Rethinking Middle East Politics

Abstract

The process by which the modem Middle East has taken its present political shape and continues to develop is the subject of a large and diverse realm of scholarship. Authors have examined this topic from a variety of academic and political points of view, but few have been able to classify the assortment of past works in a coherent way while formulating a valid new approach to this complex area of study. Simon Bromley's most recent book, Rethinking Middle East Politics, is an ambitious work that is more successful than most earlier endeavors at meeting this dual challenge. Borrowing heavily from Marxism, Bromley pieces together a "historical- materialist" approach that, he posits, illuminates the processes of tate formation and political development in the Middle East while highlighting both the distinctive aspects of the region's development and its similarities to other nondeveloped areas. The book is not flawless; Bromley makes several claims that may not be as universaJly accepted as he suggests and supports the modem Middle East case studies with only a limited number of references. Despite these relatively mild shortcomings, Rethinking Middle East Politics as a whole provides a compelling and often provocative description of the Janus-faced nature of Middle East state formation and political development. Bromley begins with an introduction to culturalist and materialist arguments about non-European societies and their development. The reader will be impressed with Bromley's ability to impose a sense of order on the wide-ranging writings of such thinkers as Karl Marx, Bassam Tibbi, Max Weber, and Edward Said and to put together a cogent analysis of the implications of these schools of thought for Middle East development ...