Reviews for A Gramscian Analysis of the Role of Religion in Politics: Case Studies in Domination, Accommodation, and Resistance in Africa and Europe

The average rating for A Gramscian Analysis of the Role of Religion in Politics: Case Studies in Domination, Accommodation, and Resistance in Africa and Europe based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-01 00:00:00 John Kruse Don't confuse this with the book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, the excellent book about poverty in America by Harrington that was published in 1962 and is still relevant. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington is Harrington's biography with a maybe clever but certainly confusing title. If you don't know, Michael was a lapsed Catholic, a committed socialist and a prime mover in the Democratic Socialists of America. He was a liberal in that he wanted to change the system from within and worked hard to do that through the left wing of the Democratic Party but he was also a radical in that he wanted ultimately to change the system. His commitment to socialism was well known and unquestioned. He was rarely involved in direct actions or nonviolent civil disobedience. What he did best was write, tour, speak, debate and recruit. His focus was on democratic socialism. If you want to know something about the socialist movement in the U.S. since the 1950s, you will find this book interesting. If you are not interested in socialism at all, you are probably reading about the wrong guy because that is one of the things that Michael Harrington was all about! You can skip a couple of chapters of this book if you are not much interested in the internal workings of the various socialist parties in the U.S. Michael's life is interesting even without that but easily half the book is about socialist organizing and infighting, successes and failures. I have not read many biographies so maybe I shouldn't be surprised that this book starts when Michael is born in 1928 until he died in 1989. It is doggedly linear: it pretty much goes through his life year by year. His life as a Catholic student for his educational career through undergraduate school and his year at Yale in Law School to try to please his parents is only barely kept me interested. However, the time he was with the Catholic Worker in NYC interested me more because I have some experience with that organization and movement. Michael was a writer pretty much from the get go. He wanted to be a poet and spent a lot of years in Greenwich Village hanging out with the literary set. He wrote a lot of book reviews for the Village Voice and then a lot of material for socialist magazines and papers. He was an intellectual. The Other America changed his life when it was published in 1962. It was a best seller and he became a hot property in the best sense. He spent the rest of his life focused on social change and played a long and major role in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and its successor, the Democratic Socialists of America. He left his mark on left wing politics in America and to some extent in the world. He played a behind the scenes role in developing President Johnson's War on Poverty, never getting any public credit. As a socialist, he was never accepted (nor did he seek to be accepted) as a part of the Washington, D.C. establishment. The book is extraordinarily well researched with 65 pages of footnotes, many with additional detail. I wanted to like this book a little bit more than I actually did in its first half. There is too much socialist party internal workings and disputes for my needs. And I am very receptive to socialism, just never liked the infighting and turf wars that regularly dominated U.S. socialist politics. I never did manage to meet Michael Harrington although I was probably in the same room with him at least once as he was involved with some of the same pacifist organizations that I was. That is a small universe so there are some familiar names scattered here and there in the book. Michael was a fascinating and complex guy but he was a couple of notches above me intellectually so I have to mostly be satisfied with admiring him while not always following what he is saying. That applies to his two memoirs and this biography. Sad to say The Other American was written after Harrington died so did not benefit from his direct involvement. I have to limit myself to three stars but, if you like socialist party history, it probably moves up to four. You will get a detailed view of left wing politics in the U.S. from the 1950s through the 1980s. (Addendum: I have a rule that a movie gets four stars if it makes me cry. Books rarely make my cry but The Other American ended with tears running down my cheeks so I better give it four stars. I am very glad I was persistent and read it to the end.) For my review of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, go to . That is really the book to read before you tackle this biography. It is very accessible and is must reading for anyone interested in poverty or social change work. A good socialist, Harrington was always in the corner of the underdog.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-20 00:00:00 Robert Moore I looked for a biography of Harrington after joining the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA is an unusual party on the socialist left since it balances its proud socialist tendencies with its anti-Communism, its political realism (it doesn't put forward its own candidates but works within the progressive wing of the Democratic party) and its strong partnership with the far stronger European socialist parties (the DSA is the US sister party in the Socialist International). This book is very helpful in understanding how a party like the DSA came about. It traces the life of Harrington through the complicated history of socialist and Catholic progressive movements he was involved in through the mid-century and the conflicts of the 60s-80s between anti-Stalinist socialist parties and their new challengers among a New Left enamored with national liberation movements, whatever their totalitarian tendencies might be. Isserman has a strong leftist background but doesn't pull any punches. His bio of Harrington contains plenty of material on Harrington's failures, the pathetic sectarian conflicts that destroyed so many of the movements he was a part of, and the failures of both the radicals and conservatives within the socialist and Democratic left of the United States. The book is well written and researched but ends rather suddenly with Harrington's death, not taking the opportunity to reflect on his legacy or the developments of the DSA he founded in the years afterwards.