensely manifest the ways in which poetry and politics can mutually traverse each other. The heritage of domination and diglossia confronting many Francophone authors has resulted in countless works that are insistently preoccupied with the status of language and literature's sociopolitical powers. Here, I examine Panneaux-réclame, the powerful forgotten work of québécoise poet Michèle Lalonde. Written for the 1970 Nuit de la poésie, a live anthology of poetry of the Quiet Revolution, Lalonde's poem represents less a commitment to a party line, or the positive expression of a political message or ideological conviction, but rather an engagement with and within language, a critical dialogue with politics exposing the ways in which language can sustain or subvert an oppressive order.

Democracy Begins at Home: Moderation and the Promise of Salvage Ethnography

This article ethnographically maps the activism of moderates engaged with grassroots Republican Party politics in Kansas, a state that for the last two decades has been a primary battleground in America's so-called ‘culture wars’ in which the value of ‘moderation’ has been the subject of strident contestation. Drawing inspiration from the writings of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, it probes the testimony of activists in an effort to identify those political and social practices and principles that might be considered constitutive in the making of a moderate politics. The goal is to ‘salvage’ a rudimentary activist theory of moderation for those seeking to champion and defend contemporary American democracy at a time when publics and their institutions have been compromised by, or succumbed to, electoral polarization and political extremism. The article argues for the displacement of the usual representation of moderation as a default position defined by the absence of strong ideological or other convictions in favour of an understanding of moderation as a disciplined engagement with divided publics. Most importantly, moderates embrace democracy as a yet-to-be-fulfilled moral project, which serves to infuse the values that underpin moderate politics with normative power and purpose. How to render these values operational in a divided politics remains a central question for both activists and scholars committed to moderation and the practices and values it names.

The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics, and the Character Wars of the New Nation by R. Kent Newmyer (review)

Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics, and Character Wars of New Nation By R. Kent Newmyer. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 226. Paper, $28.99.)The latest contribution recent outpouring of scholarly and popular books about Aaron Burr, Burr Conspiracy, and Burr trials, R. Kent Newmyer's Treason Trial of Aaron Burr grounds cele- brated trial squarely in field of legal history. Burr trial is valu- able, in Newmyer's view, because it affords historians a unique glimpse of judicial lawmaking in young republic, not because it helps us better understand either Burr or conspiracy (212). Read on those terms, this book makes a valuable contribution its field.Because Burr trial was at once precedent-setting and well- documented, Newmyer argues, it allows us to capture lawmakers of new nation in act of making out of collision between inherited law of monarchical England and the perceived needs of new republic (4). This idea of lawmaking extends far beyond constitutional conventions and legislative bodies emphasize enforcement and, especially, adjudication of law. As Newmyer shows with Burr trial, judges (particularly Chief Justice John Marshall, sit- ting as a circuit court judge in Richmond), lawyers (including nearly all of leading figures of Virginia bar), and executive officers (most importantly President Thomas Jefferson) all took part in contest transform constitutional definition of into something that could be used decide guilt or innocence in specific cases. This process, moreover, involved forces remote from both original intent of authors of and American and English case history. The ideological convictions, character traits, and personal quirks of lawmakers and political framework created by new Constitution contributed emergence of new legal doctrines regarding treason, as Newmyer demonstrates (4).Much of book narrates and analyzes a yearlong sequence of legal proceedings that began in fall of 1806. This encompasses grand jury hearings into Burr's actions in Kentucky and Mississippi Territory; circuit court and Supreme Court rulings regarding Burr's associates Erick Bollman and Samuel Swartwout in nation's capital; and multiple stages of Burr's trials for and misdemeanor in Virginia. These proceedings raised a number of important legal questions. Was there a common law of crimes inherent in sovereignty of federal government that made some acts, such as conspiring commit treason, illegal even though Congress had never acted outlaw them (4)? Had American jurisprudence incorporated an English doctrine of constructive treason that effectively eliminated any distinctions between accessories and principals and between conspiring and participating (61)? As Newmyer shows, Burr controversy often propelled leading Republicans and leading Federalists answer these questions in ways that conflicted with their ideological convictions and earlier stances.Burr himself plays a supporting role in book, and is more acted upon than acting. …