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Hi - long time lurker first time poster. I've downloaded the online scans of WHN's book myself but found the discussion here truly valuable. It gets at the higher goal of reading this book - as insight into how Wang perceived the evolution and pitfalls of modern American society, as well as interpreting this book just as a grand history of the US, a genre harder to find these days. Here's some important news: someone on twitter actually machine translated the entire book already. He uses the DeepL software, which I can attest is much better than Google Translate. This versions will have errors due to transcription and translation, but I hope it could still help others engage with the text or to save time with the translation. https://twitter.com/JaakWaller/status/1353100985325903872 I'm happy to do my part to help translate and commentate Ch. 5-7. My credentials are that I'm a native Chinese speaker and a PhD student in the social sciences. These chapters on US politics appear in demand and it's also something I can speak to as someone who refreshes political journalism twitter too much. This book is also quite frustrating to read, because WHN hedges a lot in his preface about the book's themes. While more informed readers can disagree (please do), I think this book has a tight structure and WHN is defending some specific theses throughout but not straight up saying what they are. From start to finish, WHN wants to analyze the question of "why did a nascent country like America become the dominant world power" through what he calls the "historico-socio-cultural" framework. And very quickly in the preface and first chapter, I argue he starts to contemplate three themes that make up three distinct sections of the book: 1) He analyzes the American "national character" in a pretty old-fashioned way, much like the US military did after the war with their anthropological studies of other nations. It's interesting to note that the phrase "American dream" 美国梦 appears once in the whole book, while the phrase "American spirit" 美国精神 gets like 30+ hits across all the chapters. However, the bulk of his analysis on national character is in Ch. 1-3. The most important technique in this part is that he contrasts his own Marxist/historicist interpretation of how American society coalesced around certain ideas, with the "liberal consensus" he found in books like Commager, which asserts that a free people settling into America associated themselves around principles of freedom, pragmatism and human progress. I think in Ch. 4 he discusses the stability of modern American society because its structure concords with the liberal consensus that is promoted in American civic education. In Ch. 11 he discusses political controversies and structural issues with American society by framing them as breakdowns in the American national character. 2) Ch. 5-7 are about the American political system. In the preface WHN asks "The economic decision-making power of the United States is mainly controlled by private consortia. Is this democracy? Is this undemocratic? I fear it cannot be answered so simply." WHN describes the structure of American government and of American policymaking, with a particular focus on how politicking is possible despite the weak party system of the United States, where it's obvious that political parties are not guiding institutions but rather a collection of interest groups jostling for power. This is where he also ties in his anecdotes from living in Iowa during the 1988 presidential campaign and seeing retail politics up close. 3) Ch. 8-10 seems to be focused on the nature of American capitalist institutions, and how American capitalism has been able to thrive, maintaining a prosperous society while also fueling the innovation that made the US as strong as it was then. (I haven't even skimmed this part so this is a total sketch. I might edit later.)
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Feb 4, 2021 21:31
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 00:41 |
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