Panaemonium

by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Book Overview

Ten years before the Soviet Union collapsed, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stood almost alone in predicting its demise. As the intelligence community and cold war analysts churned out statistics demonstrating the enduring strength of the Moscow regime, Moynihan, focusing on ethnic conflict, argued that the end was at hand. Now, with such conflict breaking out across the world, from Central Asia to South Central Los Angeles, he sets forth a general...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198277873
• ISBN13: 9780198277873
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Moynihan Rides Again

For me, a trained American political scientist, this book is a work of genius by one of our nation's foremost geniuses of the art of the political and sociological sciences. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a renaissance man of sorts: His resume is long, varied, cross-disciplinary and distinguished. We have heard his voice ripple across the political and sociological landscape on more than just a few occasions: Always warning against taking the easy quick-fix route to social problem-solving, always warning against making the facile interpretations to domestic and international policy. More often than not, it has been his lone voice that has left a ringing echo in the wilderness. And just as was the case when Richard Clark sounded the alarm on terrorism, many of us in the State Department heard him but we just were not tuned into the same frequency: terrorism just seemed so far-fetched that we thought the guy was some kind of kook. The same is true with Pat Moynihan: We have all heard his spiel but just were not always tuned into the same frequency. Recall that it was his analysis that backed up the famous (or infamous depending on ones position on the issue) Coleman Study that set U.S. Education policy for a generation. It was his prediction too that suggested that there would be a social meltdown in the black family and he gave all the reasons why. It happened exactly as he predicted, and black leaders are still chasing their tails and firing at each other in a circular firing squad, in perpetual denial about the things Moynihan had made crystal clear in this respect a decade before the meltdown occurred. Then, he opposed the Reagan "Communist scare" because of the Cuban and Soviet follies into Angola: To Moynihan this excursion was a joke that would simply hasten the fall of the USSR, which is exactly what it did. His advice to the US government: to ignore it, actually got him "eased-out" from his post as Ambassador to the UN. And finally he was one of only a handful of experts that predicted the fall of the Soviet Union at least a decade before it actually happened: Making clear that it would be due to ethnic fragmentation as much as to anything else. Never did he "read the tea leaves" more accurately, nor have his predictions about the role and importance of ethnicity been more prescient than in the claims set forth in this book. He has localized the source of the disturbance as being the preoccupation with the internationally voguish term "self-determination of independent people." Yet, when the term "people" are examined closely (or even the terms nation and state for that matter), he finds the same thing that Vlamik Volkan found: that people are bound together as much by their vulnerabilities and "chosen fears and insecurities" as they are by language, race, customs and a shared history. (Patrick Geary also found the same in this book Myth of Nations.) And chosen fears, grievances, and animosities have a very, very long half-life: They seem n