Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class
Regular price
€92.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Gyorgy Peteri
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Gyorgy Peteri
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJD
Category=HBLW3
Category=JPFC
Category=NHD
Class power
Cold War History
Consumerism
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Hungarian History
Inequality
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
State-socialism
Product details
- ISBN 9781666923964
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 159 x 237mm
- Publication Date: 17 Nov 2023
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.
György Péteri is professor emeritus at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.
