Readings

James Anderson was an officer in the Chinese Maritime Customs through the 1920s and 1930s, and part of the large contingent of international officers staffing this service. He was also the father of Benedict Anderson (of “Imagined communities” fame) and Perry Anderson (historian, for many years editor of the “New Left Review”, and author among other things of interesting books on Gramsci). Perry wrote two essays (about 15.000 words in total) on his belated encounter with his father, of whom he knew very little, through written records.

I happened to read recently this review of a book on democracy in ancient Athens and the class of civil servants that used to run it. As I read it, I felt an urge to draw some sort of lesson… without being able to find them. Anyway, here are the two parts of that article that drew my attention. 1. Cleisthenes is the ancient Athenian leader who “extended the vote to the landless masses”, which is basically the main reason why Athenian democracy is celebrated to this day.

In 2004, the Carnegie Moscow Center published a book titled “Russia: the next ten years” (Kuchins and Trenin, 2004). In the introduction, Kuchins makes clear that the aim of the publication is not “to predict” what would happen in the following ten years but rather “to elucidate the context for critical choices for Russian policymakers and the Russian people” (p. 10). However, many of the contributors tried to picture the Russia of 2014, often presenting both a more optimistic and a more pessimistic scenario.

Originally published in Italian on Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso’s blog Some time ago I found at home an old book I bought in a second-hand bookshop in Cracow at the time when I was student in Poland. I ignored it for all these years, but I finally made up my mind and decided to read it. The book was published in Warsaw in 1973 at the time when Gierek was ruling in Poland and Brezhnev in the Soviet Union.