The decade of the 1980s has brought tremendous changes within the political fabric of the global spectrum. There has been upheaval in Communist China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union; there has been an increased role for women and minority groups within the political process; Liberation Theology has emerged as a major new way of thought in several areas of the world; and nationalism and Third World ideologies play an even greater role in social and political thought.
With this in mind, Lyman Tower Sargent, Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri St. Louis, has written a new update to his 1969 version of Contemporary Political Ideologies. The text itself is a broad introduction to a set of modern methods, organized in a dialectical, or argumentative weaving of different ideas. Thus, one of the major strengths of the book is its ability to give the reader a chance to sort through a variety of arguments and information, and to come to a coherent, considered, opinion about a wide variety of issues.
Sargent comes well qualified for this venture. Besides his position at the University of Missouri, he has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter, England, and an Academic Visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Besides the work under review, Sargent is the author or co author of at least six other books on political theory and ideologies, as well as a number of scholarly articles on political theory.
The book itself is organized into twelve major sections, each making up a component of four parts: Democracy, Communism, Traditional Opponents of Marxism, and The Third World. However topical this approach seems to be on first glance, Sargent uses the dialectical model throughout the text to give the reader both sides to the major parts of each ideological argument. Besides this, the book contains sections on current trends, effectively updating the book for the 1990s...