Radical Wing Research Articles

Конфронтация „режима нормализации” и оппозиции в Чехословакии в конце 1980-х годов XX века

The paper refers to Russian and foreign archival documents, which became the basis for the analysis of relationships between the „party-and state authorities” and opposition in the Czech Republic in the late 80s of 20th century. State authorities with conservative bias demanded that the „normalization” regime be stricter whereas „pragmatists” were contemplating a dialogue with the opposition. After the events of November 17 for a very long time also the followers of „non-political politics” in the opposition considered a dialogue with the pragmatic faction of the state authorities whereas the radical wing representatives were calling for immediate free elections and establishment of democratic institutions of power. However, it was the upward movement, beginning with the student demonstration of November 17, 1989 and ending with mass demonstrations which gathered as many as 700,000 people in Prague in the end of November, that gave momentum to historic transformation in the Czech Republic as it came up with its own hierarchy of historical priorities different from that of numerous government and opposition circles. These activists who were able to adjust their former standpoint to social expectations enjoyed public support.

John L. O'Sullivan and his times

The life of nineteenth-century journalist, diplomat, adventurer, and enthusiast for lost causes John Louis O'Sullivan is usually glimpsed only in brief episodes, perhaps because the components of his life are sometimes contradictory. An exponent of romantic democracy, O'Sullivan became a defender of slavery. A champion of reforms for women, labor, criminals, and public schools, he ended his life promoting spiritualism. This first full-length biography reveals a man possessed of the idealism and promise, as well as the prejudices and follies, of his age, a man who sensed the revolutionary and liberating potential of radical democracy but was unable to acknowledge the racial barriers it had to cross to fulfill its promise. Sure to be welcomed by scholars of the Jacksonian era and others interested in nineteenth-century American history, John L. O'Sullivan and His Times presents an in-depth examination of O'Sullivan's ideas as they were expressed in the Democratic Review and other newspapers and literary magazines that he edited. O'Sullivan was a crusader whose efforts to end capital panishment came within a hair's breadth of ending hanging in New York; an editor who called down the wrath of the people upon speculators, promoters of privilege and monopoly, and eloquently praised the virtues of majority rule and citizens' right to control and transform their government; a political operative who supported the radical wing of the Democratic party, battled nativists, and plotted strategy with a young Samuel J. Tilden; a promoter of a fresh American literature who significantly aided Hawthorne's career and familiarized his readers with the works of Whitman, Poe, Whittier, and Thoreau. Through extensive research of primary materials - including contemporary correspondence and journals of public figures such as Martin Van Buren, William Marcy, Benjamin F. Butler, Samuel Tilden, and James K. Polk - author Robert D. Sampson explores the many facets of this enigmatic figure, a man described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the truest and best men in the world.

On the Tail of the Panther: Black Power and the 1967 Convention of the National Conference for New Politics

Addressing the opening night rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) Convention on 31 August 1967, the executive director William F. Pepper informed the several thousand delegates that:Historians may well count your presence here as the most significant gathering of Americans since the founding of our nation. Never before have so many Americans, from so many different living conditions, come from so many diverse sections of the land to dedicate themselves to the rebuilding, indeed to the reclamation of their government and their destinies.Pepper concluded his remarks by declaring that “it may well be that what you begin here may ultimately result in a new social, economic and political system in the United States.” Outside the auditorium a bongo group was chanting “Kill Whitey.” The convention was one of the most ambitious attempts to forge a broad political alliance of antiwar organisations, New Left insurgents and the radical wing of the civil rights movement in 1960s America. It was planned by the NCNP, a co-ordinating organisation that hoped for a fundamental reconstitution of the American socio-economic and political order. Scholars have largely ignored the NCNP, and although the 1967 convention makes brief appearances in the literature it is generally portrayed as a farcical horror show. However, the motives behind, events of, and reaction to the convention reveals much about “the movement” in late sixties America.

One Step Forward, One Step Backward: Chen Shui-bian's mainland policy

Chen Shui-bian has been lauded for his moderation in handling cross-Strait relations but reviled for his vacillation. The most evident case of Chen's unsteadiness is the President's position on the issue of 'one China'. He has been running the gamut from 'future China' to the latest 'accepting one China is equivalent to the end of the ROC'. This lack of consistency can be explained by factional politicking within the DPP. Since the DPP was created in 1986, it has been quite evident that the party has been polarized into two major factions, the Formosa faction and the New Tide faction. The radical wing got the upper-hand as the overseas independence advocates started to flow back at the beginning of the 1990s. A few years later, the party started to change on its stand on Taiwan independence. The humiliating defeat of the DPP candidate Peng Ming-min in the 1996 presidential election prompted further transition. In the meantime, the weakening of the moderate wing in the DPP put Chen in a very difficult position. The party's leadership on the left had constantly warned their followers of self-destruction should the principle of 'one China' be accepted.

From understanding society to discovering the subject

Succeeding to the philosophy of law, sociology organized itself no longer around the absolute State but around society itself, conceived as a system, both differenciated and able to control itself. The concepts of institution and socialization formed the core of a large number of analyses which were both theoretical and empirical. But this `classical' view disintegrated itself both because markets eliminated a large part of institutional controls of change and because new social movements, from the 1980's on, rejected this society-centered view of social life. More recently, only the critical approach within this so-called functionalist approach survived actively, interpreting all social categories as instruments serving a domination which is more and more internalized. The most radical wing of the women's movement gave the most elaborate expression of this trend. But it necessarily exhausts itself by its entirely critical and self-destructive point of view. The field of sociology must be entirely redefined. Some introduce the idea of a world — or global — society; some others try to give a new life to basic ideas, such as social bonds, solidarity and communication. A third group, using various vocabularies, gives a central role to the idea of Subject, which is very different from the concept of Self in its classical sense, because the Subject is defined as a self-referential effort of each individual or group to create itself as a principle of integration of more and more diversified experiences.

From understanding society to discovering the subject

Succeeding to the philosophy of law, sociology organized itself no longer around the absolute State but around society itself, conceived as a system, both differenciated and able to control itself. The concepts of institution and socialization formed the core of a large number of analyses which were both theoretical and empirical. But this `classical' view disintegrated itself both because markets eliminated a large part of institutional controls of change and because new social movements, from the 1980's on, rejected this society-centered view of social life. More recently, only the critical approach within this so-called functionalist approach survived actively, interpreting all social categories as instruments serving a domination which is more and more internalized. The most radical wing of the women's movement gave the most elaborate expression of this trend. But it necessarily exhausts itself by its entirely critical and self-destructive point of view. The field of sociology must be entirely redefined. Some introduce the idea of a world — or global — society; some others try to give a new life to basic ideas, such as social bonds, solidarity and communication. A third group, using various vocabularies, gives a central role to the idea of Subject, which is very different from the concept of Self in its classical sense, because the Subject is defined as a self-referential effort of each individual or group to create itself as a principle of integration of more and more diversified experiences.

I Gesuiti e l’Illuminismo. Politica e religione in Austria e nell’Europa cen-trale (1773-1798) (review)

I Gesuiti e l'Illuminismo. Politica religione in Austria e nell'Europa centrale (1773-1798). By Antonio Trampus. [Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia, Fondo di studi Parini-Chirio, University degli Studi di Torino, Nuova Serie, 5.] (Florence: Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki. 2000. Pp. 386. Lire 77,000 paperback.) The author's aim is to examine the situation of the ex-Jesuits in the German provinces of the Austrian Empire, from their suppression in 1773 to 1798. How did ex-Jesuits conduct themselves after suppression? Did they survive as more than dispersed fragments? What role did they play in the intellectual and political life of the time? Dr. Trampus approaches these questions on the basis of a careful examination of an impressive array of archives, with results that are often surprising. After a detailed survey of the flourishing state of the Society in these provinces at the time of suppression, he traces the fate of the ex-Jesuits. Their numbers slowly declined, but only from the effects of age, mortality, and the end of recruitment; few laicized. Equally few left the Empire. Most remained in their former locations, often their former abodes. Surprisingly, they usually continued to live a common life according to their old rules; and they did so with the tacit consent not only of the bishops and civil magistracy, but that of Joseph II. Thus the Jesuit community survived, despite the dissolution of the Society. The ex-Jesuits, aside from those who from age or infirmity had to survive on government pensions, followed various activities: in 1780 over 30% were teachers, 15% parish priests, others librarians, preachers, confessors, a few even bishops. But the ex-Jesuits were not content merely to survive. Despite their dissolution, they did not sink into apathy and despair, but continued to take an active part in cultural and intellectual life. They sought in particular to carry on the struggle against the radical Enlightenment that had caused their suppression and sought to undermine Christianity. They were not hostile to the Enlightenment as such, favoring the effort to improve society by the application of reason and science, but only to the efforts of its radical wing, which saw the destruction of Christianity as a necessary step to that end. They hoped rather to reconcile the Enlightenment and Christianity, a project far more plausible in central Europe than in France. Of the ways in which they sought this reconciliation, perhaps the most unexpected was their presence within the masonic lodges, which the author's archival research documents in great detail. Though this has been noted before, it has usually been dismissed as simply an example of the seductive appeal of the Enlightenment. The reality was different. The archives show them taking an active part in the debates within the lodges, especially on the possibility of reconciling faith and reason, the Enlightenment and Christianity, perhaps through reform in the Church. …

Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict

Warrant for Genocide provides a unique, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the underlying causes of the World War I Armenian genocide. It traces genocide to the origin and history of the long-standing Turko-Armenian discord with the massacres treated as a means to resolve the conflict between a powerful, dominant group and a weak, vulnerable minority. The World War I destruction of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire was neither an accident nor an aberration. The seeds of the large-scale deportations and massacres of Armenians can be found in the 1919U1920 Turkish Courts Martial documents of leaders of the Young Turk Ittihadist regime. These were replete with xenophobic nationalism, calls for the use of arms to achieve that end, and references to Islam to incite the masses against Armenians. The utmost secrecy, camouflage, and deflection with respect to their plans were evident in what was not said. This was a drastic departure by the regime from its publicly proclaimed posture of egalitarianism, heralding the dawn of a new era of multiethnic harmony and accord in the decaying empire. Dadrian carefully details these calculated deliberations and the concomitant shift from Ottomanism to Turkism in the radical wing of the regime. He illustrates how this rekindled enmities between dominant Turks and subject minorities. The desire to neutralize or eliminate the opposition helped pave the way to a new and radical nationality policy. To Dadrian, the act of genocide was a draconian method of resolving a lingering conflict. No analysis of the Armenian genocide can be adequate without understanding the origin, elements, evolution, and escalation of the Turko-Armenian conflict. Dadrian details this admirably, showing that in the final analysis, the Armenian genocide was a cataclysmic by-product of this conflict. Genocide and Holocaust scholars, Armenian area specialists, and human rights activists will consider this an essential addition to the literature.

Who Determines the Self in the Politics of Self-Determination? Identity and Preference Formation in Tatarstan's Nationalist Mobilization

In the late 1980s, as the world's oldest socialist state launched a massive program of economic and political reform, nationalism in the Soviet republics contributed not only to the end of reform, but also to the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union itself. By 1991 fifteen new nation-states were created out of the union republics. National independence for these states represented the crowning moment in ethnonationalist revivals initiated by intellectuals but carried out by mass publics through protest cycles, popular referenda, and, ultimately, elections for independence. At the same time, national revival had also been taking place within the Soviet Union's autonomous republics, the majority of which were located inside Russia.'1 In the Tatar Autonomous Republic nationalist politics was developing along a trajectory similar to that of the most aggressive union republics. In 1988 the nationalist Tatar Public Center (TOTs) was formed, explicitly modeling itself on the Baltic popular front organizations. It began by calling for the protection of Tatar culture and ended up championing full independence for Tatarstan. In 1991 a radical wing broke off from TOTs and formed Ittifak, or Alliance. Ittifak promoted an exclusivist nationalist agenda, openly hostile to Russians in Tatarstan. As Ittifak attempted to win support away from the moderate Tatars, pro-Russian and profederalist groups organized in response. In the radicalization of the Tatar nationalist movement and in the growing popular support for these groups, we observe the origins of an ethnic outbidding scenario. Ethnic outbidding takes place when political entrepreneurs in a multiethnic polity attract political support by advocating a more ethnically exclusivist program than other politicians. In Tatarstan, despite early mobilization, neither outbidding nor mass nationalist mobilization ultimately occurred. Unlike the union republics, the autonomous republics remained a part of the Russian Federation. Popular support for the nationalists in Tatarstan weakened as the more moderate President Shamiev and his government emerged as the political victor. With the conclusion of a bilateral treaty between Tatarstan and Moscow in 1994, the republic backed away from national secession. By 1996 nationalist opposition groups had become practically irrelevant. How can the rise and subsequent wane of nationalist mobilization in Tatarstan be understood? And what can attention to cases of unsuccessful ethnic mobilization illustrate about the phenomenon more generally?

The Tradition of Greek Democracy

Moses Finley's reflections on ancient and modern democracy, explicitly directed against the liberal mainstream of political science, but also - avant la lettre - against the belittling of Greek democracy that has become fashionable among post-Marxist radicals, can be taken as a starting point for further discussion of historical as well as theoretical questions. The points at issue have to do with the belated recognition of democracy as a part of the Greek tradition, but also with the divided and contested modern tradition that grew out of this new perspective on the past. The French Revolution is crucial to both aspects of the problem. Although it can be shown that the well-known attempts of the revolutionaries to appropriate classical models did not - in the short run - radically alter the image of ancient Greece, the very experience of the revolution - both as an exceptionally dramatic historical event and as a key episode in a more long-term process - was bound to change modern perceptions of the classical world. The new understanding of Greek democracy, made possible by the revolution but not inspired by it, was first articulated by the radical wing of 19th-century liberalism; but it could, in due course, serve to develop a critique of liberalism.

Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic

In the transatlantic world of the late eighteenth century, easterly winds blew radical thought to America. Thomas Paine had already arrived on these shores in 1774 and made his mark as a radical pamphleteer during the Revolution. In his wake followed more than 200 other radical exiles--English Dissenters, Whigs, and Painites; Scottish lads o'parts; and Irish patriots--who became influential newspaper writers and editors and helped change the nature of political discourse in a young nation. Michael Durey has written the first full-scale analysis of these radicals, evaluating the long-term influence their ideas have had on American political thought. Transatlantic Radicals uncovers the roots of their radicalism in the Old World and tells the story of how these men came to be exiled, how they emigrated, and how they participated in the politics of their adopted country. Nearly all of these radicals looked to Paine as their spiritual leader and to Thomas Jefferson as their political champion. They held egalitarian, anti-federalist values and promoted an extreme form of participatory democracy that found a niche in the radical wing of Jefferson's Republican Party. Their divided views on slavery, however, reveal that democratic republicanism was unable to cope with the realities of that institution. As political activists during the 1790s, they proved crucial to Jefferson's 1800 presidential victory; then, after his views moderated and their influence waned, many repatriated, others drifted into anonymity, and a few managed to find success in the New World. Although many of these men are known to us through other histories, their influence as a group has never before been so closely examined. Durey persuasively demonstrates that the intellectual ferment in Britain did indeed have tremendous influence on American politics. His account of that influence sheds considerable light on transatlantic political history and differences in religious, political, and economic freedoms. Skillfully balancing a large cast of characters, Transatlantic Radicals depicts the diversity of their experiences and shows how crucial these reluctant emigres were to shaping our republic in its formative years.

Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory 1787-1900 (review)

462 Rhetoric & Public Affairs important to be glossed here; at best, something of its tone can only be suggested in his observation that "Gay rights rhetoric is almost apolitical, perhaps even antipolitical , in that it addresses the multitude as a mass of individuals, not as a political unity. Its appeal is not to de cive but to each person as a maker of his or her own destiny. It is a rhetoric of disengagement. In all this, the rhetoric of gay rights establishes itself, not as a rhetoric of judgment, but as a rhetoric of nonjudgment. There is no potential for radical commitment in such a discourse" (184). As for the rhetoric of gay rights, so for McCarthy, Welch, and all of us, all the well-intended voices for an under-obligated world. For all its darkness, however, Darsey's vision of our times is not without prospects of its own; and the many readers of this important book will come to understand that the note heard finally is itself carried by the prophet's voice. Stephen H. Browne The Pennsylvania State University 1. Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, vol. 1, eds. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (Glouster, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 431. Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory 1787-1900. Edited by Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998; pp. xv + 925. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper. Every person who claims expertise in the rhetoric of the United States of America should study Lift Every Voice. That few persons will find this a self-evident proposition constitutes a sad commentary on the state of rhetorical studies. Today, the study of rhetoric is fractured into highly polarized divisions. The so-called radical wing will not read this book, because in spite of their vaunted interest in social equality, they would rather study pop culture and theory than attend to the concrete discursive actions by which the oppressed have constructed progressive social change in our history. Besides, our students prefer to study television, and catering to such preferences makes one a "cool" professor. Even African American professors and scholars recently seem caught in this trend, preferring to teach the popular subjects of movies and interpersonal dating instead of the history of the struggle for progressive change wrought by African Americans. More conservative scholars will skirt this volume with equal deftness, but for different reasons. Certainly, conservatives will shy away from the radical values of the rhetoric contained in this volume. They may resist putting themselves under the sway of the passionate eloquence of these voices, which demand justice and equality as the foundations of human civilization. Up front, however, conservatives will be predisposed to deny that most of these voices are eloquent. Applying the narrow criteria derived from studying a narrow canon, they will be unable to cope with this Book Reviews 463 truly oral rhetoric. They will (mis)judge Samuel H. Davis's plea for "Our Rightful Claims" according to standards of Anglo-American literature. Focusing on how it violates the norms of written grammar and sentence structure, they may miss the oral eloquence of his denunciation of "the tyrant, who holds in one hand the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees freedom and equal rights to every other citizen, and in the other 'the scourge dripping with gore,' drawn from the veins of his fellow man" (195). Current fads and long-term prejudices should be swept aside, however. This volume offers to educate us on one of the central struggles of U.S. history, to expand our understanding of the range of human eloquence, and to deepen our appreciation of the scope of African American oratory. For those outside the African American community it also offers the chance to increase one's understanding of what it means to be "African American." Lift Every Voice is based on the out-of-print classic Voice of Black America, which was edited by the respected historian Philip Foner. The more recent volume , completed by the rhetorician Robert Branham, is narrower in historical scope and broader in its...

Common Roots and Entangled Limbs: Earth First! and the Growth of Post‐Wilderness Environmentalism on California's North Coast

Conflicts over the protection of redwood trees on California's North Coast are often depicted as following the trajectory of the radical wing of the larger American environmental movement, in which “radical” refers to the sharpness of the boundary drawn and defended between human despoliation and pure nature or “wilderness.” Earth First!—an environmental organization characterized by their slogan, “No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth!”—is often depicted as simply the leading edge of this deepening rift between nature and culture. I argue, on the contrary, that the Earth First! branches on California's North Coast should be understood as making bold, if incomplete, attempts to cast off the problematic nature–culture dichotomy and to define social justice and ecological health as struggles with a common root. By moving beyond wilderness, the North Coast Earth First! offers the promise of a truly radical movement, by which I mean one which truly confronts capital's interlinked degradation of both natural and human communities. This article examines the efforts by the North Coast Earth First! to inscribe a new community of activists and timber‐workers joined in the struggle to contest corporate claims on the redwood forest. It explores the ambiguous effects of activists' “embodied” and “home‐based” practices on this budding alliance, particularly the ways in which such practices also have alienated workers by redefining the redwood forest as the exclusive property of the activists' themselves.

Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic

In the transatlantic world of the late eighteenth century, easterly winds blew radical thought to America. Thomas Paine had already arrived on these shores in 1774 and made his mark as a radical pamphleteer during the Revolution. In his wake followed more than 200 other radical exiles English Dissenters, Whigs, and Painites; Scottish lads o'parts; and Irish patriots who became influential newspaper writers and editors and helped change the nature of political discourse in a young nation. Michael Durey has written the first full-scale analysis of these radicals, evaluating the long-term influence their ideas have had on American political thought. Transatlantic Radicals uncovers the roots of their radicalism in the Old World and tells the story of how these men came to be exiled, how they emigrated, and how they participated in the politics of their adopted country. Nearly all of these radicals looked to Paine as their spiritual leader and to Thomas Jefferson as their political champion. They held egalitarian, anti-federalist values and promoted an extreme form of participatory democracy that found a niche in the radical wing of Jefferson's Republican Party. Their divided views on slavery, however, reveal that democratic republicanism was unable to cope with the realities of that institution. As political activists during the 1790s, they proved crucial to Jefferson's 1800 presidential victory; then, after his views moderated and their influence waned, many repatriated, others drifted into anonymity, and a few managed to find success in the New World. Although many of these men are known to us through other histories, their influence as a group has never before been so closely examined. Durey persuasively demonstrates that the intellectual ferment in Britain did indeed have tremendous influence on American politics. His account of that influence sheds considerable light on transatlantic political history and differences in religious, political, and economic freedoms. Skillfully balancing a large cast of characters, Transatlantic Radicals depicts the diversity of their experiences and shows how crucial these reluctant emigres were to shaping our republic in its formative years.

Calvin and Farel: the Dynamics of Legitimation in Early Calvinism

AbstractIn 1541 Calvin did not return to Geneva to reform a city but to reform a nation: Geneva was to be the staging area, France the target. By no means the lonely decision-maker of later scholarship, from the very beginning Calvin together with Fare] and Viret formed the "Holy Triumvirate" (Bucer), cooperating closely and forging the powerful alliance between Geneva, Neuchitel, and Lausanne. In August-September 1558 their common front collapsed when Calvin sacrificed the bonds of friendship with his former comrades-in-arms, outmaneuvering the radical wing in an effort to respond to the unexpected opportunities for a legitimation of the Reformation in his native country.

Over the rainbow: money, class and homophobia

Family and community romance market forces, political influence separate lives trade secrets cross-gender the radical wing breaking barriers - the morning after.

The Attraction of Aristocratic Women to Pharisaism During the Second Temple Period

Unlike Christianity, which regards the word “Pharisee” as synonymous with “hypocrite,” “legalist,” and “petty-bourgeois,” Jews have always understood Pharisaism as the correct and trustworthy side of Judaism. Since the eighteenth century, all disputants who participated in the great controversies and schisms within Judaism have claimed to represent the true heirs of the Pharisees. For example, adherents of the strong anti-Hasidic movement initiated by R. Eliyahu of Vilna in the second half of the eighteenth century, who are usually referred to in literature by the negative appellation “opposers” (םירננחמ), referred to themselves by the positive title “Pharisees” (םישורפ). When the Reform movement was founded in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the goal of reforming the Jewish religion to make it more “modern” and acceptable to its neighbors, the reformers perceived themselves as the true heirs of the Pharisees. In his important study of the Pharisees and Sadducees, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders, ofWissenschaft des Judentumsand an important spokesman for the radical wing of the Reform movement, formulated the view of the flexible open-minded Pharisees, who reformed Judaism to the point of contradicting the laws set out in the Pentateuch, in order to accommodate them to their changing needs. Geiger's opponents easily produced evidence that negated his findings and proved beyond doubt that they, in their conservative strain, were the real heirs of Pharisaism. To his opponents, Geiger was a representative of the detestable Sadducees or their later counterparts, the Karaites.

Politics as if women mattered: a political analysis of the National Action Committee on the status of women

In Politics as if women Mattered, the analysis begun in Jill Vickers's contributions to Challenging Times and Women and Social Change is further developed via a detailed examination of the NAC. Co - authored with Pauline Rankin and Christine Appelle, this monograph is both theoretically sophisticated and rich in empirical detail. The key themes raised by the earlier two anthologies -- the distinctiveness of Canadian feminism; the relationship between feminist, regional and nationalist politics in English Canada Quebec and the First Nations; the tension between institutionalized and grass - root feminism; debates around feminist process and organizational structures; the challenge of integrating issues of class, race disability and sexual orientation into feminist agendas; and the implications of an increasingly conservative political climate -- all resurface here as the context and challenges that have shaped the NAC's evolution into a parliament of women.Vickers et al. trace NAC's development from 1971, when a coalition of 30 - odd groups came together to monitor the implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, to 1988, when it acted as all umbrella organization for some 600 groups with a diverse and far - reaching agenda for social change. With great deity and precision, the authors reveal the institutionalization of the Canadian women's movement through NAC. In doing so, they reject pejorative interpretations of institutionalization as co - optation, and argue instead that:... women need structures to sustain their projects over time just as men do. As long as we could believe that the goals of women's movements could be achieved within a single generation, this point had no great urgency. Now that it is apparent ... that we must persuade women in the future to complete our projects, it is necessary to appropriate the concept of and reconceptualize it to interpret women's political practice (4).The NAC's emergence as the central institution of the Canadian women's movement is significant in analyzing the distinctiveness of Canadian feminism and its relationship to the broader political culture in which it has developed. As Vickers has argued elsewhere, the Canadian women's movement differs from its US and western European counterparts in both its ideological diversity, and its continued interaction with the state while at the same time maintaining its autonomy. This double dynamic is traced through three eras of the NAC -- the founding era (1972 - 78), the transitional era (1979 - 82), and the era of institutionalization (1982 - 88).From its inception, the NAC was the focus of tension between different generations of feminists -- the older, more liberal wing concerned with implementation of the already formulated agenda of the Royal Commission, and an emergent younger, more radical wing with an alternative agenda. The former dominated the alliance of the founding era, shaping the NAC's initial orientation as an educational and communications link on status - of - women concerns. The largely Toronto - based founding alliance assumed the efficacy of conventional lobbying practices, and had little self - understanding of the NAC as having a policy - making potential. This was also the era of expansion in general state involvement in status - of - women concerns, as evidenced by the establishment of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, the Secretary of State's Women's Program and Status of Women Canada. The centralist environment of the Liberal era shaped the NAC's links with these official political channels and focused concerns on federal issues. There was early commitment within the NAC to linkages with the Quebec women's movement and to native women's rights, but representational structures remained undeveloped (at least in part due to limited financial resources). At the same time a more radical agenda was emerging, not from within the executive, but on the pages of the NAC's first periodical, Status of Women News, which . …

Mailer's Psychology of Machines

Summer 1990 issue. OR YEARS has dreamed of writing a great of America, a creation equal to phenomena of country itself (Cannibals 99). For some readers, closest he has ever come to this is still The Naked and Dead (1948), endebted though he may have been, at age of twenty-five, to Farrell, Steinbeck, and especially Dos Passos for book's panoramic vision of American society. Yet it is in strong work of 1960s-the psychological romance of An American Dream (1965) and imaginative journalism of The Armies of Night (1968)-that came to see his own life as a possible embodiment of contemporary history and began, Whitman-like, to identify his personal destiny with destiny of nation. Here is American author who sets himself task of being American author and who continues to engage readers despite diminishing likelihood of his ever completing his great work. Of a Fire on Moon (1970) is one of Mailer's most formidable attempts to read history-the flight of Apollo 11 to moon-as a chapter in an ongoing fiction of his own, a novel in line of Armies and his 1968 convention piece, Miami and Siege of Chicago. Like precursors, moon book is of more than journalistic value, and because dramatizes his failures no less scrupulously than he does his successes, it comes to reveal, as few traditional novels have been able to, difficult relation between technology and private imagination. Alvin B. Kernan rightly situates Mailer's subtle attack against rationalist world of NASA within the entire radical wing of romanticism, tough, revolutionary line that leads Blake and Byron, for all their differences, through such poets as Rimbaud to Sartre and Genet (155). Laurence Goldstein includes Fire in his fascinating survey of flying machines in modern literature, and George P. Landow concludes his ground-breaking study of nonfiction prose from Carlyle to Mailer with an able exposition of most complexly technical passage in book. But this powerful lineage cannot quite make up for a singular failing, a seeming inability on part of to bring temperamental force of personality to bear on what he himself, early in book, calls these

Critical cosmopolitanism: Urban and regional studies into the 1990s

This paper reappraises and contextualises the more salient contributions to British urban and regional studies in the 1980s. The particular emphasis will be on the contributions made by production geography, although the consumption geographic level will not be neglected. A further emphasis is on the radical wing of this work where the major advances have been made. This paper is structured chronologically. After an introduction pointing to the connections between social change and intellectual change, the first main section focuses on research developed to deal with the latter end of the Fordist era. The next section explores work on the crisis of Fordism and the emergent Post-Fordist era. Finally, a speculative conclusion picks out those elements of Post-Fordism which can be expected to underpin both spatial development and academic analysis into the 1990s.