Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies最新文献

{"title":"The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-6370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-6370","url":null,"abstract":"The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward Bruce Bartlett Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 There ought to be a special place in the pantheon of heroes for people who think for themselves and who, though they have convictions, allow themselves to be beholden to no fixed interest group or faction. Bruce Bartlett, an economic historian and widely published author, has long been associated with the Reagan legacy in the United States, but that association has been of the sort one would expect for an independent thinker. In the 1970s, he served on the staffs of Congressmen Jack Kemp and Ron Paul; and in the following years was a domestic policy adviser to President Reagan and then a treasury official in the administration of George H. W. Bush. It tells a lot about him, though, that in 2006 he authored what to many of his erstwhile associates would seem an heretical book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, and accordingly was fired by a Republican-aligned think tank. Now he challenges a long-held cornerstone of free market, limited government thinking by arguing that John Maynard Keynes was actually a conservative who sought a realistic way to combat the Great Depression and thereby to save the capitalistic system. Further, Bartlett supports a Value Added Tax (VAT) for the United States, a position that he says political leaders privately tell him is sound but that has been too politically risky for them to embrace. It is both a weakness and a strength that in this book he focuses almost entirely on monetary/fiscal policy to the exclusion of all else. The strength is that he has much valuable to say about those policies, but it would seem that today's economic conundrum goes far beyond them, so that the \"real economy\" and manifold predicaments of the society need to be considered as part of the economic condition. If the fiscal deficit is a problem, this suggests that the immense cost of foreign wars, of military undertakings throughout the world, and of overall global meliorism as supported by both neoconservatism and neoliberalism simply have to be taken into account. Further, Bartlett continues the vogue among most economic commentators of disregarding the hollowing-out of the American manufacturing system and of employment through offshoring, out-sourcing, vast imports, and immigration (both legal and illegal). Nor does he discuss the historic shift of the American economy into financialization, an emphasis on finance that brought with it the many structural pathologies that were so instrumental in producing the crisis of 2007 and beyond. All of this, and more, is part of the economic fix the United States is in today, so that a preoccupation with monetary and fiscal policy hardly covers the ground. It is incongruous that Bartlett doesn't reach out to include these things, because not doing so runs directly contrary to his basic methodology. Throughout the book, he argues effective","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77413613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim280020428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim280020428","url":null,"abstract":"The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World Alan Greenspan Penguin Books, 2008 This is in effect a memoir of Alan Greenspan's professional life. Only in part (and by virtue of an Epilogue) does it deal with the financial crisis that hit in August 2007, some nineteen months after he retired from his position as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. But because Greenspan was a leading figure in world central banking during his eighteen-plus years as chairman, and because those years included the period leading up to the financial crisis, this book deserves a prominent place among those that discuss the crisis and its causes. The main portion of this book was published in June 2007, just weeks before the crisis became evident. The Epilogue, written a year later but still three months before the crisis reached its apex, was added for later editions. Although it does not appear in the book, Greenspan's testimony before the U. S. House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in late October 2008 provides still a third window into his thinking. It was in that testimony that he acknowledged trepidation about some of the premises that had long guided his economic philosophy. There is much to be mined from this book - far more than we will be able to discuss in this review. The main stem, as just indicated, is a memoir, but it also surveys a number of topics for their own sakes. For example, there is a chapter on the fall of Communism, another on the Clinton administration's economic policies, and chapters on the situations of China, Russia, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, the \"Asian Tigers\" and India. Greenspan was born in 1926. His parents' families, Jewish and lower middle class, had immigrated to the United States from Romania and Hungary at the turn of the century. He attended New York City's George Washington High School, which he describes as \"one of the city's largest and best public schools,\" after which he obtained his undergraduate degree in economics summa cum laude from New York University in 1948, followed by an M.A. there two years later. His brilliance became apparent early, manifesting itself in his love of math and music, and his ability to master data. He studied under later-Fed chairman Arthur Burns at Columbia, but became so busy working in various aspects of economic data analysis and econometric model-building that he didn't follow up with his doctorate (again in economics and from NYU) until the 1970s. He wound up serving on the JPMorgan board, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Gerald Ford, and headed a commission on Social Security reform for President Reagan. He was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987, retiring in January 2006. Greenspan's personal characteristics provide a fascinating mixture. He immersed himself splendidly in the details of industries and firms, from which he found substantial guidance about the economy as a whole","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81811731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-2285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-2285","url":null,"abstract":"A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent Robert W. Merry Simon & Schuster, 2009 Robert Merry's lucid new biography of James K. Polk, the eleventh president of the United States who served from 1845 to 1849, combines the virtues of an experienced journalist and perceptive historian. His 35 years as a journalist and publishing executive included several years as a Wall Street Journal correspondent and a long stint as the president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly. This is his third book that relates to America's place in the world (which, as we will see, is something that a biography of Polk inevitably does). Historians have given Polk a high place among American presidents, but, as Merry notes, he hardly exists today in the American public's memory. We can well surmise that the reason for his obscurity lies in the course American history took after his presidency. Just twelve years after he left the White House, the country was torn by a civil war that arose out of a cauldron of passions and that established, for at least this past century and half, the perception of heroes and villains. Andrew Jackson, James Polk and Millard Fillmore were among the presidents who sought to tame those passions (especially over the burgeoning slavery issue), consciously giving priority to the preservation of American unity as the more important value. Neither pole before the Civil War would honor these peace-keepers' seeming passivity; and after that war the praise inevitably went to the victors and to the cause they had championed. Polk went into office with a commitment to serve only a single four-year term, but during that brief period was able to accomplish each of his four objectives: to settle the dispute with Britain about the gigantic \"Oregon\" territory (which included not only what is today the state of Oregon but also lands far to the north), to acquire California from Mexico, to institute a \"tariff for-revenue-only\" (as distinguished from a protective tariff), and to create an \"independent treasury\" not tied to the banking system. Although it was not within his original aspirations, Polk's tenure also saw the acquisition from Mexico of the immense \"New Mexico\" province, resulting in a total extension of the United States to include not just Oregon, Washington, Texas and California, but also the present-day states of \"New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada..., as well as parts of... Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Wyoming.\" The term \"Manifest Destiny,\" coined by New York editor John O'Sullivan in 1845, fittingly described this extension of the United States to become a continental power reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The nomination of Polk by the Democratic Party in 1844 resulted from a compromise among the competing factions that had supported formerpresident Martin Van Buren and Senator Lewis Cass. In the ensuing election, Polk narrowly defeated the Whig Party nominee, Sen","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73011166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-6385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-6385","url":null,"abstract":"Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy Joseph E. Stiglitz W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 Joseph Stiglitz's Freefall is another excellent discussion of the global economic crisis, authored by a man who ranks high among the commentators. Stiglitz was the chief economist at the World Bank during the East Asian economic crisis in 1997-1998, and then chaired the United Nations commission that sought reforms for the global financial and monetary system. He was a member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors. This is his fifth book. There seem to be a great many Nobel Prize winners in Economics (whose collective wisdom doesn't seem to have saved the world from its financial travails), but it would surely be amiss not to mention that Stiglitz is among them. This book testifies to his distinction in that select group. Because Freefall can hardly examine the crisis without covering much of the same ground as the other books we have reviewed, we will avoid repeating that analysis here. We prefer to focus on those aspects of Stiglitz's discussion that address unresolved issues or that most bring his own learning to bear: * His view of the plight in which today's \"capitalism\" finds itself. * What he says (and yet doesn't say) about the whirlpool of global finance. * His critique of the response that the U.S. Federal Reserve and government have made to the crisis, including what he thinks should have been done. * In connection with this critique, his reflections on the performance both of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations' actions through the end of 2009. * What reforms Stiglitz considers needed. His view of today's \"capitalism.\" Although Stiglitz affirms \"that markets lie at the heart of every successful economy\" and is by no means anticapitalist, he shares the view that has come to be held by a great many thoughtful commentators that today's \"capitalism\" bears little resemblance to the competitive \"private enterprise\" that supporters of a market economy have long championed. He speaks of an \"ersatz capitalism\" that features a \"corporate welfare state\" driven by \"blatant greed\" and an ideology, sponsored by special interests, that has made a fetish of \"self-regulating markets.\" \"The current crisis has uncovered fundamental flaws in the capitalist system, or at least the peculiar version of capitalism that emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century in the United States.\" This realization is an intellectual earthquake. It should profoundly redirect the thinking of America's free-market enthusiasts, who will do their philosophy a great disservice if they insist on blind loyalty to the current system. We saw the same theme in our review of John Bogle's The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism,1 where we wrote that \"in common with many others today, Bogle sees that the market system has become untracked - has 'lost its soul' - and needs much devoted attention (especially from capitalism's supporters","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77263327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-3403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-3403","url":null,"abstract":"Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West Christopher Caldwell Doubleday, 2009 Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. With this book, he has added his voice to the literature discussing and warning against the on-going change occurring in the identity of Europe as its native population shrinks and as an immigrant population, mostly Islamic, establishes within it a growing parallel society. This journal has reviewed three of the earlier books: Walter Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe (in our Winter 2007 issue, pp. 519-522), Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance (Winter 2005, pp. 524-531), and Patrick J. Buchanan's The Death of the West (Spring 2002, pp. 126-130). Even though they deal with the same theme, each of these books, including Caldwell's, has much to say that keeps it from being a mere repetition of the others. Caldwell's contribution consists largely of his emphasis on Islam and his dissection of shibboleths that have long ruled the thinking within Europe, especially within Europe's governing class. This isn't to say that he doesn't have a good deal else to tell. His work with The Weekly Standard makes clear his identification with American \"neo-conservatism\"; and, among the authors just mentioned, this puts him closest to Blankley. He avoids, however, the extremes of which we were so critical in Blankley's book. Caldwell does not join Blankley in calling for a testosterone-ladened ruthlessness in response to jihadism. Caldwell mostly limits himself to factual explication and conceptual analysis, leaving policy prescriptions to others. If he agrees with Blankley's extremes, he gives no indication of it. It is surprising that Caldwell writes about the demographic threat to Europe without showing an awareness of (or giving a nod of recognition to) the other books. He does, at least, tell about Jean Raspail's haunting 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints; but neither the bibliography nor the index mentions Blankley, Buchanan or Laqueur. The surprise at these omissions is lessened, of course, because we know that many authors say very little about the contributions of others. This fashion would seem to stem in part from the incivilities imposed by publishers' and authors' frequent insistence upon an overly-constricted interpretation of the \"fair use\" doctrine, which has long made it legally uncomfortable to bring in other authors. Caldwell's book gives informative details about the history of Islamic immigration into Europe. During the decade immediately following World War II, a prostrate Europe desperately needed manpower, and brought in large numbers of immigrants for what Europeans thought would be short stays. But then, when \"the economic benefits [that] immigration brought [proved] marginal and temporary,\" most of Europe (except for France until 2006) shifted to a more selective type of immigration. It found it difficult, however, to find highly skilled people. Despite this and \"ge","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89994420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Is the What","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv6wgdww.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv6wgdww.7","url":null,"abstract":"What is the What Dave Eggers McSweeney's, 2006 What is the What is a partly fictionalized account of the life of one of the four thousand \"Lost Boys\" who were brought over to the United States in 2001 after fifteen years' wandering and encampment as refugees from the civil war in the southern Sudan. Above all, readers come away with a vivid sense of the cruelties and indifference human beings inflict upon each other, and with an equally vivid sense of the tenacity of life that has so long kept Achak Nyibek Arou Deng, the book's subject, going through all these years. Deng was born into a Dinka village in southern Sudan before the outbreak of the civil war there (the war that preceded the current war in the western Sudanese region of Darfur). When his village was burned by Arab raiders, he joined the tens of thousands of refugees, many of them unaccompanied children, who trekked across the Sudan for asylum in Ethiopia. He spent three years in the Pinyudo camp inside Ethiopia until the refugees there were driven out with mass bloodshed by the Ethiopians. Horrors of many kinds-including those from humans, crocodiles and lions-accompanied Deng at each step of his odyssey. Eventually, he lived for ten years in the Kakuma refugee camp inside Kenya. It was from there that he and other \"unaccompanied children,\" mostly boys but with a few girls, were brought to the United States in 2001. To its credit, Eggers' book is not a typical account designed to play upon the empathy and credulity of sympathetic souls who read it. Eggers quite candidly describes that genre: \"The tales of the Lost Boys have become remarkably similar over the years... Sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements, and the Lost Boys have been consistent in their willingness to oblige. Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making them as shocking as possible.\" He admits that his own telling \"includes enough small embellishments [so] that I cannot criticize the accounts of others.\" Perhaps, as he says, he cannot criticize those others; but there is much honest candor in the book, as we will see. Some of this candor has to do with the quizzical irrationality of American altruism. We know, of course, that throughout the history of the United States many Americans have been inspired by an altruism that is unrestrained by reason. This is the giddy \"do-goodism\" that mixes so many fine qualities with a child-like naivete that is blind to causes and consequences. About this, the book has Deng saying that \"we were the model Africans... We were applauded for our industriousness and good manners and, best of all, our devotion to our faith. The churches adored us, and the leaders they bankrolled and controlled coveted us. But now the enthusiasm has dampened. We have exhausted many of our hosts. We are young men, and young men are prone to vice. Among the four thousand are those who have entertained prostitutes, who have lost week","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84220334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education","authors":"I. McNish","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-4932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-4932","url":null,"abstract":"Karl Mannheim's Sociology as Political Education Colin Loader and David Kettler Transaction Publishers, 2002 In the words of the publishers of this book, \"German professors and academic intellectuals are often blamed for their passivity or complicity in the face of the anti-Republic surge of the late Weimar years, culminating in the National Socialist rise to power,\" but Karl Mannheim was not amongst these. This was in fact a kind way of avoiding stating that Karl Mannheim was at heart a Marxist, as was his prime academic mentor, Georg Lukacs. In fact, while reading this book we need to remember that Lukacs, whom Mannheim admired so much, had actually served as \"Commissioner for Culture\" in BeIa Kun's murderous Soviet-style government of Hungary, during the chaotic years following the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. It is to Mannheim's credit that he himself rejected violence as a means toward attaining the Communist goal, although perhaps this rejection was only due to his belief that sudden revolutions tended to strengthen opposition toward \"social change.\" Instead he argued that class barriers had to be lowered by subtle means before any radical reconstruction of society could win universal acceptance. While at Heidelberg, Mannheim was impressed by Max Weber's sociological treatises, and especially by his analysis of the dangers of bureaucracy. The authors, both seemingly favorable toward Mannheim, accordingly concentrate on showing how Mannheim took established Weberian sociology as his starting point, and having gained the attention of his audience, diverted it in line with Marxist principles. \"Not Marx but Max Weber usually served him as the paradigm for sociology in appeals to wider publics. Like Albert Saloman, however, he did not let his invocation of Weber stand in the way of his simultaneous identification of sociology with Marxism in the extended sense, especially when addressing students.\" (p. 163) Thus we see a conflict between more objective sociologists such as Leopold von Wiese, Georg von Below on the one hand, and politically-oriented intellectuals such as Eduard Spranger, Max Adler, Karl Kautsky, Albert Salomon, Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim, all of whom saw sociology as a tool by which they could indoctrinate students - or, in the words of the book's title, as \"political education.\" Thus there was an important contrast between Weber and Mannheim. Max Weber was an academic who valued the high cultural achievements of Western civilization. Mannheim, on the other hand, although a talented academic, rejected Western civilization, and particularly the German tradition that favored elitism and idealism. In the post-World War II environment, when Marxist-sympathizers such Jean Paul Sartre achieved a powerful role in Western intellectual circles, some writers portrayed Weber as a Nazi sympathizer, while portraying Mannheim as the defender of democracy. The fact that Mannheim was intellectually active","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80996468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Democracy without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State","authors":"I. McNish","doi":"10.5860/choice.43-4912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.43-4912","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81560023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Who Are the Jews","authors":"James Blakely","doi":"10.4324/9781315509013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315509013","url":null,"abstract":"Who Are the Jews? Vol. I: Soul of the Israelites, ISBN 0-913993-17-4 Vol. II : A Nation of Philosophers, ISBN 0-913993-18-2 Seymour W. Itzkoff Paideia Publishers, Ashfield, MA, 2004 Within the next several years, Volumes I and II of Who Are the Jews will be joined by a third and final volume, which will survey the historical, ethnic, religious history of the Jewish people into our own time. Volume I, Soul of the Israelites, gains its theme from the role of Moses the law giver, the inner ethical rock upon which Judaism was based. Itzkoff s biblical and historical analysis confirms Sigmund Freud's 1937 view in Moses and Monotheism of the probable Egyptian origins of this figure. The fact that Moses was but sixty or seventy years removed from the Pharaoh Akhenaton, c.1350 BCE, who but for only one generation overthrew the anthropomorphic animal gods of the Egyptian priesthood for a more philosophical monotheistic sun-god, argues for the probable affiliation of Moses with the Egyptians. The Exodus could have taken place c.1275-1225 BCE, a period close to the rule of the Hyksos (1650 BCE) derived Asiatic dynasty of the red-headed Rameses II. That the Hellenistic Egyptian priests of Heliopolis so viewed Moses is additional support for the plausibility of Itzkoff s argument. Much study is given to the origins of the various Israelite tribal units. Here Itzkoff sees three groups amalgamating into one national unity under Saul, David, and Solomon, to defend themselves from the advancing Philistines - unquestionably Mycenaean (Homeric era \"sea people\") Greeks - who, earlier, had given the Egyptians much trouble. These groups were a) the Exodus Semitic rabble from Egypt, led by a determined and visionary Moses; b) the Yahwist tribes of the Sinai, Negev, northern Arabia, who were essentially monotheistic, sharing their circumcision ritual with the Egyptian aristocracy; c) the northern Canaanite tribes of Israel, worshipping the traditional Babylonian/Syrian chief god, El, Elohim, Elohenu. The glue that held these diverse peoples together, along with an existing Indo-European component of Hyksos, Hurrians, Hittites, and Greeks (here including the peoples of the Jebusite town of Jerusalem that David made his capital) was the mysterious and all-powerful war god Yahweh and the ethical discipline that the Levites and priests had tried to force upon these formerly Habiru ruffians. From the beginning, this century-long monarchy fulfilled the warning that Samuel the judge had given the Israelites about relinquishing their tribal freedoms for a king, to defend them. The moral corruption, the falling away from the difficult disciplines that Moses and then the written Pentateuch had placed before them, undermined the Mosaic vision. First, the breakup of the tribes into two monarchies. Then, the descent of the religion into a Near-Eastern syncretism. By the time Israel, the state, and its ten tribes fell before the Assyrians, c.700 BCE, the northern monarchy envisioned ","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78306313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-1252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-1252","url":null,"abstract":"The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners Debra J. Dickerson Anchor Books, 2004 There is something in this book for just about everyone, depending upon a reader's proclivities. Those who read it to find ammunition against whites will find it there. Those who wish to see a black author's own characterizations of what is to her the deeply flawed behavior of many other blacks will find that there, too. Those who would like to see some emphasis, at least, on the decent and responsible behavior of a large number of people in either race will be disappointed, but apparently Dickerson feels the negatives exist in such abundance that they deserve the center of attention. Ironically, she is critical of \"the hysterical black polemicist [who] is the snarling German shepherd that blacks loose on racism,\" but that is a description a reader can't help but feel fits Dickerson herself throughout much of the book. Looking at the world through a haughty intellectualism that gives her an Olympian perspective and allows her to apply much pop psychology, she finds fuel for dissatisfaction with almost everybody. Those who come under her scalpel include the current black leadership; the \"Movement Generation\"; the black \"bourgeoisie\"; the great bulk of black males; black women, who despite being the work horses of their race have many undesirable qualities, according to Dickerson; and whites, for their racism, \"structuralized greed, entrenched privilege, and xenophobia.\" There is in all of this considerable grist for thought, and for good reason: Dickerson is in a position to have much to say. She is a sharecropper's daughter who graduated from Harvard Law School, and the wife in an interracial marriage. Her style is articulate (and she takes pleasure in an occasional sally into intellectualized smut). Even though there is much to criticize her for, her negativity has a unique value in light of the circumstances in which Americans find themselves today: it brings her to say things that few others are able to say in a society stifled by political correctness (i.e., by an insistence upon ideological conformity). Slurs against whites are politically correct, so there isn't much she can dish out along those lines that hasn't already been said. But that isn't true of her criticisms of today's black population. Her observations there offer a window into a forbidden subject. In this review, it will be valuable to examine what she has to say about whites, but most especially about blacks. Her book's content has significance for reasons Dickerson herself may not intend. If her critique is to be taken seriously, she is suggesting something quite startling and unexpected: that there is much that is problematic about the \"moral high ground\" that has allowed the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to sweep all before it. Those reading her observations can't help but entertain questions about the moral justification for the process of soc","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85920238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}