Gölgelerin Efendisi 5 - Kuzeydeki Büyücü - John Flanagan kitap serbest oDF biçim

Marvin Dorosan marvindorod7ec — An interesting exploration of what really matters. I enjoyed the helpful questions at the end of the book and look forward to using them to find what really matters to me.

Itunube Itunube _tunube — I disturbingly couldn't put this book down. Gruesome and real.

Andre Lawson _eptic — To understand this book and its context in International Relations theory, you need to be aware of the famous essay (later, book) by Francis Fukuyama http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama entitled "The End of History and the Last Man", written after the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet Union. Fukuyama argued that, essentially, western liberal democracies and free-market ideologies were triumphant, and that the great ideological struggles in history were at an end. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_... This has proven to not be the case (as Fukuyama himself has since admitted). Kagan's book is a bold (if totally expected) rejoinder to Fukuyama. Since I love academic feuds, I could not resist this book. (See also Richard Posner versus Stanley Fish versus Ronald Dworkin, the movie "Arguing the World" http://www.pbs.org/arguing/ or more generally the Letters to the Editor of any edition of the New York Review of Books. The Posner v Dworkin v Fish debates were like a intellectual version of a Godzilla movie, and really awakened my slumbering mind as an undergrad English major at MSU. Reading their debates on law and literature was as transformative an experience as reading the essays of Francis Bacon.) Back to this book, Kagan writes "The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas and on the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are a product. Our political scientists posit theories of modernization, with sequential stages of political and economic development that lead upward towards liberalism. Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over the centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer." (p.102) He responds that "progress" is not inevitable, but contingent on historical events which could have gone either way - battles, social movements, treaties, economic practices, the work of institutions. While all of this is true, Kagan also subscribes to the IR school of "realism" (note, that is just a label chosen by the theorists themselves, it's like calling your political party the "majority" party, and is not indicative of whether their arguments have a strong fidelity to actual reality). This concise book is pragmatic and a enjoyable response to Fukuyama, nuanced and complex (unlike much political commentary in America these days). It was also refreshing for me to return to the realm of international relations after spending time reading public international law texts (which suffers from insularity and granularity - never dealing with global geopolitics, economics, or any system of thought outside PIL itself). In that sense, the book was a good summary of at least one view, "Realist", of current geopolitics. However, Kagan, suffering from the cognitive blinders which ideology imparts, writes to persuade using false dichotomies, straw men, and provocative assumptions - all of which amount to, essentially, scaremongering for too much of the book. He also completely neglects to see the effect of soft power (cultural influence, technological influences and innovation, and the benefits and flexibilities of open societies over closed, autocratic ones). Additionally, any IR theory suffers from being what my friend, an economist Ph.D candidate, calls derisively "Big Think" - in that IR deals with opaque vagaries, little case-by-case explanations using its methodology, and has absolutely no predictive power. There were a few points of convergence between Kagan and I: "yet history has not been kind to the theory that strong trade ties prevent conflict between nations. The United States and China are no more dependent on each other's economies today than were Great Britain and Germany's before World War I." This would be a very provocative statement around the editorial desk of the Economist or Financial Times, and I would LOVE to hear any liberal development economist or macro-economist try to respond to this. They would sputter some vague answer... "To the extend that the data suggests that.... economics has more rigorous methodology... economics has both predictive and explanatory power.... trade ties disincentivize nations from pursing war..." I remain totally uncertain about this, however, and admit that global events are usually a lot more complex than any one discipline has the power to explain fully. International Relations theory, Economics, International Law, Critical Theory, etc., - these can only contain one facet, always incomplete, of actual reality. The place a lens over reality, highlight some features which conform to their disciple, and diminish the facts which do not fit their discipline, much less their theory. In this sense, Kagan's book (while worth the $3 I paid for it from the used remainder books pile at Books-A-Million, here in DC), is essentially a intelligent exercise in sophistry, rhetoric masked as science, and easily seen as the thoughts of an individual trapped in his own cognitive framework.