Thomas Ponniah is Lecturer and Assistant Director of Studies in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, and Faculty Associate in the Program on Justice, Welfare, and Economics, Harvard University. Jonathan Eastwood is Boetsch Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington & Lee University.
Thomas Ponniah and Jonathan Eastwood have produced an engaging and
profoundly thought-provoking collection of essays on Venezuela’s
process of political and social change under the late President
Hugo Chávez. The volume rises above the simplistic, and often
sterile, debates over democracy versus authoritarianism, and
capitalism versus socialism that Venezuela’s polarized politics all
too frequently elicit. Instead, its high quality analytic and
theoretically-driven essays explore the consequences of Venezuela’s
political experiment for institutions and individuals in all of
their complex, multidimensional, and contradictory nature. In
carefully selecting essays that reflect the gamut of political
positions, the editors invite us to confront our preconceptions,
move past them, and draw our own conclusions about the impact,
meaning, and legacy of Venezuela’s ‘revolution.’
*Contemporary Sociology*
This excellent book makes an important contribution to the
scholarly debate on the meaning of Venezuela’s Bolivarian
Revolution since the democratic election of Hugo Chávez to the
presidency in 1998. While some scholars depict the Chávez regime as
autocratic and undemocratic, others view Chávez’s Venezuela as
embodying 21st-century participatory democracy and socialism.
Eastwood and Ponniah have assembled a collection of high-quality,
well-researched essays in an attempt to overcome the polarized
nature of academic debates on Chávez’s Venezuela… This pathbreaking
book shows that the Venezuelan experience with 21st century
socialism transcends the country’s borders by planting the seeds of
an alternative modernity.
*Choice*
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