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Stanley Aronowitz, Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006)

Nikolas Kozloff, Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

While Hugo Chávez has yet to define the “socialism for the twenty-first century” that he has vowed to create in Venezuela and enable elsewhere in the Americas, he has shown us a credible first step: a political and economic project meant to redistribute wealth and power downward and southward, from the privileged to the poor, and from the U.S. to the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).

Steve Martinot, Forms in the Abyss: A Philosophical Bridge between Sartre and Derrida (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

Jonathan Scott, Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006).

A notorious thing about democracy is that it is easy to define but difficult to interpret. Yet, you cannot implement the idea without interpreting it, and in fair detail. Granted that democracy is government by consent, we are immediately faced with a dilemma between a maximalist and a minimalist interpretation. In the first approach a democratic government would have to be one based on the explicit consent of all the people and operated by way of decisions enjoying the same quality and extent of consent. On this construal, no known government could be called a democracy.

Botswana many seem an unlikely place in which to explore the intersections of gender politics, democracy and socialism in Africa.1 The gendered “dual political systems” and strong market women’s associations of West Africa that might provide historical precedents and contemporary political bases for women’s rights organizing are absent,2 and Botswana scores are weak by the criteria of liberal feminist political science and the dominant development models, including the Millennium Development Goals.3 There are no electoral quotas for women and relatively low percentages of women in parliamen

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA). He has written widely on Latin America and US foreign policy. He is working on a book, “The New Fire in the Americas: Popular Challenges to Political Parties, the State and a Faltering Empire.” <censa@igc.org>

MAAT was to ancient Egypt as Wisdom was to ancient Greece. Wisdom was to Plato’s aristocratic regime as Maat was to Egypt’s social and political life. The concept of Maat insinuated itself into every aspect of Classical Egypt. Pharaohs and the majestic slaves who erected the pyramids swore by Maat. Rich and poor, men and women, slaves and free citizens worshipped the magic of Maat. Maat was the moral organizer of everyday life. Every facet of life was framed by Maat.