Postmaterial Development : The Search for a New Asian Model

Conventional wisdom has it that the Asian "miracle" was fueled by a strictly defined set of "Asian values." On closer examination, those values turn out to be more Western than Asian. The "miracle," moreover, often achieved economic development at the expense of political underdevelopment and ecological destruction. The resulting "Asian model" eschewed a wide range of nonmaterial goals, such as communal integrity and environmental balance, which were deeply embedded in Asian traditions. It took the Asian Crash to puncture that model, casting doubt on the working assumptions of three decades of full-throttle economism. Before the Crash, democratic values were often dismissed - along with human rights, gender rights, and environmental protection - as luxuries to be deferred until after development was complete. Some iconoclasts, such as Amartya Sen, strongly refuted that modernist formula, but it was the Crash that provided the smoking gun to place postmaterialism on the Asian political map. The result is not only a more sustainable model of development, but a more inclusive view of Asian values. Key Words: Postmaterialim, Economism, Asian Values, Asian Model, Asian Cras

The Crisis of Asian Globalization : Toward a Senism of the Left

Asian Crisis put globalization on trial, and helped to put politics back into development discourse. Not since the glory days of Third Worldism had politics held the developmental spotlight. This restoration owed much to Amartya Sen, whose work not only re-politicizes development discourse, but does so from within the inner sanctum of the world system. Though Senism is not ordinarily associated with radical critique, its egalitarian focus is loaded with oppositional content. It follows from Sen's axiom of "concurrence," as we term it, that democratization is central at all stages of development. In his view the Asian Crisis confirmed the high cost of undemocratic governance. While Asian exceptionalists hold that liberal democracy is not needed on the Rim, and indeed would be a hindrance, Sen foregrounds the instrumental as well as intrinsic value of the freedom factor in all real development. His outlook, moreover, is deeply rooted in Asian axiology. In lieu of the statist economism that monopolized the term "Asian values" during the "miracle" years, Sen proposes an "Eastern strategy" that draws on the deeper and more humane traditions of Asia. From this vantage it is obvious that development reaches far beyond the GDPism that dominates the standard discourse of growth. What has passed for development in much of Asia is mere profit-taking, and when the social and ecological costs of that taking are weighed in the balance, the result is often a net loss. Sen's focus on human capabilities points toward more sustainable development, but also collides with current power structures in the East and West alike. Senism, in short, is inherently oppositional, and can better serve the Left that the Right

Mailer's Postmodern Armies: The Political 'Postmodernization' of American Nonfiction

It would be extremely difficult to say whether Norman Mailer's first allegiance, throughout his career, has been to romance or to reality. Mailer seemed to sense from the time of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, that the reality he wanted to express could not be communicated except through romance, and that romance would lose much of its meaning without its realistic content. It was this same conviction, uniting art and reality, that drove Mailer as a young writer into politics. More than a decade before Eisenhower would coin the term 'military-industrial complex,' Malier's The Naked and the Dead (hereafter N & D) warned of a permanently militarized America. In a 1948 interview, Malier said of N & D that. An important character in N & D, General Cummings, predicted that the massive orga-nization of Americans. Sociologists such as Riseman (The Lonely Growd),White (The Organization Man), and C