Civilizing the Enemy
German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6325186 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrei S Markovits (0000-0002-2255-9732, University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 662-663 |
| Publication date | 2007-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 2006 |
| Venue | Perspectives on Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1537-5927 • E-ISSN: 1541-0986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1537592707072015 |
| OpenAlex | W2074528059 |
| Language | EN |
Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. By Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 286p. $27.95. Rarely have I enjoyed (and learned from) reading a book as much as this one, whose parts are quite brilliant on occasion but whose overall argument falls well short of its claim and aim. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues with verve and conviction that the Federal Republic of Germany's creation and its subsequent joining in alliances with the United States and its European partners would not have occurred without the invention, the implementation, and deployment of “the West” as a unifying concept of political, cultural, and social identity. Challenging the explanatory powers of realist theories, as well as their international relations constructivist, Marxist, and liberal counterparts, Jackson develops something he calls a “transactional social constructionist conception of social reality: transactional because the analytic focus is on social ties and transactions rather than putatively solid and stable actors with relatively fixed interests, and social constructionist because the causal mechanisms producing policy outcomes involve the social production and reproduction of patterns of meaning” (p. 15, italics in original). This self-labeled “post-structural approach” (ibid., again italics in original) allows Jackson to navigate a fine line between the Scylla of contingency and the Charibdis of determinism even though he comes closer to the “agency” side of the ubiquitous agency—structure tension that will remain forever unresolved
Agency (philosophy · Epistemology · German · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · European history and politics · History · Law · Philosophy
Anxiety geopolitics
Foreign Policy and Identity
Wage Employment in Africa
High-Yielding Variety Policies in Africa
Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy
The Trade Imperative
Technical Change and Agricultural Productivity
Culture, Identity, and Grand Strategy
Uneven, Contradictory, and Brutal Economic Development in Africa
Varieties of Common Sense
Unbalanced Development
Investment, Wage Goods, and Industrial Policy
Working Out the Solution to Rural Poverty
Made in Africa
Liberalism and Transformation
Ghosts in the Neighborhood
Liebe und Macht in der deutsch-amerikanischen Sicherheitsbeziehung 2001-2003
Narratives in International Studies Research
Process Tracing
Toward a Sociology of Generational Change
Global Race War
Beyond the narco frontier; rethinking an imaginary of the margins
Norway and Russia in the Arctic
Russian Certainty of Nato Hostility
Is there a religious bias? Attitudes towards military humanitarian intervention in Germany
Agentic misrecognition in world politics
Nato’s Afghan partners
Varieties of Social Construction
Party contestation of foreign policy in the new global (dis)order
Pax Americana”
African Economic Development
Parsing the Practice Turn
The Practices of Evaluating Entitlements
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |