Communism, or as Ken Jowitt prefers, Leninism, has attracted, repelled, mystified, and terrified millions for nearly a century. In his brilliant, timely, and controversial study, New World Disorder, Jowitt identifies and interprets the extraordinary character of Leninist regimes, their political corruption, extinction, and highly unsettling legacy.

Earlier attempts to grasp the essence of Leninism have treated the Soviet experience as either a variant of or alien to Western history, an approach that robs Leninism of much of its intriguing novelty. Jowitt instead takes a "polytheist" approach, Weberian in tenor and terms, comparing the Leninist to the liberal experience in the West, rather than assimilating it or alienating it.

Approaching the Leninist phenomenon in these terms and spirit emphasizes how powerful the imperatives set by the West for the rest of the world are as sources of emulation, assimilation, rejection, and adaptation; how unyielding premodern forms of identification, organization, and action are; how novel, powerful, and dangerous charisma as a mode of organized indentity and action can be.

The progression from essay to essay is lucid and coherent. The first six essays reject the fundamental assumptions about social change that inform the work of modernization theorists. Written between 1974 and 1990, they are, we know now, startingly prescient. The last three essays, written in early 1991, are the most controversial: they will be called alarmist, pessimistic, apocalyptic. They challenge the complacent, optimistic, and self-serving belief that the world is being decisively shaped in the image of the West--that the end of history is at hand.

Ken Jowitt is the Pres and Maurine Hotchkis Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jowitt specializes in the study of comparative politics, American foreign policy, and postcommunist countries. He is particularly interested in studying types of anti-Western ideologies that might appear in the near future and, in that context, is working on Frontiers, Barricades and Boundaries, a book dealing with the changes in international political geography and the challenges to American and Western institutions.

Among his recent publications is The New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (University of California Press, 1992). He has also written "Really Imaginary Socialism" (East European Constitutional Review, spring/summer 1997), "In Praise of the Ordinary: An Essay on Democracy," published in Adam Michnik's Letters from Freedom (University of California Press, 1998), "Russia Disconnected" (Irish Slavonic Studies 19 [1998]), "Challenging the Correct Line" (East European Politics and Society, fall 1998), and "Ethnicity: Nice, Nasty, Nihilistic," in Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions, ed. Daniel Chirot and Martin E. P. Seligman (American Psychological Association, 2001).

In 1997 he delivered the presidential address at Whitman College. In 1998 Jowitt delivered the Princeton Lectures, and was the Jean Monnet Visiting Scholar at the European University in Florence. He has spoken at the Commonwealth Club, the World Presidents Organization, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. In addition, he appears occasionally on the CNBC program Hardball.

Jowitt has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1968. In 1983 he won the University Distinguished Teaching Award and was dean of undergraduate studies from 1983 to 1986. In 1995, the year he was named Robson Professor of Political Science, he also received the Distinguished Teaching Award for the Division of Social Sciences.

Jowitt received his bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1962 and his master's degree and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963 and 1970, respectively. The University of California Press published his doctoral thesis, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, in 1971.