Political Decay Research Articles

Political order and political decay: from the industrial revolution to the globalization of democracy. By Francis Fukuyama

Political order and political decay: from the industrial revolution to the globalization of democracy. By Francis Fukuyama

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, Francis Fukuyama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 658 pp., $35 cloth.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, Francis Fukuyama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 658 pp., $35 cloth.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. By Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. ISBN-13: 978- 1374227357. 672 pp. Hard Cover, $ 35.

Modern states and changing nature of political order has always been of interest to historian and political scientists. Scores of volumes are written on the subject matter from various perspectives covering the origin of state system to the fragmentation of political boundaries, development of supranational entities to the global networks of groups, and institution of market system to the implications of transnational corporations. Moreover, the advent of globalization, with the growing interconnectedness of the world in terms of economies and political order, instigated research studies on the eroding political system, state order and rule of law in many countries. To bring a comprehensive and an interesting account to readers on the history of modern state, Francis Fukuyama has contributed an impressive study in two volumes beginning from , the prehuman times to the globalization of democracy. The two volumes revolve around the argument that functioning and successful liberal democracy combines three essential elements: the state, rule of law and accountability. The book, a cohort of the first volume, is a project that attempted to advance and update Samuel P. Hungtington’s classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, presents a detailed account of evolution of government and political order in different parts of the world. With some success stories, Fukuyama critically evaluates the causes and consequences of “political decay” of modern state system in many regions.

Individualism and Political Disorder Introduction: Political Disorder and Decay

This note forms the introduction to a book entitled: Individualism and Political Disorder. It helps to contextualize the rest of the articles in the book. The chapters in the book are papers written by James M. Buchanan, singly or jointly with Yong J. Yoon, after the publication of his collected work volumes (1999-2001).

Parties, political decay, and democratic regression in Sri Lanka

Among states that gained independence following World War II, Sri Lanka was widely considered to have a good chance of succeeding democratically. This promise was sundered when successive leaders embraced ethnocentric policies that were geared towards empowering the majority Sinhalese Buddhists at the expense of minorities. This ethnocentrism contributed to civil war and adversely affected the country's institutions – including the island's political parties. The attendant political decay has not only led to malgovernance and democratic regression, it has pushed the country in an authoritarian direction. Sri Lanka thus represents a classic case of how ethnocentrism can undermine democratic institutions and of the long-term negative consequences.

Drunk and Disorderly: Alcoholism in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary

CONOR PICKEN Bellarmine University Drunk and Disorderly: Alcoholism in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. —Constitution of the United States, Amendment Eighteen, Section 1 Elegance, esprit, culture? Virginia has no art, no literature, no philosophy, no mind or aspiration of her own. Her education has sunk to the Baptist seminary level . . . Urbanity, politesse, chivalry? Go to! It was in Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband whiskey in women’s underwear. —Henry Louis Mencken (“The Sahara of the Bozart” 159-60) THE DRAMATIC EVENTS IN WILLIAM FAULKNER’S SANCTUARY BETRAY A region under the siege of corruption, as pervasive violence precludes any hope of orderly reconciliation between entrenched power and those subject to it. The world of novel has been described as a “wasteland” (Blotner 269) whose moral, social, and political decay rots everything from church to brothel. Situating this wasteland in a specific context, François Pitavy remarks, “prohibition so saturates the narrative that it comes to inform it—to control its very writing. From subject matter, prohibition becomes a governing concept ordering the narrative—at once what is told and what must remain untold” (47). Lost in the novel’s sensational violence is the fact that Sanctuary, as Pitavy claims, is very much about Prohibition. The circumstances informing the central plot rely on outward signifiers of Prohibition, placing the novel as one set in and responding to the milieu propagated by the Eighteenth Amendment (also known as the Volstead Act). Essential to Sanctuary.’s contextual frame is not only the culture of gangster bootlegging and societal corruption but the very act of drinking itself, for nearly everyone in the novel imbibes prodigiously. In the cases of Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens, two characters whose alcoholic benders resonate across the novel’s entire social spectrum, such egregious overconsumption warns of how Prohibition complicates what were once stable, though problematic, gender, class, and race structures in the South. Their 442 Conor Picken catastrophic imbibing reflects Prohibition’s legislative impotence both as a means to regulate drinking and, more importantly, to address what “progressive”1 reformers deemed a moral problem. Faulkner uses booze in a way that does more than point to the obvious failures of the Volstead Act, however. By characterizing alcohol consumption in its ugly reality (which is to say alcoholically), Faulkner challenges long held cultural precepts that celebrated drinking as a badge of honor, instead using consumption and its consequences to critique his fictional town of Jefferson’s troubling response to the destabilizing of Southern social hegemony. Indeed, the pervasive consumption of prohibited alcohol effectively undermines the antiquated Southern form traditionally prescribed to white men and women of estimable social class. In the end, the categorical fluidity and ironic subversion of Gowan’s “gentleman” and Temple’s “lady” identities prove that, in Faulkner’s Jefferson, the only thing more ubiquitous than bootlegged liquor is hypocrisy. Faulkner’s oeuvre is populated by many notorious drinkers whose thirst for booze eventually becomes their undoing—Jason Compson, Sr., and Uncle Maury from The Sound and the Fury. serve as examples. What makes Temple’s and Gowan’s descent into alcoholism2 significant is the fallouttheiraddictionsprecipitatevis-à-vis. Southernsocialrelationsand the problematic intersection of broader socio-political forces present in the Volstead-era South, suggesting that the region is in fact “diseased,” a useful metaphor when considering that Gowan Stevens and Temple Drakedrinkalcoholically.Moreimportantly,thenovelgivesinsightinto the evolving ways that drinking registered in the national consciousness at the time of its publication, particularly in light of Prohibition’s obvious failures to legislate morality and cure America of its pandemic of alcoholic overconsumption. Thus, it proves no accident that Gowan’s and Temple’s spectacular drinking binges coincide with the Volstead era, 1 I use the term “progressive” in reference to a broader set of beliefs that challenged the status quo. In hindsight, Prohibition is understood for the legislative disaster that it was, though it emerged in large part as the result...

J.R.R. Tolkien and Jordanes. Some resemblances in spiritual outlook

An analysis of three instances of the influence exerted by Jordanes on J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium: (a) the notion that cultural and political decay may be caused by being exiled from a formerly paradisiacal situation; (b) the notion that winning a war against Evil may become an unwanted cause of cultural devolution; (c) the construction of a pseudo-history by establishing genetic and cultural links with a mythical, highly evolved people from the legendary past.

Foundations of Political Order in Emerging Democracies

Political development and decay is one of the most studied topics in political science. The issue continues to occupy many political scientists and is also highly empirically relevant – not least in light of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The question is whether democracy can and will make headway in this region, as it has been resistant thus far to the emergence of democracy. These societies are deeply ‘patrimonialised’; that is, the practice of patron–client relationships structures the interaction between state and society. This review essay discusses two recent books that cast new light on how countries can overcome such fundamental obstacles to democratisation as patrimonialism. Most recently, Fukuyama has offered a comprehensive reinterpretation of human history with The Origins of Political Order, but one that is broadly in line with the basic understanding in North, Wallis and Weingast's Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. However, both contributions are difficult to apply to contemporary cases of democratisation. The objective of this review article is to sketch a starting point for such a contemporary analysis, which could also help us understand the prospects for democracy in the Middle East.

Effects of Elitism and External Debt Crises on Nigerian Citizenry

This paper examines the nexus between the elites and external debt imbroglio on Nigerians. It argues that the flakes of the debt crises are the killings and bombings in different parts of the North with the psychological fear in the south that this billowy suicide flame will soon waft in. The method adopted in this work is the content analysis of external debt profiles since 1961 up to June, 2012. Data extracted are consequently used to test a hypothesis using the t-test at both 0.05 and 0.01 levels of significance. However, the two types of elites show that they are agents of political decay, a description Samuel Huntington gave to the military in the sixties. The results indicate that there is no significant difference between the military and their democratic elites. Problems emanating from these high external debts are high unemployment rates, decaying infrastructure, delayed or outright stoppage of promotion, among others. Consequently, frustration propels the followership, sponsored by some disgruntled elites, to express their disgust in different ways such as suicide bombing and forming of religious, cult and ethnic militia. All this has led to the insecurity of lives in the polity. The antidote is for the political elites to find lasting solution to the debt crises and to desist henceforth from taking foreign loans .This is the veritable desideratum to propel the country towards meaningful and sustainable development.

China's New Political Discourse

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons.In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.

Meritocracy Is a Good Thing

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons.In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.

Political Meritocracy and Direct Democracy: A Hybrid Experiment

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well.The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons.In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.

From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

L’Afrique à rebours: la décadence dans un corpus de littérature Togolaise

During the past fifteen years, the West African country of Togo has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of writers - a third generation since independence from colonisation - working in the French language. Born around 1960, these writers have been making their way onto the literary scene since approximately 1990. A certain number of distinctive traits, which have attracted the attention of critics, unequivocally delineate this generation from the two that preceded it. Among these is a new literary aesthetic that resonates with the fin de siècle - with the end of the twentieth century, but also with the end of the second millennium. Moreover, such ends of time cycles, because they exacerbate apprehension about the future and provoke a desire to re-evaluate the past, are propitious to the development of Decadent literatures.The goal of this contribution is to examine parallels between the nineteenth century Decadence movement and the new literary aesthetic being employed by Togolese writers of the third generation - and to thereby demonstrate that their aesthetic is without question a neo-Decadent one. Not only does it emerge at the end of the century/millennium, a time when humanity is inevitably reflecting on its fate, but it also coincides with the accelerating globalisation of information (the Internet) and of commercial markets, a context worth taking into account in that it represents a symbolic loss of landmarks, and a doing away with traditional frontiers - both themes that have preoccupied Decadents of all times and all places. Using the work of two Togolese writers (Kossi Efoui and Sami Tchak), this article will explore in exactly what ways these writers can be categorized as Decadents, and the different methods of transgression they use to depict their discontent with their society of origin, which, at the end of the twentieth century, is in a situation of political, economic and social decay.

<em>Jibo Nura. Redefining Moments for Project Nigeria in the Twenty-First Century</em>. London: Authors OnLine Ltd, 2010

Reviewed by: Redefining Moments for Project Nigeria in the Twenty-First Century Olayiwola Abegunrin Jibo Nura. Redefining Moments for Project Nigeria in the Twenty-First Century. London, England: Authors OnLine Ltd, 2010, xiv + 282 pp. Tables, Notes, Bibliography, Index. $13.95 paper. ISBN 978 07552 0632 2 Redefining Moments for Project Nigeria in the Twenty-First Century is a collection of published newspaper articles, conference papers, commentaries, and interviews on the Nigerian political situation, written between 2000 and 2009 and compiled into a book by the author, Jibo Nura. What strikes me most is the dynamism in northern Nigeria about which the young generation of northerners are speaking and writing on Nigeria’s political decay. As a Nigerian political observer who has written on the country’s development and political situation since independence, I am surprised. This is healthy and welcome development and is good for the country. It also shows that northern Nigeria is not as monolithic as it used to be. We are witnessing a new north in the Nigerian political equation of the twenty-first century. The author begins the first chapter with this statement: “Fellow countrymen, today we are going patriotic; patriotic in the sense that Nigeria, from independence to date, has undergone a series of metamorphoses and yet fails to develop into an adult. The transformation processes are gradually getting worse and seemingly, nobody cares to ask him/herself emphatically, the basic question: What went wrong?” (p. 15). It is very interesting to see a new generation of northerners admit that the British came to Nigeria as a basis for leadership manipulation and for the colonial need for political and constitutional advancement of the British system in order to exploit Nigeria’s economic resources. It is very rare for a northerner, and especially the older generation of northern leaders, to state openly that the British came to exploit Nigerian economic resources as this author has stated. Times are changing. In the chapter entitled “French Diplomatic Missions and investment in Nigeria,” the author points out that France provides technical military assistance agreements to most of its former African colonies, which in turn provide the latter with facilities. Likewise, Chad and Cameroon have defense agreements with France, with considerable military latitude and facilities (p. 44). In Nigeria, French investment as of 2006 was $4 billion (p. 47), which is [End Page 170] the largest in all of West Africa; hence, French investment in Nigeria is very vital to the French. As a true northerner, Jibo Nura defends the former and first governor of Northern Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, whom he called “Gamji—meaning the oak tree that endured and survived the most unfavorable conditions; . . . the bonafide son of Northern Nigeria; the father of northerners who sacrificed his energy, skills and leadership ability to the upliftment of Northern Nigerians” (p. 76). Comparing his leadership to that of the current leaders in Northern Nigeria, Nura writes, “[I]f Sardauna were alive he would have seen how north is being discredited by its treacherous sons, who have destroyed the grand design of Ahmadu Bello’s one north, one people and one destiny” (76). The author spends much time on the political corruption in his home state of Jigawa. He points out how Governor Ibrahim Turaki corruptly mismanaged the budgets of the state by enriching himself and his cronies and left office after eight years with a debt of $250 million and nothing to show for this. Jigawa remains one of the most backward and poorest states in Nigeria educationally, where only 105 students in the whole of the state were admitted to university in 2000, compared to thousands from other states. Besides accusing Governor Ibrahim Turaki of Jigawa State and the current northern political leaders of corruption, he also accused former President Olusegun Obasanjo of corruption and neglect of the northern states, failing to provide them with the dividends of democracy and better opportunities that he has provided to the southern states of Nigeria. One important point that the author does not mention is the role of the military in Nigerian politics. It is very important to know and pay attention to the role of military in...

Hegemonic Regime Survival and Legitimation in Uganda: A Review Essay

Uganda has been of immense interest to what Mahmood Mamdani uncharitably refers to as ‘stargazing academics in distantivory towers’2 who produce a plethora of commentaries and scholarly work on the country’s politics, culture, economy, etc. At the peak of political decay and societal dysfunction – especially in the 1970s and 1980s – the country suffered stupendous deficiency of long-term intellectual commitment on the part of its citizens, leaving the task of knowledge production to foreign nationals in the ivory towers of the Western (especially the American) academe. To fill this void, a few initiatives came to the fore in the mid/late 1980s, including the founding of Fountain Publishers to support and promote local scholarly publishing, and the Centre for Basic Research (CBR). Both Fountain Publishers and CBR are based in the Ugandan capital, Kampala...

Patron-Client Politics, Democracy and Governance in Nigeria, 1999-2007

This paper examines patron-client politics in the context of democracy and governance in Nigeria with special focus on the first phase of the Fourth Republic, 1999-2007. The paper, which is essentially based on study of secondary source of data, revealed that the politics is neither historically new nor peculiar to Nigeria. Its evidence abounds in older democracies, emerging democracies and even authoritarian regimes. In Nigeria, its evidence abounds in the pre-colonial political system through the colonial era to the previous civil administrations in the country since independence. The paper revealed that pecuniary motivation and the deployment of primitive tactics to settle political scores make the patron-client politics a unique phenomenon in the recent political history of the country. The paper further reveals that the contemporary practices of patron-client politics negate the fundamental values and principle of democracy and governance. The plausible explanation adduced for the influx and changes in the patron-client politics include structural character of the Nigerian state which creates large stakes for the control of state power and other factors such as political decay, weak party structure and discipline, imperial presidency, political immaturity and lack of political charisma among office seekers.

Ruth Lister: Citizenship in Theory and in Practice

Ruth Lister: Citizenship in Theory and in Practice Alexandra Dobrowolsky (bio) Whereas many scholars, especially feminist scholars, have expressed a commitment to informing their theories with praxis, few have achieved the fine balance found in Ruth Lister’s Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (second edition, 2003). This is not at all surprising, given that Lister’s academic pursuits were, and continue to be, infused by an activist past and a highly politically engaged present. And so, when it was first published in 1997, and then again, in the 2003 edition, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives not only offered a comprehensive overview of some of the most challenging, contemporary debates on citizenship, and related political and feminist theory, but also featured pragmatic efforts to advance progressive political alternatives through the formulation of thoughtful, context-speficific, policy-oriented directives. The book first appeared in a period of great political flux in Britain, at a time marked by an unusual mix of both political despair—given the after-shocks of Margaret Thatcher’s “elective dictatorship”—and hope, which came with New Labour’s rise to power and 1997 landslide election win. To be sure, there was also uncertainty, and for some, palpable unease, about how the latter’s “third way” would unfold, that is, what would ultimately come of Labour’s efforts to stake a middle ground between Thatcher’s New Right imperatives and the socialist principles of “old” Labour. Nonetheless, there was a sense of cautious optimism that the new, New Labour government would have to engage in creative policy thinking in order to make good on its promise to redress the social, economic, and political decay wrought by Thatcherism. What followed was that, at a dizzying pace, the Labour government introduced countless new, and seemingly ever [End Page 295] changing, policy discourses and directions. Unlike the previous anti-statist Conservative governments, this was an active government. But then again, more akin to its predecessors, this was also a government that demanded an active citizenry. As a result, New Labour’s understanding of citizenship became fundamental to its multipronged reform project. However, it became increasingly apparent that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s main citizenship thrust was mostly propelled by Tory muscle. That is to say, under the Conservatives, the view that the duties of citizenship should carry more weight than citizenship rights, in general, and state-supported social rights, in particular, had gained ascendancy. Similarly, “no rights without responsibilities,” the mantra of Blair’s guru, Anthony Giddens, seemed to sum up the state of play of citizenship under New Labour (Dwyer 1998, 2008; Lister 1998, 2003b; Lund 1999). Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives springs from this turbulent, British political context. Ruth Lister sought to give voice to, and to actualize, alternative, feminist-inspired citizenship models wherein not just the obligations of citizenship, and the more coercive forms of active citizenship, dominated the political agenda. Building on feminist work that had called into question deeply entrenched dichotomies (e.g., public versus private), her objective was to extend this critique to the fundamentals of citizenship and break through its multiple binary oppositions, old and new: from long-standing ones that continued to define citizen “insiders” and construct “outsiders”; to the latest either/or scenarios that pitted rights against responsibilities and “individual rights” against “social rights” (2003a, 8). What is more, the intent was not solely to expose the dialectical nature of these binaries, but also to transcend them in ways that would have real life impact. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives had practical political consequences. By the time the second edition was released in 2003, the British political context had shifted once again. The Labour government’s abundant policy output had abated, and what had initially appeared to be a willy-nilly “what matters is what works” rationale had consolidated into a policy agenda with a much more complicated cast. In brief, it reflected a distinctive “social investment” perspective, in which, for the most part, citizenship concerns remained highly individualistic and duty-oriented, particularly in relation to paid work, but there were also some notable exceptions (Dobrowolsky 2002; Lister 2003b; Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2005; Dobrowolsky and Lister 2008). [End Page 296] The departures...

All-Stars & Movie Stars: Sports in Film & History (review)

Reviewed by: All-Stars & Movie Stars: Sports in Film & History Randy Roberts All-Stars & Movie Stars: Sports in Film & History. Edited by Ron Briley, Michael K. Schoenecke, and Debrarah A. Carmichael. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. 2008. We sit in the dark, gazing at actors on a silver screen, and see … what? Adventure, heroism, despair, anguish, triumph, failure—certainly, that and much more. We also see our concerns and anxieties—threatened masculinity, gender and racial inequality, political decay, social disorder, and economic chaos. Films are our personal mirrors, often reflecting our dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears. All-Stars & Movie Stars, a collection of essays on sport films, provides ample evidence that sport films are not a class apart, that if as a body they do not quite rise to the level of a genre, they are nonetheless films that tell us a great deal about our society and culture—as well as about ourselves. As with all such collections, the quality of the essays varies in terms of research and writing, but as a whole they treat sport films as significant cultural documents. Throughout there is an attempt to fuse academic concerns with race, class, and gender with traditional sport films and documentaries. Dayna B. Daniels, for example, explores misogyny and the treatment of women in sport films, Pellom McDaniels III focuses on the treatment of African Americans in baseball films, Ron Briley shows the racial politics inherent in Hoosiers, and John Hughson examines the social context of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Of course a number of other essays also address these themes, including ones by Victoria Elmwood and Clay Motley that discuss the class, racial, and gender implications of Rocky. At times the essays verge on suggesting that sports films are about everything but sports. Indeed, in a delightful essay Latham Hunter demonstrates how The Natural can be used to introduce students to the field of cultural studies. As a whole, the essays seem directed toward history and cultural studies scholars and students. Most do not address specifically film studies issues. A full discussion of sports films as a separate genre or subgenre would have been a welcomed addition. Nor are a number of subjects of interest to sport historians addressed. How, for instance, have sport films influenced and shaped how we regard athletes and how the games are played. In an essay on televised golf as narrative, Harper Cossar discusses how television dictates how we watch the game, but there is no discussion of how the game has fundamentally changed to meet the demands of television. Similarly, basketball, football, baseball, boxing, and a number of other sports have altered their rules and tempo to suit the demands of television. All-Star & Movie Star is highly suggestive. It demonstrates that sports films are rich documents, that they offer much for scholars of film, television, cultural studies, sport, and history. It also signals a need for more systematic studies, such as Dan Streible's Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (2008). [End Page 189] Randy Roberts Purdue University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Political Decay and Cultural Achievements: The Politics of Cultural Patronage During the Phanariot Administration of the Romanian Principalities

Abstract : Political Decay and Cultural Achievements : The Politics of Cultural Patronage During the Phanariot Administration of the Romanian Principalities. The study presents some observations regarding the diligent cultural activity of the Phanariot governors in the Romanian Principalities (1711/ 1716-1821), in response to the necessity to gradate with notes and details the general negative overview of the scholars regarding the cultural achievements of the Southeastern Europe and particularly of the Romanian Principalities in this late period of political decay, i. e. of accentuation of the Greek political dominance against the Romanian people in the times of Ottoman economics’ and ideas’ decadence.