The book provides a theoretical explanation of the major outcomes of Ethiopia's social revolution, namely, the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and the implementation of a far-reaching Marxist-Leninist revolution by a military committee (the Derg) and its collapse in 1991. The book extensively discusses the question of knowing whether existing theories of revolution throw light on the eruption of a radical revolution in Ethiopia and, most of all, whether they can accommodate the major anomaly of a socialist revolution being executed by a military committee that radicalized after the removal of the imperial regime. Hence the central thesis of the book: both the overthrow of the monarchical order and the radicalization of the Derg must be tied to social conditions that exasperated elite conflicts for scarce resources, with the consequence that the espousal of radical ideologies (socialism and ethnonationalism) became the sole avenue for the exclusive control of state power. Moreover, the book shows how the struggle of exclusive elites for the control of the state explains the Derg's need to put its fate in the hands of a providential leader, to wit, Mengistu Haile Mariam. In light of the theoretical debate over the role of charismatic leaders in history, the book establishes how Mengistu's narcissism led him to become the sole owner of the revolution and how his dictatorial rule brought about his own demise and that of the Derg, following the military defeat of the Ethiopian army in the hands of ethnonationalist insurgents. Another fundamental contribution of the book is a theoretical articulation of political conflicts and ideology that critically intervenes in the divisive issue of the primary cause of revolutions. Granted that ideology is more of a justification than a drive, the Ethiopian case illustrates how conflicts between mutually exclusive elites favor the path of political outbidding mobilizing utopian projects so as to galvanize the support of the masses. The perceived transcendence

Ideology and Elite Conflicts: Autopsy of the Ethiopian Revolution

History

Kebede, Messay

Africa

Lexington Books

Survival and Modernization, Ethiopia's Enigmatic Present: A Philosophical Discourse

Survival and Modernization - Ethiopia's Enigmatic Present tackles the enigmatic question on Ethiopia's failure to modernize. The enigma springs from the absence in Ethiopia of the major deficiencies invoked to explain underdevelopment. By combining sociological and political analyses with philosophical inquiries, the book attempts to explain how Ethiopia was driven into a wrong track through various historical detours, delays, indecisions, and uprootedness.

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Red Sea Pr

Survival and Modernization - Ethiopia's Enigmatic Present tackles the enigmatic question on Ethiopia's failure to modernize. The enigma springs from the absence in Ethiopia of the major deficiencies invoked to explain underdevelopment.By combining sociological and political analyses with philosophical inquiries, the book attempts to explain how Ethiopia was driven into a wrong track through various historical detours, delays, indecisions, and uprootedness.

Social Sciences

This book proposes a new reading of Bergsonism based on the admission that time, conceived as duration, stretches instead of passes. This swelling time is full and so excludes the negative. Yet, swelling requires some resistance, but such that it is more of a stimulant than a contrariety. The notion of élan vital fulfills this requirement: it states the immanence of life to matter, thereby deriving the swelling from an internal effort and allowing its conceptualization as self-overcoming. With self-overcoming as the inner dynamics of reality, Bergson dismisses all forms of dualism and reductionist monism because both the absence of negativity and the swelling nature of time posit a creative process yielding a qualitatively diverse world. This graded oneness is how the lower level activates intensification by turning into limitation, making possible higher levels of achievement, in particular through the union of mind and body and the integration of openness and closed sociability.

Bergson’s Philosophy of Self-Overcoming: Thinking without Negativity or Time as Striving

Philosophy

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

This book discovers freedom in the colonial idea of African primitiveness. As human transcendence, freedom escapes the drawbacks of otherness, as defended by ethnophilosophy, while exposing the idiosyncratic inspiration of Eurocentric universalism. Decolonization calls for the reconnection with freedom, that is, with myth-making understood as the inaugural act of cultural pluralism. The cultural condition of modernization emerges when the return to the past deploys the future.

Africa's Quest for a Philosophy of Decolonization (Value Inquiry Book Series 153) (Value Inquiry, 153)

Rodopi

Meaning and Development (Value Inquiry Book Series 16)

Religion & Spirituality

Editions Rodopi

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