While the economic miracle of Singapore is widely known, the ideas that have underpinned it remain to be documented and critically examined. The single political party that has governed Singapore over the past three decades of nationhood has successfully developed different ideas at different times to organize the multiracial population into a relatively unified people who strive collectively to transform their own material conditions.
This is the first book critically to analyse the evolution and succession of the above ideas within changing circumstances. In particular, the author charts the rise of "Asian communitarianism," a set of ideas consecrated explicitly as a national ideology. In contrast to foreign critics who readily see developments in Singapore as evolving phases of an unchanging authoritarian regime, the writer, a Singaporean himself, sees them as an attempt to develop a particular form of anti-liberal democratic polity by a highly ideologically conscious political elite.

Chua Beng-Huat is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.

Introduction 1 Ideological trajectory: from authoritarianism to Communitarianism 2 Reopening ideological discussion 3 Pragmatism of the PAP government: a critical Assessment 4 The business of living: transformation of everyday life 5 The making of a new nation: cultural construction and national identity 6 Not depoliticised but ideologically successful: the public housing programme 7 Confucianisation abandoned 8 Building the political middle ground 9 Towards a non-liberal communitarian democracy, Conclusion