3 Review(s)

This is a book of essays in honour of J.D.B.Miller. It focuses on one of his central concerns - the relationship between the West and the Third World. Of all the things "the West" might mean and has meant - from the direction of that part of the horizon where the sun sets to the totality of the tradition derived from Greece, Rome and Judaeo-Christianity - this book means the liberal/democratic West in oposition to the Communist East, and that version of modernity which is represented by the developed capitalist world. For the Third World it starts with Bruce Miller's own "rough pattern of identity" for those countries as being formed from three main characteristics - being non-European, non-Communist and poor. This meant for him the countries of Asia and Africa not under the control of Europeans and not having communist governments. He left out Latin America as a kind of fourth world of its own, but it has included because of its centrality in the project for the economic emancipation of the Thirld World.The author's strategy for the construction of the volume was to deal with the major third World regions and the West, and then with items that gave an account of the linkage between the Third World and the West - strategic, economic, institutional, political, and moral.