How does the excessive bureaucratization of central planning affect politics in communist countries? Mark Beissinger suggests an answer through this history of the Soviet Scientific Management movement and its contemporary descendants, raising at the same time broader questions about the political consequences of economic systems. Beissinger traces the rise and decline of admin...(展开全部)

This paper has been written: First. To point out, through a series of simple illustrations, the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts. Second. To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man. Third. To p...(展开全部)

This paper has been written: First. To point out, through a series of simple illustrations, the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts. Second. To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man. Third. To p...(展开全部)

Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev tr...(展开全部)

The Soviet project of creating a new culture and society entailed a plan for the model-ing of "new" persons who embodied and fulfilled the promise of socialism, and this vision was expressed in the institutions of government. Using archival sources, essays, and interviews with journalists, Thomas C. Wolfe provides an account of the final four decades of Soviet history viewed th...(展开全部)

Artemy Kalinovsky’s Laboratory of Socialist Development investigates the Soviet effort to make promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, Kalinovsky places the Soviet development of central Asia in...(展开全部)

Artemy M. Kalinovsky is a Senior Lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches courses on Soviet history, Central Asia, and contemporary Russian foreign policy. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) and Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonizat...(展开全部)

Talal Asad is a professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation―from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign―is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often...(展开全部)

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation―from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign―is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often...(展开全部)