Revolutionary Totalitarianism, Pragmatic Socialism, Transition

Authoritarianism, Democracy and the Transition to Socialism

Market Transition and Societal Transformation in Reforming State Socialism

The far-reaching institutional change and societal transformation occurring in former state-socialist societies have attracted new social science interest in transition economies. This chapter reviews recent research on China, highlighting the theoretical arguments and findings of general interest to social scientists. The paper argues that a paradigm shift is taking place within research on Ch...

Islamism and Totalitarianism

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and even more so since the spectacular attacks by Qa‘idat al-Jihad against the U.S. on 9/11, there has been an ever-growing flood of academic and journalistic publications devoted to radical Islam. Unfortunately, much of that literature has embodied problematic conceptual perspectives that can best be characterized as ‘Islam bashing’, ‘Islam apologism’, o...

Revolutionary Science

On rare occasions in the history of science, remarkable discoveries transform human society and forever alter mankind's view of the world. Examples of such discoveries include the heliocentric theory, Newtonian physics, the germ theory of disease, quantum theory, plate tectonics and the discovery that DNA carries genetic information. The science philosopher Thomas Kuhn famously described scienc...

Revolutionary Algorithms

The optimization of dynamic problems is both widespread and difficult. When conducting dynamic optimization, a balance between reinitialization and computational expense has to be found. There are multiple approaches to this. In parallel genetic algorithms, multiple sub-populations concurrently try to optimize a potentially dynamic problem. But as the number of sub-population increases, their e...