Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution
396 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:01 Nov 1986
ISBN:9780292738430
In this critical study of the thought of Augusto Cesar Sandino and his followers, Donald C. Hodges has discovered a coherent ideological thread and political program, which he succeeds in tracing to Mexican and Spanish sources. Sandino's strong religious inclination in combination with his anarchosyndicalist political ideology established him as a religious seer and moral reformer as well as a political thinker and is the prototype of the curious blend of Marxism and Christianity of the late twentieth-century Nicaraguan government, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.
This is a fascinating book, which should be must reading for anyone seriously concerned with the crisis of Central America, and particularly the Nicaraguan revolution.
[Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution] is an enormously enlightening and original study. . . and should constitute a landmark work. . . on a socio-political and historical event of immense significance. . . . the book is so careful and systematic in making its case that I expect it to define a new paradigm regarding Sandino, and regarding the contribution of anarchist theorists to modern revolutionary thought and practice.
Donald C. Hodges (1923–2009) was Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Part One. Sandino
- 1. The Making of a Revolutionary
- The Mexican Experience
- The Struggle in Nicaragua
- Revitalizing an Ailing Cause
- Understanding Sandino
- 2. Activating Ideologies
- The Legacy of Mexican Anarchism
- Spiritualist, Freemason, Theosophist
- The Spiritism of the Magnetic-Spiritual School
- The Anarchism of Austere Rational Philosophy
- Sandino’s “Rational Communism”
- The Coming “Proletarian Explosion”
- 3. Strategy for Subversion
- Appeals to Patriotism
- Sandino’s Liberalism
- The Turn toward Populism
- Sandino and the Comintern
- 4. The War in Nicaragua
- The Yankee “Machos”
- The Bankers of Wall Street
- The “Whited Sepulcher”
- Nicaragua’s Political Leaders
- The Defending Army of National Sovereignty
- Stimson or Sandino?
- 1. The Making of a Revolutionary
- Part Two. The Sandinistas
- 5. From Sandino to Sandinismo
- Recovering Sandino’s Thought
- Transmitting Sandino’s Example
- The Marxist Influence
- Promoting the New Marxism
- What Is Sandinismo?
- 6. Political Assessments
- Nicaragua’s Neocolonial Status
- The Rise of a Bourgeois Opposition
- The Emergence of a Proletarian Vanguard
- The Development of a Revolutionary Situation
- 7. Reflections on Strategy
- The Original “Foco” Strategy
- The Strategy of Prolonged People’s War
- The Strategy of Popular Resistance
- The Strategy of General Insurrection
- 8. Ideologies of the Revolution
- The Cult of the New Man
- The Defense of Human Rights
- The Religious Policy of the FSLN
- Ernesto Cardenal’s Tour de Force
- The Ideological Pluralism of the FSLN
- 5. From Sandino to Sandinismo
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
