Universität KonstanzExzellenzcluster „Kulturelle Grundlagen von Integration“

Neuerscheinung: Vanguard of the Revolution. Von A. James McAdams

3. November 2017


The Global Idea of the Communist Party
Princeton University Press 2017


Taking readers from the drafting of The Communist Manifesto in the 1840s to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, McAdams describes the decisive role played by individual rulers in the success of their respective parties—men like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro. He demonstrates how these personalities drew on vying conceptions of the party’s functions to mesmerize their followers, mobilize their populations, and transform their societies. He also shows how many of these figures abused these ideas to justify incomprehensible acts of inhumanity. McAdams explains why communist parties lasted as long as they did, and why they either disappeared or ceased to be meaningful institutions by the close of the twentieth century.


Prof. Dr. A. James McAdams lehrt International Affairs an der University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA) und ist Direktor des dortigen Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Er war Fellow am Kulturwissenschaftlichen Kolleg Konstanz (September 2012–January 2013), wo er an vorliegendem Buch gearbeitet hat.