Greetings Economists, On Mar 15, 2006, at 6:21 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
Quoting: Neil Davidson, March 2006, ...When the Enlightenment ideas came to the masses of the Islamic world, they came not as a recapitulation of the European experience of the 17th and 18th centuries, but in the form of Marxism - the radical inheritor of that experience. Unfortunately the theoretical and organisational forms in which Marxism made its impact were Stalinist and consequently carried within them the seeds of disaster - most spectacularly in Iraq during the 1950s and in Iran during the 1970s, but more insidiously almost everywhere else. It is because of the catastrophic record of Stalinism, and more broadly of secular nationalism, that people who would once have been drawn to socialism see Islamism as an alternative path to liberation today... Doyle, I have trouble with saying the Enlightenment ideas were something special for Islam that Stalinism had a hand bringing down. Personally I see the U.S. support for fundamentalists as a method of countering the left secular forces in geo-politics. And I find rationalism problematic in the sense of trying to deal with religion mainly because rationalist can't recognize emotion structure that religion uses copiously to bind people to their practice. So I find this essay muddled. thanks, Doyle saylor
