Including essays by several leading contemporary specialists, this volume addresses the extent to which postcommunist societies have successfully institutionalized democratic politics and capitalist market economies over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. As the first volume to apply a systematic "comparative historical" approach to the subject matter, it reveals the precise social, cultural, and geographical constraints and opportunities facing postcommunist reformers.

Addresses the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe.

Stephen Hanson traces the influence of the Marxist conception of time in Soviet politics from Lenin to Gorbachev. He argues that the history of Marxism and Leninism reveals an unsuccessful revolutionary effort to reorder the human relationship with time and that this reorganization had a direct impact on the design of the central political, socioeconomic, and cultural institutions of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. According to Hanson, westerners tend to envision time as both rational and inexorable. In a system in which 'time is money, ' the clock dominates workers. Marx, however,...

This book examines the causal impact of ideology through a comparative-historical analysis of three cases of post-imperial democracy: the early Third Republic in France (1870-1886); the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918-1934); and post-Soviet Russia (1992-2008). Hanson argues that political ideologies are typically necessary for the mobilization of enduring, independent national party organizations in uncertain democracies. Clear and consistent ideologies can artificially elongate the temporal horizons of their adherents. By presenting an explicit and desirable picture of the political future,...