Typical_Name
10th March 2014, 06:28
My History of Economic Thought class has assigned Joshua Muravchik's "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" as required reading, and I need to do a review on the book. I'm just starting to read it, but what I've read so far (and the fact that my extremely right-wing and overtly pro-Austrian professor likes the book) suggests that the author is likely a right-wing crank.
I expect much of the book to be either dishonest or misinformed (I'd like to say I'm keeping an open mind, but frankly I would be shocked if I came out of this agreeing with Muravchik). I'm actually not required to reference outside sources when reviewing the book (this is true of all the book reviews done in this class), but frankly it just doesn't feel like a college-level assignment without me referencing outside sources. Unfortunately, though, I don't feel like I'm well-informed enough about socialism to deliver a scathing review to each and every point in the book, and while I might be able to pick out the obvious stuff (ie, apparently at some point the author claims that Mussolini's fascism is a branch of socialism), I'll probably miss serious falsehoods that could become difficult to dislodge.
So I come here. I'm not intimately familiar with the way things are around RevLeft, but I figure that a massive community of leftists on the internet has at least a couple people who can point me to some things to watch out for with this book. Anyone have any suggestions?
(I post this on the "Opposing Ideologies" section because it's about an opposing ideology, and because I'm not really sure if I'm pure enough to post in the other sections. No one's really sure what my ideological views are, aside from that they're different from their's.)
I expect much of the book to be either dishonest or misinformed (I'd like to say I'm keeping an open mind, but frankly I would be shocked if I came out of this agreeing with Muravchik). I'm actually not required to reference outside sources when reviewing the book (this is true of all the book reviews done in this class), but frankly it just doesn't feel like a college-level assignment without me referencing outside sources. Unfortunately, though, I don't feel like I'm well-informed enough about socialism to deliver a scathing review to each and every point in the book, and while I might be able to pick out the obvious stuff (ie, apparently at some point the author claims that Mussolini's fascism is a branch of socialism), I'll probably miss serious falsehoods that could become difficult to dislodge.
So I come here. I'm not intimately familiar with the way things are around RevLeft, but I figure that a massive community of leftists on the internet has at least a couple people who can point me to some things to watch out for with this book. Anyone have any suggestions?
(I post this on the "Opposing Ideologies" section because it's about an opposing ideology, and because I'm not really sure if I'm pure enough to post in the other sections. No one's really sure what my ideological views are, aside from that they're different from their's.)