A fresh look at world affairs that finds room for the Rest as well as the West.
The decline of the West? The end of the American century? Good thing, this sweeping history argues.
International relations professor Acharya offers a definition of “world order” that admits at the outset that there’s never really been any such thing: that is, a single entity governing the entire globe. Instead, there have been multiple world orders, usually imposed by an empire, sometimes by “a system of sovereign states.” The present world order, such as it is, is less dominated by empires than before, and if China and the U.S. harbor imperial ambitions, neither is likely to be the single dominant power of the future. This, Acharya argues, is a good thing, leaving room for “a confluence of civilizations, rather than a clash of civilizations.” Acharya builds his argument from antiquity to the present: He considers the Egyptian-dominated coalition of great powers in the Middle East of three dozen centuries ago, with Egypt first among equals, whereas the Sumerian and later Persian empires “developed an imperial world order through outright conquest and domination of its neighbors.” Fast-forward to nearer our own time, when European powers rushed to build colonial empires, many sustained by enslavement, all “the result of superior military technology, religious zeal, disease, and brutality.” Against these examples, Acharya argues that the future world order will include formerly colonized nations; in this regard, he notes that Nigeria is a net exporter of popular culture via its film industry, with other film centers in India and China now supplanting Hollywood in the world market. Just so, he adds, Italian food may be the most popular in the world, but it’s now followed by various Asian cuisines. That’s one form of world order, to be sure, and, Acharya observes approvingly, the West no longer has a lock on it.
A fresh look at world affairs that finds room for the Rest as well as the West.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781541604148
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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