The CSS Wisdom, Over 1000 Qoutes and Excerpts By Bilal Zahoor

Best For Competitive Exams (CSS,PMS,PCS & All Descriptive Exams)

FOREWORD

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants", says Isaac Newton in a February, 1676 letter to Robert Hooke. By giants, what Newton would have meant is not just the awarded authors of the day but thinkers challenging the unchallengeable ideas; and it is this unconventional wisdom that Newton seems to have benefitted from and achieved what few others could achieve in their lifetime. While my achievements are nowhere close to those of the great Isaac Newton, I too owe my success in CSS to the critical works of the 21st century giants. It is the theories, various praxes and accounts of evolving socio-political and economic event - captured in books and articles that helped me develop the ability to think, analyse and critique. At the same time, I must proclaim that CSS is not about cramming countless number of books and papers without being able to manage the limited time one has. While I cannot deny the humungous role some of my most favourite social scientists played in my success, I also owe this achievement to my ability to manage time and share it equitably amongst the subjects I chose. This book, The CSS Wisdom, I feel, is an ideal compendium for a candidate like me. It helps fathoming the works of the giants while also allowing one to save some time.

The book contains over 1300 quotes and excerpts from the books, papers and essays of thinkers as towering and unconventional as David Harvey, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Daniel Ziblatt amongst others. Unlike most books of quotes, it also attempts to challenge the cultural and intellectual hegemony of the Global North and includes passages and quotes from the path-breaking works of the eastern thinkers such as Edward Said, Tariq Ali, Rubina Saigol, Arundhati Roy, Ayesha Siddiqa and Afiya Zia. Even a cursory reading of the book shows the diversity of views and authors, reflecting a break from the traditional methods of compiling a book of quotes.

Even more impressive is the format of the book. The book covers 30 topics broken into multiple sub-topics to reflect on some of the most significant issues facing the world. Fascism, for instance, is a word that has gained great traction in recent times, but cannot be understood without taking account of its history, evolution and contemporary variants. The chapter of quotes on fascism The CSS Wisdom offers covers most of these aspects: it first sets out to define fascism, then explores its history and interaction with gender and its various existing forms and ideologies, followed by a set of quotes suggesting ways to fight this dangerous menace. It is this excellent mix of breadth and depth that makes The CSS Wisdom unique. The breadth lies in its scope and the vastness of issues and topics it covers, the depth in the multitude of aspects of a topic it delves into. From politics and democracy to economy and development and from governance and corruption to education and literature, the book seems to explore a vast range of themes that are highly relevant to a CSS examination, especially the papers on Essay, Current Affairs and Pakistan Affairs. The book also offers some brilliant quotes on feminism, contemporary social and separatist movements, human rights, refugee crisis, water crisis and religious extremism. Living up to its name, it also uncovers the wisdom of the media scholars and takes account of the increasing censorship in Pakistan and abroad.

The CSS Wisdom is not intended to make you rote learn hundreds of quotes and excerpts but expose you to myriads of progressive views on some of the most significant topics related to a CSS examination. One may learn some of them by heart and use them in an answer; others can be used in their paraphrased forms. Personal experience has made me realise that the argumentative ability owes a lot to the references one has to substantiate one's argument. This is especially true for the Essay paper where one needs references, in the form of quotes and excerpts, in a bid to give substance to an argument. Considering the enormous potential of this book to help aspirants ace the competitive examinations, The CSS Wisdom is the first major book of quotations geared to the needs of modern readers in general and CSS aspirants in particular.

Laraib Aslam (10th position, CSS 2017)

November 2019, Lahore

CONTENTS

· Editor

· Contributors

· Foreword

Part I – Politics, Ideology and Democracy

· Populism

· Secularism

· Fascism

· Islamophobia

· Democracy

Part II – Economy, Development and Colonialism

· Capitalism and Neoliberalism

· Inequality

· Development and Human Development

· IMF and The Developing World

· Foreign Aid

· Climate Change

· Colonialism And Neo-Colonialism

Part III – Governance, Population and Corruption

· Government and Governance

· Global Governance

· Population Explosion

· Corruption

Part IV – Education, Science and Literature

· Curriculum

· Education

· Science

· Literature

Part V – Feminism, Social Movements and Freedom

· Feminism

· Social Movements

· Freedom and / or Separatist Movements

Part VI – Human Rights, Migration and Religious Extremism

· Human Rights

· Refugee Crisis

· Water Crisis

· Religious Extremism and Terrorism

Part VII – Media, Internet and Technology

· Media Freedom

· Social Media

· Technology

POPULISM

What is Populism?

Populism as an 'ideology', however 'thin' it might be and we follow Albertazzi and McDonnell in claiming that its core is the pitting of 'a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous "others" who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice. (Cas Mudde, 2004)

Populism resembles a drunken guest at a dinner party: he's not respecting table manners, he is rude, he might even start "flirting with the wives of other guests." But he might also be blurting out the truth about a liberal democracy that has become forgetful about its founding ideal of popular sovereignty. (Benjamin Arditi, 2005)

Populism, I suggest, is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified-but, I shall argue, ultimately fictional-people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way.3 (Jan-Werner Muller, 2016)

A more recent approach considers populism, first and foremost, as a political strategy employed by a specific type of leader who seeks to govern based on direct and unmediated support from their followers. It is particularly popular among students of Latin American and non-Western societies. The approach emphasizes that populism implies the emergence of a strong and charismatic figure, who concentrates power and maintains a direct connection with the masses. 4 (Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017)

On the Rise of Populism

The world of mutual tolerance envisaged by cosmopolitan elites from the Enlightenment onwards exists within a few metropolises and university campuses; and even these rarefied spaces are shrinking. The world at large from the United States to India manifests a fierce politics of identity built on historical injuries and fear of internal and external enemies.5 (Pankaj Mishra, 2017)

If short-term fluctuations in economie factors cannot explain the rise of populism, its underlying causes must operate on a longer time scale. And indeed, there do seem to be two fundamental developments that match the timeline of the populist rise and help explain the particular shape populist politics have taken in recent decades: a decline in living standards from one generation to the next and the perceived threat to national identity posed by immigration and the growth of supranational organizations. (Yascha Mounk, 2017)

Today's raving; frenetic, exorbitant politics rhetorical idealism about nation, race and culture an extravagantly is often the product of people unconnected to political parties or movements. (Pankaj Mishra, 2017)

The first U.S. populist movement we would unequivocally describe as right wing was the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which was a counterrevolutionary backlash against the overthrow of slavery and Black people's mass mobilization and empowerment in the post-Civil War South. Earlier repressive populist movements paved the way for right-wing populism, but did not have this same backlash quality as a central feature. (Chip Berlet, and Matthew N. Lyons, 2018)

In Western and Northern Europe, since the 1980s right-wing populism has developed as small and single-issue protesters who presumably took up problems that had not been discussed by political institutions of representative democracy. Until the late 1980s most of these mini parties, some of them originating from the "old" political right, hardly rose above the voting threshold and did not make it into parliaments. This situation changed beginning in the early 1990s, when the "new" right ideology helped to transform farright parties into a more populist direction. 'Right-wing parties in [...] Western Europe have become parties without history. By avoiding any discourse on fascism or Nazism, by claiming to represent a completely new agenda, right-wing populism tries to avoid a debate which could jeopardize its rise. (Birgit Sauer, Anna Krasteva and Aino Saarinen, 2017)

What Populists do and how they Mobilise People?

The populist core claim also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people to begin with. In the words of the French philosopher Claude Lefort, the supposedly real people first have to be "extracted" from the sum total of actual citizens. This ideal people are then presumed to be morally pure and unerring in its will. ¹⁰ (Jan-Werner Muller, 2016)