Andrew C. Janos – författare

Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, edited by Andrew C. Janos and William B. Slottman, brings together a distinguished group of scholars to reassess one of modern Europe’s most enigmatic revolutions. Arising in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I, the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted just 133 days, yet its legacy continues to spark debate. This collection, the outcome of a landmark Berkeley conference, approaches the 1919 regime not as an isolated Hungarian episode but as part of broader patterns of political collapse, social mobilization, and revolutionary ferment across Central and Eastern Europe. Essays examine the breakdown of oligarchic politics before 1918, the coalition between Socialists and Communists, agrarian dissent, Romania’s and Austria’s reactions, and the movement’s ties to international communism.By weaving together domestic, regional, and transnational perspectives, the volume illuminates the complexities of coalition politics, the limits of revolutionary legitimacy, and the shifting ideological currents of the European Left. Rather than offering a single interpretation, the essays highlight tensions between local circumstances and global revolutionary aspirations, situating Hungary’s upheaval within the larger story of twentieth-century communism and nation-state formation. Revolution in Perspective thus serves both as a case study in the fragility of post-imperial societies and as a critical intervention in comparative revolutionary history—indispensable for scholars of Eastern Europe, socialism, and the contested legacies of 1919.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, edited by Andrew C. Janos and William B. Slottman, brings together a distinguished group of scholars to reassess one of modern Europe’s most enigmatic revolutions. Arising in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I, the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted just 133 days, yet its legacy continues to spark debate. This collection, the outcome of a landmark Berkeley conference, approaches the 1919 regime not as an isolated Hungarian episode but as part of broader patterns of political collapse, social mobilization, and revolutionary ferment across Central and Eastern Europe. Essays examine the breakdown of oligarchic politics before 1918, the coalition between Socialists and Communists, agrarian dissent, Romania’s and Austria’s reactions, and the movement’s ties to international communism.By weaving together domestic, regional, and transnational perspectives, the volume illuminates the complexities of coalition politics, the limits of revolutionary legitimacy, and the shifting ideological currents of the European Left. Rather than offering a single interpretation, the essays highlight tensions between local circumstances and global revolutionary aspirations, situating Hungary’s upheaval within the larger story of twentieth-century communism and nation-state formation. Revolution in Perspective thus serves both as a case study in the fragility of post-imperial societies and as a critical intervention in comparative revolutionary history—indispensable for scholars of Eastern Europe, socialism, and the contested legacies of 1919.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Recent economic and political developments in the Third World and in Communist and advanced industrial societies have challenged some of the most cherished assumptions of social science, forcing social scientists to rethink many of the categories of their discipline.In a concisely written and provocative book, the author traces this process of rethinking. He does so by going back to the nineteenth-century origins of political sociology and economy, and by exploring more recent attempts by American scholarship to fashion from the writings of Smith, Marx, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim a new universal theory of modernization and political change. The author argues that these attempts led to a new intellectual crisis, which could be resolved only by a "paradigm shift," that is, by refocusing the discipline from the classical concept of social relations to a new global concept of the division of labor and systems of exchange.Overall, the volume may be read both as an intellectual history of modern political science, and as an attempt to fashion an analytical tool for empirical research. As such, it will be of interest to students of political philosophy as well as of comparative politics.

Combining engaging narrative with analytic power, this book presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the Continent.The central theme of the book is best summarized by the familiar French proverb that the more things change the more they are the same. For while the historical experience of East Central Europe in the modern world may be described as one of endemic political change—from Western liberalism to corrupted parliamentarism, from fascism to state socialism imposed by the Soviet Union, and now to a fledgling new liberalism under Western auspices—all these political systems faced the same stubborn facts of life: the region's economic backwardness vis-à-vis the West, the debilities of small nationhood, and the cultural divide between the lands of eastern and western Christianity.In dealing with this volatile mix of continuity and change, this book provides a new interpretation of the politics of the region in the modern period. At the same time, it also contributes to the ongoing dialogue among disciplines by attempting to strike a better balance between cultural and economic explanations of conflict, between structural and institutional approaches to politics, and, above all, between intra- and extra-societal forces that shape power and politics in national states.For the purposes of this book, East Central Europe is defined as the territory of the historical precursors, and contemporary successors, of the eight lesser member states of the former Soviet Bloc.