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Sto caricando le informazioni... A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (edizione 2008)di Chris Harman (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaA People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium di Chris Harman
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. An excellent book, well-written and gripping in a way few histories of this length are. Harman sets out his vision of the class-based progression of human societies and the rise and fall of different socio-economic systems with clarity and persuasive argument. While I might quibble a few points here and there, in the main this is a magisterial work which any student of history should absolutely read ( ) I found this book offensive. There is really no other way to put it. It's blatantly one sided, with pointless character assassinations on one side and whitewashing on the other. The author uses a really insulting tactic of quoting other sources as if they were factual on disputed matters giving no background or differing sources or even any disclaimers. A lot of it is childish point scoring and "look how nasty capitalism is". At the same time though, I found it interesting and I useful to see what the world looks like through the eyes of communism's number one fan. Funny how there are no fans of communism in countries that suffered through it. Another problem with this book and pretty much any communist is they always compare capitalism in practice with communism in theory which is a pointless comparison. Want to debate which one is better in theory? Fine, but don't use examples from the real world to show how capitalism is broken because then we have to use examples from the real world for communism and that debate you have lost about 50 times over and still losing by such a wide margin it's embarrassing. Well, it's not really "... a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals." and it's not at all, really, "a people's history". This book just happens to acknowledge (only occasionally) the populations behind the leaders, and is nothing more than the new historicism - which is great - marketed as "A people's history of X". Many recent history books talk at least as much about the human environment in which events happen. So he sometimes used Marxist ideas to frame events. There's nothing odd about that: much less odd than talking about "raw economic forces" devoid of actual humans. Histories of the world are always great, I think. This one was great too - otherwise it wouldn't have got 3 stars.
Chris Harman's A People's History of the World is a very welcome and largely successful attempt to produce a popular history of the human species, bringing out the interconnection between the development of modes of production on the one hand and class struggle on the other. The book is closer in spirit to The Communist Manifesto than to Capital, because of this interweaving of story and structure while taking into account a further century and a half of history and historiography. It is 729 pages long, with the last 150 years taking up just over half the space. But to put this another way, Harman still devotes 300 pages to events and developments prior to the industrial revolution. Early chapters cover the farming revolution, the urban revolution, and the rise of the early states and empires, drawing on the work of Jared Diamond as well as Gordon Childe's classic materialist studies in pre-history, updating Childe's account with the later findings of such scholars as Colin Renfrew and Charles Maizels.
Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of technological change as well as the impact of powerful individuals and revolutionary ideas, these societies have engendered events familiar to every schoolchild-from the empires of antiquity to the world wars of the twentieth century. In a bravura conclusion, Chris Harman exposes the reductive complacency of contemporary capitalism, and asks, in a world riven as never before by suffering and inequality, why we imagine that it can-or should-survive much longer. Ambitious, provocative and invigorating, A People's History of the World delivers a vital corrective to traditional history, as well as a powerful sense of the deep currents of humanity which surge beneath the froth of government. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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