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Posted 1 day ago by Super Admin / Tags: political science, Africa, international affairs / 0 Comments
Africa is re-emerging as a strategic piece on the global chessboard.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is approaching the 1 billion mark, and by 2050 is expected to reach 1.8 billion inhabitants. This demographic dynamic is imposing a dizzying pace on the continent’s economic, social and political transformations. In view of the speed and amplitude of the metamorphosis underway, it is worth scouting out the road ahead.
Yet public debates continue to portray the space south of the Sahara as a blighted and marginalized land, untouched by globalization. This view of Africa has to a large degree overlooked the changes deeply affecting African societies, changes which few have fully grasped. Now, in the early 21st century, while the world’s emerging actors observe African developments attentively and actively reconsider their relationships with the continent, the transatlantic community seems to be hesitating.
Four decades ago, a renowned economist wrote on the “Asian drama”, predicting that underdevelopment would remain the main feature of Asia, in part due to the burden of a rapidly expanding population. China, the sleeping giant, has now risen to become the world’s second largest economy in 2010.
Africa is the sleeping giant of the early 21st century. The purpose of Africa's Moment is not to predict whether it will thrive or stumble, nor to determine who might then be held accountable or take credit for progress made. What matters is that policies are reshaped to be in step with the present and foreseeable opportunities and risks that stem from its demographic trends and what we perceive as the strategic re-emergence of Africa.
An Africa of 1.8 billion inhabitants will rapidly gain a stake in the globalization game. If transatlantic partners do not sufficiently commit to cohesive and forward-looking policies toward Africa, we risk facing the domestic consequences of its great transformation. Africa’s re-emergence calls for urgent changes in conventional thinking and public policy.
Olivier Ray currently works at the French Development Agency. Previously, he worked for the United Nation's Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Security Council Report, on questions of development, conflict prevention and post-conflict recovery.
Posted 4 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Spielberg, Tintin, media studies, film studies / 0 Comments
Tintin and War Horse are two Spielberg films that have been released in America, within two days of each other. Neither has taken top honors in the box office but the earnings are respectable enough to show that Spielberg still plays to the massive audiences that he helped create forty years ago.
The geographical center of the audience has shifted to somewhere over the Atlantic and he has given Tintin to the Europeans a month before he release it domestically; while he delayed the foreign release of War Horse. Prioritizing the foreign release suggests a willingness to strategize the foreign audience more than us Americans.
I ask myself what these films imply for a book entitled Steven Spielberg’s America. They confirm the end of a Bush era cycle that began with Minority Report (2002) (or perhaps even further back with Saving Private Ryan (1998)) and culminated in Munich (2005). Spielberg portrayed American (and Israeli) anxiety over democratic openness, responsibilities and security in most of the seven films he directed through this cycle.
But the book argues that the director often pulls his punches in his treatment of history. Currently the king of the blockbuster is still willing to take the historical turn.
Both films are set in the first half of the previous century. Tintin is a character created in 1929 by the Belgian cartoonist Herge. War Horse is the story of an English horse conscripted for World War One service and captured by the Germans. But neither refers to a specific historical-political problem.
Yet there is something of the political moment in them if only in the way that an American filmmaker still wants to work with European stories. Is it that the Atlantic cultural divide has evaporated?
However, this is the moment Europe has become the exotic “other” in rightwing American politics, the example of the hell that waits, if we abandon the free market. Therefore in selecting such settings we can suspect Spielberg of being the liberal in the domestic culture wars.
Spielberg always presents himself as an entertaining storyteller, not an engaged liberal. The films’ market plans assume the universal cultural appeal of the wish fulfillment genre. It is this assumption of universalism that triggers the Barthesian analysis of ideology.
The cartoon images and photo-realisms of the two films are determined by the same impulse. Even the central positions of a horse and an ageless teenaged boy respectively in the two stories work against specific identities.
The European settings let the American Spielberg off the hook. He can ignore the Belgian colonialism of the original Tintin and pick the Tintin stories that take him the furthest away from Herge’s own compromised politics. He was once naïve about the colonial ideology of classic Hollywood that he unwittingly quoted in the first two Indiana Jones movies. Now he knows enough to avoid it if not what to offer as an alternative.
There is an analogous ambivalence in Tintin’s style. It may be pioneering a new level of capture motion animation, but it uses animation to improve photo-realism by degrees, not to break with it. For example the code of realism in Tintin lengthens the actor’s ability to suspend gravity, as Tintin tumbles from one hammock to another, but it does not defy natural law. Overall the movie plays as a prequel to the next installment that Peter Jackson will direct.
The director’s heart was more in War Horse. The English writer who created the story, Michael Morpurgo, shares Spielberg’s sentimentalism whereas Herge only shares his visual approach to adventure.
Again the American can ignore the specifics of the Great War in order to tell a universal anti-war story. This is in contrast to Saving Private Ryan where Spielberg’s great concern was to insist that Americans embrace the actual reality of their parents fighting the war.
In that picture he used subjective sound, shaky hand held camera, chaotic framing and de-saturation of color to drive home the point that this “really happened.” In War Horse the images of trench fighting are well known and the filmmaker does little to make them strange or to shock us, except for the central conceit of placing the horse as the primary agent.
Spielberg does not go as far as to tell the story in the horse’s voice (Morpurgo did). But he uses cinematic techniques to restore the central perspective to the horse in contrast to the stage production of War Horse.
Of course, a horse’s perspective transcends politics. It is a continuation of Spielberg’s approach to sentiment that has formed the “auterist” spine of his entire career. I argue that it is indicative of the present state of American realism that discourages storytellers from assigning moral responsibility.
Perhaps the most revealing contrast is not between War Horse and Saving Private Ryan but with Paths of Glory (1957) made by Stanley Kubrick (later to become Spielberg’s friend) that lets nobody off the hook (least of all the viewer) for the great bloody mindedness of the last century.
We await Spielberg’s Lincoln picture to see if he can abandon his universalism and engage his liberalism long enough to teach the hard lesson that Americans have to learn in the current political impasse.
Frederick Wasser is an associate professor at the Department of Television and Radio, Brooklyn College-CUNY.
Posted 28 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: cultural sociology, economic sociology, consumption, consumerism, consumer society / 0 Comments
It was only $2. And those who enrolled in auto-pay wouldn’t be charged. Verizon’s convenience fee for making one-time bill payments got the math right but the meanings wrong. A public controversy ensued as consumers expressed righteous outrage over the new wireless phone fee, and the company backed down.
Had monthly phone or data rates inched up on all plans by less than a dollar, who would have noticed? It was not the amount but the culturally inappropriate manner in which it was levied that stirred the flames. If you ask consumers whether Verizon should charge more for specific categories of service, the answer depends on the service you’re talking about. Sometimes consumers will appear to be penny wise but pound foolish as they quibble about a dollar here or there, but these consumers are acting appropriately given their understandings of what’s right and what’s wrong for a specified category of expenditure.
The Culture of Markets builds on arguments by economic sociologists like Viviana Zelizer who show just how fraught spending categories can be. Money earned by a child who delivers newspapers or who mows the neighbors’ lawns gets its own nickname (category): paper money, lawn mowing money. The child may be encouraged to use those funds for school related expenses or to buy toys, but those earnings are unlikely to be applied to the rent or the car note. Money that comes from a lottery win gets spent differently from money that comes from an adult’s salary. And what the right price is also depends on negotiation and group understandings. In other words, what we think we should do with our money depends on where it came from, who earned it, and the purpose to which it will be put. Paying more to pay a bill just feels wrong. It stirs up a collective memory of exploitation and usury. And these collective understandings of what the charges mean compel consumers to act to restore their sense of justice.
Markets are not amoral places; they are moral communities with situation-specific norms and principles that are keenly felt when breached. As Verizon comes to understand the morality of markets, they will find that they can charge more, but first they have to get their categories right.
The Culture of Markets makes sense of market mishaps such as this one and provides other examples of how companies inadvertently stir up firestorms: why consumers “inexplicably” fail to respond to market stimuli (e.g. incentive pay, some types of tax cuts), and why “more efficient” options are sometimes foregone.
People do lots of different things in markets, and their understandings about what they are doing depend on more than mathematical calculations. As their intentions and the stories that they share with others come into focus, we can better perceive what money means, how demand rises and falls, why producers partner with specific types of suppliers and distributors, and why well calculated schemes go awry. (See my blog: cultureofmarkets.com)
Frederick F. Wherry is associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.
Posted 31 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Sovereignty, statehood, recognition, global politics, Peace, Conflict Resolution, International Relations / 0 Comments
The recent Palestinian bid for international recognition has failed to secure the backing that the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was hoping for, and it looks like the United States will not have to use its veto at the United Nations Security Council.
Even so, the Palestinian leadership has until now rejected the less ambitious option of becoming a “non-member state” of the UN - which could be achieved through a vote in the General Assembly - and remains set on full recognition. This speaks to the continued appeal of international recognition. So what does the failure to gain UN recognition mean for the future of Palestinian statehood?
When David Cameron was asked why Britain did not support the Palestinian bid, he replied “I don’t believe you create a state by making declarations” and proceeded to argue that “you create a state by bringing together the two relevant parties ... and hammering out an agreement” (the Guardian, 26 November 2011).
But the peace process has so far failed to create an independent Palestinian state, and has now ground to a halt, and although UN recognition would not in itself have created the empirical realities of statehood on the ground, it would have put Israel in a very difficult position. Even if - as was always more likely - recognition had been blocked (solely) by a US veto, such a moral victory would have strengthened the Palestinian position.
As it is, Palestine will continue to exist as an anomaly in the international system of sovereign states: it is recognised by a large number of states, enjoys observer status at the UN, and became a member of UNESCO in October 2011, but it has not gained full international recognition and the empirical realities on the ground do not reflect independent statehood.
Palestine is not the only anomalous entity in the international system of sovereign states. Entities such as Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Taiwan and Transnistria have all failed to gain international recognition, or are only recognised by a few states, yet they function by and large like independent states.
They enjoy all the trappings of statehood such as an army, a government, courts, hospitals, schools and other public services, and some of these entities may even be better functioning than their de jure parent state. Lack of recognition, and an anomalous international position, therefore clearly does not preclude survival, but does that mean that recognition - or the lack thereof - does not matter?
These entities survive despite their lack of recognition and their survival depends on the support of transnational networks, including patron states, diasporas, international aid organisations and trade (legal and illegal).
Now, recognised states also rely on external support for their survival, for example in the form of military alliances and trade agreements, but for unrecognised states such support is always problematic. Their lack of recognition means that important doors remain closed to them.
Even a case such as Taiwan is unable to become a member of the IMF and the World Bank and its membership of the World Trade Organization is dependent on it accepting the name Chinese Taipei. For other unrecognised entities the reality is one of international isolation and their access to international finance and trade is almost non-existent.
As a consequence, most of these entities depend for their survival on the military and financial support of an external patron; such as Russia in the case of Abkhazia and Armenia in the case of Nagorno Karabakh. This has led some observers to denounce unrecognised states as little more than the puppets of external actors.
While survival without recognition is clearly possible - and some of these entities even thrive - the lack of recognition therefore comes at a price and this affects the kind of entities that result: external backing is paramount and internal cohesion crucial for their continued survival.
Unrecognised states frequently introduce political reforms - partly in a bid to improve their chance of international recognition - but such democratising efforts tend to be undermined by an emphasis on the need for unity in the face external dangers. These entities are, moreover, highly militarised and although the image of puppets is often over-played, unrecognised states do find it hard to escape their external dependence.
International recognition consequently matters; even in a time of globalisation and even in cases that have for decades been outside the control of their de jure parent state. Declarations do not create states, but their absence affects the kind of entities that results: their internal developments and their reliance on external actors.
The example of Kosovo, moreover, shows that widespread international recognition is far from an empty gesture. The above-mentioned entities, in any case, already enjoy the territorial control to which Palestine aspires. Despite the existence of the Palestinian National Authority, which was established to govern parts of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel maintains a degree of control over both territory and internal security that prevents Palestine from enjoying de facto independence.
This makes international recognition all the more important; it would help create a reality of statehood that is presently missing, whereas in the other cases, it would recognise a reality that already exists.
Recognition is not the be-all and end-all of state creation, but it does matter, and it affects not only the lives of the people living in these entities, but also the prospect of finding peaceful solutions to protracted conflicts.
Nina Caspersen is the author of Unrecognized States: the Struggle For Sovereignty in the International System, which analyses how unrecognised entities survive and develop, and the effect this has on attempts to reach compromise solutions.
Posted 31 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: social history, encyclopaedia, knowledge, wikipedia / 0 Comments
The origins of this book were in personal curiosity, in an attempt to answer the question, by what paths did we reach our present state of collective knowledge? Hence I start in the middle of the 18th century, where volume one ended, and continue the story until the present. The book focuses on academic knowledge, but discusses its relation to other forms of knowhow. It concentrates on the West, but notes the exchange of knowledge with other parts of the world, especially with China and Japan. In order to compensate for both national and disciplinary biases, this study adopts a comparative approach. In a field dominated by specialized studies, the book attempts an overview.
A Social History of Knowledge is inevitably concerned with long-term processes, among them reform, quantification, secularization, professionalization, specialization, democratization and globalization. However, I also emphasize the importance of the coexistence and interaction of trends in opposite directions, a kind of equilibrium of antagonisms. Thus the nationalization of knowledge coexists with its internationalization, secularization with counter-secularization, specialization with attempts at interdisciplinarity and democratization with attempts to counter or restrict it. Even the accumulation of knowledge is offset to some degree by what is lost (destroyed, discarded or simply mislaid).
Peter Burke is Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge.
Posted 32 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: art, Philosophy, analytic aesthetics, cultural value, authenticity, taste, perception, expression, representation, art theory, art criticism / 0 Comments
When people ask me what I do, and I say that I work on philosophy of art, a great many otherwise educated people draw a blank. They can’t imagine what happens when philosophers discuss art.
The answer, of course, depends on your conception of philosophy: the sole origin of philosophy is a sense of wonder or amazement. Or at least that is the position that Plato ascribes to Socrates in the Theaetetus. Throughout Plato’s writings, Socrates’ method is to select a concept that everyone else seems to find unproblematic. He asks them to explain it, or he begins by reporting how someone else has explained it. He then unravels the assumptions of the explanation until it becomes apparent that the topic is far more complex than it seemed.
For those who possess the requisite sense of wonder, this process is stimulating. For many of Socrates’ discussion companions, it is frustrating and annoying, and some of the dialogues break off with the ancient equivalent of “Gosh, look at the time. I must be off to keep that appointment to trim my beard.”
For thirty years now, I have been professionally amazed by our assumptions about the arts. Above all, I have been puzzled by assumption that there is cohesion to the raggle taggle cultural activities that we group together with those words, “the arts.” And the longer I spend with the topic, the more amazed I am that almost everyone believes that there is a clear boundary between the arts and the many cultural activities that fall beyond that boundary.
I do not mean to suggest that the collapse of the boundary is something recent or particularly postmodern. It was no clearer a hundred years ago, nor two hundred. Three hundred years ago, the category was “the fine arts” (actually, it was sometimes an even more slippery construction: “the finer arts”), and it was used to distinguish between the books that were appropriate for the leisure time of a cultured reader and those that were not.
Today, bookstores routinely segregate the stuff called “literature” from the romance novels and vampire stories (and vampire romance stories) and self-help books that actually appeal to the majority of readers.
With minimal adaptation, virtually the same words could be used concerning the intersecting category of the aesthetic.
In the spirit of Socrates, I have found that teaching philosophy of art is first of all a matter of generating that motivating sense of wonder in my students. There are many challenges to doing so. There are the obvious ones that make any college instruction a challenge.
However, philosophy of art must deal with the additional challenge that almost every student who enters the classroom is quite certain that they can distinguish artworks from non-artworks. And yet, once we move beyond a few familiar names — the Mona Lisa, that “song” by Beethoven that starts da da da daaa — no two of them agree on which music or movies or books are artworks and which are not.
Another challenge is that almost none of them voluntarily spend time attending to the things that they push to the “art” side of the conceptual boundary. Never mind where you locate that boundary: today’s college students simply don’t have much exposure to art. I kept all of these challenges in mind when I designed this introduction to my philosophical field of specialization.
The Philosophy of Art differs from other recent introductions to the field by devoting four of its nine chapters to the topics of creativity, art forgery, authenticity and cultural appropriation, and the boundary line between fine art and popular culture.
Because they interest me, most of my previous writing has centered on the latter pair of these four. But they also happen to be philosophically rich topics that resonate with people who can’t work up much initial excitement about the more traditional issue of how to define art.
As I point out, that tradition is a recent one: Plato and Aristotle engaged in debates that remain central to philosophy of art, yet they were not culturally positioned to worry about the definition of art. Thus, philosophizing about art does not have to start with the issue of the proper definition of art. And therefore I reserve that topic for a later chapter, after showing that there are many other conceptual puzzles about art that can engage our sense of wonder. (But have no fear: if the definition of art is the topic that makes you pick up the book, the chapters can be read as self-sufficient discussions of their nine topics. Yet there’s also abundant cross-referencing that points out where a point made in one chapter intersects with a related topic elsewhere in the book.)
I want to be very clear that the cultural ignorance that seems an obstacle to teaching philosophy of art is also liberating. Philosophers like to discuss Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman. But few students who are being introduced to philosophy of art know those names. Those who teach philosophy of art must also serve as art history teachers.
What I find liberating about this situation is the freedom it offers us in selecting examples. From the neophyte’s perspective, Warhol and Emily Dickinson and Yoko Ono are all equally fresh and therefore equally subversive.
However, it’s then a very small step to a more inclusive approach. To someone who’s paid no attention to poetry, seventeenth-century haiku is no more culturally remote than Emily Dickinson or T. S. Eliot. Or, to put it the other way around, a European “classic” like the ballet Swan Lake is as culturally remote as Japanese kabuki theater.
To the extent that philosophy of art explores human activities and values that are alleged to be human universals, we ought to be discussing both Swan Lake and kabuki, Rembrandt and Katsushika Hokusai, Mickey Mouse and anime. Therefore I do.
And once I got over the idea that there’s an organized canon of examples that we all know about, I finally accepted that most art is unfamiliar to most of us. At that point, the freedom to be more inclusive dovetailed with the responsibility to do so, and the result has been that students are relieved that their ignorance about the “big names” in art won’t be an obstacle to their philosophizing about art. And then they become a bit more liberated in their thinking. They feel that they have permission to wonder about the full diversity of the art world. Its borders start to look very strange.
Another technique to induce wonder - on a small scale, admittedly - is the regular placement of short thought experiments. More than 60 of them are sprinkled through the book. They are clearly delineated invitations to stop reading in order to think about the implications of adopting an idea or thesis.
In some cases, the exercise is a simple reminder that the reader should now consider their own example of an artwork, rather than rely solely on the examples that others have chosen for them to consider. In other cases, I hope to create resonances between different parts of the book.
For example, early in the book, I call attention to Amie Thomasson’s point that some positions on the nature of art are simply too revisionist to succeed. Much later, I try to remind readers of this point by asking them to reflect on Leonardo da Vinci’s written descriptions of his goals in producing visual representations, and then ask whether it is plausible to accept a definition of art that implies that da Vinci completely misunderstood what he was accomplishing.
These many attempts to get the reader to think on the go are then supplemented by the traditional practice of ending the chapters with sets of review questions and with suggestions for further reading and, usually, of films that will provide additional grist for thought.
Theodore Gracyk is department chair and professor of philosophy at Minnesota State University.
Posted 43 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: wood, cultural history, timber / 0 Comments
Wood is a material fundamental to world history, which is important to examine, and of which everybody has their own discoveries and experiences. ‘Ötzi’ the ice-man needed it when he was climbing his Alpine glacier; so did medieval cathedral-builders; so does today’s growing green economy.
From time immemorial, the skill of the human hand has developed by working on wood, so much that we might say that the handling of wood is a part of human nature: a basic element in the history of the human body. ‘Wood is one of the greatest and most necessary things in the world’, Martin Luther said in a talk on 30 August 1532, ‘I marvel how our god has given so many uses to wood for all men in the whole wide world.’
Four hundred years later, Lewis Mumford, a grandfather of American environmentalism said ‘Take away wood and one takes away literally the props of modern technics.’
Since Werner Sombart, the pre-industrial era has been called a ‘Wooden Age’. Wood, however, is not only a typical pre-modern material, but a requirement for industrial development, whether in North America, in Central Europe or in Japan. We often forget that role.
The worry of a future wood famine caused a panic in the 18th century, which marked the roots of modern environmentalism; this fear has returned in recent times. ‘Sustainable development’, set as the goal for the whole world economy at the 1992 environmental Rio summit, was first applied – though it seems to have been forgotten in Rio – to the forest, and especially the montane and saline forests of Central Europe.
My own debut in the matter was in 1981, at an international conference in Essen on ‘Energy in History’, where I questioned the thesis of a catastrophic shortage of wood in the 18th century. This triggered a controversy that rumbles on even today, thirty years later, more lasting than most other controversies among German historians. For it has been the sacred myth of the proud German forestry culture that, ever since Germany began to revive after 1800, it has protected its homeland more than any other countries from the threat of a supply disaster.
But the Wooden Age did not end because of a shortage of wood, any more than the Stone Age ended because a shortage of stone. A broad overview demonstrates this fact more clearly than a plethora of special studies could ever do. Growing scarcity of wood was not the time bomb of the Wooden Age, as Sombart believed it to be, but rather the emergency brake of an economy which was not fit for permanent growth.
In pre-modern time, the ‘limits to growth’ were self-evidently natural and no title for a bestseller. Today, these limits have been rediscovered. Now, wood could become the epitome of sustainability. If the old Age of Wood did not collapse because of a wood shortage, a new Age of Wood may be possible, to at least some degree.
The histoire totale of wood and woodlands, which goes beyond the traditional boundaries of forest history, demonstrates what many discussions, even at an international level, have continued to ignore until now: that the solution of many wood supply problems will not be found in the forests alone. Forest history is intimately connected with the great mainstreams of history. The sustainable use of forests is not solely a question of forestry.
Wood traces the environmental, cultural and technological history of wood. It demonstrates that wood offers a secret key for a better understanding of world history, of certain peculiarities and of varieties of cultures, moreover of the rise and fall of great powers. It also reveals a co-evolution of nature and culture which offers hope for our future.
If we look only at the mass of complaints about forest destruction and wood shortage that reached a peak in the late 18th century, one is tempted to argue – as many have done before – that the rise of the West based on coal and steel was a response to the growing scarcity of wood. But that seems to be wrong (though the discussion continues).
In most regions, industrialization proceeded on the basis of wood along with animal and water power. A global comparison clearly shows that, in the 18th century, Europe was still relatively rich in timber with no exceptional shortages.
Wood is a key to historical microcosms, but at the same time to questions of big theories on world history. In the ‘modern world system’ described by Immanuel Wallerstein, does the timber trade further widen the gulf between core and periphery – Wallerstein’s central concept – or do the forests on the contrary give the periphery a special opportunity?
Is Garrett Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ decisively confirmed by the history of the forest, or are on the contrary forest communities the best example for the rehabilitation of local commons, as Elinor Ostrom suggested in the work that won her the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics?
‘America’s Wooden Age was a wonderful era, specifically because of the nature of the prevailing technology which depended so heavily upon wood’; so begins the anthology America’s Wooden Age, published in 1975 by the National Museum of History and Technology.
So, we might ask, if the Wooden Age was so wonderful, why didn’t America stick with wood until today? If one writes a history of wood filled with enthusiasm for the material, one finds oneself asking why it no longer rules the world, but often has been driven out by other materials.
A critical approach is needed in order to avoid succumbing to illusion. If wood is to win back some ground, an explanation is needed as to how it lost that ground in the first place. Many advantages of wood have become evident only in retrospect. And the narrow horizons of the timber industry have prevented many an opportunity from being seized. The trio of forestry, the timber industry and environmental movement are still filled with deep tensions. We are a long way from a grand Green Trinity which could become pioneering for a future Age of Ecology. Wood’s history is an unfinished story.
Joachim Radkau is professor of modern history at Bielefeld University.
Posted 114 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Cultural theory, continental philosophy, media studies, literary theory, postmodernism, Philosophy / 0 Comments
What’s the fuss about Sloterdijk? – more talked about than read; praised, condemned and until recently ignored in English-language scholarship.
This book offers an introduction to, critical appraisal of and engagement with this mercurial thinker. It is the first book devoted to Sloterdijk in English, and its contributors are an international and interdisciplinary dream-team – Babette Babich, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Eduardo Mendieta, Marie-Eve Morin, Efraín Kristal, Wieland Hoban, Nigel Thrift, Jean-Pierre Couture, and Sloterdijk himself.
Ranging across his extensive works, the contributions focus on key themes and crucial questions. You’ll find discussions of his politics, his ways of engaging in debate, his understandings of space, humanity, art, anger, literature and language.
No one interested in philosophy and social theory in the twenty-first century can fail to have an opinion on Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk Now provides plenty of ammunition for the debates to come.
Stuart Elden is Professor of Geography at Durham University.
Posted 114 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Sovereignty, statehood, recognition, global politics, Peace, Conflict Resolution, International Relations, politics, security studies / 0 Comments
Unrecognized states are places that do not exist in international politics; they are state-like entities that have achieved de facto independence, but have failed to gain widespread international recognition. Territories such as Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh, Somaliland, Taiwan and Transnistria frequently enjoy all the trappings of statehood: an army, a government, courts, hospitals, schools and other public services. They may therefore look like states and act like states, but they are not recognised as such in the modern international system.
Unrecognized states hold a fascination for the intrepid traveller with a fondness for the paradoxical, but their involvement in conflicts over contested territories also makes them of wider interest. Some of these conflicts – in places as diverse as the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the South Pacific – have elicited major international crises and intervention, while others could be the site of future warfare. Even so, there has been a lack of academic analysis of these curious anomalies and they remain subject to myths and simplifications.
Unrecognized states join a list of other anomalies in the international system, such as associated territories, internationally administered territories and mini-states, but unlike such entities unrecognized states are not afforded a place in the international system of sovereign states. Their lack of recognition comes at a significant cost, yet a number of unrecognized states have survived for decades and some of them even thrive. This raises important – yet hitherto largely unanswered – questions about the conditions that enable these anomalies to survive in a system of sovereign states and about the kind of entities that can emerge from non-recognition. In answering these questions we find out something important, not just about unrecognised states, but also about sovereignty and statehood.
Building on extensive fieldwork, my new book Unrecognized States: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Modern International System examines the origins of unrecognized states, the factors that enable their survival and explores their likely future trajectories: is reintegration, status quo or recognition on the cards for these entities and how can peaceful solutions best be promoted? I hope that this book will prove a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in contested territories, sovereignty, state-building and conflict resolution.
Nina Caspersen is lecturer in peace and conflict studies at Lancaster University.
Posted 116 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: climate change, social systems, sociology, environmental studies / 0 Comments
In Climate Change and Society the ‘social’ is positioned at the heart of the analysis of why climates are changing and of assessing and developing alternative futures. This book especially demonstrates the importance of social practices that over time are organised into powerful ‘socio-technical’ systems. In the fateful twentieth century, various high carbon social practices, increased income, wealth and movement, engendered huge population growth, increased greenhouse gas emissions and used up maybe half of the world’s oil that had made this world go round. Especially important in stabilising these high carbon systems was the ‘carbon military-industrial complex’, the most powerful of set of interests operating worldwide.
In this new century it is such systems that have to change, to move from growing high carbon systems to a cluster of those that are low carbon. It is clear that such a transition has to happen fast so as to create positive feedbacks of each low carbon system upon each other. How can we change such systems and practices, and how can they be changed in time? The urbanist Mike Davis concludes that such a Plan B is unlikely to have been realised by 2030 and the convergent effects of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people will produce negative synergies beyond our current imagination.
John Urry is professor of sociology at the University of Lancaster.
Posted 141 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Organizations, communication, emotions / 0 Comments
I wrote Communicating Emotions at Workafter spending several decades collecting emotional narratives from clerks, probation officers, teachers, firefighters, managers, factory workers, and many others. From this research I learned several important truths.
First, although work is often mundane, emotional encounters make it more meaningful, memorable, humane and (sometimes) stressful.
Second, the success of organizations and individual workers very much depends on their capacity to communicate and regulate human feeling.
Third, emotional communication is often a positive force in organizational life. It is often through expressions of feeling that we forge bonds with coworkers, mark and resist unethical practices, and create cohesive responses to complicated tasks.
Fourth, emotional communication is too often abused or neglected, often with profoundly negative consequences for people and organizations.
Emotion certainly has its biological, cognitive, and affective dimensions, but this book is very much about communication. I want students to think deeply and concretely about how emotion arises from interactions, language practices, collective performances and messages produced by organizations for various audiences.
The book is also firmly rooted in the practice of work. Students will see that emotion is shaped by organizational rules, rituals, processes, and power relations - that emotion flows across teams, networks, technologies, occupational cultures, and work/home boundaries.
In writing Communicating Emotions at Work I made every effort to engage the student reader. At the same time, I hope the book spurs more organizational researchers to think about emotion as a rich communicative phenomenon, one essential to the process of organizing.
Vincent R. Waldron is professor of communication studies at Arizona State University.
Posted 164 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: gender, inequality, globalization, marginalization, social theory, education / 0 Comments
A world out of control? A world of ruthless elites, environmental disaster, reborn patriarchy, and growing gaps between rich and poor? A world where the alternatives are riot, terrorism, or futile protest? Our world, right?
If that is NOT to be our world - if we want real democracy in rich countries as well as poor - we need new strategies of social change, and knowledge to base them on. Confronting Equality shows how social science provides knowledge and ideas vital for democratic politics. Its chapters discuss men’s role in achieving gender equality, the social impact of neoliberalism, the new politics of teaching, key theorists of global society, and more.
Social science matters. Reliable knowledge matters. Much social research is presented in conservative, dependent, or depressing ways. But social science can be a site of excitement and insight, and a way of opening new perspectives on the world.
Raewyn Connell is university professor at the University of Sydney and the author of numerous books, including Confronting Equality, Gender, and Southern Theory.
Posted 149 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: gender, sociology of gender, women's studies, gender studies / 0 Comments
Our academic and activist experiences and influences represent a generational and gender divide. Martha got her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1977 and Mike from New York University in 2006. Martha became an active member of the women’s liberation movement in 1970 at Kent State University and has continued her activism throughout her academic career. As a graduate student, Mike was involved in organizing a graduate student union and challenging sexism in the academy. As a faculty member, he has continued his feminist campus activism in anti-militarism, anti-violence, and other issues. Despite our differences, we recognized early on that we shared an understanding of gender and a commitment to social justice.
Our process of writing this textbook together has not only involved the task of writing, but also of pushing each other to recognize our intellectual and social justice priorities and to work together to articulate those into common themes. At the same time, by thinking of our past and current students, we asked ourselves the question, “what distinguishes students who ‘get’ feminist sociology from those who do not?” We quickly realized that what students who “get” feminist sociology have in common is the ability to mobilize their feminist sociological imaginations to conduct analyses of their own.
This realization set us on the path of designing a textbook to inspire students to ask questions and seek answers about gender and to provide them with tools to investigate gender from a feminist perspective. A jumping off point for us was to organize the textbook around the central ideas we distilled from our own engagement with feminist theories and activism, encouraging students to infuse their analyses with attention to gender inequality, gender’s intersections with other systems of inequality, a relational global perspective, and social change. As feminist scholars and activists deeply committed to social justice, it was also important to us that we help students develop strategies for engaging in their personal and political lives in socially just ways.
Martha E. Thompson is professor emeritus of sociology and women's studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Michael Armato is associate professor of sociology and women's studies at Northeastern Illlinois University. They are the authors of Investigating Gender, out in December 2011.
Posted 163 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Colonization, Russian empire, culture, literature, History / 0 Comments
Studying imperial Russia, scholars have produced two stories. One concerns a great country that competes successfully, though unevenly, with other European powers, produces brilliant literature, and stages unprecedented social experiments. The other story is one of economic backwardness, unbridled violence, misery, illiteracy, despair, and collapse. I subscribe to both of these at once.
But scholarship is not a dual carriageway; we need to find a way to coordinate the different stories that we believe in. My solution is a kind of Eisensteinian montage interwoven with an overarching principle, which in this book is internal colonization. I propose this concept as a metaphor or mechanism that makes the Russian Empire comparable to other colonial empires of the past. So, in this book, the two Russian stories combine into one: the story of internal colonization, in which the state colonized its people.
Before and during and after the imperial period, the Russian state was engaged in the colonization of foreign territories and it was also concerned with colonizing the heartlands. Peoples of the empire, including the Russians, developed anti-imperial, nationalist ideas in response. These directions of Russia’s colonization, internal and external, sometimes competed and sometimes were indistinguishable. Dialectic in standstill, as Walter Benjamin put it, but also an explosive mix that invites oxymoronic concepts such as internal colonization.
Incorporating different disciplines, voices, and periods is a risky task for a cultural historian. I take courage in the idea that high literature and culture in Russia played significant roles in the political process. Due to its paradoxical mechanism, internal colonization made culture politically relevant and power culturally productive. For an empire such as Russia’s, its culture was both an instrument of rule and a weapon of revolution. Culture was also a screen on which the endangered society saw itself – a unique organ of self-awareness, critical feedback, mourning, and warning.
Human grammar distinguishes between subject and object, while human history does not necessarily do so. Self-imposed tasks – self-discipline, internal control, colonization of one’s own kind – are inherently paradoxical. Languages, including scholarly ones, get into trouble when they confront these self-referential constructions. In the twenty-first century, scholars of globalization meet the same logical difficulties as the scholars of Russian imperial history met in the nineteenth century. Of course, I hope that the world of the future will be no more similar to imperial Russia than it will be to British India. But the experience and experiments of the Russian Empire can still teach us some lessons.
Alexander Etkind is director of Russian studies at King's College, Cambridge, and the author of Internal Colonization, out on 23 September.
Posted 176 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: security studies, intelligence, democracy / 0 Comments
National security intelligence is a vast, complicated, and important topic, with both technical and humanistic dimensions - all made doubly hard to study and understand because of the thick veils of secrecy that surround every nation’s spy apparatus. Fortunately, from the point of view of democratic openness as well as the canons of scholarly inquiry, several of these veils have fallen in the past three-and-a-half decades. The disclosures have been a result of public government inquiries into intelligence failures and wrongdoing (especially those in 1975 that looked into charges of illegal domestic spying in the United States), accompanied by a more determined effort by academic researchers to probe the dark side of government.
The Cold War was, in large part, a struggle between espionage organizations in the democracies and in the Communist bloc, illustrating the importance of a nation’s secret agencies. Sometimes spy services have been the source of great embarrassment to the democracies, as with America’s Bay of Pigs disaster, along with the questionable assassination attempts against foreign leaders carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), acting under ambiguous authority from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Harmful to the reputation of America’s democracy, too, were the domestic espionage scandals of the mid-1970s, the Iran-contra scandal a decade later, and, most recently, revelations about torture and other forms of prisoner abuse employed by the CIA and military intelligence agencies in the struggle against global terrorism. Intelligence mistakes of analysis can have enormous consequences, as well, such as when the United Kingdom and the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 based in part on a faulty assessment that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was developing weapons of mass destruction that could soon strike London and Washington. Further, intelligence organizations and operations are a costly burden on taxpayers - costing some $75 billion a year in the United States, according to America’s Director of National Intelligence in 2010. For all of these reasons, national security intelligence deserves the attention of the public, closer study by the scholarly community, and improved accountability inside democratic regimes.
National security intelligence is a rich and exciting field of study, for researchers, policymakers, government reformers, intelligence professionals, students, and attentive citizens in every democratic regime. My volume offers an introductory look at this subject, with hopes of encouraging further study by scholars of all ages and a renewed dedication to intelligence reform by government officials and citizen activists.
Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia and the author of National Security Intelligence.
Posted 214 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: cultural criminology, positivism, antipositivism, social theory / 0 Comments
The sociological imagination can be engendered by social marginality. It flourishes at times of rapid change and in environments of diversity; it can be obscured by academic isolation far from the maelstrom of late modern life; it can be forcefully suppressed by government intervention; it can be rung out of the budding scholar by a tedious apprenticeship within the discipline – a so-called professionalization – which prioritizes quantitative methods and digital distancing over human contact, verstehen and patient ethnography. For Mills a key indice of loss of such imagination was the rise of abstracted empiricism where reality was lost in method and measurement, where the tools of the trade become magically more important than reality itself, where to put it metaphorically, the telescope becomes of greater importance than the sky.
I have traced in this book how abstracted empiricism has expanded on a level which would have surely astonished Mills himself. How in much of the social sciences reality has been lost in a sea of statistical symbols and dubious analysis. I have, in part, focused on developments in criminology because it is here where abstracted empiricism and positivism has flourished to the greatest extent, producing a new genre of research and a novel breed of journal which has all but forgotten a great legacy of scholarship, where theory has been banished to the passing nod and the perfunctory and critical work significantly marginalized. But such a process has, as we shall see, spread to mainstream sociology and has clear resonances throughout the social sciences.
Even if a science of society were possible, positivism is poor in its measurement and tawdry in its theory. Such a conceptual inadequacy is manifestly multiplied by its refusal to recognize that cultural nature of human beings: their ability to turn factors and circumstances into narratives of their own making. As it is, the new ‘scientific’ criminology has been unable to explain the drop in the crime rate in the recent period just as it failed to explain the rise in crime in the sixties through to the eighties. Countless anomalies in research findings occur, their supposed veracity merely bolstered by their repetition rather than any approximation to the truth. Often the researchers sense that they are skating on thin ice but the hubris of science and a great deal of physics envy helps them navigate the pond. Such toxic data corrupts any policy recommendations and raises questions of the direction and extent of funding.
This book calls for a fundamental reassessment of the direction in which criminology is heading. If it can create a moment of hesitation and contribute somewhat to the growing scepticism with regards to the widespread desire to quantify every aspect of the human condition it will have succeeded in its aims.
Jock Young is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justiceat The Graduate Center, CUNY, Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of Kent, and the author of The Criminological Imagination.
Posted 214 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: applied communication, communication studies, public health / 0 Comments
In what ways does communication in health organizations matter to patients, consumers, and health professionals? How do health organizations function communicatively? Why do the people who work in health professions interact as they do? Communication in Health Organizations provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of the research literature to help readers answer these questions and reflect on their own involvement in the health system.
Spanning communication, medicine, nursing, allied health, and public health, this book considers the complexities and contingencies that constitute the organization of health care. Using systems theory, an approach that enhances reader understanding of health organizing, readers will gain familiarity with the communication processes and behaviors that comprise a wide range of health settings. Understanding and applying the concepts discussed in this book can improve communication in health organizations, which ultimately benefits health care delivery.
Each chapter in the book includes “Communication in Practice” and “Ripped from the Headlines” features that provide opportunities for reader engagement. Readers can put communication principles into actual practice in health organization contexts and apply chapter topics to health system current events.
Julie Apker is an associate professor in the School of Communication at Western Michigan University. She is the author of Communication in Health Organizations.
Posted 246 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Hayden White, historiography, metahistory / 0 Comments
Hayden White counts as the most influential contemporary philosopher of history. He is often praised and criticized for his “narrativist” approach to the study of history. Among historians and literary scholars in particular, the name of White is almost synonymous with a “linguistic” or “narrative” turn in historical studies. Few readers, though, have asked why White is interested in narrative discourse, how this interest relates to his moral concerns, and why most of White’s publications, including his ground-breaking Metahistory, focus on moral agency, human self-determination, ideology, and myth, rather than on narrative discourse.
My book tries to answer these questions. Starting with White’s doctoral studies in medieval church history, I try to show how White developed a highly “undisciplinary” philosophy of history, inspired more by existentialist–humanist preoccupations with human freedom and moral self-determination than by the academic historical discipline in its twentieth-century state. I argue that a desire “to get out of history”, or to exchange historical thought in its academic incarnation for more existential modes of historical representation, is a leitmotiv in White’s entire philosophy of history.
One of the surprising conclusions I reach is that White’s frequently quoted Metahistory is often misunderstood. In spite of what many readers assume, it is not a study of historical discourse, but a passionate plea to reunite historical thought with myth and moral imagination. I also argue that White’s “tropes”, as famously presented in Metahistory, are no linguistic templates for historical thought, but metaphoric labels for ideal-typical views on how “history” relates to myth, dream, and imagination.
So, in a sense, this book offers a re-interpretation of White, thereby correcting the sort of Wikipedia wisdom so often associated with his name.
Herman Paul is lecturer in historical theory at Leiden University, and the author of Hayden White.
Posted 247 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Facebook, social network, anthropology / 0 Comments
The text below is an edited transcript of a longer interview, which you can see on its full glory on YouTube.
George Miller:
When we met recently it was to discuss Danny's new book, Tales from Facebook, which looks at the consequences of being a Facebook user on people's lives. How is it changing our behaviour and modes of interaction, especially between men and women? What is it doing to our sense of ourselves and of time? Is it ultimately a disruptive or a conservative force?
Some of these questions we tackle in this interview. All of them you will find treated in more depth in the book itself.
GM:
For this study, you chose not to focus on Facebook users in London or New York or Sydney or wherever; you chose Trinidad. Tell me why.
DM:
The main point of this kind of ethnographic research is to insist that there is no such thing as ‘Facebook’. Facebook is what users do with it. So there is no alternative than to take a given population, and study how they use it.
One of the points about taking somewhere like Trinidad is nobody expects Trinidad to be the exemplification of what Facebook ‘really’ is. That allows people to recognize that the idea that US college kids showed us ‘the true Facebook’ doesn’t hold water, when Facebook is actually now seeing its main increases in places like Indonesia and Turkey.
GM:
It might be interesting to talk a little bit in more detail about some of the pen portraits in the book. Dr Karamath is an interesting example; he’s an older man in a particular phase of his life. So how’s he using Facebook?
DM:
Dr Karamath has effectively become disabled, so he’s to return to Trinidad, and really he’s just stuck in his house. He used to be a very cosmopolitan international player, a human rights lawyer, and this could have been the end of everything that was worthwhile in his life.
What’s fascinating is the way that he sees the potential for Facebook to give him his life back; he can go online for the whole of the day and find a particular role. Everybody is swamped by information these days, and so he aggregates information from, say, the human rights or environmental sector, he pares it down and he brings it to the attention of others. So he feels that merely the fact that he’s got time to spend on Facebook gives him a new useful role. He also develops a completely new social circuit with some diaspora Indians in New York, and London, which works very well for both him and for them.
Although we associate Facebook with university students and the young, because that’s where it came from, there’s every reason to feel that in the long term, the most important impacts of Facebook will probably be on the elderly. The people who need it most will be those who suffer from restrictions, who find it harder to get out, yet want to retain their links with their family and wider social networks. I think therefore Dr Karamath is a very important portrait, because he demonstrates one of the key futures of Facebook: the elderly and the disabled.
GM:
You were very honest in the book in saying that you thought that the Facebook game Farmville was a vain pursuit before you looked into it further. Then after your encounter with a boy called Arvind, you rather revised that. Tell me about his case.
DM:
Yes, it wasn’t just that it was a vain pursuit. I just disliked Farmville. The cartoon characters, the way it kind of operates; I found it very hard to warm to Farmville, until I met Arvind. But Arvind was a very quiet, very gentle, and generally not very successful young man. He’d tried at various things, but none of them went right for him, and things were looking rather hopeless. He got on a course to work as a carer, and most carers in Trinidad tend to be women - and of course Arvind is very shy with women.
But it was those women that persuaded him to go onto Farmville in the first place, and he really got hooked and became an inveterate Farmville player and very good at it. Because Farmville is a social game, you progress by helping each other. That brought him into interaction with his fellow students, and on that he could build a wider friendship group, so that now when he goes into college, he kind of can chat to all these women, and he feels much more confident. In this case, Farmville has been hugely enabling to somebody who was otherwise almost pathological in the difficulties he had in ordinary social relations.
So you start to see that Farmville, which to be honest I tended to see as a waste of time - and also aesthetically I couldn’t stand the thing - you start to understand that people using Farmville have adapted it and found ways to make it actually a rather positive instrument. So you do have to have some respect for this thing.
GM:
You suggest that Facebook may ultimately be a conservative moral force, because it makes it much more difficult for people to have an illicit liaison, since who knows when they’ll pop up in the background of a picture?
DM:
I think that’s true. I tend to veer away from simple technological determinism, but I had previously studied mobile phones. That was in Jamaica, and it was clear that mobile phones led to an increase in illicit sexual relations. It was just so easy to arrange to see somebody behind people’s backs.
It’s curious that you have this one technology that leads to a change in sexual behaviour, and Facebook, which in some ways does precisely the opposite. People are starting to realize that before they were known on Facebook, they were relatively discreet. They’d be in another town, say, when they were with what we’d call their mistress (in Trinidad, it’s “the deputy”, or “the outside woman”). But now so many people can take photos from mobile phones, upload them onto Facebook, they get tagged, and suddenly everyone’s aware that you were with this person when you said you’d be somewhere else.
There’s an interesting opposition here between the impact of mobile phones and of Facebook. And yes, I think I would go on the line and say that Facebook is actually going to lead to a decrease in adulterous relationships.
GM:
Do you see other conservative aspects to Facebook, in terms of community and cohesion and it drawing people together?
DM:
It’s better to regard Facebook as an essentially conservative media, rather than some vanguard of the new. There have been many changes in modern life that have led to separation, led to people being say more transnational, led to a certain individualism, and to the decline of the more intensive forms of social relations. My overall argument is that people recognize these changes and actually regret that loss of community, but have found through Facebook a way to bring back many of the kinds of social relations that were becoming attenuated.
The internet previously had tended to lead us to have separate interest groups. People called them communities, but they weren’t. They were just different bodies of interest groups that formed their own network on the internet.
But the whole point of Facebook is that it’s much more like an actual digital community, because it brings all these different social networks back into the same place. So kinship is there, friendship is there, work colleagues are there, and they’re all in view of each other.
That, I think, is very different from the previous impact of the internet; almost the reverse. That’s why it’s best understood as conservative – people are looking back to the way social relations used to be, or the way they imagine social relations used to be, and using Facebook to resurrect them.
Daniel Miller is professor of anthropology at University College London, and the author of Tales from Facebook. His other books include The Comfort of Things, Au Pair and Stuff.
Posted 247 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: financial crisis, NHS reform, neoliberalism / 0 Comments
News that the UK government has been spending 56 million a day sub-contracting its own activities to private corporations makes interesting reading. There have been repeated government claims that, under the Big Society programme, it is concerned to ensure that a wide range of different kinds of organization would win such contracts and not just firms.
To see how the government contracting business is stacked in favour of the big corporations one can look at the plans for sub-contracting the delivery of much of the National Health Service that are at the heart of the controversial Health and Social Care Bill. Here in particular, privatization to corporations is explicitly presented as only one of a number of outcomes of the competition regime proposed.
But look at the realities of the situation. NHS medical practitioners and hospitals are (unsurprisingly) primarily health-care professionals. They are not expert in marketing or in contract-winning. They do not have the competence, resources or time to lobby and sweet-talk contract commissioners and put a shiny advertising gloss on their work. Much the same is true of the voluntary organisations which are invited to bid for some contracts.
The private health-care firms, mainly giant US corporations with extensive experience of running health care in that country’s private system, do have the appropriate experience and knowledge. They also have very strong incentives to pour money into contract bidding. Given their large resources, it makes considerable sense for them to risk loss-making bids for UK health contracts in the first instance.
Non-commercial competitors will be unable to match them in this exercise and will be driven from the market. These will therefore not be there to compete the next time round, when prices can then be raised. Public-service contracting rules are unable to counter loss-leader tactics of this kind and will, as so often in the past, be naïve counterparts to very wily and strategic corporate bargainers. There is therefore no level playing-field in competition between corporations on the one hand and existing public providers and the voluntary sector on the other.
Further, it must be noted what competition is about here. It is competition for the winning of contracts, not for the provision of health care. The ultimate consumers of the health service are merely users; they are not part of the market relationship, which is between commissioners and contractors. Competition over how best to win a contract from a public service commissioner is not the same as competition over how to provide the best health care to a public. This is especially the case when, as is necessary, contracts last for several years.
In this country and elsewhere there have been many examples in recent years of privatization contracts of this type, across a wide range of public-service activities. A notable feature has been the emergence of a small number of corporations, with origins in traditional areas of government contracting like armaments and road-building, who have spread their activities to areas very new to them, from back-office local government services to nursery schools. The most striking recent case was the award of a contract for running parts of the UK 2011 Census to Lockheed Martin, the US armaments contractor.
The core business and expertise of these firms is in political lobbying and public contract-winning, not in providing the actual services they are claiming to be competent at providing. This is logical; their market relationship with a customer occurs at the point of gaining the contract, not providing the service.
The Health and Social Care Bill will lead, within a few years, to the privatization of these services to a small number of large corporations. Many of these will have their headquarters abroad. It is impossible that the proposers of the Bill do not know this, and it must be assumed that they want it. There is therefore a clear dishonesty in the official claim that these changes are part of a localization agenda.
Decision points, and the appropriate addresses for complaints and queries by users, will be removed to levels far more remote than a UK primary care trust. So powerful have corporate lobbies become that politicians are willing to play such games with the NHS.
From health to banks
The aftermath of the financial crisis presents a similar story. In the UK this has been redefined as a crisis caused by excessive public spending. It was not; it was caused by extraordinarily irresponsible behaviour by bankers, who made, retain, and indeed continue to reap enormous rewards for their pains.
In the USA, President Obama’s fairly tough financial regulation bill is being drastically watered down by a Congress highly responsive to the millions of dollars brandished by the financial sector’s corporate lobbyists – just as his health service bill was watered down following lobbying by that sector’s corporations.
In the UK government refuses to call the bluff of banks who make unlikely claims that they will leave the country if regulation is increased, while hobbling any attempts at the international action that can meet those claims head on.
In the 2010 general election British voters had a choice between a party that crumbled before corporate interests and one that is in large part constituted by those interests. It is not so different for voters in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Democracy enables us to choose between those who do not dare confront corporate power and those who represent it.
In some fields professional institutions that stand outside the political system – such as the medical profession – offer some defence against this impenetrable wall. In the case of the financial sector the only professions are those of the sector itself.
Not surprisingly therefore bankers see no reason to change their investment strategies, to accept tighter regulation, or to moderate their earnings – earnings that in principle are the rewards of risk-taking but which are today guaranteed by taxpayers.
Colin Crouch is professor of governance and public management at the University of Warwick Business School. His book The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism is published this month by Polity.
Posted 248 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: governance, politics, Regulation, globalization / 0 Comments
From climate change to organized crime to financial regulation through to global pandemics, many of the gravest problems society faces today cannot be resolved by any country acting alone. Globalization has created a world of “complex interdependence” in which cooperation across borders is required to provide the security, prosperity, and wellbeing on which we all depend.
Traditionally, transborder cooperation has been negotiated between nation-states. In the aftermath of the Second World War, states created a range of intergovernmental institutions—the international financial institutions, t
he trade regime, and above all the United Nations—that have become the core of our current multilateral order.
Fascinatingly, however, these traditional institutions are being joined by an increasing range of new forms of global governance. For example, transgovernmental networks link ostensibly domestic government officials into flexible platforms for coordination and information exchange. Private regulatory schemes hold corporations responsible for environmental and social standards. Diverse coalitions of actors—states, corporations, NGOs, and others—form multistakeholder initiatives for topics as diverse as disease prevention and the management of the Internet. We live in a period of remarkable innovation in global governance.
Scholars and practitioners have recognized these changes, which pervade nearly every area of global politics, but have yet to fully describe or explain them. We need to know what has changed, why it has changed, and what implications the changes hold for the political issues that affect our societies. A first step toward answering these crucial questions—until now missing from the literature—would be a comprehensive mapping of the new institutions. This is what the Handbook of Transnational Governance hopes to contribute. In it, we have gathered over 50 expert summaries of innovative forms of global governance which, together, provide the most complete picture of the new forms of governance that yet exists. We hope this resource will help students, scholars, and practitioners to better understand the changing institutional landscape that increasingly shapes every aspect of political life.
Thomas Hale is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. David Held is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Their new book, Handbook of Transnational Governance, is out now.
Posted 253 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: economics, Business, institutions, sociology / 0 Comments
Institutions and the Economy examines how institutions – understood as the formal and informal rules and practices that surround us as we go about our daily lives – enable and shape economic life. Institutions impact consumer preferences, the actions and processes of firms, wealth and poverty in countries, the growth of international trade, and much more. Indeed, none of the preconditions for economic activity – such as the existence of buyers and sellers, recognizable goods and services, and the information we need to make choices – would be in place without institutions.
These insights challenge some of the most basic postulates on modern economic theory, which either minimizes the role of institutions in the economy or views them as factors that help primarily by promoting efficiency. Synthesizing and refining the central concepts developed by economic sociologists during the last twenty years, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how economic life unfolds from the individual to the transnational levels.
Francesco Duina is professor of sociology at Bates College, visiting professor in the Department of Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School, and the author of Institutions and the Economy.
Posted 275 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: media studies, globalization, European studies / 0 Comments
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary media field in Europe. It examines the current structure of the various sectors that make up the European media market (broadcasting, the press, the internet), and identifies and assesses the major players and issues. It covers a broad spread of media markets, highlighting the new sectors that are emerging and outlining the factors driving the media business into the 21st century.
One of the key arguments of European Media is that Europe continues to offer the best place for examining global media processes. In doing so, the book
a) describes the issues, dynamics and the realities of the European media sector by synthesizing the most up-to-date information on developments;
b) asks whether we are seeing the emergence of European media or simply the continuation of separate national media in a European context;
c) explores debates about the role of the media in the formation of a European public sphere and a European identity.
The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with the structure of the European media, the second with the Europeanization of the media, and the third with the political and cultural dimensions of Europe and the EU.
Each of these sections provides material that will be of interest and value to both students and researchers seeking to explore the nature of the media in Europe.
Ralph M. Negrine is professor of political communication at the University of Sheffield, and co-author of European Media.
Posted 276 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: coltan, columbite-tantalite, Democratic Republic of Congo / 0 Comments
When first asked by Polity to write ColtanI was thrilled. Tantalum, or ‘coltan’ as it is known in the Congo, was the most topical of natural resources. Allegations were swirling on activist blogs, in academia, and at the United Nations about coltan’s relationship to ongoing violence in the Congo: that it was generating profits for armed groups that were waging war and abusing civilians, and that Western consumers were fuelling the conflict through their demand for electronic products such as mobile phones and laptops containing coltan.
I began by reading everything about coltan that I could lay my hands on and quickly started writing. However, after three months the work slowed. I discovered that much of what had been published on coltan repeated the same arguments, relied on the same incomplete data and failed to ask or answer the big questions about coltan. What I was writing repeated initially these same established views.
For six weeks I stopped work completely. I scratched my head wondering what angle Icould take that was new and different, and that would bring a fresh perspective. Suddenly it struck me that what was most interesting about coltan wasn’t about what was happening on the ground in the DRC, which is where all the journalists and scholars were looking for their story. Rather, it was why an obscure mineral that was little known outside geological and scientific circles a decade ago was suddenly all over the internet and in the media.
Activism about coltan was the story that needed to be told. It was activists and NGOs – with the help of some UN and government reports – that had made coltan topical. I suddenly had a focus and, instead of worrying about whether I was missing something by not doing fieldwork in Congo myself, I started to research coltan initiatives and the activism around them.
There are lessons from my initial writer’s block and subsequent epiphany about the political story about coltan that needed to be told.
First, in this era of globalised information when new information is constantly being produced, good data can quickly be overlooked or forgotten. For example, in 2000 the Gorilla Organization and the Pole Institute did a series of interviews with coltan miners and their families. The interviews were all available online, yet other authors had overlooked them, possibly thinking that the findings were no longer relevant. As it turns out, these interviews were a treasure trove of under-analysed qualitative data that remains pertinent today.
The second lesson is that notwithstanding the scope for further research on coltan mining in Congo, such as anthropological or micro-economic work, geographical proximity to a mining site neither produces all the answers nor generates the most important political questions about natural resources. In fact, being close to the mining ‘action’ can hinder analysis. Reflection from afar, on the other hand, can sometimes generate the best questions and the clearest answers.
Michael Nest is an independent scholar and the author of Coltan.
Posted 304 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: cosmopolitanism, realism, International Relations, political philosophy / 0 Comments
This book opens up a needed space between cosmopolitan moral and political thought and the way in which international relations are theoretically framed.
Since the end of the Cold War, the cosmopolitan moral principle has informed, to a greater or lesser extent, the terms through which both states and peoples argue about basic human needs and basic forms of human solidarity in the face of global issues. As soon as one speaks, for example, about human rights, about the ‘conscience of humanity’, about global solidarity and cooperation, about a universal aspiration towards freedom (however then defined), about a minimal universal culture, one is necessarily postulating norms that transcend the empirical borders of the world. Although there is much disagreement about the breadth and depth of these cosmopolitan norms, they are, since 1945, historically embedded in a globalized world, underpinned by material interdependence. The question that the book addresses is accordingly, what are the most interesting ways of articulating the relationship between these norms and our understandings of the force-field of international relations?
I take as my way in the three schools of international relations theory that are constitutively the most resistant to universalism in this field: realism, Marxism and its avatars, and postmodern IR thought. Through a series of ‘debates’ between the basic assumptions of these schools, and their consequent critiques of contemporary cosmopolitanisms, on the one hand, and a cosmopolitan response to these assumptions and critiques, on the other, I advance a sophisticated cosmopolitan position that assumes contemporary dilemmas among morality, legality and politics. In doing so, the book shows both the importance and difficulty of relating the present theoretical and practical interest in cosmopolitan thought to international political dynamics.
From out of these three debates I draw several conclusions. These conclusions are both particular responses to the assumptions of each school and more general. With regard to the realist critique of cosmopolitanism, I argue for a cosmopolitan realism of the lesser violence: that is, the need for states to assume, in their own interest, minimal cosmopolitan commitments and to work for a global public realm in which practices of domination and violence are reduced as much as possible. With regard to the Marxist critique of cosmopolitanism, I argue that endogenous development strategies can only be properly articulated through global governance structures given the global reach of the capitalist system. With regard to postmodern criticisms of cosmopolitan universalism (particularly in the context of the human rights regime) I argue that legal cosmopolitan norms form the basis for protection from violence, but that international legal proceduralism must be supplemented by political argument and justification (the most recent example of this need is the intervention in Libya). These three arguments criss-cross and dovetail each other, allowing me to expound a general theoretical position that foregrounds, between norm and experience, the importance of cosmopolitan political judgment.
With the ongoing pluralization of power centers in the world, some theorists of IR argue that cosmopolitan liberal norms are in decline (and that, given the necessary complicity between universalism and imperialism, this is a good thing). On the basis of my understandings of a politics of the lesser violence and cosmopolitan political judgment, I argue, rather, that the ideological future is open and uncertain, and that a sophisticated cosmopolitan liberalism could help to orient the world and its plural power structures to less domination and violence during this century. The book constitutes, consequently, an engaged argument in political ethics. By confronting political theory with the specificities of international relations and, inversely, it seeks simultaneously to channel cosmopolitan theory towards the requirements of political agency and to re-orient political agency towards global vision and global leadership.
Richard Beardsworth is Professor of Political Philosophy at the American University of Paris and the author of Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory.
Posted 304 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Africa, development, resources / 0 Comments
Foreign direct investment in Africa has risen six-fold since 2000 on an annualised basis, according to the publication African Business. African trade is also booming and these interlinked processes are indicative of the “new scramble for Africa” which is currently underway. While in the 1990s Africa was primarily conceived of in the capitals of the great powers as a security threat or problem, the growing scarcity of critical natural resources globally, particularly in the context of rapid Asian growth means that the continent is once again central to the interests of great and emerging powers in both economic and political terms.
My book examines the drivers of renewed economic interest in Africa, the strategies different actors from the Chinese state to small foreign-owned companies employ, and what the impacts of these engagements are on African poverty, politics, labour and its environment. What is currently happening on the continent will shape its development prospects in the coming decades. I hope you enjoy the book and would be happy to discuss it with you on the Polity blog.
Pádraig Carmody is senior lecturer in geography at Trinity College Dublin and the author of The New Scramble for Africa.
Posted 303 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: cosmopolitanism, realism, International Relations, political philosophy / 0 Comments
After I finished making my case for an alternative interpretation of the “realist” school of international theory during a panel at the recent International Studies Association meeting in Montreal, an audience member posed an important question: who cares?
Why bother challenging the dominant interpretation of realism as an institutionally complacent and conservative theory of international politics? What do we gain by underlining international realism’s original reformist and politically progressive impulses?
I responded by offering two answers. Both are deeply political.
In the US (and elsewhere), dominant foreign policy elites have effectively monopolized the category of “realism” and thereby married it at the hip to many troublesome foreign policies.
Condoleeza Rice, for example, has frequently described herself as a disciple of Hans Morgenthau. Innumerable neoconservative pundits (e.g. Charles Krauthammer) like to describe themselves as realists as well. The result is that the concept of “realism” now conveniently serves as an intellectual cover for much of what passes for right-wing foreign policy.
Realism represents too rich and multifaceted a tradition to be left in the hands of the political right or, for that matter, even the centrist US foreign policy establishment (as exemplified by journals like Foreign Affairs). Reclaiming that tradition represents an important political task.
We need to show that the Emperor has no clothes: the right-leaning defenders of deeply problematic foreign policies who wrap themselves in the realist tradition do so only by distorting what that tradition is all about. So we need to make it clear that realism is a deeply contested category whose core attributes can and should be mobilized by progressives who seek far-reaching global change and ultimately, global democracy.
The second political target of my reinterpretation of realism is located on the left. Many of them have become enamored of cosmopolitan international theory; I sympathize with their efforts. But the fact of the matter is that cosmopolitans have simply not done justice to some theoretical matters about which politically progressive realists (e.g., Carr, Herz, Morgenthau, and Niebuhr) thought long and hard – most importantly perhaps, the question of power.
In particular, the realist view of robust statehood as ultimately essential to successful global governance remains intellectually vital. Too often, cosmopolitans have subscribed to anemic ideas of “global governance without government.”
Realism can show us how and why this is a mistake. If we are serious about global governance, we will need to consider the possibility of a political and institutional aspiration that too often remains a taboo even among the most ambitious cosmopolitans: world government. Even if it is at best a long-term aspiration, a properly conceived model of world government potentially remains an attractive goal.
Posted 304 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Arab media, al jazeera, Gutenberg, printing / 0 Comments
Several researchers of the Arab print media inaccurately claim that Islam prohibited printing and assume that printing began with Gutenberg. Thus they begin their study of Arab print media from the period of what I consider to be the dark age of the Arab world, the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter on Arab printing corrects this inaccuracy and suggests that Arabs knew printing before Gutenberg and that printing (block printing) flourished during the earlier periods of Islam.
In discussing the development of early Arab newspapers the book also focuses on the geo-political factors that affected the development of the popular Arab papers. Earlier works often give attention to the official papers.
Nabil Dajani is Professor of Communications at the American University of Beirut and the co-author of Arab Media.
Posted 304 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: british politics, miliband, cameron, AV, alternative vote / 0 Comments
Labour leader Ed Miliband called it ‘people power’. Hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets of central London to protest against the coalition government’s programme of public sector cuts. Anti-capitalist and anarchist groups may have grabbed the headlines – much to the dismay of Miliband and the trade unions that organised the day of action – but was this a turning point for Labour in its fight to get back to power?
I doubt it. Putting aside whether voters support government cuts – they’re split – the real problem Labour and all British political parties face is the rise of the ‘undecideds’. These are voters who can’t makeup their minds which party to support – and sometimes switch their support between and across elections. This is a long-term trend. Voters have become less partisan in their politics, more willing to make political choices. This has fragmented the British party system, underpinning the rise of a more multi-party politics across the UK. Parties on the ideological edge (notably UKIP, BNP and the Greens) as well as mainstream nationalist parties (SNP, Plaid), are in the political running (and in some cases, in power). These smaller parties, it should be added, have also got their act together on the campaign trail.
This doesn’t make life easy for the traditional big beasts of British politics – Labour and the Conservatives. Not only do they have to fight the resurgent Liberal Democrats, but also watch their backs for the so-called minor parties. At the ballot box, British political parties have to reach those parts of the electorate other parties certainly can reach. And if first past the post is replaced by the alternative vote in elections for Westminster (the referendum is next month), what is called ‘catch-all’ politics will intensify as parties seek the second and third preferences of voters as they strain for the magic 50 per cent line.
For Labour, then, getting mainly hard core Labour supporters onto the streets of London against a Tory-led government is the easy bit. Getting ‘the people’ (read: voters with all kinds of different interests and views) on Labour’s side is much harder. Ask Tony Blair.
Stephen Driver is head of the Department of Social Sciences at Roehampton University and the author of
Understanding British Party Politics.
Posted 346 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Sociology; Social Policy; Political Science / 0 Comments
Welfare rather than happiness or feeling good
In a time when talk of happiness and subjective well-being is all around, it is good to remind ourselves that there is another way of conceiving of human well-being. I make a strong case for the concept of welfare in this context. This concept’s original and enduring meanings lie in the distribution of material resources and the institutions and practices that govern access to resources and responses to inequalities.
As it has developed, welfare has become a concept attuned also to trajectories over time, inquiring of how people fare as their lives unfold. The term welfare has to some extent been corrupted – its dominant public register in the US, for instance, has come to be the behaviours of those receiving public benefits which have been interpreted usually in a negative fashion. This is a particular reading that robs the concept of its universal application. For, as an idea, welfare taps into the nature of social divisions and opposing philosophical and political positions on how to address fundamental issues about the good society.
One can see why concepts like happiness and well-being appeal. They have a ready reference to individuality and subjectivity on the one hand and agency and self-fulfilment on the other. All of these are central references in a time when such a vacuous notion as the 'big society' is mooted and even seriously entertained in some quarters. Welfare appears too passive in a context in which people are supposed to be self provisioning and too oriented to subsistence and minimum standards for those who prefer to see the world as a universe unbounded in riches and opportunities open to us all.
None of the new concepts is superior to welfare in describing the human condition and setting up an ideal to which we should aspire. I would argue that happiness and well-being are economically and politically shallow - they are too focused on the mind-sets and emotions of individuals and conceive of social and economic factors mainly as background conditions affecting individual functioning. Society becomes little more than the ‘atmosphere’. Moreover, there is no moral register in happiness - fairness and justice have no place in it and the concept has no terms to deal with unfairness or injustice in underlying conditions which lead to inequalities in the distribution of, among other things, happiness or chances therefor.
Welfare provides elements of the big picture that are missing from other concepts and approaches. In particular, it has a clear view of social progress which extends way beyond how happy individuals feel or a happy society. Moreover, welfare’s strong focus on objective conditions is to be underlined in a period when social structural factors are under-emphasised in policy, theory and research but count hugely in people’s everyday lives. We should note, with some irony, that as the conditions of people’s lives deteriorate, public discourse is being directed more and more to their mind-sets, emotions and feelings.
Let’s get serious and bring discussions of welfare back to the table I say.
Mary Daly, author of Welfare, is Professor of Sociology at Queen's University, Belfast.
Posted 346 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Literature; German Literature; European Literature; Cultural Studies / 0 Comments
Modern German Literature is a case study of literature as a cultural and spiritual resource in modern societies. It is as much about literature, as a variety of social and artistic practices, as it is about Germany. It is neither literary criticism nor literary history but something in between. It asks what kind of resource many different kinds of writing in German from many different parts of Europe have been in the period one could roughly describe as ‘modernity’. I understand this to mean the part of European history that goes from the high tide of the Enlightenment in the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the Cold War in 1989, when it finally ceased to be possible to believe that capitalism meant freedom simply because it was not state-controlled.
Beginning with the emergence of German language literature on the international stage, the book plays down the familiar labels and periods of German literary history in favour of the explanatory force of international cultural impact and symbiosis. It explores, for instance, how specifically German and Austrian conditions shaped major contributions to European literary culture such as Romanticism and the ‘language scepticism’ of the early twentieth century.
From the First World War until reunification in 1990, Germany’s defining experiences have been ones of catastrophe. Abandoning chronology, the book provides an overview of the different ways in which German literature responded to historical disaster. They are, firstly, modernism (the ‘literature of negation’), secondly, literature under totalitarian regimes (the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic), and thirdly, the various creative strategies and evasions of the capitalist democratic multi-medial cultures of the Weimar and Federal Republics.
The book aims at a balance between textual analysis and cultural theory, hoping to combine intellectual independence with usefulness to readers who wish to learn about a body of significant European literature.
D r Michael Minden is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German and Dutch at Jesus College, University of Cambridge.
Posted 346 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Politics; Philosophy; Political Philosophy; Human Rights; Justice / 0 Comments
Michael Freeman, author of a new second edition of Human Rights, looks at the boundaries of the concept.
The practice and academic study of human rights have been dominated by lawyers. Respect for human rights depends on the rule of 
law and thus lawyers have co ntributed, and continue to contribute, much to the formulation and im plementation of human rights. Yet there are obviously important political, social, cultural and economic dimensions to human rights. Why are governments so inconsistent (some would say hypocritical) in their approach to human rights? What social conditions are favourable and unfavourable to delivering such human rights as those to health, education and an adequate standard of living? What are the relative contributions of lawyers and soc ial movements to the promotion of human rights? Are there important cultures that resist the human rights message? If so, how should human rights supporters respond to their challenge? Is respect for multiculturalism compatible with defending the human rights of women, children and sexual minorities? Which economic strategies are most likely to promote development with respect for human rights? Should the powerful international econom ic institutions – such as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation – do more to promote human rights? Should the academic economics profession take human rights more seriously? Should human rights activists take economics more seriously? These are some of the questions I address in the second edition of my book, Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary Approach. In addition, I give an historical account of the development of human rights with some original elements; most standard accounts, for example, begin their histories of human rights in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ignore the important debates about inherent and universal rights that took place in the late Middle Ages. It is now commonplace to talk of `three generations’ of rights: civil and political, economic and social, and various `solidarity’ rights. This is unhistorical. It is worth knowing that economic rights and the rights of indigenous peoples were among the first human rights to attract the attention of philosophers and theologians. So, many disciplines other than that of law can deepen our understanding of human rights.
Michael Freeman is Reader in Government at the University of Essex.
Posted 374 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Politics; Parliament; Conservative Party; Government / 0 Comments
Tim Bale, author of The Conservatives: from Thatcher to Cameron, reflects.
To hear some people talk you’d think that Andy Coulson, by signing on as David Cameron’s Head of Communications back in mid-2007 had single-handedly saved the Tory Party from having to face a snap election which it looked sure to lose. Between then and his resignation in the face of persistent public interest in his role in the phone-hacking scandal engulfing his former employer, the News of the World, he was apparently the only man standing between a leadership supposedly incapable of understanding how the other half lives and an electorate of inverted snobs. There maybe a grain of truth in all this – Coulson undoubtedly sharpened up the media operations of a Party not exactly renowned for looking or sounding much like the country it aims to govern. But it seriously overstates how much social representativeness and presentational tactics matter to political success. Far more important is getting the fundamental strategy right. This has long been David Cameron’s strongpoint. Whether, however, it remains so is worth debating.
When Cameron assumed the leadership of the Conservative Party at the end of 2005 it had done little or nothing to overcome the negative perceptions that had seen it lose three elections on the trot. Those perceptions had begun to build up even before 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was deposed by her colleagues. For fifteen years, however, the Party remained wedded to the belief that it had somehow won‘the battle of ideas’ and therefore didn’t really need to change its tune. This might not have mattered had Labour not worked so hard to pull itself back into the centre-ground and then found itself a credible leader: John Major, after all, was able, after taking over from Thatcher, to win the 1992 election pretty convincingly – at least in terms of vote share if not parliamentary seats. But once Tony Blair took over, and was able to persuade voters that he could deliver both a dynamic economy and a commitment to renewing Britain’s crumbling health and education systems, the Tories were in deep trouble. Ideologically incapable of appreciating just how far to the right they were stranded – and individually and institutionally incapable of doing much about it even if they had ‘got it’ – a succession of Conservative leaders (Hague, Duncan Smith, and Howard) virtually gave up trying to fight Labour on electorally-crucial issues like the economy and public services. Instead, they tried (spurred on by their so-called friends in Britain’s highly partisan print media) to makethe most of issues like law and order, Europe, and immigration, where they could argue they were more in tune with public opinion.
Cameron’s insight was to realise that Conservative leads in these areas were virtually guaranteed and that ‘banging on’ about them not only added little to overall levels of support for the Party but actually had a negative impact, reinforcing impressions – especially among liberal middle class voters – that the Tories were narrow-minded, mean-spirited, out of date and out of touch. He also understood that the Party, at least in opposition, had to ‘concede and move on’ when it came to health and education. The same desire to signal a return to the centre-ground even extended to the economy – at least until the global downturn messed up everyone’s calculations. Cameron, having done a great deal to ‘decontaminate’ the Conservative brand by stressing his commitment to the NHS, his relaxed attitudes on many social issues, and his concern for the environment – and having slowly and carefully brought back into the mix hardy perennials like crime, immigration and taxation – then took the risky decision to take a more hawkish line on the deficit. The gamble that voters would appreciate a little more honesty about the ‘austerity’ needed to balance the books wasn’t wholly misplaced, but nor did it pay off as handsomely as he had hoped. Labour may have been incapable of winning the election in 2010, especially having decided to stick with Gordon Brown. But it could still frighten enough voters about Tory cuts to prevent Cameron making it back into Downing Street without the assistance of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.
Once in power, however, Cameron has decided to play an even riskier game, so much so that it’s no longer clear whether his strategic sense remains as keen as it once was. The cuts announced since the formation of the coalition may be an economic gamble – testament to the fact that Conservatives remain as convinced now as they ever were that shrinking the state will energise the economy. But the biggest gamble is political. A Conservative Prime Minister who failed to win a general election outright because he was unable to persuade enough people to trust his party has chosen (like Thatcher in 1979) to risk confirming their suspicions rather than (as, say, Churchill had been determined to do after1951) allaying their fears. It worked for her because she made damn sure, at least before the poll tax fiasco, that she left the middle class welfare state untouched and because she could bank on enough residual support in the North to see her through. Cameron, on the other hand, is letting ‘middle England’ fend for itself, while a large part of the North (and of course most of Scotland) is a Tory-free zone, meaning he will need a bigger vote share than Thatcher did to maintain a working majority at Westminster. Even if Cameron finds a Coulson Mark II, then, it’s hard to see how together they can do much about these inconvenient truths.
All this presents Labour with an opportunity. Whether it’s one that its leader Ed Miliband is able to exploit may depend, at least in part, on whether his party can avoid making some of the same mistakes as the Conservatives. It has to listen to voters more than to its own members and the media. It has to avoid the complacency that comes from winning second order contests, like by-elections, local elections, and elections in Wales, Scotland and Europe. And all this can only come about if it acknowledges the scale and the scope of public disillusion with what it had done and become in government. In opposition at least, you are a price-taker rather than a price-maker: deprived of the opportunity to implement policies that deliver the goods to key sections of the electorate, and having used up in office whatever chance you may have had of securing a long-term shift in public perceptions, you simply have to go with the grain. That means giving up, at least for a while, some of your most deeply-held beliefs and admitting – genuinely rather than through gritted teeth – that your rivals may be more in touch with public opinion than you’ve been. That’s democracy, and – as the Conservatives took so long to remember – parties which fail to meet the electorate at least half way, are doomed to failure until they do.
Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex.
Posted 430 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Philosophy; Continental Philosophy; Politics; Social Science; Humanities / 0 Comments
David West on the new edition of Continental Philosophy: An Introduction
To set out to write something as ambitious as an introduction to continental philosophy might be thought unwise, to say the least. It is, of course, only possible to write an introduction to such a broad and diverse tradition – or as some would insist, a motley array of traditions – by focusing on the most important figures and ideas. This means inevitably dealing more cursorily with some others. The unavoidable choices made on the way are, no doubt, always controversial.
But even a necessarily incomplete account of continental philosophy makes it easier to access the most diverse thinkers by providing a kind of map of the whole tradition. One major aim of Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, therefore, is to present major thinkers and ideas in a systematic (but not necessarily synthetic) way. In other words, philosophers are considered through their relationships to one another, even if their views do not necessarily all ‘add up’ to some greater truth. In broad terms, continental philosophers are considered in terms of their critical but varying stances toward Enlightenment or scientific rationalism and European modernity.
Adopting this approach, it is possible to cast light not only on important individual philosophers and their ideas but also on the broader trajectory of continental philosophy. As a result, it is also much easier to understand the point of different approaches – to grasp what these philosophers are doing with all those ideas and arguments. How else, after all, can we begin to understand what philosophy really is? Surprisingly some accounts of philosophy seem to lose sight of this fundamental question – as if it were enough just to list the fundamental questions of philosophy and then some of the most popular answers to these questions.
The systematic approach is the ultimate justification for the particular selection of thinkers in this introduction. But even if some thinkers are left out or, more often, not treated in as much detail as some would like, the overall account should still help to understand their fundamental concepts. Ideas of reason or rationality, knowledge, history and power, mind and body, emotion, experience, and understanding are just some of these key ideas. The concept of philosophy itself is, of course, inevitably at stake both in the very definition of a continental tradition of philosophy as well as in the arguments between different approaches within that tradition.
A number of ‘classic’ thinkers and ideas are essential points of reference for other thinkers in the continental tradition and often in so-called analytical tradition as well (for a brief explanation of this distinction have a look at the introduction). Works of continental philosophy are rarely without some significant intellectual relationship to pivotal thinkers like Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl and Sartre – even (and perhaps especially) when they attack them.
However, on an encouraging note, pointing to all of the numerous family resemblances – and family disputes – within continental philosophy shouldn’t be taken to imply that you can’t understand one philosopher without understanding all his or her sources and influences. That view leads rapidly to an infinite (or at least very lengthy) regress. What is certainly true is that we will understand more recent philosophers better if we also understand something of what earlier philosophers have thought. So this approach can be taken in a much more encouraging way - the many connections between different thinkers mean that understanding any one significant thinker throws light on many others. Rather than facing the potentially infinite task of understanding predecessors in order to understand successors, we discover instead that on turning to a previously unknown thinker you already know quite a lot.
All that said, it might still be thought that to attempt a second edition of such an ambitious work looks (with apologies to Oscar Wilde) very much like foolishness. The main justification for undertaking such a work – for re-opening what amounts to a considerable can of worms – is, of course, the fact that continental philosophy continues to change, sometimes in quite radical ways. To reflect some of these changes, I’ve added to this new edition a full-length chapter on continental philosophy in the twenty-first century. This chapter focuses on Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and a number of other related thinkers.
The thinkers discussed in the new chapter, who turn in a variety of ways towards more political concerns (what they sometimes call ‘the political’), often draw on the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. So I’ve also added a new section on these thinkers in Chapter 4. All these additions reflect the fact that although postmodernism and associated debates (dealt with at the end of Chapter 7) are still important, they can no longer be regarded as the central and defining focus of current continental philosophy. Other than that I have (I must admit) made minor additions and revisions too numerous to mention – which taken together amount to substantial evidence of the fatal temptations involved in rewriting what once seemed finished and ‘final’.
David West is reader in political science at the Australian National University.
Posted 451 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Peace Studies; Conflict Resolution; Politics; International Relations / 0 Comments
Denis Sandole, author of Peacebuilding, blogs on the synergistic partnerships necessary to eliminate violent conflict.
Other than finding it extremely difficult to say 'no' to Dr. Louise Knight, Polity's senior acquisitions editor, who invited me to participate in Polity's Series on War and Conflict in the Modern World, I was attracted to write Peacebuilding: Preventing Violent Conflict in a Complex World, by the, perhaps, arrogant assumption that I could make a contribution to solving the kinds of problems that citizens and political leaders alike around the world are confronting more and more with each passing day. These are the kinds of problems that theTurkish-American social psychologist Muzafer Sheriff implied years ago were linked to his innovative concept of superordinate goals: problems that could not be solved by any one actor alone but only by the coordinated efforts of multi-level, multi-sectoral actors workingtogether in synergistic partnerships.
Hence, for a comprehensive, macro enterprise such as Peacebuilding to be effective, it must address climate change, pandemics, population growth, ecological degradation, poverty, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, state failure, and terrorism, among others, operationally as well as conceptually in any given pre-, during-, or post-conflict situation because these may be among the complex, interconnected"hidden drivers" of the conflict in question.
One of the major reasons why Peacebuilding has not been too successful up until now is because the underlying, deep-rooted causes and conditions of violent conflict have tended not to be addressed by a fatigued but also impatient international community. This volume makes a contribution to at least sensitize us to that need and to how it can be addressed.
Dennis Sandole is Professor of Conflict Resolution and International Relations at George Mason University.
Posted 470 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Social Theory; Cultural Theory; Philosophy; Politics; Media Studies / 0 Comments
Paul Taylor, author of Zizek and the Media, blogs on an unlikely academic celebrity.
Slavoj Z
izek is a discombobulating tour de force who, more than any other living intellectual, embodies “the Heineken effect” - he refreshes the parts other theorists cannot reach. Love him or loathe him, Zizek and the Media demonstrates that the surprising success of such an unlikely academic celebrity, is ironically due to the stubbornness with which he has kept faith with two deeply unfashionable influences - Marxism and psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, these approaches are profoundly out-of-favour at a time when they have never had so much diagnostic accuracy.
Addressing such suggestive Zizekian concepts as the chocolate laxative, this book shows how he exposes media cant by uncovering the miscellaneous forms of denial and repression that are used to avoid acknowledging a series of fundamental political contradictions at the heart of the capitalist project.
Zizek's iconoclastic blend of high theory and filthy humour tends to produce polarized responses among his now huge international audience - either zealous admiration or po-faced distaste. To move beyond both these sorts of reaction, Zizek and the Media examines the underlying significance of his provocatively perverse humour by subscribing to Todd McGowan's belief that, “the path to seriousness is strewn with jokes”. From the preface onwards, the theoretical importance of Zizek's comic obscenity is tackled directly. There is a consistent focus upon the way in which his scholarly analysis and media performances combine form (provocation) and content (abstract theory) in order to uncover, with Zizek's unique skill, the misleadingly obvious ways in which today's media achieves its ideological effects. It is shown to be at its most ideologically dangerous when it appears to be functioning normally. From Kung Fu Panda to Forrest Gump, Zizek and the Media systematically exposes the darker side of the superficially benign to show that whatever life's secret ingredient really is ... it is definitely not a box of chocolates.
Notwithstanding “the Marx Brother” comedy he provides along the way, Zizek and the Media argues that he is a Hegelian jester with a deadly serious political point. Like the Joker from The Dark Knight, Zizek's ultimate political point is no laughing matter. To quote the final chapter's paraphrasing of that film's police commissioner James Gordon: ‘Zizek is the theory-hero Gotham doesn't deserve ... but the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he's not our hero … he's a voluble guardian, a watchful provocateur ... a dark knight of the dark night of the soul.’
Posted 486 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Globalization; Food; Security Studies; International Relations; Environmental Studies / 0 Comments
Bryan McDonald blogs on food security in a global age 
From food riots in Mozambique, Egypt and Haiti to tainted food recalls in the United States and China, questions of food quantity and quality have emerged as critical issues of concern for states, international organizations, and individuals.
Globalization and global change have amplified traditional food security concerns such as chronic malnutrition but have also given rise to new forms of challenges from biotechnology, bioterrorism, and emerging infectious diseases. Food security challenges are made more complex in that they impact and interact with other global security concerns such as reducing conflict and instability, maintaining economic prosperity, and ensuring human rights.
Food related events in recent years highlight the rise of an interconnected global food system that transcends national boundaries: tainted milk powder from China was found in products as far away as the Netherlands, challenges of chronic hunger and obesity have reached crisis levels in many parts of the world, and rising global food prices have fueled unrest and hardship in more than sixty countries in just the past few years.
While global food networks provide opportunities for improving human health and well-being, a full examination reveals considerable challenges to successfully navigating the new global food security landscape to ensure that all people have access to sufficient safe and nutritious food necessary to lead active and healthy lives.
Today’s global food problems emerge out of a complex mix of economic, environmental, political, and social factors that impact what ends up (or doesn’t end up) on people’s plates. These new forms of threat and vulnerability have become increasingly clear to policymakers, experts, and publics. What is less clear is how to effectively address these challenges and improve food security.
Food Security provides a detailed and comprehensive introduction to the major issues impacting global food security including detailed discussions of the need to ensure nutrition, manage global environmental change, and optimize food safety. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in security studies, international politics, and environmental studies as well as general readers who are seeking new perspectives on global food issues.
Posted 506 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: political philosophy; politics; philosophy; J.S.Mill / 0 Comments
Dale E. Miller, author of J. S. Mill ,sheds new light on the work of a classic thinker
Mine is hardly the first book on the Victorian philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, and someone might well wonder why another is needed. Part of what I take to make my book distinctive is apparent from the table of contents.
I address a broad sweep of Mill’s views, as opposed to focusing on a single text. I attempt to show how Mill’s utilitarian moral philosophy, his liberalism, his theory of democracy and his views on economic organization fit together into a coherent whole.
In order to explore the topics that I cover in sufficient detail, while keeping the entire discussion to a tractable length,I do forgo any detailed discussion of Mill’s work in other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology, logic or metaphysics.
Nevertheless, I say enough about these topics that readers will have a sense of the foundations of his practical philosophy. In my chapter on the‘proof’ of the principle of utility, for instance, I explain how Mill’s much-maligned argument for the claim that happiness is desirable as an end is analogous to his vindication of the faculty of memory.
Needless to say, I believe that my book is also distinguished by the interpretation of Mill that it presents. This is not to suggest that I offer a radical rereading. Mill is a sufficiently lucid writer that we cannot have entirely misunderstood him unti lnow.
Still, his writings do present us with many interpretive quandaries. Mill scholars disagree about how he conceives of happiness, what he takes to distinguish right actions from wrong ones, what account he means to offer of the notion of harm, whether he is an elitist or an egalitarian and whether he is a socialist.
In brief, I argue that
- Mill is a consistent hedonist who conceives of happiness in terms of pleasure and freedom from pain and who conceives of pleasure and pain as mental states.
- He holds what we would today call a ‘rule-utilitarian’ theory of morality, according to which an action is wrong if it would maximise happiness for people generally to‘internalise’ a rule that forbids it, that is, to feel guilty about breaking such a rule.
- He understands harm — the pivotal concept of On Liberty — in terms of damage or a definite risk of damage to one’s interests, where interests bear a (very loose) resemblance to Rawlsian ‘primary goods’.
- His nuanced theory of democracy incorporates elitist and egalitarian elements, with neither clearly predominating. This is most clearly reflected in his endorsement of a plural voting scheme in which (nearly) everyone gets a vote but the better educated get more votes. (Contrary to several other recent commentators, I show that Mill’s endorsement of plural voting is not half-hearted, that it is not withdrawn and that it is not given merely to the idea of using plural voting as a temporary expedient.)
- Mill is a socialist only by his own overly broad definition of ‘socialism’. He is best viewed as an advocate of competition and limited (if not minimal) government who happens to believe both that market economies will spontaneously move in the direction of employee ownership and that this is a pleasing prospect.
In the book’s concluding chapter, I argue that Mill is a utopian — although not, I hasten to add, in the pejorative sense of the word.
Mill is a utopian inasmuch as he believes that it may someday be possible for nearly everyone to lead a life that is genuinely happy, that is, that contains little pain and is rich in the best and most valuable pleasures.
Moreover, he believes we must move society toward this end if happiness is to be maximised. While some interpreters may find Mill’s more utopian moments excessively romantic, I take this thread to serve an important unifying purpose within his moral, social and political thought.
Furthermore, I take the attractiveness of this vision of a possible future to account for much of Mill’s appeal as a philosopher, and I do not think that it can be dismissed out of hand as utterly unrealistic.
Finally, I hope that my book is distinguished by its ability to appeal to diverse groups of readers. My ambition while writing was two-fold.
On the one hand, I wanted to write a scholarly book that would be of interest to Mill specialists, one that defends a controversial interpretation by drawing on a wide range of Mill’s works and engaging with the secondary literature.
At the same time, though, I aimed to keep the discussion accessible and lively enough that it would be suitable for advanced undergraduates (and I am gratified that everyone who was kind enough to provide a blurb for the book’s cover commented favourably on its readability).
If the book has something to offer to these very different groups, it should have something to offer everyone in between, such as someone who already knows one of Mill’s texts well but wants to see where that work fits in the larger picture.
Posted 514 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Literature; Politics; French; Cultural History; Europe / 0 Comments
Alison Finch, author of French Literature, posts on the relationship between writing and power.
I’ve always been keenly interested in both politics and literature. But when I was an undergraduate studying French literature at Cambridge, these two passions were in separate parts of my life. I was active in student politics, but as far as my studies went, it was rather frowned on to depart from the text in front of you.
The Cambridge English Faculty’s stress on ‘practical criticism’ was also important in the Modern Languages Faculty, where you were encouraged to see the text as a ‘well-wrought urn’. You had to know what was called ‘the background’, but if you started to strip down literature for its ideas, you were reminded that any political pamphlet had ideas; what was unique to good literature was that it expressed things beautifully.
The notion that you might study a ‘second-rate’ novel by a woman just because it was by a woman was anathema. Gradually, that changed. Critics began to emphasise that the form of even great art couldn’t be divorced from the conditions of its production, and that literature could change readers’ political consciousness.
It could reinforce stereotypes, or it could powerfully suggest socially radical scenarios. And it could do so through a range of tones and techniques: tragic, comic, quietly ironic, metaphorical.
I found these developments exciting – without them I could not have written my last book, Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France. At last, a way to bring together my political and literary interests! So when Polity asked me to contribute French Literature to itsCultural History of Literature series, I jumped at the offer.
One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about writing the book has been the chance to show that even exquisite and apparently highly individual style has roots in politics of the time. That is particularly the case in France, which of all European countries has most valued fine wit, virtuoso literary patterning and the role of the intellectual.
Indeed, there are three French words that demonstrate this. Esprit can’t be properly translated into English: it means spirit, wit and mind all at once. Nor can moraliste: not ‘moralizer’, but he or she who comments on social and psychological behaviour non-judgmentally, wryly, compassionately: see how droll and paradoxical we humans are! And finally, philosophe does not mean ‘philosopher’ in the Anglo-American usage. It means ‘thinker’, one who participates in political debate and who may also – this brings me back to my main theme – compose drama, fiction, even verse.
The philosophes, at least, saw no contradiction between the writing of literature and the wish to intervene in politics. And while this has not always made ruling elites happy, those elites have, at almost all stages of French history, understood and promoted the international prestige of great writing as part of French ‘exceptionalism’.
So French literature is a particularly rewarding subject for a ‘cultural history’ – and I’m glad that, among many other attractions, writing the book enabled me to say what I think is politically and artistically unique about France’s stellar writers.
Posted 584 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Asian American Politics; Politics; American Studies / 0 Comments
The 2010 midterm elections may have a critical impact on Barack Obama’s political future. What role will Asian Americans play in shaping the President Obama’s fate?
Almost twenty years ago, Don Nakanishi suggested that Asian Americans could become an important swing vote in California. More recently, S.B. Woo formed “80-20,” a group trying to get Asian Americans to vote as a bloc to increase their political influence, but the effort has had limited success so far. Do Asian American votes matter?
Some suggest that Asian Americans are too few and too diverse to make up an important voting bloc. Outside of Hawai‘i, where they are thedominant ethnoracial group, Asian Americans are usually less than 10 percent of the population. Even in California, they make up only about 13 percent of the population, and their diversity makes it doubtful that they will be a potent voting bloc even in the Golden State (AsianAmericans do hold considerable power in some local elections).
However, a recent Gallup poll suggests that Asian Americans may still wield political leverage. According to Gallup, Asian American are more likely to label themselves moderate than Americans as a whole (46 to 36percent), and more so than any of the other major ethnoracial groups. Interestingly, Gallup also reports that no other ethnoracial group except African American is as likely to identify as Democrat as Asian Americans. What can explain these findings?
It’s possible that one part ofthe explanation is religious. The Gallup report finds lower levels of religiosity among Asian Americans, although cultural differences might mean that Gallup’s measure misses some aspects of Asian American religiosity. Even so, the Gallup finding suggests that the increasing influence of Christian religious conservatives within Republican Party may not be as attractive to AsianAmericans.
If this is correct, Asian Americans might still become an important swing vote. While the Republican Party has moved to theright, the endangered species known as “moderate Republicans” might look to Asian Americans as potential supporters. Economically conservative but socially moderate candidates—characteristicof moderate Republicans—might appeal to many Asian American voters, and states with higher numbers of Asian Americans—such as California and New York—are also ones where small bands of moderate Republicans have continued to exist, and sometimes even thrive.
In addition, socially moderate candidates might be able to rally large numbers of Asian Americans in cases where immigration and immigrants are a flashpoint. Although anti-immigration voices are increasingly influential within the Republican Party, notable exceptions remain, including former President George W. Bush, and, until recently, SenatorJohn McCain.
South Carolina Tea Party favorite Nikki Haley seems to fit this description. Although Haley has apparently dropped references to her Sikh background as she has risen to favorite status in the gubernatorial campaign, her campaign has stressed economic conservatism and open government, not the social issuesof the religious right.
While Asian Americans are unlikely to represent a powerful national voting bloc, there is no such thingas a national election in the United States. As every experienced campaign manager knows,the president is elected in fifty different state campaigns, where the key challenge is to assemble enough victories to add to 270 electoral votes. Congressional campaigns are still usually dominated by local concerns, and growing numbers of Asian Americans mean an increasing number of House districts where they might wield influence. According to the 2008 American Community Survey estimates, Asian Americans make up over 30 percent of the population in four congressional districts in California (districts 12, 13, and 15, and probably also district 8).
Savvy candidates would still do well to court Asian American voters in districts where their numbers are growing. Asian Americans are growing at a faster ratethan Latinos (measured by percentage increase). Meanwhile, organizations such as APIAVote are working hard to mobilize more Asian American voters in 2010. “Raging moderates” is probably far too strong a term, but Gallup andother data suggest that Asian Americans may indeed be a force for moderation in American politics.
Posted 610 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: consumerism, consumer culture, consumption, sociology / 0 Comments
Shopping: meaningful or meaningless? It is the activity on which we in the rich nations spend most time after work and sleep, and the favourite soft target for the commentariat who regularly argue that shopping is more than emblematic of a ‘hollowed out’ society and is actually destroying the social fabric of modern ‘consumer’ societies.
Modern societies are consumer societies, as well as producer ones,and as they are also urban societies - self sufficiency is not an option.
Written against the grain of a social critique which cannot distinguish between shopping and consumerism this book shows how the activity of shopping holds us together physically, socially, psychologically, and as a community. As a ‘practice’ shopping is a mainstay of everyday life.
Shopping, the book, is essential for second and third year courses in the sociology ofeveryday life and will soon earn a place in courses in economic sociology; consumer behaviour; the life course; material culture; psycho-social studies; business studies; gender studies; cultural studies; and practical ethics.
Based on the premise that shopping is both more and less than buying, Shopping argues that to understand the activity we have to understand the meanings made and remade through it, and this can lead us to see shopping also as a‘practice’ as understood and commended by social philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Still, shopping is not normally seen in this way and Shopping explores why shopping has a ‘bad name’, how it ‘fell from grace’ and instead of being associated with thrift and good housekeeping became synonymous with being a spendthrift. Our attachment to shopping is not all selfishness, frivolity and indulgence,and going shopping is not how we spend most of our money.
Shopping explains why early shopping memories are so lasting, why we have a deep attachment to certain shops, what we learn from shopping, how it tracks us and nudges us along the life course, and why old people are culturally ‘absent’ from the high street.
Examining shopping is a way of examining culture, thus in how we shop, where we shop, why we shop, and whether we profess to like or dislike shopping, are part of the way we express ourselves but also our nationality, our class and our gender.
Shoppingchallenges many everyday assumptions about shopping as well as the popular discourse about it as the epitome of meaninglessness, before concluding with a bold and radical account of the meaning of shopping as based on a ‘deep structure’ formed from the unconscious meanings and processes evoked by the activity.
Perceptive and penetrating, imaginative and interdisciplinary, Shopping is not a text book, but makes its readers think. It is completely original, there is nothing else like it on the market and it will be controversial.
Posted 651 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: History; Architecture; Built Environment; Urban Planning / 0 Comments
What is Architectural History? is organized by five chapters. The first positions modern, academic architectural history (the architectural history of Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Riegl and their contemporaries) as a disciplinary inh
eritance of four traditions for knowing architecture as a past field. These are the presentation of architectural history in the architectural treatise, as part of the architect’s historical and technical patrimony; of the architect as an artist in history, in the biographical tradition consolidated by Vasari; of architecture as a fact of the past available for empirical study; and of architecture as part of culture, and therefore subject to the early study of cultural history. Of these, cultural history (or the cultural sciences) has arguably played a strong role in establishing the field’s disciplinarity.
Chapter two lays out a series of methods—soft methods—by which historians organize past time and relate it to the present: as a succession of styles, governed to a greater or lesser degree by concurrent historical events; as a succession of architects, subject to processes of influence and transferral; according to geo-political boundaries, recognizing that the historian can often find coherence in a field bounded by a political border or held together by a shared language; by type, comparing like with like in order to understand processes of change within comparable buildings; as a technique, finding a history in the arguably irreducible concerns of (what we can now call) architecture over a long period of time (planning, spatial formation, shelter, etc); and theme and analogy, where architecture can be held to index concerns that are not architecture’s own (or, which in turn help shape architecture as a field).
The next chapter draws upon a series of cases to consider the relation between forms of evidence and the kinds of architectural history they allow. It suggests that evidence can be procedural, contextual or conceptual in nature, each kind of evidence serving the historical subject to specific ends: from tying up loose ends in established knowledge to defining architecture historically on new grounds. Chapter four returns to the question of actuality, asking how involved architectural historians should be in the world of architectural practice. It sets up a conversation between three architectural historians of note—Zevi, Millon and Tafuri—to tease out a series of positions on this question, which are in turn informed by Croce, whose influence over the Italian discussion on this issue has been immense.
The final chapter speculates on the impact of the ‘theory moment’ on the shape and possibilities of architectural historiography in the present moment, tracing some developments that would seem to have decisively informed the outer limits of the field, its content, and the objectives of its scholars.
I would be a fool to imagine this as a definitive answer to the question What is Architectural History?, and indeed I look forward to learning from the debate that my own views will provoke.
Posted 651 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Sociology; Disability, Disabled; Social Policy / 0 Comments
A decade ago, a socio/political or ‘social model’ of disability – inspired by an understanding of the economic, political and social deprivations encountered by people with accredited impairments and labelled ‘disabled’ – was hardly visible within mainstream sociology and related disciplines. Today it stands centre stage alongside sociological explanations of racism, sexism, heterosexism and other forms of social oppression and inequality.
The last decade has witnessed a growing number of undergraduate and post-graduate courses in the general area of ‘Disability Studies’ at both the national and international levels. This has been accompanied by the establishment of specialist centres, journals and professional chairs in disability and related fields. Globally, the rise in interest in disability has been equally phenomenal. In 2010, for example, there are international Disability Studies conferences in Honolulu, Montréal, Philadelphia, and Tokyo. The UK Disability Studies Network holds its fifth international event this September at the University of Lancaster. All of which has generated considerable debate and discussion about the relevance and utility of social-model-inspired theorizing and research for the 21st century within the academy and beyond.
At the same time, social-model-inspired insights are firmly established in government and policy circles and official documents in Britain and elsewhere. Important examples in the UK include the setting up of the ‘Disability Rights Commission’ in 2000, the Cabinet Office report Improving Life Chances for Disabled People (2005) and the setting up of the Government’s ‘Office of Disability Issues’ in 2007 and their assertion that ‘by 2025 disabled people in Britain should have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life and will be respected and included as equal members of society’ (Cabinet Office 2005: 5). Similar assertions are implicit at the European level (Equal Opportunities for People with Disabilities, 2003) and internationally with the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Yet despite these initiatives, exclusion rather than inclusion into the mainstream of economic and social life remains a constant feature of the everyday lived experience of the overwhelming majority of disabled people and their families. The numbers of disabled people have increased significantly over recent years. Yet barriers to inclusion in education, employment and mainstream leisure and social activities are still prevalent. Consequently disabled people remain the ‘poorest of the poor’ in all societies. The situation is especially dire in the poorer nations of the ‘developing’ world where health and disability-related support services are almost non- existent.
Moreover, public attitudes toward the meaningful inclusion of disabled people are now seriously undermined by the recent resurgence of interest in eugenic-type solutions to the problem of disability which many claim threaten their very existence. Examples include developments in bio-medicine, prenatal screening and the growing trend toward the legalization of ‘assisted suicide’ for people with ‘serious handicaps’ and or ‘terminal illness’.
All this has created a heady mix of progress coupled with new and continuing demands for change which has inspired the new edition ten years on.
The second edition of Exploring Disability has been completely re-written and expanded to take account of these developments. As in its predecessor, the book’s 10 chapters focus on the increasingly complex relationship between theory, policy and practice and on-going struggle for meaningful change. It concludes with Chapter 9 which addresses recent ethical debates surrounding ‘Disability and the Right to Life’ and Chapter 10 which centres on global perspectives on ‘Disability and Development’. The book will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the growing controversies surrounding the struggle for human rights and equality for those sections of the population who are unfortunate enough to be labelled ‘disabled’.
Posted 686 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Philosophy, the Normative / 1 Comments
The biggest buzzword in contemporary philosophy is normativity. Volum
e after volume has been churned out defending the idea that normativity is real, indispensable, even the single metaphysical basis for everything, including nature. The past of philosophy, especially Kant and German idealism, has been reinterpreted as being about normativity. Wittgenstein has been made into a defender of normativity against naturalism. And the rejection of normativity is characterized as irrationalism because reason is a normative concept. The term has crept into social theory as well, with Habermas and his endorsement of arguments taken from Robert Brandom.
So what is normativity? The one thing it is not is the sociological fact of people behaving in a certain way, using certain terms, and believing certain things. Behavior can be contrary to the relevant norms, and beliefs can be false. Genuine, as distinct from sociological normativity is the thing that makes behavior wrong, usage genuinely meaningful, and beliefs false. Without genuine normativity, there is no meaning, no truth or falsity, no act correct or incorrect. And this has implications for Asociological accounts of the social world: without accepting the reality of genuine normativity we can't even describe the social world as we know it, because the world as we know it is constituted by these normative distinctions.
How do we know all this? Regress arguments. When we use normative language, or even reason about something, and are asked for a justification of our reasoning, we get back to a justification in the same normative language. The mere fact that people expect a promise to be fulfilled doesn't make it a promise or generate an obligation. Only a norm, one that says something like one should fulfill ones promises and justifies our saying that someone who fails to fulfil a promise has done something wrong. Merely violating our expectations is not wrong.
This, at least, is the conventional wisdom in philosophy. But philosophers ordinarily keep an eye on the shiny regress arguments and avert them from the trainwreck of the metaphysics behind it. What is this normativity that lies at the end of justification? Is there really a realm of the normative? Is it really the case that every time one uses a normative term, such as correct,and that one invokes this netherworld of normativities? Does appealing to genuine normativity actually explain anything in this world? And if so, how does this kind of explanation relate to the kinds of explanations social scientists have given of normative facts? What is the source of normativity? There seems to be little agreement, and wide variation, in answers to these questions, where there are answers at all. And when we look at the answers, they turn out to be all over the place: from a system of proprieties co-extensive with language, to presuppositions that flash into existence whenever they are needed, to the Kantian norms of reason, to the tacit rules behind the meanings of sentences, to the normativity embodied in and created by collective intentions, and on and on. This should be an embarrassment, but no one seems to be embarrassed about it.
There is also a puzzle about what exactly normativity explains. Does it explain something real that the social sciences don't explain? In the case of science, this problem has been discussed in two ways. One argues that science is a normative activity and therefore any sociology which purports to account for science must be insufficient. The other says that philosophy of science is an attempt to make normative sense of science, and that this activity does not compete with explanations of science or the course of scientific development: the project of fashioning a normative lens for science and the project of explaining what scientists believe to be true are different enterprises, that do not compete. One could extend this to other forms of normativity: there is what people say and understand, and what they believe to be correct speech; then there is what is really correct speech. Social science is concerned with the former, normativity with the latter.
Normativists say that social science explanations don't explain normativity: they are only about regularities or probabilities, expectations, perhaps, but never the normative fact, and therefore the meaning, of promising itself. Is this really true? A simple example is the explanation of Maori gift customs in Marcel Mauss's classic The Gift. The Maori think there is a spiritual substance, Hau, that attaches to a gift and must be returned by the giving of another gift. They acknowledge that hau is a mysterious thing. Nevertheless, they believe in it, and organize their social and economic life around this substance. Hau is a Good Bad Theory: good, because it co-ordinates behavior and motivates compliance; bad, because hau is an non-explanatory, false, and fails to fit into our ordinary stream of explanation, which is why the Maori treat it as a mystery.
This standard social science explanation works just fine for the Maori. It is difficult to imagine even a normativist philosopher quibbling with it. But it also raises a tough question: why don't explanations like this apply just as well to our own moral beliefs? If we think we are obligated to return a phone call, is the obligation any more real, or is our belief that this obligation is real any different than the beliefs of the Maori about hau? Isn't the whole concept of normativity suspiciously like the concept of hau, namely a false belief wrongly used to explain something that isn't there in the first place?
In a way, this one has an easy answer: there is no difference. And there is nothing mysterious that is left over after the social science explanation is given. For beliefs like this, it makes sense to be a relativist. But things appear to be different for reason or rationality itself. How can we treat that as a superstition? We rely on it. It is not a good bad theory, but a good good theory, if it is a theory at all. Here, it seems, the regress arguments work: there is no denying rationality, because justifying our denial would assume rationality, the rationality of the speaker and the person persuaded. And rationality is normative.
Or is it? Do we really appeal to rationality when we try to persuade someone or communicate with them? When we try to communicate anything, we have to say something that is intelligible. And we hope that the listener will understand it and see it is true. But that is not the same as invoking a norm. But something is right in the normativist argument. What we do need, to communicate or to reason with another person, as the normativist argument suggests, is a stopping point: an end of the regress, something that is in common that the justifying can close with. The normativist thinks these stopping points must be norms because they are not causes or data.
But there is another possibility, found both in the philosophical tradition and in the social science tradition Brentano's notion of Evidenz, which appears also in Weber in relation to empathy. Evidenz is defined by Brentano as being evident to all. The things that are evident to all though the all needs to be qualified might include steps in reasoning, or ostensive definitions that were understood by others, which are the kinds of regress-stoppers that are needed. Brentano thought of Evidenz as an alternative answer to the problem of grounding mathematics, which bedeviled Frege and Husserl. The alternative was derived as Apsychologism and the concept of Evidenz as subjective. But the critics were wrong, and they misrepresented it.
Today we can construe these points of mutual obviousness in terms of cognitive science concepts. The mirroring system in humans, the basis for empathy, is a good candidate for naturalizing Evidenz, for accounting for such things as our capacity to understand others without appealing to normativities, hidden structures of norms, and the like. These systems are objective. They do much of the explanatory work that the mysterious notion of normativity is claimed to do. We can do without these mysteries.
Stephen P. Turner
Posted 686 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: sociology, Dying, Death, America / 0 Comments
As we write this blog we are coping with the aftermath of the tragedy in Haiti. The latest count is an estimated 230,000 deaths and rising. Haiti happened too late to be included in our book but it reflects its scope--trying to understand and explain who dies, how we die, what 
happens after we die, and how do we cope with death. We clearly saw the social implications of death in Haiti, as the poor died by the tens of thousands, where the medical care was makeshift and minimal, where the survivors had nowhere to find shelter and no food to eat, and the dead were buried in mass graves.
We use three central themes in this book. First, we look at death and dying at the macro level, how many people have died and the social structure in which the deaths occurred, and the micro level, the individual instances of death. Second, we relate the patters of social inequality that are institutionalized at the societal level to the corresponding patterns inequality at the individual level of dying. Third, we outline the topics of consumerism and commercialism that link life and death in late capitalist American society.
We divide the book in four parts. In Part I we examine the demographic aspects of death, who dies according to gender and race in United States and how it compares to other nations. We also examine the cultural changes in perceptions of death in the western world from the Middle Ages to the present and how death is intertwined with the nature of health care in today’s America. In Part II we discuss where death takes place, increasingly away from home and into medical establishments. We then turn to the dying itself and examine the controversial topics of euthanasia and assisted suicide. We end the section in surveying the various types of funeral practices, such as the movement away from traditional burial toward cremation and more recent green modes of burial—chemical free and in biodegradable containers. In Part III we look at the individual death of children and then review death and destruction on a large scale, from war to natural disasters such as Katrina. In the final section, Part IV, we turn to the professionals who have to tell the ‘bad news’ to the dying or the families of the dead. This topic is followed by the different ways in which we grieve when someone dies and then we move on to discuss the various beliefs (or lack thereof) from religious to philosophical in immortality. We conclude that death is a mirror of the way Americans live, increasingly highly expensive and consumeristic, continuing to privilege the rich over the poor and still trying to deny its coming by wrapping it in ribbons and glitter.
Posted 708 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Finance, economy, Regulation, globalization, Business / 0 Comments
With all the hand-wringing that goes on over financial regulation, you would think that books on the subject would be two a penny. Surprisingly, they are not. So, Howard Davies’s and David Green’s book, Global Financial Regulation, remains an essential guide.
This is despite the fact that, as they write in the Update, “Time seems to have speeded up in the world of financial regulation” since the first edition was published in spring 2008. That Update is, of course, a crucial part of the second edition, but the job is made easier by the fact that two important trends in reforming the system were recommended by the authors.
The first is that the Financial Stability Forum should be beefed up and fulfill its promise as a co-ordinating body for the world’s economic and financial regulators. Now dubbed a board, in April 2008 it set out tasks for bodies ranging from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to the IMF and national central banks. In many cases this remains a work in progress, but profound changes in such areas as bank capital and liquidity requirements have been initiated.
The second is the expansion of the membership of international bodies to reflect the changing balance of power in the world towards emerging nations such as China. This addresses the legitimacy issue raised in the book. An obvious example is the expansion of the political hub from the G7 to the G20.
Other trends are either less clear or less appealing to the authors. The US, with its bewildering array of financial regulators has realised the need for fundamental re-engineering. But while some consolidation of banking supervision has taken place, delivery of wholesale change has run into political resistance, not least because of scepticism about giving additional power to the Federal Reserve.
In the EU, the Larosière proposals have tackled both the need for a systemic risk board and greater cross-border powers to ensure standards are applied. But, in the authors’ view dependence on co-operation between national regulators remains a second best solution in a single market.
Larosiere also left the sectoral bodies – covering banking, insurance and markets – intact. This is out of line with the book’s original theme that such divisions are out of date. The collapse of firms such as the insurer AIG through their dabbling in investment bank-style activities would seem to bear out the need for regulating according to what the institution actually does, rather than what it calls itself.
The authors’ background is at the Bank of England and the FSA, where they led the case for “one stop shop” regulation. But even though the crisis has shown little correlation between structure of regulation and good or bad outcomes, there preference for a unitary authority has been frustrated. In prudential supervision, the swing is back towards central bank authority, with new or separate bodies focusing on consumer protection. If the Conservatives win the UK general election this spring, the FSA will be dismantled.
But none of this negates the value of the original book, which is descriptive rather than opinionated. The advantage is that it does what it says on the tin. It is indeed an essential guide to the teeming bodies that feed into the “simplified” chart on page 33.
The authors conduct a first-class bluffers’ tour of differing approaches to regulation and of the surprisingly short history of cross-border bodies. The Basel Committee only dates back to 1974 and the buzzphrase “financial stability” is a juvenile apparently coined in 1994. Charles Goodhart has since pointed out how hard it is to define it, let alone measure it.
[OPT PARS] [They also point out how difficult it is for grand international initiatives to be effective. The book describes the other FSAP – not the EU’s action plan but the Financial Sector Assessment Programme of the IMF and World Bank. Launched in 1999, it has cost more than $1bn and “most major countries” have been assessed.
Exceptions are China and the US – one of many instances where the latter is a whipping boy in this book. The former is of course to be welcomed into every international forum. Yet are these two countries wrong to resist when cost-benefit analyses of this FSAP have proved inconclusive and the inspectors could not even sniff the onset of an international crisis in the Dominican Republic.
In the end regulation is a political subject and the authors do portray their prejudices: they do not like sectoral regulation, fragmented and competitive regulation, or regulation pulled in different ways by politicians.
As one would expect from powerful intellectuals, the case for a rationalised and simplified way to manage the international world of finance is strongly made.
But the practical problem of how universal regulators can develop sufficient market knowledge is skipped over; and so too is the cultural divide between prudential supervision and consumer protection.
Jane Fuller is Co-director at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation.
Posted 717 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Philosophy, African American Studies, Karenga / 0 Comments
Maulana Karenga is an important American cultural philosopher and one of the leading proponents of the cultural reconstruction thesis for African Americans. His key writings, based upon his studies of African cultural and philosophical history, treat the classical bases for re-interpreting the social behavior of people whose cultures have been crushed by oppression. In effect, Karenga is an ethicist, having studied ethics as one of his two doctorates, but he is also an activist who has found his intellectual and creative values in the realm of political organization. Karenga is the author of many books and monographs, but his major tome is Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt. He is also the author of scores of important articles advancing the Kawaida, traditions, thesis that creating a dignity-affirming life is a key component for fully realizing the human potential.
Karenga’s works, especially in African moral philosophy, whether Yoruba, Ancient Egyptian, or Zulu, are always grounded in his belief that Africana Studies represent the best route to a resurgence in ethical decisions in the communities broken by hegemonic racism. In recognizing the possibilities in reconstructive freedom, Karenga commits himself to serudj-ta, that is, repairing the damage that has been done to African and African American people. No contemporary African American thinker has impacted the popular culture and language of the American society as thoroughly as Karenga. Indeed, his creation of the holiday Kwanzaa, now celebrated by nearly thirty million people around the world, has made him an enormously significant cultural presence. While some authors have written about Karenga’s personal life and activist work, the book, Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait, is the first work to seriously deal with his ideas.
Posted 717 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: politics, International Relations, Power, the State, globalization, Justice / 0 Comments
Financial crisis, environmental crisis and terrorism are all taken as signs of the weakness and increasingly irrelevancy of states. C
apital, ecological disasters and terrorisms seemingly cross borders with impunity. In fact, citizenship remains one of the most important determinants of someone’s life chances. Stand at the U.S.-Mexican border, at the wall dividing Israel and the Palestinian territories, or on the beaches of the European islands in the Mediterranean to see what efforts governments make to secure their borders and the risks non-citizens take to pass through those divides. Jobs, civil rights, social benefits, physical security, and even water are kept on one side of those borders. More than thirty million humans today are refugees, fleeing from one country to another in an effort to survive.
States and their futures matter because, at the outset of the twenty-first century, they remain, by far, the most significant repositories of power and resources in the world. The vast majority of violent deaths are caused by wars between states, by states’ violence against their own subjects, and by armed attempts to seize state power.
Politics is almost entirely about states. People mobilize to influence state policies, and to gain control of states through elections or with violence. Where states are weak, as in much of Africa, citizens’ life chances and life spans are drastically reduced. Every realistic plan for economic growth, for reductions in poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental degradation, and to slow or reverse global warming depends largely on initiatives that are directed by governments alone or in concert.
Posted 726 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Empathy, Civilization, History, climate change, economics, politics / 0 Comments
The anemic global economic recovery is
beginning to stall. Unemployment is shooting up again. The housing market is threatened by a new wave of foreclosures. Tens of millions of Americans are teetering on the edge of survival. Public surveys show that people on Main Street are fast loosing trust in Wall Street and the workings of the market. What’s gone wrong?
The economists have a difficult time understanding the public reaction, in large part, because they believe the market is functioning as it should: that is, it is serving as a self regulating arena where individual material self interest can express itself under the guidance of an “invisible hand” that continually adjusts supply and demand and other market forces to ensure a proper functioning of commerce and trade. Recall, the words of Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist of the Enlightenment, who wrote in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that
Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment to whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of society’s, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leaves him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society.
What the economists fail to grasp is that commerce and trade, and indeed, all market relations, are only made possible by a very different kind of “invisible hand”—the one that establishes social trust among people. That social trust, in turn, is created by the extension of empathic sensibility to others. This is the process that creates human culture.
Sometimes referred to as the third sector, as if to suggest that it is of less relevance than the marketplace or government, in fact, the culture or civil society is the primary sector. It’s where people create the narratives that define their lives and the life of the society. These narratives serve as the cultural common ground that allows people to create emotional bonds of affection and trust, without which commerce and trade would be impossible.
While the empathic drive is faintly acknowledged by economists, it is relegated to a secondary level in human affairs − something one engages in within the family and among friends and neighbors, but which plays no appreciable role in the economic arena. Being open, vulnerable and sensitive to the plight of others is considered detrimental to commercial relations and a prescription for failure in the marketplace.
Yet the market requires a continuous infusion of social trust to function. Indeed, the market feeds off social trust and weakens or collapses if it is withdrawn. That’s why there are no examples in history in which markets preceded culture or exist in its absence. Markets are extensions of culture and never the reverse. They have always been and will always be secondary rather than primary institutions in the affairs of humanity because culture creates the empathic cloak of sociability that allows people to confidently engage each other in the marketplace.
Only recently, in the wake of the disastrous downturn of the global economy have some economists began to turn their attention to the role social trust plays in providing the foundation for commerce and trade.
The close ties between commercial and empathic bonds might seem a bit paradoxical, but the relationship is symbiotic. Sociologist Georg Simmel, in his landmark study on The Philosophy of Money, observed that coins are promissory notes based on the assumption of an established collective trust among anonymous parties that guarantees that at some future date the token passed in an earlier exchange will be honored by a third party in a subsequent exchange.
It’s instructive to note that when anthropologists study the history of exchange, they find that social exchange virtually always precedes commercial exchange. The Trobriand Islanders engaged in an elaborate social exchange of shells, often canoeing long distances between islands to pass the tokens back and forth as a way of cementing bonds of social trust. Commercial exchange in the Trobriand Islands was always preceded by social exchange, again confirming the ancient wisdom that cultural capital precedes commercial capital and that commerce is an extension of cultural relations and, therefore, not a primary institution in the affairs of humankind.
The relationship between empathic and commercial bonds is complicated and fragile. That’s because empathic extension is always a nonconditional gift, freely given, without consideration of reciprocity on behalf of the other, either in the moment or in the future. While commercial exchange would be impossible without empathic extension first establishing bonds of social trust, its utilitarian, instrumental, and exploitive nature can and often does deplete the social capital that makes its very operations possible. That’s exactly what’s occurring now in the United States and around the world in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown.
The populist revolt that is spreading to many countries represents a profound loss of trust in the global economy and is fueled by the sense that a small elite has rigged the game in favor of a few at the expense of the general well-being of society. But below the heat and light of the populist outcry is a deeper feeling of betrayal; that is, a feeling that our business leaders no longer empathize with the plight of their fellow citizens. It is this deep sense of abandonment that is perpetuating a decline in social trust and threatening to transform America, and other nations, into social chaos.
Still, economists shake their heads and continue to hope that governments can patch together a rational, quantifiable, utilitarian set of mechanisms to regulate a global economy and jumpstart the economic engine, only to throw up their hands in despair when world trade talks breakdown. A history lesson might be instructive to help world leaders and economists get to the nub of the problem.
At the beginning of the modern market economy, Europe found itself in the throes of a great struggle between a new commercial order and an old economic regime. New technologies were radically altering spatial and temporal realities. The old medieval social economy, based on controlling production, fixing prices, and excluding competition from the outside, was too provincial to accommodate the range of new technologies that were making possible greater exchange of goods and services between more people over longer distances.
What was missing was a new, more expansive, and agile political framework that could transcend the thousands of local municipalities and force the elimination of local tolls and tariffs and countless other statutes and codes that maintained an aging medieval economy. It was this need, says Karl Polanyi, “which forced the territorial state to the fore as the instrument of the ‘nationalization’ of the market and the creator of internal commerce.”
Although never intended, the emergence of the territorial nation state had a collateral effect that proved to be every bit as important as acclimating large populations of previously disparate people to national markets. Nationalism extended the empathic impulse to the new expansive borders of the nation itself.
Today, the new technologies of Third Industrial Revolution − distributed communications and distributed renewable energies − are taking us to a new biosphere economy. The human race is becoming technologically interdependent and interconnected. What is sorely missing, however, is a leap in human empathy, beyond national boundaries to biosphere boundaries. We need to create social trust on a global scale if we are to create a seamless, integrated, just, and sustainable planetary economy.
We can no longer afford to limit our notion of extended family to national boundaries, with Americans empathizing with fellow Americans, Chinese with Chinese, and the like. A truly global biosphere economy will require a global empathic embrace. We will need to think as a species − as homo empathicus − and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization imbedded in a shared biosphere.
Jeremy's new book, The Empathic Civilization is now available from polity.
Posted 738 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: sociology, globalization, climate change, Copenhagen / 0 Comments
The Sociology of Globalization discusses dimensions of globalization from media and identity to migration and social movements, from history to theories. It also argues that environment, economics and politics are things that any sociologist who aspires to understand society needs to pay attention to. These dimensions affect society. They are not outside it.
Recent developments such as the Copenhagen climate talks and the financial crisis raise possible conclusions about globalization: 1) they appear to demonstrate the reality of global interdependency; 2) they suggest a crisis for the neoliberal type of globalization that seems to have been behind such problems; and 3) they show the need for global governance to tackle climate change and regulate the economy.
Interdependency – global but uneven
It’s true that climate change and financial crisis demonstrate global interdependency. But they also involve great unevenness. The financial crisis was global. Events in one small part of the world had global repercussions. But how global was it? It had origins at a local level, in the US sub-prime mortgage market and in irresponsibility and lack of political regulation in US lending. Some countries have been more affected and taken longer to come out of recession, like the UK and Spain because of their financial bias or housing markets. Other parts of the world were less affected. China and Brazil are two significant economies that experienced less upheaval. Or areas have been affected differently - for instance through the impact being on exports or aid rather than finance. Countries also responded differently. Some like the US and UK poured money into their economies. Others, like Germany, were more cautious.
So, global interdependency has been shown in the economic crisis - but with local differences in its origins and effects, more than homogenisation or evenness. Similarly climate change has effects across the world. But these are greater in some areas, such as African countries and low-lying islands, whose carbon emissions are often quite low. At the same time, out of nearly 200 countries in the world just two – the USA and China - produce 40% of the world’s carbon emissions. The effects and origins of climate change are also uneven.
A crisis for neoliberal globalization?
Has the credibility of neoliberal globalization been damaged by climate change and the financial crisis? Many say these were caused by individualism, lack of regulation, short-termism and risk – all characteristics of neoliberal types of capitalism in the Anglo-American world. During the economic crisis, economies that are more regulated, state-interventionist and social, of a German or Japanese type, gained the edge in arguments about how organise capitalism. For some, globalization is the spread of neoliberalism. So if the credibility of neoliberalism is damaged this also means that globalization is under threat.
Opinion polls show that the public is appalled by the greed and irresponsibility of bankers, and to be paying the price for this with cuts to their jobs and public services. If neoliberalism is to be challenged in favour of more social and regulated types of capitalism there is no better chance than in the context of climate change and financial crisis. However public criticism has been personalised, aimed at greedy bankers, irresponsible borrowers and weak politicians rather than structures or systems. Politically there has been no systematic attempt to shift away from neoliberalism. Governments have bailed out capitalism with big injections of finance, rather than reconstructing it. Banks are determined to continue paying bonuses that encourage risky and individualistic behaviour. There was no greater opportunity to challenge neoliberal capitalism than the financial crisis, but it has survived intact.
Towards global governance?
Both climate change and the financial crisis appear to have shown the need for global governance. They are global problems, which require the combined action of many governments rather than just national solutions. However this hasn’t happened. The financial crisis was tackled by reflation at a national level, rather than regulation globally. And this was effective, bolstering the credibility of nation-state politics.
The crisis was linked to the irresponsibility of finance and deregulation. Common taxes and regulations on finance could have been introduced across nations by global agreements, but governments didn’t pursue this. If this crisis didn’t provide a basis for more global governance, in pursuit of the responsibility of capital to society, it’s difficult to see what will.
The failure of global agreement at Copenhagen, meanwhile, has been blamed on weak-willed leaders. But it was caused by structures as much as personnel. One typical problem in global governance is that it involves many actors with conflicting interests. At Copenhagen 195 countries seated round a table couldn’t find a common position. Another problem is that powerful actors can wreck the whole thing by their recalcitrance. In the past on climate change this has been the USA. We are told that this time it was China. These problems are as much to do with this kind of structure as with individual leaders.
Before Copenhagen countries like Australia said there was more chance of national governments finding solutions and enforcing them than of this happening globally. National levels are where agreements can be made and sanctions are enforceable. At the same time, agreements on economic issues, carbon emissions, and disarmament, for instance, need to be made above national levels. But the lack of a basis for this in global governance, means that above-national but below-global arrangements may have to be where this happens
Pre-Copenhagen President Obama sought bilateral agreements on climate change with countries like China and India. After Copenhagen commentators argued that solutions need to start at local and national levels, where there are people pursuing carbon reductions, or with enough in common with others to make agreements with them. Such below-global attempts to pursue alternatives nationally and in international alliances have also been pursued by politicians like President Chavez of Venezuela.
So, in the case of two major crises that seem to call out for global regulation, below-global and bottom-up seem as effective approaches as global and top-down. Copenhagen and the economic crisis have left us with an unevenly globalised world, with neoliberalism over a crisis which it seemed could have defeated it, and with national and bilateral government as important as global governance.
Posted 738 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Peace, Conflict Resolution, sociology, globalization / 0 Comments
Over fifty people were killed in the Johannesburg area in 2009. This seems unsurprising given that it considered the murder capital of the world. The fifty or so people to whom I refer, however, are different: they were economic migrants from neighbouring states, drawn to South Africa by its status as rainbow nation and by the prospect of work. The display of very magnanimous forgiveness South Africans showed each other after the collapse of apartheid and the evident stability of its new non-racial political system makes it appear odd that strangers should be viciously attacked. South Africa’s peace process has been universalised and its processes of reconciliation, truth recovery and memory management have been championed as examples for other societies undergoing a democratic transition to peace. A sociological approach to peace processes, however, identifies the weaknesses in South Africa’s transition. The peace process was an elite compromise at the top, in which Black people felt everything would change because they now held political power and Whites felt nothing would change because they retained control of the economy. This is no conundrum. South Africa’s peace process has essentially been about the introduction of good governance structures to deliver institutional reform. This approach to peace processes is the dominant one in the West and argues that the introduction of democratic politics, human rights law and free market economics is the way either to eliminate conflict or allow its reproduction in non-violent ways. We might call this a political approach to peace processes. It is based on the naïve assumption that once problematic politics are resolved, social healing, reconciliation and restoration follow on naturally. South Africa – and all other political peace processes – illustrate that they do not. Underlying the political peace process is a social one; the social peace process is about societal healing, forgiveness, the restoration of social relationship and the like. Good governance approaches neglect the social peace process or take it for granted. A sociological approach to peace processes, however, prioritises it, taking for granted that institutional reform is essential and must proceed in parallel. For all the institutional reform in South Africa, there has been very little societal healing. Frustrated economic expectations, fierce competition for economic resources and huge unemployment spilled over into attacks on strangers. The incidents offer no better demonstration of the need for a sociological approach to peace processes: of the need to address issues of justice, fairness and social redistribution in addition to ending the killings; of the need for good governance institutional reform to be introduced in a context in which issues of victimhood are also dealt with, where public policies are forged to manage the problem of social reintegration for ex-combatants or assist with the empowerment of women, the deconstruction of violent masculinities amongst ex-combatants, or which deal with the management of emotions, introduce spaces for hoping and forgiving, assist in bottom-up truth recovery and forms of memory work that help in the re-remembering and re-memorialisation of the past. These are the topics that go to define the sociology of peace processes.
Posted 750 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: media, Technology, Digital Culture, Music / 0 Comments
More than ten years have passed since Shawn Fanning and friends released the file-sharing software "Napster" to the world and thereby kick-started one of the most radical transformations of the multinational music industry.
Today, young music listeners no longer put on a CD then they party and it is actually also becoming less common that they play MP3s from their computers or iPods. Rather, the young audience of today listen to music from YouTube, last.fm, Lala, Spotify, or some other Web-based music service. Music is no longer something the mainstream audience owns and collects - Music has moved
into the Cloud.
*'The Cloud' has been used as a metaphor for the Internet since the early 1970s when the technologies behind the network of networks were invented. A cloud was considered to be a useful and vague enough symbol which could be used to summarize all the resources, cables and gadgets which connected the computers at the nodes of the network.
*During less than a decade, the music industry has completely shifted from the physical to the virtual - from the Disk to the Cloud. The Disk-based music industry was all about control and a music firm's top priority was to maximize the revenues from each individual piece of intellectual property and to minimize unauthorized use. In a Cloud-based music industry, it is
still important to know how one's intellectual property is used by the
audience but it is more or less impossible to control that use. In a
Cloud-based music industry, music firms must embrace the enhanced connectivity between fans and build their businesses on an assumption that their recordings are universally available.
The relationship between connectivity and control is fundamental to all cultural and media industries, and as the connectivity increases and the ability to control the flow of information decreases, the logic of these industries is radically altered. In the old music industry, the content(music) and the medium (disk) were inseparable, and the music industry was focused on music products as a physical goods which were shipped and sold all over the world. In the Cloud-based music industry where information is more or less impossible to control, it becomes increasingly difficult to charge a premium for discrete chunks of information. As soon as some kind of information is uploaded to the Cloud, it is instantly universally accessible which makes the commercial value of providing basic access to an individual track or album very close to zero. But there are other things which remain chargeable. In a world where information is abundant, people may not be willing to pay a premium for basic access to that information, but they are most likely willing to pay for services which help them to conveniently navigate through the vast amounts of information. Such services, such as the currently much-hyped European based service Spotify, is an example of how the industry may be able to survive even without the ability to control.
Further, the increased connectivity combined with various kinds of music production tools enable 'non-professionals' to create, remix and publish content online. The making of mashups and remixes based on well-established musics seems to be a thriving mode of consumption in the Cloud-based music industry. Many music firms respond to this user behavior by arguing that this is copyright infringement which should be policed and ceased as soon as
possible. However, it is not entirely unrealistic to assume that those fans who create, remix and upload content to the Cloud also are the most dedicated and loyal. It is also quite likely that they are the ones who spend the most on concerts, merchandise etc. Based on those two assumptions, it makes sense for music firms to secure a good relationship with these fans, encourage their creative desires and do their best not to push them away.
Posted 752 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: social policy, happiness, politics, society, economics, halpern / 0 Comments
For this blog post, I thought I’d set out the bones of the argument in my new book The Hidden Wealth of Nations. I certainly found it interesting to revisit some of the big questions that in government there’s rarely the luxury of time to examine very deeply, rolling up my statistical sleeves to wade into data sets and literatures around public concerns, well-being, social policy, inequality and developments in government itself. I should stress that this has been a personal project done alongside the set-up of the Institute for Government, but I have nonetheless been grateful to my colleagues for indulging intermittent and excited reflections on my latest analysis. It is also, as the title implies, ultimately an optimistic vision.
Prosperity and well-being. The book starts by revisiting Easterlin’s famous paradox – that wealthy nations are much happier than poor nations, and yet decades of growth do not seem to have boosted the happiness within them. I argue that this occurs because a bundle of deeply rooted social characteristics of countries – values, institutions and ways of relating to each other – independently drive both the ability of countries to take advantage of new economic opportunities (hence economic growth) and their citizens’ happiness. This gives us important insights into how we can both boost growth and increase well-being – and strongly implies that they are not incompatible. In many areas, the implications of the well-being literature simply confirm existing lines of policy, but there are some areas where it pulls you in a different direction. I also suggest one or two areas where economic policy has missed important tricks, such as the promotion of information as a public good.
Not getting along. The focus of the book then shifts to rising public fears in the UK and a clutch of other countries of other people in recent years – concerns around crime, immigration and terror. There is a detailed analysis of the empirical roots of these concerns, including why they only seem to have affected a minority of countries, and an examination of what evidence-based policy responses might look like. The evidence base is, in many areas, in great tension with the media headlines and public instincts, at least within theAnglo-Saxon world.
Virtue. These public concerns form the background to the pivotal argument of the book: how can societies, communities and policymakers support ‘virtue’ in their citizens, as opposed to simply stamping out bads? Across nations, while traditional religious beliefs have only marginally altered, their influence on our other attitudes has waned dramatically – though with the notable exception of North America. Yet there’s little evidence for ‘moral decline’. And within nations moral and social attitudes have become more nationally distinctive. Drawing heavily on studies of how citizens spend their time, the book concludes that policy has systematically underestimated the importance of what Offer calls the‘economy of regard’ – the parallel economy of everyday life within which we help each other acts of consideration, care and reciprocity, and a key part ofthe Hidden Wealth of Nations. Echoing the analysis on prosperity and well-being, the policy implications are drawn out, including the intriguing case for community-backed complementary currencies to oil the works of the economy of regard just as conventional dollars and pounds oil the ‘real economy’.
Inequality and fairness. Levels of poverty, fairness and inequality are defining characteristics of many nations, often representing the darker side of Hidden Wealth with major consequences for citizens. Reducing poverty and inequality was a major ambition of the Labour project, and though the growth of inequality was halted it was not reversed despite twelve years of effort. One reason is that inequality has its roots in a far wider range of factors than income or education. At the same time, though the public does not like inequality, there is little appetite for more conventional policy responses and most countries are broadly accepting of their situation, whatever their absolute level of inequality. It is suggested that, in the long-term, inequality can be reduced with the help of ‘affiliative welfare’ - an attack on a broader range of capital inequalities harnessing the desire to help those close to us.
Power and governance. The last chapter seeks to bust a number of common myths about shifts in political trust and confidence, but suggests that there are other underlying trends that are a source of deeper concern. It then offers thoughts and cross-national evidence on how governance will need to evolve in relation to the division of power, the practical provision of public services, and its re-emerging role in relation to behaviour change in the decade to come.
The book finally concludes with a suggested top-10 list of policy proposals for current, or future, Prime Ministers.
Posted 752 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Spielberg, film studies, cinema, media, politics, film, Wasser / 0 Comments
Is Steven Spielberg a better political filmmaker than his peers?
Surprisingly, yes.
Steven Spielberg has managed to show that the most successful film director in the history of popular culture is capable of engaging history - but not quite as he pleases. He has done so to a greater degree than his fellow film entertainers. Scorsese, the “thoughtful” American director, has not been as political as Spielberg, nor has Soderbergh or Coppola or other “auteurish” directors. Because Spielberg is the great mass entertainer his engagement is richer than more overtly committed filmmakers. His sincerity brings the audience along but the blockbuster apparatus of distracting visual thrillsleads to contradictions.
Spielberg has made a great deal out of his balancing act between serious and “popcorn” (entertaining) movies. In 1993 he shot the serious Schindler’s List while finishing up on the popcorn Jurassic Park. Other pairs include Lost World(popcorn) and Amistad (serious); Munich (serious) was released within the same year as War of the Worlds (popcorn). But to present this as a balancing act between two opposing poles is deliberately misleading. The “serious” films are not that different from the entertaining ones. He does not switch crews, cameras, and distributors when going from one to the other (he barely scales back the budget). This fact alone shows Spielberg believes the blockbuster style is capable of engaging politics and history.
The critics have not accepted this and from the mid-1970s both academics and journalists have bemoaned the rise of the blockbuster and the corresponding decline of more artistic and, by implication, political filmmaking. Many have written some version of this critique of the blockbuster. Pauline Kael’s take on it was perhaps the most intriguing, since she praised his filmmaking skills in his first feature film but nonetheless came to bemoan the overwhelming dominance of the Spielbergian vision in the film industry of the 1980s. It was a vision limited to the American suburbs, the family, and the eternal wish-fulfillment of popular culture.
Spielberg and his fellow blockbuster creator George Lucas drew such negative reactions because their films reversed the direction all thoughtful people were hoping that American filmmaking was going before Jaws broke box office records in 1975. The previous direction has been labeled “new Hollywood” and was ushered in with the release of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. It reached a high-water mark when Midnight Cowboy won the1969 Academy Award for best picture. These films emulated the various foreign films that emphasized artistic autonomy. They were not overtly political but everyone understood how their themes of alienation and dissatisfaction resonated with the political strugglesto implement a new era of civil rights and limit the U.S. imperial project.
This personal-expression trend faded whenthe studios realized that the thrills and spills of Jaws and StarWars had revitalized a formula for attracting the huge audience. As artistic autonomy faded so did any kind of political overtones in the movie plotlines themselves. Indeed, part of the blockbuster formula for attracting a huge audience was to paper over the cultural and political divisions of the 1960s. Lucas had stumbled upon it in American Graffiti and Spielberg came to it in Jaws after the relative disappointment of The Sugarland Express. The blockbusters flattered the “hipness” of one side of the cultural wars while giving the other side old-time movie thrills.
This papering over of the political divisions coincided with the Reagan turn in American politics. The 1960s leftwingers were often anti-government because government was not doing enough to fulfill New Deal promises of social justice. The Reaganites took over the anti-government ideology and attracted many former countercultural adherents. On both sides of the Atlantic neo-liberals worked to delegitimize all domestic government activities and knocked out the props supporting labor unions. Instead they established the idea that the marketplace could deliver public benefits more efficiently than the government. Few places in the cultural sphere, certainly not the Hollywood blockbuster, resisted this rapid ideological transition.
American filmmakers are not deep political thinkers, which is perhaps why the best political films are those that are not the product of overt reasoning, but in their naiveté reflect the contradictions of American politics itself. The most fruitful contradiction comes from sincerity. All too often there is cynicism either from the right (Milius, the various makers of the Rambo series and vigilante films) or the left (Oliver Stone) that reduces the story in order to eliminate contradiction. From the beginning, Spielberg’s sincerity stood in contrast to his fellow directors. He loves American popular culture and he unashamedly wants to please all audiences. He emphasizes giving the viewers not only a story but an experience. The narratives of Close Encounters and E.T. do allude to bitter social isolation but watching these films overwhelms the viewer with the pleasurable experience of sentimental fulfillment.
This desire to please is at odds with the desire to engage history as politics. Yet unlike other filmmakers of his generation, Spielberg has been drawn to history and politics. Increasingly,in the last decade with Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, and Munich, but starting even earlier with Saving Private Ryan and Amistad, audiences can find a politically liberal motivation behind Spielberg’s choice of scripts. Given the original blockbuster formula of papering over political divisions, this motivation should alienate parts of the blockbuster audience. The American audience rarely gives a Spielberg film its profits anymore. For example, Amistad was a box office failure and prominent American pundits attacked Munich. In compensation the foreign audience has made several Spielberg political movies successes, such as Munich and Minority Report. Why does such an inveterate crowd-pleaser jeopardize his domestic audience to embrace these libera lthemes? Perhaps because his artistic soul is reacting to the darkening American climate today and on a more conscious level he wants to share the populism of classic Hollywood with his various global audiences.
The 1930s Hollywood populism, however, was never dominant and like a regressive gene shows up as a contradiction in Spielberg. This is perhaps most evident in Saving Private Ryan, which is not a hawkish call to arms but an examination of the paradoxical duties of the citizen-soldier (something that became so paradoxical that the United States eliminated the citizen army as it used volunteer soldiers to pursue police actions around the world after the loss of the Vietnam war). During the Bush years Spielberg kept leading his audiences back to old-fashioned issues of trust, community and law versus security. Yet both he and the audience share a disdain for public life that works against old-fashioned populist resolutions. Sometimes he distracts the audience from the contradiction with “you are there” camera work. Other times he retreats behind the claim of being merely an entertainer. At all times his work at pleasing international audiences reveals political dilemmas that tell us more about our collective selves than does the work of other more cerebral filmmakers.
Frederick Wasser's new book, Steven Spielberg's America, is available now.
Posted 800 days ago by Super Admin / Tags: Molly Rothenburg, The Excessive Subject, Polity / 0 Comments
On the Edge
Edged in: I decided to write this book when it became clear to me that a new theory of the social subject, with some powerful advantages for social change theory, had become sequestered within a small area in the academy simply because it was associated with psychoanalysis. It turns out that the theory of the excessive subject, as I term it, depends on developments in the fields of symbolic logic, topology, and set theory that can be applied to the question of how to model causality in the social field. Lacan was instrumental in bringing these developments into the discourse of the humanities, but they are not psychoanalytic per se. Lacan picks up these developments because they enabled him to articulate a causal logic necessary for his sense of the way the subject emerges. That logic, which I refer to as “extimate causality,” offers a significant alternative to the causal logics of Marxism and Foucaultianism, but the alternative became quarantined on account of attacks on psychoanalysis by prominent theorists in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. I want to make this alternative available to a wider audience, especially to students.
Backing away from the edge: The book tells the story of a number of theoretical attempts to find an alternative causal model of social effects in order to grapple with the fundamental problem of how subjects conditioned by ideology and cultural practices could become change agents. This problem is the common link among a number of theorists who otherwise don’t seem to have much in common. It is the central focus of Pierre Bourdieu’s efforts to split the difference between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the subject, and it shapes Michel de Certeau’s response to Bourdieu. Judith Butler has her own way of intervening in that discussion, by trying to cobble together a model from Bourdieu, Derrida, and Lacan. Ernesto Laclau encounters this problem as he seeks to articulate a theory of the formation of politically effective groups from the concept of the split subject. Slavoj Žižek takes it up in his accounts of revolutionary violence. I follow this thread through these thinkers in some detail to develop a history of approaches to the problem and to highlight the ways that each thinker both relies on some version of extimate causality and then repudiates it when it compromises, or seems to compromise, some cherished political tenet.
Cutting edge: The story’s central figure is the subject in its social dimension as excessive to itself. I explain how the social subject comes to acquire this excess by giving my readers an accessible account of set theoretic principles and fundamental concepts from nonclassical logic that converge with Alain Badiou’s philosophical writings as well as Lacan’s theories. I discuss the Möbius topology of the social field in terms that link up with Felix Guattari’s early work and Giorgio Agamben’s current investigations. I explore the utility of the excessive subject for thinking politics and ethics that spotlights features of Jacques Rancière’s, Walter Benjamin’s, Theodor Adorno’s, and Emmanuel Levinas’s writings. The excessive subject turns out to provide a means for assessing the degree to which a given theorist has an adequate model of social interaction to ground political and ethical proscriptions. I argue that the model of the excessive subject is crucial for the most innovative work being done today in political and ethical philosophy.
The disappearing edge: The Möbius strip, with its paradoxical two-in-one-sidedness—its edge between two sides that mysteriously disappear as you trace a path along one side only to find yourself on the other—serves as a useful analogue to the excess of the social subject. The excess of the social subject both separates it from its fellow subject and links it to them: the excess of the subject, which is a function of the subject’s emergence by way of the addition of a negation to its initial state of being, is irremediable and essential. I argue that we must understand that this excess is not the impediment to the social field but rather the means of producing and sustaining the social field. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, dreams of absolute comm-unity or comm-union fantasize that the excess of the social subject can be eradicated, a fantasy that predominates in the literature on political and ethical theory. Theories of ethical action, for example, that rely on the subsumption of one subject to the demands of a radical other, fantasy the erasure of the excess requisite for the social/ethical relation in the first place. But, in fact, attempts to eradicate excess risk the collapse of the social field itself and set in motion catastrophic pathological defenses to protect the social field, examples of which tragically abound in modern history. The book explains the generation of this excess, how the excessive subject functions in the social field, and how the circulation of affect in the social field promotes or impedes political and ethical activity.
Gaining an edge: I wrote this book for students and for others who wish to understand why social change theory has taken certain paths and ignored others. I want them to know that many of the most significant thinkers of our day have been using the model of the excessive subject without making it explicit. I want to see what happens when that model becomes more widely available. I want students to acquire an advantage by learning a new set of tools with which to think. My hope is that this book provides the means for a new appraisal of the possibilities for social change. I look forward to the work that will be done with these new tools.
Posted 800 days ago by Polity Blogger / Tags: Oliver Leaman, Islamic Philosophy / 1 Comments
When I was asked to prepare a second edition of my Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy I wondered what needed to be added to the existing text. When I looked at the book again it seemed strange that although I emphasized that Islamic philosophy is a living part of world philosophy, I only dealt with earlier aspects of Islamic philosophy, so I thought it would not be a bad idea to have a chapter on some more modern thinkers in the discipline. I wrote such a chapter, and I think it gives a broad view of where Islamic philosophy is today, with the views of a range of contemporary thinkers and the sorts of issues that have become part of the modern curriculum. One of the unusual features of Islamic philosophy is that there has been a protracted debate on what it is throughout the tradition, and that debate persists today. The controversy brings in interesting features of how Islamic culture differs from other cultures.
The other chapter I added deals with a related issue, something that people constantly say to me, that Islam has yet to experience an enlightenment, and that it needs to go through such an event in its cultural history. As a result, they suggest, Islamic philosophy is too limited in its scope and cannot really take on the challenge of modernity and a commitment to reason. I argue against this approach, and compare and contrast the ways in which Jews and Muslims reacted to the Enlightenment. There is no right or wrong way of dealing with modernity, and different communities will react differently, and there is nothing problematic about that. In any case, it just is not true that Islamic philosophy has not taken the Enlightenment seriously, and the idea that there is something very different about Islamic culture on this and related topics should be questioned. This brings us back to the essentially contested concept of a philosophy being Islamic. All religious philosophy contains within itself a struggle between the traditional rules of religion and the rational principles of philosophy, and how that struggle plays out defines the nature of the religious philosophy. My book tries to sharpen how this plays out in the case of Islamic philosophy.
Oliver Leaman
Posted 800 days ago by Polity Blogger / Tags: Ellis Cashmore, Martin Scorsese, America, Polity / 1 Comments
“In this country, it doesn’t add inches to your dick to get a life sentence” Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in The Departed
America is a country where success is measured by how long you have to wait in line to get served. The shorter the wait, the more successful you are. This is one of the lessons Martin Scorsese teaches us.
In his new book Martin Scorsese’s America, Ellis Cashmore has anatomized Scorsese’s film, not just his dramas, like GoodFellas and Raging Bull, but his documentaries like No Direction Home (about Bob Dylan) and his television program “Mirror, Mirror,” which he directed for Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. This is the first comprehensive examination of Scorsese’s entire oeuvre and the first attempt to explain the clasp Scorsese has had on the hearts and minds of filmgoers.
“This city doesn’t discriminate: it gets everybody ”
Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) in Bringing Out the Dead
Cashmore, author of Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham (now in its second edition), begins from the understanding that films have no power to entertain us unless they educate us too. In his own fashion Scorsese has taught us more about America than any living filmmaker. Indisputably one of the greatest living directors, Scorsese has, over four decades, provided us with a body of work that reveals the story of America.
“We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges … we were treated like movie stars — with muscle … we had it all ”
Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in GoodFellas
“What give Scorsese’s film reverb is their sense of engagement with American issues. His themes are big and resonant. The manic pursuit of the American Dream of success, the moral and cultural decline of the cities, the hopelessness of romantic love, what it means to be a man – these are the kinds of issues that pulse through Scorsese’s films.
And, yet Cashmore asks whether, for all his daring and ingenuity as a director, if Scorsese is a conservative filmmaker: there are traditional values and attitudes that go unchallenged, and cautiousness about radical change, especially in relation to gender, politics and religion. Women are frequently compliant doormats who give men license to philander just as long as their credit card bills are settled every month.
“All the animals come out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies”
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese’s America is a place where everyone obsesses over something, where lives collapse and are rebuilt, where women willingly submit to being doormats and license their man to philander.
“American culture, for Scorsese, is a proving ground for manhood: in every movie, he makes his audience familiar with the brutality of manhood, not always in a physical sense either. Scorsese’s anti-heroes can be smooth-talking charmers one second, blood-curdling fiends the next.”
“Should I fuck him, or fight him?”
Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) in Raging Bull
Yet for all his daring and imagination, Scorsese is, on Cashmore’s account, a conservative filmmaker. “He respects the nuclear family, never challenges the preeminence of men and seems to admire the maneuvers of career criminals, who exploit the weak for their own gain.”
In Scorsese’s America, there are no moral signposts signaling the roads to redemption or damnation. The police are criminals in uniforms and criminals seldom taste the costs of their behavior. Yet, somehow, Scorsese has held his finger to the pulse of the nation in a way that arguably no other director has managed.
“How could he write ‘how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man’? This is what my father went through: he was the one who wasn’t called a man.” Mavis Staples [on Bob Dylan], in No Direction Home
Cashmore argues that Scorsese has produced a comprehensive portrait of America. “No living filmmaker can boast such a range of subjects and such historical depth,” says the author. “Scorsese’s America starts in the 1860s and brings us right up to date, examining what Scorsese sees as a society that continually rips itself apart then repairs itself.”
For Cashmore, Scorsese’s epic tales warrant comparison with Tolstoy, his explorations of the city are worthy successors to those of Dickens and his sympathetic yet authentic portrayals of disillusionment rank with those of Steinbeck. And yet, the nagging doubt remains: is Scorsese a reliable chronicler of America, or merely a visionary filmmaker?
