A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Jeremy Friedman.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Ripe for Revolution traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge ahead through trial and error. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jeremy Friedman is the Marvin Bower associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution over the course of the twentieth century, as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization.