Nach ein paar Hinweisen auf wunderliche Phänomene des Weinens wird der Gegensatz von Tränenapparat und leerem Horizont nonverbalen Weinens thematisiert. Damit wird die Berechtigung begründet, über eine Kulturgeschichte des Weinens zu sprechen. Beispiele aus der Antike, dem Mittelalter und der Vorklassik werden exemplarisch für die Offenheit früherer Epochen gegenüber dem Weinen angeführt. Da auch die wissenschaftliche Analyse des Weinens in einer Kulturtradition zu sehen ist, wird ein Querschnitt historischer und aktueller Forschungsergebnisse diskutiert; es wird dabei auf die "Gefahr" für das Weinen hingewiesen, durch Empirie seine wahre Funktion zu verdecken. Die Wahrhaftigkeitsfunktion des Weinens wird an Beispielen aus der Politik demonstriert. Zum Schluss wird die Notwendigkeit hervorgehoben, dem tabuisierten Weinen, das jenseits banaler und kon-textueller Zusammenhänge auftritt, durch den Gebrauch des Sprechens und der Psychotherapie die zerbrochenen Inhalte zurückzugeben. Diese Inhalte lassen sich nach dem Schema des Dra-menaufbaus erkennen.Schlüsselwörter Tränen; Weinen; Antike; Mittelalter; Empfindsamkeit; Politik; Psychotherapie; Narrativ. ; After several references to the enigmatic phenomenon of weeping, the contrast between the lachrymal glands and the "emptiness" of nonverbal crying will be put into context. It becomes therefore plausible to discuss the cultural history of crying. Examples from the ancient world and medieval and preclassic eras are given to illustrate their relatively great openness to weeping. Since the scientific analysis of crying has to be viewed as a specific cultural tradition, a cross section of historic and current research results shall therefore be discussed, including a discussion of the "danger" of disguising the true function of crying through empiricism. The truthfulness function of crying is demonstrated by examples from the political arena. To conclude, the necessity of removing the taboo from weeping is emphasized, as well as the need for speech and psychotherapy to allow the act of crying to return to its original meaning. It is suggested that this matter can be recognized through the pattern of drama building.Keywords Tears; Crying; Ancient world; Medieval times; Preclassic era; Policy; Psychotherapy; Narrative ; Le thème des larmes est inépuisable. Elles sont associées à d'innombrables mythes et contes et on les retrouve aujourd'hui dans la presse à sensation - lorsque la question est posée de savoir pourquoi telle ou telle personne - un politicien non-réélu, une médaillée olympique - en a versé. Par ailleurs, les scientifiques s'intéressent à l'appareil lacrymal par rapport à son usage potentiel et à ses fonctions au niveau de l'organisme humain. Je pense du reste que cette discussion est largement close. Selon Antonio Damasio (2003), les glandes lacrymales sont un organe déjà entièrement développé à la naissance et qui permet à l'individu de verser des larmes comme bon lui semble. C'est en fait ce signal non-verbal qui doit intéresser, dans la mesure où il est soumis à une évolution en cours de vie et où, comme la capacité à marcher et à parler, il fait l'objet d'un apprentissage. Quels sont donc les contenus immatériels des pleurs, quel est le sens qui peut être dérivé de l'acte non-verbal qu'ils représentent ? Ils impliquent en fait les dimensions interprétation et communication et, à ce niveau, on ne peut nier que ce qu'ils expriment est relativement constant sur le plan de l'usage et des occasions. Nous en trouvons d'anciens témoignages, par exemple, dans l'Odyssée. Les Romains étaient eux aussi concernés par les larmes. Le Moyen Âge semble avoir été une époque où l'on pleurait particulièrement volontiers. Et Lessing, dans ses théories sur la tragédie, considère les pleurs comme un instrument d'élaboration d'une morale - ils ne seraient donc pas une fin en soi. Aujourd'hui, en une époque dominée par la pensée scientifique, le fait de pleurer est plutôt décrit en termes objectifs. C'est pourquoi - à mon avis - nous ne comprenons souvent plus du tout pourquoi quelqu'un pleure. Les sciences objectives ont fait des larmes un phénomène marginal et leur contenu n'est plus communicable, donc tabou. L'emprise de la science sur l'existence qui avait débuté avec Galilée provoque des questions sur la fonction évolutionnaire des larmes et sur les processus physiologiques d'homéostasie ; scientifiquement parlant, les pleurs servent à désintoxiquer le corps et ils sont régulés par les systèmes nerveux sympathique et parasympathique. Il est clair que ce modèle n'est pas faux, mais je tiens à souligner qu'il ne nous permet pas de saisir l'ensemble du phénomène. Cela ne nous sert pas à grand-chose de disposer des résultats d'une recherche empirique indiquant que les femmes pleurent plus que les hommes, ou que l'on pleure plus facilement devant sa famille qu'en public. La question du pourquoi demeure ouverte, du moins concernant les situations dont le contexte n'est pas la douleur et le deuil, soit celles où des aspects biographiques et narratifs sont associés.Considérés sous l'angle de l'organe lacrymal, les pleurs ont suffisamment été expliqués et je ne crois pas que nous pouvons faire de nouvelles découvertes sur leur fonction chez l'homme. C'est pourquoi nous devrions adopter l'approche prônée par Husserl et mettre de côté tout le savoir que nous avons à ce sujet pour, avec Richard Rorty, nous intéresser au langage de ceux qui pleurent. Comment des larmes peuvent-elles être traduites en langage, comment pouvons-nous élaborer un narratif qui, à partir d'un moment de 'too much', nous permette de mieux saisir les aspects tragiques d'une biographie individuelle ? Nous pourrions appliquer à cette démarche un regard guidé par la structure classique des tragédies car cela nous permettrait de saisir les cassures qui marquent nos schémas et projets existentiels.
Comment rendre plus attractives, efficaces, efficientes et pertinentes les institutions d'enseignement supérieur ? Cette question constitue une préoccupation majeure en ce début de millénaire qui voit grandir l'intérêt pour les questions relatives à l'Education en général et celles portant sur l'Université en particulier, même au sein d'institutions fortement marquées par leurs conceptions économico-financières du développement (Banque Mondiale, FMI, et autres bailleurs de fonds). Cette situation découle de la crise que connaît l'Université aussi bien dans les pays riches que dans les autres, bien qu'elle reste plus marquée dans ces derniers. En fait, elle est la résultante de mutations des missions de l'Université, de la raréfaction de ses ressources, de l'augmentation de ses charges, du fait notamment de la massification (quantitative et qualitative) de ses effectifs, de la faiblesse de son efficacité aux plans interne comme externe. Entre autres mesures correctives, la sélection à l'entrée a été retenue dans beaucoup d'Université dont l'U.C.A.D. Le présent travail est une contribution à la maîtrise des facteurs prédictifs de la performance des étudiants en première année. Il tente de dégager les pistes d'action pour arriver à une modélisation des déterminants de la réussite à l'université. Spécifique tant au plan contextuel (espace, discipline et période), méthodologique (empirisme et théorie, évaluation et prospective avec des données de types transversal et diachronique portant sur des étudiants satisfaisants ou non aux critères de sélection) qu'épistémologique (enjeux ontogénique, politique et pragmatique, articulation du quantitatif et du qualitatif et prise en compte du singulier et du commun), la recherche procéde d'un raisonnement en trois étapes qui constituent trois études emboitées. La préférence a été donnée à l'analyse des variances expliquées par les différentes variables prédictives et des coefficients de régression plutôt qu'à l'étude des coefficients de corrélation. Cette analyse est précédée d'une étude des évolutions des indicateurs macroscopiques (effectifs, taux de réussite, budgets, temps de transit) et des erreurs commises dans la sélection. La Faculté des Sciences et Techniques de l'U.C.A.D. a été retenue comme terrain de la recherche. Nous avons pu y étudier un échantillon comprenant à la fois des étudiants satisfaisant aux critères de sélection et des étudiants ne satisfaisant pas à ces critères. En général, quand il s'agit d'évaluer une procédure de sélection à l'entrée d'un programme de formation, ce dernier groupe, parce que les personnes qui la constituent ne sont pas autorisées à suivre les programmes de formation visés, n'est pas pris en compte. En fait, il est impossible d'avoir les données les concernant. Dans notre cas, il nous a donc été possible de faire des comparaisons. ; How to make more attractive, effective, efficient and relevant the institutions of higher education? This question constitutes a major concern at this beginning of millennium which sees growing the interest for the questions relating to Education in general and those bearing about the University in particular, even within institutions strongly marked by their economic-financial designs of the development (the World Bank, the IMF, and other backers). This situation rises from the crisis as the University in the rich countries as in the others undergoes as well, although it remains more marked in the latter. In fact, it is the resultant of changes of the missions of the University, of the rarefaction of its resources, the increase in its loads, and the fact in particular of the massification (quantitative and qualitative) of its numbers, of the weakness of its effectiveness in the domestic fronts like external. Inter alias corrective measurements, the selection at the entry was retained in much University of which the U.C.A.D. This work is a contribution to the mastery of the predictive factors of the performance of the first-year students. It tries to release the tracks of action to arrive at a formalization of the determinants of the success at the university. Specific so much to the contextual plan (space, discipline and period), methodological (empiricism and theory, evaluation and futurology with data of the types transverse and diachronic bearing on satisfactory students or not with the criteria of selection) that epistemological (stakes ontogenetic, policy and pragmatic, articulation of quantitative and qualitative and taken into account of the singular and the common run), research proceeds of a reasoning in three stages which constitute three encased studies. The preference was given to the analysis variances explained by the various predictive variables and of the coefficients of regression rather than being studied of the coefficients of correlation. This analysis is preceded by a study of the evolutions of the macroscopic indicators (effective, rate of rate of success, budgets, time of transit) and the errors made in the selection. Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of U.C.A.D. was retained like field of research. There we could study a sample including/understanding at the same time students satisfying the criteria of selection and the students not satisfying these criteria. In general, when it is a question of evaluating a procedure of selection to the entry of a training scheme, this last group, because the people which constitute it are not authorized to follow the training schemes concerned, is not taken into account. In fact, it is impossible to have the data with regard to them. In our case, it was thus possible to us to make comparisons. ; (EDUC 3)--UCL, 2007
Una labor importante en Colombia, con respecto a la gestión organizativa en el proceso edificatorio, es la labor de la INTERVENTORÍA, que tiene que ver no sólo con las obras sino en general con los proyectos, y que en el país ha venido ejerciéndose desde hace más de 50 años, tanto para las obras públicas como las obras privadas, no importando si se trata de obra edilicia o civil. Aunque en algunas leyes se habla de Interventoría y en forma incipiente tratan de establecer pequeños parámetros, no hay una reglamentación clara y precisa que trate en realidad sobre todos los aspectos fundamentales que tiene que ver con esta labor tan importante en Colombia. Entre estas leyes y decretos, podemos mencionar el Decreto 2090 de 1989 "Por el cual se aprueba el Reglamento de Honorarios para los Trabajos de Arquitectura", la Ley 80 de 1993 "Por la cual se expide el Estatuto General de Contratación de la Administración Pública" y la Ley 400 de 1997 "Por la cual se adoptan normas sobre Construcciones Sismo Resistentes" Debido a la falta de normativa que regule los servicios de la Interventoría y que determine sus funciones, alcances, beneficios, servicios y responsabilidades, y de la misma manera la incipiente bibliografía que existe sobre la temática y la poca enseñanza de la misma, es que se considera de vital importancia para nuestro medio, el estudio profundo de la Interventoría de Proyectos y Obras, conducirla al campo de la investigación y realizar una Tesis Doctoral, en donde pueda definirse con claridad, a través de las experiencias propias y de otras personas que hayan laborado en el campo de la interventoría tanto privada como pública, de las consultas y del trabajo de campo, que nos lleven a definir políticas claras sobre la regulación de la interventoría y del proceso edificatorio en Colombia y dejar de lado el empirismo que nos ha venido acompañando a lo largo del tiempo, en un asunto tan importante, en nuestro medio, como es el de la Interventoría de Proyectos y Obras, su regulación, su enseñanza y sus medios de consulta a través de una adecuada bibliografía, que nos pueda ilustrar acertadamente sobre todos los aspectos fundamentales que tiene que ver con dicha labor, en nuestro medio. Por lo anterior es que es vital el estudio y definición de la misma que nos lleven a comprender la verdadera razón de la Interventoría, su ámbito de aplicación, cuales deben ser sus servicios, sus beneficios, sus alcances y en forma muy especial, sus responsabilidades./Abstract. An important labor in Colombia, with regard to the organizational management in the edificatory process, is the labor of the "INTERVENTORIA", which has to be not only with the works but in general with the projects, and that in the country has been exercised for more than 50 years, so much for the public works as the private works, not mattering if it is a question of work edificial or civil. Though in any laws it's spoken about Interventoría and in incipient form they try to establish small parameters, there is no a clear regulation and requires that it should treat actually on all the fundamental aspects that one has to do with this so important labor in Colombia. Between these laws and decrees, we can mention the Decree 2090 of 1989 " By which the Regulation of Honorarium is approved for the Works of Architecture ", the Law 80 of 1993 " By which there is sent the General Statute of Contracting of the Public Administration " and the Law 400 of 1997 " As which procedure are adopted on Constructions Earthquake Resistant". Due to the lack of regulation that regulates the services of the "Interventoria" and that determines its functions, scopes, benefits, services and responsibilities, and in the same way the incipient bibliography that exists on the subject matter and small education of the same one, it is that I consider of vital importance for our way, the deep study of the Interventoría of Projects and Works, to it her to the field of the investigation and to realize a Doctoral Thesis, in where it can define with clarity, across the own experiences and other peoples who have worked in the field of the interventoría so much private as public, of the consultations and of the fieldwork, which lead us to define clear political on the regulation of the interventoría and of the process edificatory in Colombia and leave of side the empiricism that us has come accompanying throughout the time, in so important matter, in our environment, since it is that of the "Interventoria" of Projects and Works, his regulation, his education and his means of consultation across a suitable bibliography, which can illustrate us certainly on all the fundamental aspects that one has to be with the above mentioned labor, in our environment. For the previous thing it is that is vital the study and definition of the same one who lead us to understand the real reason of the "Interventoria", as well as it's area of application, which must be its services, its benefits, its scopes and in very special form, it's responsibilities. ; Doctorado
Comment rendre plus attractives, efficaces, efficientes et pertinentes les institutions d'enseignement supérieur ? Cette question constitue une préoccupation majeure en ce début de millénaire qui voit grandir l'intérêt pour les questions relatives à l'Education en général et celles portant sur l'Université en particulier, même au sein d'institutions fortement marquées par leurs conceptions économico-financières du développement (Banque Mondiale, FMI, et autres bailleurs de fonds). Cette situation découle de la crise que connaît l'Université aussi bien dans les pays riches que dans les autres, bien qu'elle reste plus marquée dans ces derniers. En fait, elle est la résultante de mutations des missions de l'Université, de la raréfaction de ses ressources, de l'augmentation de ses charges, du fait notamment de la massification (quantitative et qualitative) de ses effectifs, de la faiblesse de son efficacité aux plans interne comme externe. Entre autres mesures correctives, la sélection à l'entrée a été retenue dans beaucoup d'Université dont l'U.C.A.D. Le présent travail est une contribution à la maîtrise des facteurs prédictifs de la performance des étudiants en première année. Il tente de dégager les pistes d'action pour arriver à une modélisation des déterminants de la réussite à l'université. Spécifique tant au plan contextuel (espace, discipline et période), méthodologique (empirisme et théorie, évaluation et prospective avec des données de types transversal et diachronique portant sur des étudiants satisfaisants ou non aux critères de sélection) qu'épistémologique (enjeux ontogénique, politique et pragmatique, articulation du quantitatif et du qualitatif et prise en compte du singulier et du commun), la recherche procéde d'un raisonnement en trois étapes qui constituent trois études emboitées. La préférence a été donnée à l'analyse des variances expliquées par les différentes variables prédictives et des coefficients de régression plutôt qu'à l'étude des coefficients de corrélation. Cette analyse est précédée d'une étude des évolutions des indicateurs macroscopiques (effectifs, taux de réussite, budgets, temps de transit) et des erreurs commises dans la sélection. La Faculté des Sciences et Techniques de l'U.C.A.D. a été retenue comme terrain de la recherche. Nous avons pu y étudier un échantillon comprenant à la fois des étudiants satisfaisant aux critères de sélection et des étudiants ne satisfaisant pas à ces critères. En général, quand il s'agit d'évaluer une procédure de sélection à l'entrée d'un programme de formation, ce dernier groupe, parce que les personnes qui la constituent ne sont pas autorisées à suivre les programmes de formation visés, n'est pas pris en compte. En fait, il est impossible d'avoir les données les concernant. Dans notre cas, il nous a donc été possible de faire des comparaisons. ; How to make more attractive, effective, efficient and relevant the institutions of higher education? This question constitutes a major concern at this beginning of millennium which sees growing the interest for the questions relating to Education in general and those bearing about the University in particular, even within institutions strongly marked by their economic-financial designs of the development (the World Bank, the IMF, and other backers). This situation rises from the crisis as the University in the rich countries as in the others undergoes as well, although it remains more marked in the latter. In fact, it is the resultant of changes of the missions of the University, of the rarefaction of its resources, the increase in its loads, and the fact in particular of the massification (quantitative and qualitative) of its numbers, of the weakness of its effectiveness in the domestic fronts like external. Inter alias corrective measurements, the selection at the entry was retained in much University of which the U.C.A.D. This work is a contribution to the mastery of the predictive factors of the performance of the first-year students. It tries to release the tracks of action to arrive at a formalization of the determinants of the success at the university. Specific so much to the contextual plan (space, discipline and period), methodological (empiricism and theory, evaluation and futurology with data of the types transverse and diachronic bearing on satisfactory students or not with the criteria of selection) that epistemological (stakes ontogenetic, policy and pragmatic, articulation of quantitative and qualitative and taken into account of the singular and the common run), research proceeds of a reasoning in three stages which constitute three encased studies. The preference was given to the analysis variances explained by the various predictive variables and of the coefficients of regression rather than being studied of the coefficients of correlation. This analysis is preceded by a study of the evolutions of the macroscopic indicators (effective, rate of rate of success, budgets, time of transit) and the errors made in the selection. Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of U.C.A.D. was retained like field of research. There we could study a sample including/understanding at the same time students satisfying the criteria of selection and the students not satisfying these criteria. In general, when it is a question of evaluating a procedure of selection to the entry of a training scheme, this last group, because the people which constitute it are not authorized to follow the training schemes concerned, is not taken into account. In fact, it is impossible to have the data with regard to them. In our case, it was thus possible to us to make comparisons. ; (EDUC 3)--UCL, 2007
Today, the classical underpinnings of American legal education are under intense critical review. The dominant pedagogy, the case book and the Socratic method, were established by Christopher Columbus Langdell (1806-1906) at Harvard Law School more than a century ago. Together with Langdell's first year curriculum, which was exclusively focused on Anglo-American common law doctrine, and his emphasis on a competitive, anonymous graded meritocracy, this system still exercises an incredible grip on elite American law schools. But Langdell's 19th Century model has now been challenged by many rivals, including critical legal studies, law and economics empiricism, global curriculums, and clinical instruction. As is so often the case, Bacon anticipated these major forces of change. In his great De Augmentis Scientiarum (hereafter, De Augmentis), Bacon attacks the narrow parochialism of the common law pedagogy of his day. For at present there are nothing but schools and institutions for multiplying altercations and controversies on points of law, as if for the display of wit. And this evil is also an old one (Spedding ed., V, 108 De Augmentis Aphorism 93). Attacking reliance on decided judicial cases and on the parochial, prevailing common law treatises and pedagogy, Bacon evolved a new system of legal instruction based on empirical observation, distilled into maxims or aphorisms, one that sought true global significance and universal scientific legitimacy. [T]here are certain fountains of natural equity from which spring and flow out the infinite variety of laws which individual legal systems have chosen for themselves. And as veins of water acquire diverse flavors according to the nature of the soil through which they flow, just so in these legal systems natural equity is tinged and stained according to the site of territories, the disposition of peoples, and the nature of commonwealth. It is worthwhile to open and draw out the purer fountains of equity, for from them all amendment of laws in any commonwealth must be sought. The Aphorismi (Neustadt, ed., 273). This paper will set out Bacon's philosophy of legal education, analyze its fundamental pedagogical and doctrinal elements, and examine its lessons for American legal education today. In so doing, it will be necessary to traverse a minefield of controversy. As E.O. Wilson has so powerfully described in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Bacon was the grand architect of an enlightenment dream that called for the illumination of the moral and political sciences by the 'torch of analysis.' (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998), p. 23. (Hereafter, Consilience.)) Bacon was also devoted to a belief in a unity of knowledge, relying on the common means of inductive inquiry that might optimally serve all branches of learning. (Consilience, p. 27). In E.O. Wilson's words, Bacon envisioned a disciplined and unified learning as the key to improvement of the human condition. (Consilience, p. 27). But the unity of the modern legal academy has been fragmented into academic specialties and increasingly divorced from the experience of law practice. Post-modern and post-structuralist ideologies have attacked any pretense neutral and objective rule of law that could be taught in a formal, external setting, like mathematics or physics. Increasingly, law, and legal education, are seen as devoid of external truths. In E.O. Wilson's words: In the most extravagant version of this constructionism, there is no 'real' reality, no objective truths external to mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. Nor can ethics be firmly grounded, given that each society creates its own codes for the benefit of the same oppressive forces. (Consilience, p. 40). Hence comes the post-modernist prohibition against universal truth . . . which can have particular force in modern legal pedagogy. Equally important, law practice itself has changed. The three qualities of modern law, described prophetically by Max Weber (1864-1920) and articulated in his great Law and Economy and Society, seem to be coming true. First, the legal ignorance of the layman has increased, as legal rules become more specialized, complex and technical. Most lawyers in modern firms are divided into such specialties, and usually have little or no idea of what their partners and associates actually do. Second, the anti-formalistic tendencies of modern legal development have led courts and tribunals to increasingly depart from objective or universal rules, and to rely instead on economical utilitarian meaning. Finally, there is the lay justice and corporate tendencies in the modern legal profession. Weber adds, The use of jurors and similar lay judges will not suffice to stop the continuous growth of the technical element in the law and hence its character as a specialist's domain. Add to those changes the rapid shrinking of world cultures by improved communications and the welcome, and dramatic, increase in cultural diversity throughout American law schools and American society generally, and it becomes clear that conventional legal pedagogies and curricula will come under great stress. The century old orthodoxy of American legal education could soon be shattered into a hundred unrelated pieces. Can Bacon help us?
Целью статьи является изучение основных методологических подходов к исследованию кредитно-финансовой системы Российской империи второй половины XIX – начала XX в. в дореволюционной, советской и современной историографии путем определения главных принципов и характерных особенностей исследований по данной тематике в различные историографические периоды, установления наиболее ярких представителей и самых популярных проблемных вопросов русской историографии, выявления ключевых методов исследования на разных этапах. Актуальность статьи обусловлена освещением различных точек зрения на проблемы развития кредитно-финансовой системы Российской империи второй половины XIX – начала XX в., касающиеся финансирования крупных инфраструктурных проектов, проведения модернизации, использования новых финансовых инструментов для увеличения государственных доходов, а также стабилизации неблагоприятных макроэкономических проблем в историческом контексте. Эта информация может быть полезна для решения современных стратегических задач государства и рационального использования финансовых ресурсов. Новизна исследования заключается в том, что для изучения историографии кредитно-финансовой системы Российской империи второй половины XIX – начала XX в. впервые была применена институционально-эволюционная теория. Определены основные черты историографии дореволюционной (эмпиризм, отражение идеологии своей социальной группы, плюрализм мнений, глубокая эрудиция авторов), советской (проведение исследований в рамках формационного подхода и официально утвержденных методологических принципов, критика и репрессии в отношении инакомыслящих) и современной (отказ от формационного подхода, применение информационных технологий и экономических методов исследования, изучение объекта в контексте новых направлений). Освещены методы исследования (общенаучные, исторические, экономические), характерные для различных периодов русской историографии, наиболее популярные проблемы и направления изучения кредитно-финансовой системы (гендерная история, биографика, история повседневности и др.). Показан плюрализм мнений дореволюционных исследователей, отражены результаты применения советскими историками формационного подхода, выразившиеся в жесткой критике предшественников и одностороннем освещении событий, а также рассмотрено использование современными учеными различных методов исследования, разработка ими новых направлений. ; The article is devoted to the Russian historiography of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. Its purpose is to study the main methodological approaches to research of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern historiography by identifying the main approaches and characteristic features of research on this topic in different historiographic periods, identifying the most prominent representatives and the most popular problematic issues of Russian historiography, identifying key research methods at different stages. The relevance of the article is determined by the coverage of different points of view on the problems of the development of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries, concerning the financing of large infrastructure projects, modernization, the use of new financial instruments to increase government revenues, stabilize adverse macroeconomic problems context. This information can be used to solve modern strategic tasks of the state and rational use of financial resources. The novelty of the research is determined by the fact that to study the historiography of the credit and financial system of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries was first applied to institutional evolutionary theory. The publication identifies the main features of pre-revolutionary historiography (empiricism, a reflection of the ideology of its social group, pluralism of opinions, deep erudition of the authors), Soviet (conducting research in the framework of the formation approach, officially approved methodological principles, criticism and repression of dissidents), modern (rejection of the formation approach, the use of information technologies, the use of economic research methods, the study of the object in the context of new directions). The author covers research methods (general scientific, historical, economic), characteristic for different periods of Russian historiography, the most popular problems, and areas of study of the credit and financial system (gender history, biography, everyday history, etc.). The article shows the pluralism of opinions of pre-revolutionary researchers, the results of the application of the formation approach by Soviet researchers, expressed in the harsh criticism of predecessors, one-sided coverage of events, the use of various research methods by modern researchers, and the development of new directions. = Мэтай артыкула з'яўляецца вывучэнне асноўных метадалагічных падыходаў да даследавання крэдытна-фінансавай сістэмы Расійскай імперыі другой паловы XIX – пачатку XX ст. у дарэвалюцыйнай, савецкай і сучаснай гістарыяграфіі шляхам вызначэння галоўных прынцыпаў і характэрных асаблівасцей даследаванняў па дадзенай тэматыцы ў розныя гістарыяграфічныя перыяды, устанаўлення найбольш яркіх прадстаўнікоў і самых папулярных праблемных пытанняў рускай гістарыяграфіі, выяўлення ключавых метадаў даследавання на розных этапах. Актуальнасць артыкула абумоўлена асвятленнем розных пунктаў гледжання на праблемы развіцця крэдытна-фінансавай сістэмы Расійскай імперыі другой паловы XIX – пачатку XX ст., якія датычацца фінансавання буйных інфраструктурных праектаў, правядзення мадэрнізацыі, выкарыстання новых фінансавых інструментаў для павелічэння дзяржаўных даходаў, а таксама стабілізацыі неспрыяльных макраэканамічных праблем у гістарычным кантэксце. Гэта інфармацыя можа быць карыснай для вырашэння сучасных стратэгічных задач дзяржавы і рацыянальнага выкарыстання фінансавых рэсурсаў. Навізна даследавання заключаецца ў тым, што для вывучэння гістарыяграфіі крэдытна-фінансавай сістэмы Расійскай імперыі другой паловы XIX – пачатку XX ст. упершыню была выкарыстана інстытуцыйна-эвалюцыйная тэорыя. Вызначаны асноўныя рысы гістарыяграфіі дарэвалюцыйнай (эмпірызм, адлюстраванне ідэалогіі сваёй сацыяльнай групы, плюралізм меркаванняў, глыбокая эрудыцыя аўтараў), савецкай (правядзенне даследаванняў на аснове фармацыйнага падыходу і афіцыйна зацверджаных метадалагічных прынцыпаў, крытыка і рэпрэсіі ў дачыненні да іншадумцаў) і сучаснай (адмова ад фармацыйнага падыходу, прымяненне інфармацыйных тэхналогій і эканамічных метадаў даследавання, вывучэнне аб'екта ў кантэксце новых кірункаў). Разгледжаны метады даследавання (агульнанавуковыя, гістарычныя, эканамічныя), характэрныя для розных перыядаў рускай гістарыяграфіі, адзначаны найбольш папулярныя праблемы і напрамкі вывучэння крэдытна-фінансавай сістэмы (гендарная гісторыя, біяграфіка, гісторыя штодзённасці і інш.). Паказаны плюралізм меркаванняў дарэвалюцыйных даследчыкаў, адлюстраваны вынікі прымянення савецкімі гісторыкамі фармацыйнага падыходу, якія выявіліся ў жорсткай крытыцы папярэднікаў і аднабаковым асвятленні падзей, а таксама разгледжана выкарыстанне сучаснымі вучонымі розных метадаў даследавання, распрацоўка імі новых напрамкаў.
Moderator: Nancy Frankenberry (REL) Panelists: Brenda Silver (ENGL) and Lynn Higgins (COLT, FRIT, Dean emerita) Mary Hudson (PHYS) Deborah King (SOC) Nancy Frankenberry is the John Phillips Professor in Religion Emerita. She was the first woman hired in the Religion Department, the first woman tenured in the Religion Department, and the first female chair of that department. Since retiring from the teaching portion of her career in 2015, she has served as President of the Metaphysical Society of America (2017) and President of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (2016-2020). Her most recent publications are "Contingency After Nagarjuna and Rorty," Review of Metaphysics (March 2019); "Map is Not Territory, Menu is Not Meal," Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31 (2019); "The Fate of Radical Empiricism and the Future of Pragmatic Naturalism," in Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry After Representationalism, ed. Matthew C. Bagger (Columbia University Press 2018); and "Naturalisms, Ineffability Claims, and Symbolic Meanings," in The Question of Methodological Naturalism, ed. Jason N. Blum (Brill 2018). Her chapter "Wildman's Eff'ing Symbology" is forthcoming in a volume on Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective (2020). Brenda R. Silver is Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor Emerita at Dartmouth College; she also held the position of Adjunct Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. She joined the English Department at Dartmouth in 1972, the first year of co-education, and was one of the original founders of the Women and Gender Studies Program. She has taught courses on Twentieth-Century British Fiction, Postmodern Fiction, Popular Fiction, Cyberculture, and, always, Virginia Woolf. Her publications include Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks, Virginia Woolf Icon, and Rape and Representation, edited with Lynn A. Higgins, as well as articles on Woolf, Charlotte Bronté, E.M. Forster, John Le Carré, textual editing, anger, hypertext, popular fiction in the digital age, and other contemporary literary and cultural narratives. Lynn A. Higgins is the Edward Tuck Professor of French Studies at Dartmouth College. With a B.A. from Oberlin College and a PhD from the University of Minnesota, she arrived at Dartmouth in 1976, just one month after the first co-educational class graduated. She was one of the original co-founders of the Women's Studies Program, and co-taught its first course. With Brenda R. Silver, she launched the Feminist Inquiry Faculty Seminar in 1977 and directed a Humanities Institute on Gender and War in 1990. She teaches courses on 20th- and 21st century French literature and cinema, including a course on French women filmmakers. She served for eleven years as chair of her department and from 2011 to 2016 as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Interdisciplinary Programs and International Studies. Her publications include New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France; Bertrand Tavernier; Rape and Representation, co-edited with Brenda R. Silver, and articles on an array of topics including documentary film, gender and humor, and gender and war (World War II and the French war in Algeria), and cultural figures such as Chantal Akerman, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Diane Kurys, Patrick Modiano, Alain Resnais, and others. Mary K. Hudson, Space Physicist, PhD UCLA 1974, is Professor of Physics and Astronomy Emerita and served for eight years as Chair of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. Hudson is a co-principal Investigator on two experiments on the NASA Van Allen Probes satellites designed to study earth's radiation belts, and on the Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses (BARREL) along with Professor Robyn Millan of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Dartmouth. Hudson and her students study the weather patterns that originate from solar eruptions, following the energy and mass transfer through the interplanetary medium, all the way to the earth's ionosphere. Current areas of investigation include the evolution of the radiation belts; how the ionized particle outflow known as the solar wind and the magnetic field of the sun interact with the magnetic field of the earth, producing electrical currents in the ionosphere; and the effects of solar cosmic rays on radio communications near the earth's poles. Professor Hudson is also funded through NSF to study solar energetic particles and their access to the atmosphere. Deborah K. King. Born in Kansas City, Missouri during the early 1950s, Associate Professor King has been a beneficiary of the civil rights and women movements' successful court cases, legislative battles and protest demonstrations. From racially segregated public schools, she earned her B. A. from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL and her Ph. D. in Sociology from Yale University. Professor King's scholarly interests encompass law and social control; race, class and gender intersections; and historical/cultural sociology. Those scholarly endeavors have always worked synergistically with her efforts toward institutional and social change. While completing her dissertation research on the federal enforcement of affirmative action employment policies in higher education, she co-organized a group of Yale law and graduate students who wrote an amicus curiae brief for the 1978 Bakke case. Her Signs article, "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology," has become a classic and helped lay the conceptual foundation for intersectionality. During the 1991 congressional confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, Professor King along with historians Elsa Barkley Brown and Barbara Ransby organized a nation-wide campaign to challenge the misrepresentations of Black women that arose with Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment. Within weeks – and long before cell phones and social media -- 1,500 Black women signed the "Statement of African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (AAWIDO)" and raised over $50,000 for a full one-page ad in the New York Times plus major African American and other newspapers. More recent scholarship examines the role of First Lady Michelle Obama as an "othermother," and the survival strategies of Black women beauticians during the great recession. One of the never-ending projects is an analysis of the popular visual representations of prisons and correctional ideology as presented on picture postcards during the late 19th - early 20th century. Currently, her energies are focused on one project: the recovery of Dartmouth's relationships with the institution of slavery. Previous students in the course have established a website and conducted a campus walking tour of relevant sites. The term's seminar is preparing an exhibition in Rauner Library for the winter term. Professor King's related research examines the representations of Black women, enslaved and formerly enslaved, who are esteemed in the early histories of elite colleges, including Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Princeton, Harvard and Yale. She has been on the Dartmouth faculty since 1980, where she was the first African American woman to gain tenure. She has chaired both the Sociology and African & African American Studies Program, and served on steering and personnel committees of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies as well as AAAS; as a committee member and mentor for both the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Chavez-Eastman-Marshall Dissertation Fellowships. As an officer of the Dartmouth Black Caucus, she was pivotal in leading its efforts to establish the E. E. Just 1907 Professorship in honor of a pioneering cellular biologist and one of Dartmouth's early Black graduates. For more than forty years, she has participated in varied initiatives to recruit historically excluded groups into academic careers and to support their professional development and success. Preparing the way for the next generations of scholars of color and women has been an enduring professional commitment and a great joy!
An eye-opening portrait of the gun sellers who navigated the social turmoil leading up to the January 6 Capitol attackGun sellers sell more than just guns. They also sell politics. Merchants of the Right sheds light on the unparalleled surge in gun purchasing during one of the most dire moments in American history, revealing how conservative political culture was galvanized amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, racial unrest, and a U.S. presidential election that rocked the foundations of American democracy.Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews with gun sellers across the United States, Jennifer Carlson takes readers to the front lines of the culture war over gun rights. Even though the majority of gun owners are conservative, new gun buyers are more likely to be liberal than existing gun owners. This posed a dilemma to gun sellers in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election: embrace these liberal customers as part of a new, perhaps post-partisan chapter in the American gun saga or double down on gun politics as conservative terrain. Carlson describes how gun sellers mobilized mainstays of modern conservative culture—armed individualism, conspiracism, and partisanship—as they navigated the uncertainty and chaos unfolding around them, asserting gun politics as conservative politics and reworking and even rejecting liberal democracy in the process.Merchants of the Right offers crucial lessons about the dilemmas confronting us today, arguing that we must reckon with the everyday politics that divide us if we ever hope to restore American democracy to health
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Draft Translation: Not for CitationWhat follows is another attempt at a translation of an important text by André Tosel on the Marx/Spinoza relation. It is not a finished, or polished translation, but a rough sketch put forward to help people get a sense of this overlooked articulation of the relation between Marx and Spinoza.For a Systematic Study of the Relation of Marx to Spinoza: Remarks and Hypotheses
André Tosel Published in 2008 in the book Spinoza au XIXe Siècle The question of relation of the thought of Marx to that of Spinoza has up until now been the subject of more of a hermeneutic investigation than a philology. It is easier to construct a history of the different interpretations of Spinoza at the center of different Marxisms then to have determined the precise function of the reference to Spinoza in the work of Marx and to define the use Marx made of the spinozist problematic and the elaboration of his thought. More or less the Marxists that were first developed a relation to Spinoza were an important milestone on the way to developing what could be called a historical and materialist dialectic. The relation begins in the midst of the Second International. The singularity of Spinoza's thought has often been reduced to a stepping stone on the way to "monist" immanentism, which is supposed to be its philosophical structure at least in the reception of two thinkers, as Plekhanov has asserted in some preliminary texts working from some notes of Engels in manuscripts published in the USSR under the title of the Dialectic of Nature. In the dogmatic frame of the struggle between idealism and materialism, Spinoza anticipates materialism by his thesis of the unity of nature and by his doctrine of the equal dignity of the attribute of extension in relation to the attribute of thought. The doctrine of mode and substance causality, coupled with the critique of final causality and the illusions of superstition, signifies at the same time an overcoming of mechanistic thinking and the first form of the dialectic. Rare were those who, like Antonio Labriola, were careful not to oppose two conceptions of the world head-on and maintained a certain distance with polemical opposition, preferring instead to indicate that Marx did for mode of production what Spinoza had done for the world of the passions—a geometry of their production. In the Soviet Union before the Stalinist freeze, this interpretive tension is reproduced: Spinoza becomes the terrain through which the clarification of the dialectic takes place opposing mechanists and anti-mechanists, and original articulation of the thesis of liberty as the comprehension of necessity. These problems have been clarified somewhat. (Zapata, 1983; Seidel, 1984; Tosel, 1995)One would have to wait for the deconstructive enterprise of Louis Althusser for this movement to be reversed. Spinoza is no longer a moment in the teleology which is integrated and surpassed on the way to Marxism-Leninism. His work is the means of theoretical production for reformulating the philosophical and scientific revolution of Marx without recourse to only the Hegelian dialectic. Spinoza is the first to have elaborated a model of structural causality that makes it possible to think the efficacy of the structure as an absent cause over its effects. The theory of knowledge is not one that authorizes absolute knowledge, but it announces this infinite exigency of a break with ideology without the hope of arriving at transparent knowledge. It obliges one to renounce any idea of communism as a state of a final reconciliation in social relations which would be deprived of any contradictions. "We have always been spinozists,' Althusser announces in the Elements of Self-Criticism, and then proceed to the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect from the Hegelian dialectic. It is then only an epistemological obstacle which prevents Marx from realizing the full power of his critique of political economy and to explore the continent of history that he discovered. Spinoza for clarifying Marx himself. Everything has been clarified. (Cotten 1992; Raymond, Moreau, 1997). In terms of historical research, the spinozist studies that have been made after the end of the nineteen sixties in France and Italy have often been made by researchers who have rubbed shoulders with Marxism. We find the same oscillation between a tendency to read Spinoza according to a pre-marxist perspective, in the sense of a dialectic of emancipation, or liberation from a theological political complex and disalienation, even constituent power, and another tendency insisting on the infinity of the struggle against all illusions, even those of total liberation, affirming the unsurpassable dimension of the imagination in the constitution of the conatus and in the production of the power of the multitude. This oscillation is manifest often in the same commentators, often itself a function of the change of the historical conjuncture. However, up until now, there has never been an attempt to study from Marx's works themselves the structural function of the spinozist reference in the constitution of Marxist theory, one which would permit us to better understand the understanding that Marx made of Spinozist work. The interpretations have anyway have developed from a certain exteriority to the letter of Marxists texts. Several years ago, a German researcher, Fred E. Schrader, in a short text dedicated to the thematic of "substance and concept" chez Marx (Substanz und Funktion: zur Marxsrezeption Spinoza's) drew attention to this situation (1984). He rightly noted that it was necessary to distinguish two moments in the research to avoid any merely external confrontation: a) first, obviously, document the explicit and implicit mentions of Spinoza in Marx's text; 1) then, reconstruct the position of the reference to Spinoza in the process of the constitution of the critique of political economy which is the central Marxist work, alongside of the references to "Hegel" which one knows were constitutive in the years of 1857-1858. Only this philological and philosophical work can permit us to renew the state of the question. Schrader's study must be considered. We propose to develop it and comment on it because up until now it has not received the attention that it merits. Before everything else, it is necessary to be precise. The work envisioned must be considerable, it includes taking into account the texts published by Marx, those published posthumously by Engels and by Kautsky, and all of those—collections of notes and thematic notebooks—which make up the incomplete nature of Capital, including Marx's correspondence. The MEGA 2, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, still incomplete, has not finished being scrutinized. This work could begin from the hypothesis that we can conceptualize two periods in Marx's work from which it is possible to reassemble occurrences that conceptualize the reference to Spinoza in order to determine their structural function. The first period corresponds to the years of his formation and the interlinking of the critique of politics and the early critique of political economy, it begins with the concept of history underlying the German Ideology and culminates in the Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto. The second period begins with the research operating under the title of the critique of political economy beginning in 1857, interrupted provisionally in January of 1859 and beginning again in 1861. The reference to Spinoza is more explicit in the first period where it is a matter of an specifically political practice, articulating a materialism of practice. It is less explicit in the second period, it functions nonetheless as a fundamental operator in the essential theory of the substance of value in capital. The Philosophical Intensifier of Spinoza of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Destruction of the Theologico-Political Complex and Democratic Radicalism. Marx encounters Spinoza in the beginning of his theoretical and political journey. In 1841 we know from the preface by Alexandre Matheron (Cahiers Spinoza), Marx, after his doctorate, reproduced the extracts he copied from the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (MEGA 2 VI/I Berlin, 1977). He is curiously presented as the author of these texts and moreover they are reorganized in their own order which is not that of the Tractatus itself. The chapters containing the critique of the supernatural, of the miracle, and all of all forms of superstition are brought forward as essential and open on the properly political chapters dedicated to the freedom of thought (XX) and the foundation of the republic (XVI). The Ethics is not ignored but it is not reproduced, Letter XII takes the place of a speculative text and is accompanied with Letter LXXVI to Burgh. Everything takes place as if Marx considered as the most important question to be that of theological politics and is concentrated on the question of human freedom in its radical ethico-political dimension. What is important is that the revolutionary democratic state is realized according to this concept. One could also consider that Spinoza is utilized here as one of the figures that a Doctorate of Philosophy considers along with Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel as provocations, of that which puts knowledge in the service of a life liberated from the fear of authorities, which reappropriates humanity's power of thinking and acting confiscated in the service of gods and fetishes. In a certain manner Epicurus is the paradoxically the first of the thinkers who claims that "it is a misfortune to live in necessity, but it is not necessary to live under necessity." This truth finds a new application, after the French Revolution, in the age of a new ethics, where free individuals recognize themselves in a free state. 2. The explicit reference to Spinoza is displaced in the texts of the years 1841-1843—the Kreuznach manuscript dedicated to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, followed by the introduction and the Jewish Question. These constitute the Feuerbachian moment of Marx, at the heart of his theory of the alienation of the human essence. One must not make this critique of politics a simple transition towards the discovery of the alienation of social powers, nor understand it as an end of a politics understood as primarily statist. It is the ethico-political liberation which requires a transformation of social relations and which is a transvaluation or emancipation of social powers. Spinoza is not named, but certain passages from the TTP are repeated almost to the letter: Spinoza figures as the index of a new task , that is lacking in Hegel which is that of thinking beyond the dualism of civil society and the state. The name of this passage is democracy or true democracy. Marx returns to the letter of the Spinozist thesis according to which democracy is not only the name of a constituted political regime, but the essence of politics, the most natural regime, constituting the power of the people. The intensive force of Spinoza is that of democracy not as a mystical act or utopian ecstasy, but as a process of constitution that replaces actual void of the Hegelian state where the people lack themselves, in which the state becomes something separate, still theologico-political. Democracy is the active process by which the people is refigured as the negative instance of any separate political form and gives a political form to its social power. "Democracy is the truth of monarchy, monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is necessarily democracy in contradiction with itself, whereas the monarchial moment is no contradiction within democracy. Monarchy cannot, while democracy can be understood in terms of itself In democracy none of the moments obtains a significance other than what befits it. Each is really only a moment of the whole Demos. In monarchy one part determines the character of the whole; the entire constitution must be modified according to the immutable head. Democracy is the generic constitution; monarchy is a species, and indeed a poor one. Democracy is content and form; monarchy should be only form, but it adulterates the content. In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its modes of existence,. the political constitution; in democracy the constitution itself appears only as one determination, and indeed as the self-determination of the people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution, in democracy the constitution of the people. Democracy is the resolved mystery of all constitutions. Here the constitution not only in itself, according to essence, but according to existence and actuality is returned to its real ground, actual man, the actual people, and established as its own work. The constitution appears as what it is, the free product of men." It is possible to remark that this constituent power of the demos tends to be presented as a sort of causa sui in the order of world of social relations. The naturalist dimension thematized in the Ethics is not posited here with the insistence of humanity as part of nature, with the thematization of the relations between internal and external causality. Necessity seems to have disappeared for an instant. It is notable that this in the same moment that Feuerbach defends Spinoza's naturalism against Hegelian idealism and makes the author of the Ethics the Moses of modern thought who has destroyed theology by his pantheism, while reproaching him, for not having arrived at a radical humanist affirmation, since he maintained an equivocal equivalence between the naturalization of god and the divinization of nature. The Marxist reference is primarily to the ethico-political Spinoza, one of the "intellectual heroes of morality" as he says in a text contemporary with it, "Comments on the Latest Russian Censorship—" along with Kant and Fichte he is one of the heroes that found and defend the principal of moral autonomy. Spinoza makes it possible to undertake a philosophical political of Hegel, the people would be the only ontological instance that constitutes the political constitution, which is to say democracy, of civil society. Spinoza makes it possible to introduce a new dialectic within the incomplete dialectic of The Principles of the Philosophy of Right. This dialectic is simultaneously a critique. The object of this critical dialectic is the self-constitution of political activity in the struggle to overcome the domination of abstract entities erected into speculative abstractions defining the latest avatars of the theological-political complex. Schrader does not say more in the exposition of the reference to Spinoza in this first period. We could take a step beyond his analysis. A unpublished path seems to be presented. We could in fact explore it as Yovel has done (Spinoza and Other Heretics); also the first book of Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (1968) examines the double relation of the human conatus to other conatuses and objects that suit them or do not suit them the rudiments of a theory of objectification of the human essence that Marx elaborates in the texts of 1844 where he analyzes the people under the figure of the proletariat subject and object of alienated labor. The reading can shed light on Spinoza, but Marx has for his interlocuters Hegel, Adam Smith, and Feuerbach. Spinoza does not intervene here explicitly. It is preferable to follow the letter of his texts. 3. The text which follows, The Holy Family of 1845, indicates an unexamined reversal of perspective. Far from finding in Spinoza a radical thinker of liberty through the radicalization of the democratic process and developing Feuerbach's theses of the virtues of Spinoza's naturalization, far from continuing the anti-idealist elements of Spinoza, Marx for the first time distances himself from Spinoza placing him on the side of Descartes, of Malebranche, of Leibniz, of abstract rationalist metaphysics, in a paragraph before celebrating the materialists in which he inscribes himself. These are the materialists of the French Enlightenment, La Mettrie, Holbach, Helvétius, which are lauded for having operated outside of metaphysics. These are the authors that Plekhanov reinscribes as a defenders of monistic materialism in the thought of nature and in the theory of history. Certainly as Olivier Bloch in an important contribution has demonstrated ("Materialism, genesis of Marxism, 1981, reprinted in Matières à penser, Vrin, 1997), this chapter of the history of philosophy is a plagiarism by Marx who literally takes it from the Manuel d'histoire de la philosophie moderne by Charles Renouvier (1844). The soviet Diamat has been founded by a French critic… But the fact remains that Marx endorses this reconstruction which prefers Bacon, Hobbes and Locke to Spinoza, lauding them for the empiricism and nominalism: the English thinkers critique metaphysic speculation and open directly the way to materialism. Pierre Bayler in France can be considered the only fellow traveler of British empiricism by his scepticism he dissolves the metaphysics of Spinoza and Leibniz (The Holy Family, 171). The Spinoza criticized here is that of the Ethics understood as a dogmatic treatise of metaphysics which has a "profane content" but it has lost its historical condition. This is no longer the antitheological political Spinoza but the speculative philosopher. Is it necessary to conclude that this is a contradiction on the part of Marx and to forget his previous theses? It is a surprising oversight because that which Marx and Renouvier give credit to Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke can be imputed to Spinoza as well. Everything takes place as if Marx, put off by the metaphysics of the Ethics forgets what he had found in the TTP—and this seems to be a permanent transformation. In fact the contradiction is not only apparent, or, more to the point, it concerns Spinoza himself. Marx does not have as his object an analysis of Spinozism. He uses the latter by breaking it down according to the needs of his task which is at this moment is to study the activity of real man and the possibility of his transformation by bringing together the theoretical humanism of Feuerbach, the French communism and socialism, and the English thinkers who represent this humanism in the domain of practice. "[Metaphysics] will be defeated for forever by materialism which has now been perfected by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism. As Feuerbach represented materialism in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and communism represent materialism in the practical field which now coincides with humanism." (The Holy Family, pg. 168) One can detect in this passage the presence of a schematic of the history of modern philosophy which has echoes of Moses Hess and Ludwig Feuerbach, the two have confronted the problem of the critical comprehension of Hegel and have begun to present a reinterpretation of the grand moments of the history of philosophy after their master. Marx deviates from the interpretation of Hess given in a text which had a particular impact: The Sacred History of Mankind by a Young Disciple of Spinoza (1838). Hess appropriates Spinoza's theory of knowledge and exploits his theory of the imagination to develop a positive sense of social utopia, and overall makes Spinoza the true alternative to Hegel's Christian philosophy. Far from being an acosmism, the theory of substance is the perfect incarnation of the Hebraic idea of the unconditional unity of all. It is paradoxical, the other part, of the interpretation by Renouvier followed by Marx recovers and conceals that of Feuerbach that one can find in the same period in Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy (1842) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). Marx brushes up against these theses of Feuerbach on Spinoza without reproducing them in their entirety. They make Spinoza an important moment in modern philosophy: at the heart of this movement they make this philosophy an important realization of the humanization of God, Spinoza remains still a speculative philosopher who is at once produces the realization and negation of God. Speculative metaphysics realizes with him its ultimate phase which is determined contradictorily as theism and atheism in the form of pantheism. "Spinoza is the originator of speculative philosophy, Schelling its restorer, Hegel its perfecter."(Thesis 102) Pantheism becomes the only consequential theology in that it anticipates the end of theology in atheism. The Spinozist substance transforms all independent beings into predicates, into attributes of a unique and independent being. God is no longer only a thing thought, it is equally an extended thing (Thesis 3). Spinoza does not make the self-activity of self-consciousness the attribute that unifies and transforms substance into subject. This was Hegel's tour de force but he paid for it with an absolute idealism of spirit since once again spirit prevails over extension and concrete man is subject to abstraction separated from reality of self-consciousness. This inscription of Spinoza in metaphysics is all the more paradoxical because Marx finds in empiricism and British materialism the theses that Feuerbach attributes to Spinoza, and Marx accepts a definition in which materialism coincides with communism. As can be seen in this passage from Principles of the Philosophy of the Future Pantheism is theological atheism or theological materialism; it is the negation of theology while itself confined to the standpoint of theology, for it turns matter, the negation of God, into a predicate or an attribute of the Divine Being. But he who turns matter into an attribute of God, declares matter to be a divine being. The realisation of God must in principle presuppose godliness, that is, the truth and essentiality of the real. The deification of the real, of that which exists materially – materialism, empiricism, realism, and humanism – or the negation of theology, is the essence of the modern era. Pantheism is therefore nothing more than the essence of the modern era elevated into the divine essence, into a religio-philosophical principle. Empiricism or realism – meaning thereby the so-called sciences of the real, but in particular the natural science – negates theology, albeit not theoretically but only practically, namely, through the actual deed in so far as the realist makes the negation of God, or at least that which is not God, into the essential business of his life and the essential object of his activity. However, he who devotes his mind and heart exclusively to that which is material and sensuous actually denies the trans-sensuous its reality; for only that which constitutes an object of the real and concrete activity is real, at least for man. "What I don't know doesn't affect me." To say that it is not possible to know anything of the supersensuous is only an excuse. One ceases to know anything about God and divine things only when one does not want to know anything about them. How much did one know about God, about the devils or angels as long as these supersensuous beings were still objects of a real faith? To be interested in something is to have the talent for it. The medieval mystics and scholastics had no talent and aptitude for natural science only because they had no interest in nature. Where the sense for something is not lacking, there also the senses and organs do not lack. If the heart is open to something, the mind will not be closed to it. Thus, the reason why mankind in the modern era lost the organs for the supersensuous world and its secrets is because it also lost the sense for them together with the belief in them; because its essential tendency was anti-Christian and anti-theological; that is, anthropological, cosmic, realistic, and materialistic. [In the context of the present work, the differences between materialism, empiricism, realism, and humanism are, of course, irrelevant.] Spinoza hit the nail on the head with his paradoxical proposition: God is an extended, that is, material being. He found, at least for his time, the true philosophical expression for the materialistic tendency of the modern era; he legitimated and sanctioned it: God himself is a materialist. Spinoza's philosophy was religion; he himself was an amazing man. Unlike so many others, Spinoza's materialism did not stand in contradiction to the notion of a non-material and anti-materialistic God who also quite consistently imposes on man the duty to give himself up only to anti-materialistic, heavenly tendencies and concerns, for God is nothing other than the archetypal and ideal image of man; what God is and how he is, is what man ought to be or wants to be, or at least hopes to be in the future. But only where theory does not belie practice, and practice theory, is there character, truth, and religion. Spinoza is the Moses of modern free-thinkers and materialists. 4. The anti-metaphysical fury of Marx, the blind submission to Renouvier, limits him in developing an interpretation of the Ethics more nuanced and sensitive to the historical contradictions. This situation is even more strange because it is in The Holy Family that Marx interprets materialist philosophers such that they are a Feuerbachian Spinoza. On can find then three theses that Marx distributes to different representatives of materialism and that can also be imputed to Spinoza. --Thesis 1. Nature is a primary reality, it can be explained by itself without recourse to the principle of a creator. Nothing comes from nothing. One can then have recourse to Bacon for who "the primitive forms of matter are essentially living forms, individuals, and it is they that produce specific differences." He follows, as does Hobbes, in adding that "one cannot separate thought from the matter which thinks." Thought cannot be separated from matter capable of thought. --Thesis 2. The human order is inscribed in a specific manner in nature. This specificity does not specify anything extra-worldly of human activity. Hobbes has demonstrated the sensible nature of activity. "Man is subordinate to the same laws that nature. Power and liberty are identical." The Holy Family) This order is known to promote the art of forming ideas, the human species is fundamentally educatable. ---Thesis 3. What is important is to think the constitution of this human order according to radical possibilities of the ways of transforming these necessary conditions of experience of liberty-power. "If man is unfree in the materialist sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social source of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of separate individuals but by the power of society." (The Holy Family 176). It is not necessary to give the history of philosophy presented in The Holy Family a structural importance. It acts as a provisionally constructed polemical text where Marx has given the means for his own philosophical conception in broad strokes in order to better understand the intersection of humanism, materialism, and communism. The incongruence of the treatment of Spinoza, reinterpreted to be behind Feuerbach's position, was not overlooked by Marx's comrades in combat since H. Krieg (himself denounces by Marx in a virulent circular as a confused partisan of religious socialism), he wrote in a letter of June 6, 1845 in order to restore Spinoza's battle against metaphysics overlooked by Marx, "you're probably right about what it says in the English Hobbes and Locke [i.e. that they vacillate contradictorily between materialism and theism], the same for Voltaire and his direct partisans; but Holbach is practically Spinozist, and it is with and Diderot that the Enlightenment reaches its summit and becomes revolutionary." (cited by Maximilien Rubel and his edition of the philosophical texts of Marx titled Philosophie) 5. The instrumental and fluctuating character of the reference to Spinoza as a metaphysician is confirmed precisely by The German Ideology. Marx returns in passing to the place of Spinoza in modern philosophy. Spinoza has developed the principle of substantial immanence but he has not integrated the principle with self-consciousness. Hegel would be the unity of Spinoza and Fichte (The German Ideology, 107). But for Marx this representation consigns him to a partial aspect of the Hegelian synthesis. Self-consciousness is at once a hypostasis of the real activity of human beings in the process of their self-production and the "the real consciousness of the social relations in which they appear to exists and to which they appear to be autonomous." In a similar manner substance is "an ideal hypostatized expression of the world as it exists" that is take as the foundation of the world "existing for itself." Marx returns to Feuerbach for clarification of substance and it anthropological resolution. We do not know much more, but the text seems to distinguish the Hegelian critique of substance and its possible materialist significance as "the existing world." We would have expected considerations on the immanence of modes in natura naturans and of their dynamic interdetermination. In any case, Marx refuses the young Hegelain opposition between self-consciousness and substance, and proposes to maintain the category of substance as an inseparable unity of the existing mode and the beings which constitute the world in the play of their relations. Marx's criticism has as its target the mystification of self-consciousness and its anti-substantial phobia. Everything takes place as if the ontological categories of Spinoza up until now rejected as conservative metaphysics have an intensive force irreducible to the critique of the young Hegelians. However, it remains that in this complex itinerary the use value of the reference to Spinoza is concentrated in the theological political constellation and the political constitution of the political force of social force. This reference becomes the presupposition of the materialist conception of history, but it does not intervene in the texture of these concepts. The Spinoza Reference in the Critique of Political Economy, Substance and Concept Returning to Schrader and his propositions for the study of the second moment of the reference to Spinoza, that of the Marxist use of Spinozist concepts from the Ethics in the development of the critique of political economy in the development of Capital. Schrader pays particular attention to the reappearance in the margins of the reference to Spinoza in the period of the creation and exposition of the critique of political economy which is developed from 1851 to 1863. An important letter from Marx to Lassale from May 31, 1858 which was published in an obscure book on Heraclitus, gives to Spinoza's metaphysics the same status that he gave to Hegel in a famous letter to Engels a few months before. Even among philosophers who give a systematic form to the works, as for example Spinoza, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented. The true system is only present in itself. (Marx MEW, 29, Berlin, 1963, 561).
What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel's Logic at which I had taken another look by mere accident... If ever the time comes when such work is again possible, I should very much like to write 2 or 3 sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified. (Correspondence Marx-Engels) Marx makes it clear that the elaboration of the critique passes through the utilization of elements of philosophical works which others appear to have completely bypassed. The presence of Hegel is the center of the interpretation of Capital. It would appear certain to this period that Marx no longer takes inspiration from the Feuerbachian critique of abstract speculation. In this case, the Idea separated from its contents generates the latter in a mystified way by legitimizing the crudest aspects, losing the benefit of seizing the real as a contradictory process, as is explained in The Holy Family or The Poverty of Philosophy. Hegel is from now on solicited for his dialectical discoveries: he elaborates the dialectic as an immanent process of thought and his discoveries serve Marx in developing his proper critique. The presence of Hegel in the period up to the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, in passing through diverse manuscripts of 1857-1858 (The Grundrisse) and the manuscripts from 1861-1863, has been attested to and demonstrated by works, either to reaffirm the heretical Hegelianism of Marx, (Rosdolsky, Reichelt, Zelenyi, all dedicated to research the logic of Capital, all following one of the most famous injunctions of all times, Lenin in the Notes on Dialectics) or to combat it in order to argue that Marx was Hegelian or anti-Hegelian (Althusser, and Bidet in his famous study, The Making of Marx's Capital). This usage of Hegel consists essentially in using the categories of logic to expose the theoretical structure of the passages which operate from the commodity to value, from money as the measure of value to money as the means of exchange and as the universal means of payment, from money to capital. Schrader proposes the following recovery of the Marxist exposition of Hegelian categories: --Exchange value and the form of value correspond to the pure quantity of Hegel: this value and its measure is realized as money. The Marxist measure of value adopts the Hegelian determinations of the quantitative relations and their measure. --The circulation of commodities and money is described by the concepts of an infinite qualitative and quantitative process. --Finally the passage from money to capital transposes the passage from being to essence. Marx has thus read and reused these conceptual determinations for the diverse functions of commodity, value, money and circulation. And what about Spinoza? According to Schrader, he intervenes to resolve a logical problem that is at this point unresolved, that of the determination of the concept of capital supposed to integrate the logically preceding determinations. In good Hegelianism, Marx has made the movement of capital that of the essence of the concept. When Marx maintains that exchange value is realized in the circulation of other substances, in an indefinite totality, without losing the determination of its form, always remaining money and commodities, he makes capital the totality of substances. However, it thus impossible to maintain the internal connection between capital and labor, and more precisely abstract labor. Spinoza intervenes to make possible another use of the category of substance: that would not have its function to subsume the plurality of all substances, but to determine the quality of the fluent quantity that defines abstract labor. One can see this in the text of Volume One of Capital, revised by Marx in 1873 for the French translation of J. Roy. The category of substance is introduce in the passage from the commodity to its determination as the contradictory unity of use value and exchange value. The exchange of commodities is only possible if the their values are "expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantities." This something is a substance specific to all commodities. "This common "something" cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities…[] it is evident that one makes an abstraction from use value when one exchanges, and that the relation of exchange is characterized by this abstraction (Capital). Exchange and the production process which supports it operate this real abstraction from the useful qualities of the objects to be exchanged. This utility, although necessary, does not render possible the exchange of objects of value insofar as they products of labor. Exchange concerns the objects considered as products of labor. If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract. Capitalism cannot be grasped as a subject enveloping the totality of the process of the development. It is no longer a simple quantity in indefinite expansion. It is thought as the "social substance of as exchange values." This substance can be determined as capital, but it goes beyond this process of determination by constituting a remainder, a "residue" that constantly reappears. "Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values." The concept of Capital is not that of the concept of substance becoming subject., it returns to the concept of social substance defined as abstract labor creator of value, substance of value, and substance which increases value: purely progressive quantity reduced to its infinity which is a true infinity irreducible to the logic of bad infinity, that of capital which nonetheless subsumes it. However it is said that this reconstruction does not rest on an explicit reference to Spinoza. The objection is well founded. Schrader responds that it is Marx who reread Hegel and saw that the formal system of Spinoza could be used against Hegel critique of the concept of substance in the Logic. It is a matter of the problem of determination. Omnis determination negatio, Marx keeps reminding everyone of this. If it is Hegel who validates Spinoza's judgement by demonstrating its insufficiency which for Marx transforms into a sufficient truth to permit him to avoid identifying capital with the Hegelian concept. Capital can increase its reality only by determining this social substance of abstract labor, by negating it. The tendency of capital, its ideal, is the absolute negation of this substance. Marx makes the insufficiency of Spinoza's substance according to Hegel into a virtue. In the Logic the principle according to which determination is negation is recognized as essential. But Spinoza, according to Hegel, remains with determination as limit which is founded on an other being. The mode is in another from which it derives its being but this other is in itself. It is the integral concept of all realities. But its immanence is only apparent. Each mode negates each other, determination of each is the result of the determined negation of all of the others. Far from determining itself in these negations, substance is negated in its absolute indifference. It does not reflect itself in these negations no more than they reflect it. The Spinozist principle does not arrive at absolute negation that it anticipates contradictorily. The substance is posed by an external reflection which compromises the otherwise affirmed subsistence of the determinations which become an effervescent moment (attributes and modes). This can be read in the texts from The Science of Logic dedicated to Spinoza. "Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. According to Spinoza's definition, of which we say more more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect. Similarly, the substantiality of individuals cannot persist in the face of that proposition."Hegel, Science of Logic "Since absolute indifference may seem to be the fundamental determination of Spinoza's substance, we may add that this is indeed the case in so far as in both every determination of being, like every further concrete differentiation of thought and extension and so forth, is posited as vanished. If we stop short at the abstraction [of substance] then it is a matter of complete indifference what something looked like in reality before it was swallowed up in this abyss. But when substance is conceived as indifference, it is tied up with the need for determining it and for taking this determination into consideration; it is not to remain Spinoza's substance, the sole determination of which is the negative one that everything is absorbed in it. With Spinoza, the moment of difference — attributes, thought and extension, then the modes too, the affections, and every other determination — is introduced empirically; it is intellect, itself a mode, which is the source of the differentiation." Hegel, Science of Logic 3. It is capital which fails to realize its ideal determinations of essence and which falls back into the residue of the social substance, of the abstract labor which it masks. Capital as a mode of production is ruled by the real abstractions of exchange value which are not comprehended by social agents. Value is a social abstraction that is produced from the base of multiple dispersed evaluations, that the understanding of the economist produces only after the fact, but can be known as a real abstraction operated by society and which is determined as a social substance of abstract time. The determination of the common substance as abstract labor makes it possible to dissipate the mystification produced by the appearance of capital as the self moving essence of value. All of the people, who are modes of this substance, cannot immediately represent to themselves the internal determinations of this substance in which they appear other than as representation of theological-political complex, the same as the agents of capital who cannot represent to themselves the determinations of capital (commodity-value-money-forms of capital) without fetishizing them as autonomous movements of the value form. Theoretical knowledge, the Wissenschaft, does not dissolve this fetishism because the mechanisms of its social reproduction are founded on the constitution of these forms of representation and their real efficacy. Capital cannot arrive at self-identity in terms of an absolute reflection. The determination that Hegel imputes to Spinoza negatively of substance as exterior reflection can better convey the determinations of moments of its critique. This places within the development of initial economic forms this sort of equivalent of the attribute of extension that is human labor, this common social substance comprising the forms of modal representations which capture it, that is to say that the forms of consciousness and their functional relations in the material process of reproduction. It is therefore the relationship between the substances of abstract human labor and mystified or adequate forms of social representations of this substance that Marx finds in in the hidden Spinozian system and that he utilizes in order to escape the limits of Hegel's categories, which tend to sublimate substance into the concept and therefore annul the contradictions of capital in the passage from substance to the essence and the concept. From this point of view, Hegel and Spinoza would both be utilized without reservations by Marx as the complimentary and constitutive means of production of the critique of political economy. Spinoza would thus be primarily critical to the extent that the process of the development of the determination of capital cannot be ruled by the teleological order of being-essence-concept. The theory of the substance of abstract labor interrupts the movement of the idealization of capital from the mimesis of the Hegelian order that has been opposed. Spinoza is a moment of the emendation of the intellect internal to the Marxist critique, not an external instance that would be opposed in the confrontation with exteriority. On an Incomplete Analysis 1. Schrader goes no further. The outline of his work remains open. In particular this analysis Postulates as evidence a substantial theory of abstract labor, one that has come under criticism from multiple non-marxist thinkers (Croce, Pareto, Menger) and also, more recently, by Marxists (Althusser and Bidet). In this case the relation to Spinoza would lose its fecundity. But if one leaves to the side the labor theory of value and its supposed foundational role, on the internal level the analysis still remains allusive, because it would have been necessary to exceed the level of Volume One of Capital in order to demonstrate the decisive character of Spinoza's conceptuality in the Marxist conception. Despite these uncertainties, the perspective opened by Schrader is stimulating in that can necessitate a more rigorous study, tempering the contradictory interpretations by the rigors of philology. 2. Schrader's final remarks seem to us be more provocative. Starting from the idea that Spinoza and Marx begin from two different historical moments—that of manufacturing capital limited by the desire of hoarding and that of capitalism fully developed—the logical and ethico-political thesis of the submission of needs to absolute monetary enrichment, and that therefore the refusal of money as an end in itself, he begins to construct a shocking analogy between the third type of knowledge in Spinoza and the knowledge of the capitalist which exposes its money to circulation in order to multiply it. The determination of particular things sub specie aeternitas, as deepening the knowledge of their essence would symbolize with the effort of capitalists to insert money to measure things in their circulation sub specie capitalis. The reference to Marx attests to the irony of Marx: if the movement of true knowledge is infinite, this infinity cannot be confused with that of monetary accumulation which becomes a bad infinity because the means of accumulation are reversed and perverted to be posited as an end in itself. 3. It is more correct, as Schrader makes apparent, to find a space more effective for the forma mentis common to Marx and Spinoza: the two both diagnosis the pathology of the understanding and that of a form of life proper to a given historical world. Both understand the irreversible character of modern passions and set to understand and eventually cure these pathologies. Spinoza, son of a merchant enriched by international trade and a merchant himself in his youth, does not have contempt for money and the new wealth of nations promoted by capitalist economy. He does not dream of a return to oikos of finite needs in a household setting, he is not an aristoltean who condemns bad infinity of the circulation of merchandise which has as its object money and not the use value of merchandise. He registers the emergence of exchange value, he sees, as Aristotle did, that it is the subordination of true value. Remember the famous text from Ethics IV Appendix, consecrated to the function of money. XXVIII. Now to achieve these things the powers of each man would hardly be sufficient if men did not help one another. But money has provided a convenient instrument for acquiring all these aids. That is why its image usually occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else. For they can imagine hardly any species of joy without the accompanying idea of money as its cause. XXlX. But this is a vice only in those who seek money neither from need nor on account of necessities, but because they have learned the art of making money and pride themselves on it very much. As for the body, they feed it according to custom, but sparingly, because they believe they lose as much of their goods as they devote to the preservation of their body. Those, however, who know the true use of money, and set bounds to their wealth according to need, live contentedly with little. The realization of money as a concept, the accumulation of money for accumulation, is unrealized. Marx adds that this goal is inaccessible because the character of use value of commodities contradicts the universal sociality of value. The common social substance in so far as it is measured in abstract labor time is measured according to quantitatively determined portions. Money is supposed to represent value in its infinite becoming of an end in itself, but it can only effectively represent a determined part. This contradiction is resolved in the deplacement that money makes in becoming capital, exchange value multiplied in profit. Spinoza's therapeutic of desire also concern the intellect of calculation: the latter is not condemned, it is superior to the intellect of avarice which theorizes by avarita and does not develop the capacity to act and think. This understanding, however, is called upon to better understand the monetary economy by subordinating it to immanent true utility, that which is inscribed in the republic of free citizens. It is only in this sense that the accumulation of wealth under the monetary form can enter into the correct perspective of knowledge of the third kind. Marx in his own way wants to understand the action of human beings without deploring or flattering them. Capital cannot be understood going from substance to the essence of the concept, but it has its basis in substance, the social substance of abstract labor, and can be rethought and regrouped in the forms of economic understanding. Capital also has as its goal a particular therapeutic manner, the health and well-being of a social body that cannot be subsumed under capital but must encompass the increase of the capacities of acting and thinking that capital subordinates to itself. 4. This anti-teleological function of the concept of substance/abstract labor is not maintained by Marx for long in his dialectic. Certainly the function of the subject cannot be attributed to capital, but it is displaced and given a different support, not that of abstract labor with its internal multiplicity and impersonality, but its bearer, that of the working class, the proletariat, the people of the people. The substance of abstract labor becomes subject in the determination that Marx always uses with the English term general intellect. One could thus see a final return of Hegel which interrupts Marx's return to Spinoza. The communism developed by the general intellect is the practical substitute of the Hegelian concept and imposes an anthropological version and anthropocentric teleology that Spinoza would not accept. What does the general intellect represent? It represents the capacity of the proletariat to organize the ensemble of forces defining the collective worker and the cooperation associated with it, under the direction of formation of the factory in the constitution of the unqualified worker, all representing the advance front of the progressive socialization of the social productive forces. Communism is not something that is imposed as a simple moral ideal, it is a product of the real historical process. However, Marx does not escape here the teleologism that he shares with majority of German idealism. The socialization of productive forces—that for Marx leads the process of the self-production of humanity realizing its immanent end and to which he attributes the function of the concept—is not realized at the level of society. It cannot in any way constitute itself as a causa sui. The human world remains a world of world of modal relations and interactions: if the effects of liberation can realize themselves at the level of the individual (by the knowledge of singular things) or at the level of collectivity ( by the democratic constitution of the multitude), these effects would not be made from a mode as a complete cause of itself under all points of view. The capacity of a mode to act and think, human individual or society, can be more or less adequate, but this adequation does not annul the difference that separates the mode which is produced by and in another which it requires to subsist and which is produced in and by itself and becomes a cause of itself. The identity of natura naturata and natura naturans cannot grant a mode the capacity to be cause of itself under all points of view: it permits it to do so under certain points of view and certain conditions which are sufficient for an ethical realization. Communism to the extent that Marx thinks in terms of the becoming concept of the collective worker exceeds the conditions and possibilities of action predicated on modes. To this structural impossibility we can add the consideration of an analytical one: modern society is not immense and singular enterprise under the order of the collective worker, it is, to say the least, a network of antagonistic enterprises in which on the contrary the process of work is fragmented to the point where it loses all material and ideal unity, a fragmentation that has been imposed by the imperative of capitalist society. Exploitation is not only maintained but it is generalized, it is only in compensation that the recomposition of labor process itself as something collective, cooperative, and associated that Marx believes leads the dialectic of the process of capitalist production. Spinozist realism is here irreducible. It does not limited us in taking the measure of the problem posed generally by Marx, it excludes, however, the solution envisioned from speculative teleology and it compels us to attempt to comprehend the modal form in which exploitation is reproduced. How can we form a new theory of the capacity for insurrection of the multitude subordinated to capital while they also resist it. What effects of liberation can still be manifested by producing new subjectivities which are embedded in real productive activities, not prisoners of unproductive ghettos ravaged by self-destructive violence, nor recluse themselves in the powerless rumination of a moral salvation? How can we escape forms of historical impotence? How can we avoid being reduced to the status of spectators of this impotence? Such are the questions posed by Marx and which are posed again today along with Spinoza and his critique of the teleological illusions of the general intellect, questions which have not arrived at the end of their road. But it is historically vain to ask Marx these questions: they are ours and it is up to us to answer them.
El objetivo principal de esta investigación fue analizar el papel de las organizaciones de productores de frutas y hortalizas (OPFH), la evolución reciente del sector hortofrutícola y el desempeño de las OPFH en la consecución de uno de los objetivos fundamentales (concentrar la oferta comercializada a través de ellas), previsto por la Organización Común de Mercados del sector, con especial énfasis en la Comunidad Valenciana, España. Con ese fin se examinaron indicadores y variables para estudiar su dinámica su y desempeño a través de los programas operativos (PO), dirigidos particularmente a aumentar la organización como condición necesaria para equilibrar el poder de mercado dentro de la cadena de valor hortofrutícola. El trabajo ha sido estructurado en seis capítulos: en el primero se sintetizan los antecedentes de la investigación (referidos específicamente a las evaluaciones de los Programas Operativos a nivel comunitario Tribunal de Cuentas de la UE en 1996 y 2001, a estudios sobre organizaciones de productores de frutas y hortalizas en España y/o algunas CC.AA. específicas, así como a la aplicación de modelos DEA para evaluar eficiencia). En el segundo se presentan el marco referencial y los aspectos metodológicos de la investigación. En el tercero se desarrolla ampliamente el marco teórico referido a las Organizaciones Comunes de Mercados (en tanto instrumentos de la Política Agraria Común de la Unión Europea), la naturaleza de las organizaciones de productores, la cadena de valor y el papel de las OPFH en el marco de la legislación comunitaria para reequilibrar el poder dentro de ella, así como la cronología del marco jurídico-legal que regula el funcionamiento del sector de las frutas y hortalizas. El capítulo 4 caracteriza y analiza sucintamente el comportamiento reciente y las principales tendencias del sector hortofrutícola (superficie agraria, producción, precios, valor de la producción y comercio), en los ámbitos geográficos de la UE, de España y de la Comunidad Valenciana. El capítulo 5 examina la dinámica de las organizaciones de productores (organización o concentración de la oferta) en los tres ámbitos antes señalados, con énfasis en los productores integrados en entidades asociativas bajo la forma jurídica de cooperativas y sociedades agrarias de transformación. Finalmente, en el 6 se estima un modelo utilizando la técnica paramétrica no determinística del Análisis Envolvente de Datos (DEA), con la finalidad de evaluar la eficiencia de una muestra de OPFH de la Comunidad Valenciana. La investigación utiliza un enfoque epistémico integral, combinando elementos del racionalismo y del empirismo: las dos primeras fases (capítulos 1 al 5) son predominantemente descriptivas, en tanto la tercera (capítulo 6) es de carácter empírico. Para ello se utilizaron fuentes secundarias de información, tanto bibliográficas y hemerográficas, como económico-financieras (contables). Los principales hallazgos dan cuenta que a nivel comunitario, si bien ha aumentado el volumen de oferta comercializado por las OPFH, aún persiste una fuerte concentración de poder en el sector de la distribución. En España ?por su parte? hay una leve tendencia decreciente en el Nº de entidades asociativas, si bien estas han aumentado su importancia en el volumen de negocios facturado. Finalmente, en la Comunidad Valenciana ha aumentado el Nº OPFH (7% más que en 2006, aunque tiende a estabilizarse) y algunas de ella en su dimensión, al tiempo que han consolidado su orientación exportadora, con indicios de una leve tendencia a la concentración del sector. Del modelo de análisis envolvente y de la función de producción estimada para una muestra de OPFH de la CV se concluye que es posible mejorar su eficiencia si se emplean más eficientemente sus insumos productivos, entre ellos, los fondos operativos. ; Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) ; The main objectives of this research were to analyze the role of the fruit and vegetables producer organizations (FVPOs), the recent developments in the fruit and vegetables sector, and the performance of these organizations in achieving one of the main objectives in the F&V Common Market Organizations (CMO) framework (i.e., to concentrate supply or marketed turnovers in the F&V sector), with special emphasis in the Valencian Community, in Spain. A set of indicators and variables were examined in order to study FVPOs dynamics and performance through operational programs (OP) aimed to increase the organization level as a necessary condition to balance the market power within the horticultural value chain. The study has been divided into six chapters, as follows: Chapter 1 summarizes the background research (referring specifically to the evaluations of operational programs by the EU Court of Auditors in 1996 and 2001, research on producer organizations of fruits and vegetables in Spain and / or some specific autonomous community, as well as DEA models to evaluate efficiency). Chapter 2 provides the frame of reference and methodological aspects of the thesis. Chapter 3 develops the theoretical framework widely referred to as the CMO (as instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union), the nature of producer organizations, the value chain and the role of producer organizations under EU legislation to rebalance the power within value chain, and also the chronology of judicial-legal framework governing the fruit and vegetables sector. Chapter 4 briefly presents and discusses recent facts and the main trends of horticulture (referred to agricultural areas, production, prices, value of production and trade variables), within the EU, Spain, and the Valencian Community. Chapter 5 examines the dynamics of producer organizations (and organization or concentration of supply behavior) in the three regions mentioned above, with an emphasis on producers integrated to associations under the legal form of cooperatives and agricultural processing companies (SAT, is Spanish). Finally, in Chapter 6, a model was estimated by using deterministic parametric technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), to evaluate the efficiency of a FVPOs sample from the Valencian Community. The research uses a comprehensive epistemic approach, by combining elements of rationalism and empiricism; the first two phases (Chapters 1 to 5) are predominantly descriptive, while the last phase (Chapter 6) is mainly empirical. Secondary sources of information were used, including bibliographic, periodical, and economic-financial (accounting). The main findings point out that at the EU level there is still a strong concentration of power in the retail sector, although it has increased the turnovers marketed by FVPOs. Meanwhile, for the case of Spain there is a slight downward trend in the number of recognized POs although they have increased their importance in their turnovers. Finally, in the Valencian Community the number of FVPOs has increased (7% more than in 2006, although it tends to stabilize) and some of it in their dimension, while they had consolidated their export orientation, and also with signs of a slight trend towards concentration in the F&V sector. The envelopment analysis model and the estimated production function for the FVPOs sample of the Valencian Community concluded that it is possible to improve their performance if FVPOs use more efficiently their inputs, among them, operating funds. ; L'objectiu principal d'aquesta investigació va ser analitzar el paper de les organitzacions de productors de fruites i hortalisses (OPFH), l'evolució recent del sector hortofructícola i l'acompliment de les OPFH en la consecució de l'objectiu fonamental de concentrar l'oferta comercialitzada a través d'elles –previst per l'Organització Comuna de Mercats del sector, OCM–, amb especial èmfasi en la Comunitat Valenciana (CV), Espanya. Amb aquesta finalitat es van examinar indicadors i variables per estudiar la seva dinàmica i el seu acompliment a través dels programes operatius (PO), dirigits particularment a augmentar l'organització com a condició necessària per a equilibrar el poder de mercat dins de la cadena de valor hortofructícola. El treball ha estat estructurat en sis capítols: en el primer es sintetitzen els antecedents de la recerca (referits específicament a les avaluacions dels Programes Operatius a nivell comunitari Tribunal de Comptes de la UE en 1996 i 2001, a estudis sobre organitzacions de productors de fruites i hortalisses a Espanya i / o algunes CCAA específiques, així com a l'aplicació de models DEA per avaluar eficiència). En el segon es presenten el marc referencial i els aspectes metodològics de la investigació. En el tercer es desenvolupa àmpliament el marc teòric referit a les Organitzacions Comunes de Mercats (en tant instruments de la Política Agrària Comuna de la Unió Europea), la naturalesa de les organitzacions de productors, la cadena de valor i el paper de les OPFH en el marc de la legislació comunitària per reequilibrar el poder dins d'ella, així com la cronologia del marc jurídic-legal que regula el funcionament del sector de les fruites i hortalisses. El capítol 4 caracteritza i analitza succintament el comportament recent i les principals tendències del sector hortofructícola (superfície agrària, producció, preus, valor de la producció i comerç), en els àmbits geogràfics de la UE, d'Espanya i de la Comunitat Valenciana. El capítol 5 examina la dinàmica de les organitzacions de productors (organització o concentració de l'oferta) en els tres àmbits abans assenyalats, amb èmfasi en els productors integrats en entitats associatives sota la forma jurídica de cooperatives i societats agràries de transformació. Finalment, en el 6 s'estima un model utilitzant la tècnica paramètrica no determinística de l'Anàlisi Envoltant de Dades (DEA), amb la finalitat d'avaluar l'eficiència d'una mostra d'OPFH de la Comunitat Valenciana. La investigació utilitza un enfocament epistèmic integral, combinant elements del racionalisme i de l'empirisme: les dues primeres fases (capítols 1 al 5) són predominantment descriptives, en tant la tercera (capítol 6) és de caràcter empíric. Per a això es van utilitzar fonts secundàries d'informació, tant bibliogràfiques i hemerogràfiques, com econòmic-financeres (comptables). Els principals resultats donen compte que a nivell comunitari, si bé ha augmentat el volum d'oferta comercialitzada per les OPFH, encara persisteix una forta concentració de poder en el sector de la distribució. A Espanya, d'altra banda, hi ha una lleu tendència decreixent al N º d'entitats associatives, si bé aquestes han augmentat la seva importància en el volum de facturació. Finalment, a la Comunitat Valenciana ha augmentat el N º d'OPFH (7% més que el 2006, encara que tendeix a estabilitzar) i algunes d'ella en la seva dimensió, alhora que han consolidat la seva orientació exportadora, amb indicis d'una lleu tendència a la concentració del sector. Del model d'anàlisi DEA i de la funció de producció estimada per a una mostra d'OPFH de la CV es conclou que és possible millorar la seva eficiència si utilitzen més eficientment els seus insums productius, entre ells, els fons operatius. ; anidoriv@ula.ve ; anidoriv@yahoo.com ; anidoriv@hotmail.com ; anidoriv@gmail.com ; Doctorado
From the introduction: 'Brazil is rich: rich in natural resources, rich in fertile soil, and rich in people". Although the country still shows deficits in different areas, the Brazilian market has attracted large investors and companies especially in the past decade. The country's potential has been the focus of many analysts and researchers by renowned economic institutes. After years of high inflation and slow growth – especially in the eighties and early nineties – Brazil was able to recover and get back into game with the other global players. From a historic perspective it is to say that the country has gone through large transition periods in the last century. Emerging from being a major coffee exporter until the early 20th century, Brazil now belongs to one of the most industrialized countries in Latin America. Although it is the largest country in the region in terms of population figures and geographical size, its GDP share in Latin America or annual growth rate offer a different conclusion. Nevertheless, the consulting market in Brazil has been growing, in particular during the last ten years. Many European and North American consulting companies have invested into the country, built branch offices and bought local firms. Although the market is still very young, its future potential has clearly been discovered. When thinking of Brazil, the words that tend to enter people's minds are positive sounding ones such as Samba, Carneval and beautiful beaches which radiate joy and energy. On the other side issues like criminality, poverty and high social inequality are often associated with Brazil as well. Either way, it is almost certain that one will have heard of Brazil. The country manifested itself in the mind of people and has made front page news more than once. Objective, relevance and research questions: The objective of the thesis is neither to conduct a market evaluation nor to point out the importance and future relevance of Brazil in the world economy. In fact this work is an empirical study on a market entry strategy which can serve as a reference for management consulting companies that want to enter the Brazilian consulting market. Furthermore, the work attempts to deliver a comprehensive picture of this market, with the intention of elaborating on whether it is wise to invest in Brazil, or whether there may be another – more suitable – Latin American country. Yet, the focus lies on the framework for strategy formulation and the proposals that will be made thereupon. In order to accomplish this, both a classical and an empirical approach were chosen whose outcomes will be compared to one another in the last chapter. LEAN Management is a booming term in the consulting business. Everybody wants to learn the 'LEAN-Thinking" and apply the method to his/her own company. Since the late 1990s LEAN Management is experiencing an upward trend and the word has spread all over the globe to reach Brazil. Consequently, there is a growing demand for LEAN in this country, as evidenced by the number of consulting companies already present in the market and the excellent prospects it shows. The aim of the thesis is to propose which geographical regions and economic sectors in Brazil may yield attractive prospects for management consulting companies. The information is then used to formulate a market entry strategy for LEAN Consulting in the Brazilian market. In addition, proposals will be made and future scenarios presented to the reader which are augmented by emprircal findings. Based on the introduction and the objective of the topic – giving a perspective of the situation in Brazil – the following two research questions are being raised. Is the LEAN market in Brazil a suitable market for a LEAN consulting company to invest in? Which recommendations for an entry strategy can be given when entering the Brazilian LEAN market? Out of these research questions, a sub-question is derived. Can Brazil serve as an entry port to Latin America for LEAN consulting businesses? The analysis of these questions will be conducted through a theoretical as well as an empirical approach. Structure of the topic: After having presented the objective and relevance of the topic as well as the research questions, the author will introduce the structure of the thesis. Accordingly, to strengthen the arguments that will be highlighted in the conclusion, the thesis is divided into three parts. The first part consists of theoretical results selected from secondary research. Based on the theory, an empirical study is conducted, involving a group of experts who will elaborate on their personal experiences and opinions with regards to the topic. The empirical findings deduced from the study are compared with the theoretical results in order to verify, if there exist a consensus among theory and empiricism. This comparison is then used to build up the third part of the thesis – the conclusion. Methodology: In order to create a solid basis for the strategy formulation chapters two and three provide a brief overview of the economic situation in Brazil – in a Latin American context – from the earliest settlement in the 14th century until today. Furthermore, an evaluation of the market, its productivity and its growth potential, completes the picture. Recent political changes have brought an upwind into the descending system. Since the implementation of the Real Plan in 1994 the country has experienced low inflation, trade liberalization, substantial privatization, increases in import penetration and the expansion of FDI. Thus, Brazil has reason to hope for future in prosperity. The information drawn for this section consists of secondary research, covering literature as well as various online resources and online libraries, to provide an adequate framework. The literature is primarily in English and partly in German or Portuguese language. The term LEAN Consulting is explained in detail in chapter four, in order to understand the impact and relevance of the term in this context. The literature for this part is provided by a consulting company that is working according to the LEAN principles. It consists entirely of secondary research with books and magazines as main sources. The LEAN Consulting market in Brazil has a special importance for the topic and the sources are given by the same consulting company. After having applied the theoretical framework of the thesis, chapter five provides the framework for the strategy formulation. The basis to this approach is the Five-Forces-Model by Michael E. Porter. Since the topic – market entry strategy – is a rather practical issue, the main part consists of empirical findings deducted from a Delphi Study. It is based on expert interviews that were held with a group of initially nine experts from the consulting business in two stages. In the first stage, these experts were confronted with two questionnaires – consisting of open and closed questions – which they had to answer based on their personal experience and opinion. The questionnaire in the second round was based on the summarized answers of the first one, raising new thoughts to the topic. The questionnaires were submitted in German, since all of the participants were either native German speakers or had sufficient knowledge of the German language to understand the questions. The aim of this Delphi Study was to gain opinions and experiences that can neither be found in books nor in any other relevant literature. Usually, Delphi Studies are used for business forecasting. The author receives new viewpoints that are based on personal experience of the experts by living in Brazil and working in the consulting business during the last decades. The last part of the thesis draws the conclusion, comparing the classical market entry approach to the empirical findings of the Delphi Study. This then gives a profound basis for constructing strategic recommendations and provides a future outlook. It is interesting to see how the experts of the Delphi Study view the future prospect of the consulting business in the country and what should be done to boost economic growth in this area. The thesis concludes by summarizing all important findings under consideration of the background layed out in the first part of the thesis.Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH LANGUAGEIII ABSTRACT AUF DEUTSCHIV 1.INTRODUCTION1 1.1OBJECTIVE, RELEVANCE AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS1 1.2STRUCTURE OF THE TOPIC2 1.3METHODOLOGY5 2.ECONOMIC OVERVIEW AND BACKGROUND OF BRAZIL7 2.1MERCOSUR7 2.1.1History8 2.1.2Foundation8 2.1.3Economic role of the Mercosur9 2.2THE COUNTRY BRAZIL10 2.2.1Political and economic history11 2.2.2Economic environment13 2.2.3Political environment14 2.2.4Macroeconomic data15 2.2.5Social inequality17 2.2.6Level of corruption and governance indicators19 3.MARKET EVALUATION22 3.1THE 'THREE-SECTOR-THEORY' OF BRAZIL22 3.2PRODUCTIVITY24 3.3POTENTIAL MARKETS FOR MANAGEMENT CONSULTING COMPANIES25 3.3.1Major Brazilian companies26 3.3.2Strongest regions in Brazil31 3.3.3Most promising branches34 3.4CONCLUSION35 4.LEAN CONSULTING37 4.1DEFINITION AND PHILOSOPHY OF LEAN37 4.2TYPICAL PRACTICES APPLIED39 4.3DIFFERENCES OF LEAN MANAGEMENT TOWARDS OTHER METHODS42 4.4MANAGEMENT CONSULTING COMPANIES IN BRAZIL44 4.4.1LEAN consulting companies in Brazil45 4.4.2The IBCO47 4.5REASONS TO CHOOSE AN EXTERNAL CONSULTANCY47 4.5.1Criteria to choose consulting services48 4.5.2Average consulting fees48 4.6CONCLUSION49 5.MARKET ENTRY STRATEGY51 5.1OVERVIEW OF THE CLASSICAL MARKET ENTRY STRATEGY51 5.1.1Methods for market entry52 5.1.1.1Contractual agreements53 5.1.1.2Sole Venture54 5.1.2Influencing factors for the entry mode decision55 5.1.3Special characteristics of services56 5.2MARKET ENTRY STRATEGY INTO THE LEAN CONSULTING MARKET57 5.2.1Competition57 5.2.2Opportunities and threats62 5.2.3Framework for strategy formulation64 5.2.3.1Business communication65 5.2.3.2Starting the business66 5.2.3.3Employing foreign workers67 5.2.3.4Obtaining a credit69 5.2.3.5Legal constraints70 5.2.4The Delphi Study71 5.2.4.1Reasons to choose the Delphi method73 5.2.4.2Limits to the Delphi method74 5.2.4.3Experts75 5.2.4.4First round76 5.2.4.5Second round78 5.2.4.6Short summary of most important findings81 6.CONCLUSION83 6.1FINAL RESULTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS83 6.2DIRECT COMPARISON OF THEORY AND EMPIRICISM86 6.3FUTURE OUTLOOK88 6.4PROSPECT FOR FURTHER RESEARCH90 7.BIBLIOGRAPHY91 7.1BOOKS91 7.2ARTICLES/PUBLICATIONS92 7.3WEBSOURCES94 7.4FURTHER READING AND EXPERTS97 8.APPENDIX98 8.1DELPHI STUDY - SUMMARY OF FIRST ROUND98 8.2DELPHI STUDY - SUMMARY OF SECOND ROUND101 8.3CONCRETE STEPS FOR STARTING A BUSINESS IN BRAZIL105 8.4PAYING TAXES IN BRAZIL107Textprobe:Text Sample: Chapter 3, Market Evaluation: Today's marketplace is very competitive. In order to successfully place a company or a product in a new market its potential needs to be assessed first. The market evaluation uses information given about the market and helps to determine feasibility of a potential market and the competitive landscape. The aim is to compare different regions and sectors to find the strongest opportunities. This will reveal a strategic roadmap to the market entry. The Brazilian market has an enormous potential and growth is foreseen in the country for the next years. This chapter will provide an overview of the regions and branches in Brazil, pointing out the ones with the highest capability to be the future market for a management consulting company. The industrial sector is the most important one in this country and the focus of the strategy will lie on the branches present in this sector. A market segmentation presenting the biggest companies – measured by revenue – will provide the benchmark for potential growth and allows us to focus on prospective customers. The 'three-sector-theory" of Brazil: According to the 'three-sector-theory", developed by Jean Fourastié, the economy can be categorised into three different sectors of economic activity: the agricultural sector – the primary sector (commodity producing sector), the industry sector – the secondary sector (or goods-producing sector), and the service sector – the tertiary sector (or non-goods producing sector). The aim of this theory was to explain the transition from the agricultural to the industrial society and later on to the post-industrial service society in the 20th century. It is assumed that the three sectors have different opportunities to adapt to technological progress. Through the application of new technical procedures, the productivity in the primary and secondary sector increases while, at the same time, less manpower is needed and also the demand for these goods decreases with increased productivity. The excess manpower and demand, in turn, will be absorbed by the tertiary sector. The problem is that this theory assumes no influence by outside factors and therefore cannot be applied to any economy without precaution. In 2006, the agricultural sector accounted for 36% of the GDP worldwide, the industry sector for 22% and the service sector for 42%. In Brazil the distribution in the same year is considerably different, with the agricultural sector accounting for 5.5%, yielding coffee, soybeans, wheat and rice as the main products. The industry accounts for 28.7%, with its main products being textiles, shoes, chemicals, cement and iron ore. The services sector makes up 65.8% of total output. The GDP growth rate by sector in the years from 1997 to 2007 has been subject to fluctuation especially in the agricultural but also in the industry sector. The service sector has been rather stable during this period. The three-sector-theory is based on the assumption of above-average growth of demand and below-average growing productivity in the tertiary sector. The current situation in Brazil and in the global context shows a strong tertiary sector, followed by the secondary and the primary sector. This supports the three-sector-theory of the shift: agriculture > industry > service sector. Although the service sector is the strongest sector in the economy, both by total GDP and by year-over-year growth rate, it is a non-good producing sector, which makes it uninteresting for a management consulting company as they are concentrating on the industrial sector where production takes place. The theory does not explicitly state the distribution of the different branches among the three sectors. Therefore it can be assumed that some branches that are interesting for the strategy could be assigned to the service sector, although in the following this sector will not be elaborated on. The importance of the industrial sector has been fully recognized by the development studies all over the world. The industrial sector – through its linkages with other sectors – plays a very important role in achieving rapid growth and development. Most modern and rich countries have a well developed industrial sector through their early industrial revolution. It is the most important driver of the economy and apart from the service sector – the non-goods producing industry – it constitutes the biggest sector and generates the largest profit share out of all. During the last years the industrial production in Brazil was subject to many changes due to the slow growth of the economy. The country has set up an agenda to become a competitive economy that is able to provide qualified goods in sufficient quantity and to create a greater number of high skilled jobs. Brazil is on its way to transform into an economy that is included in the knowledge society and recognized as one of the main platforms for the industry worldwide. Productivity: The level of productivity is a crucial part in the context of this thesis. It indicates the general market growth and its potential for the future. Since management consulting companies will focus on the industry it is important to know, if there is a need to enhance productivity. If so, then this need would likely translate into higher investments in this area and a greater demand for support services from the consulting industry. The level of labour productivity is the primary determinant on the nation's GDP per capita growth. Brazil's weak economic growth is due to the relatively slow increase of labour productivity. The latest performance study, conducted by the Conference Board, shows a labour productivity growth rate of 1.9% in 2007. Compared to the other BRIC countries, this is the poorest rate. Russia, India and China showed a much better performance with 6.3%, 6.7% and 9.8%, respectively. This can be ascribed to transitional reallocations of employees by large companies into emerging markets that consequently foster productivity growth in the respective country. Especially India and China play a determining role in this context, since wages in these countries are notably lower than in Brazil and also in Russia, hence companies are more likely to turn to the Asian countries to make new investments that lead to job creation. According to a study on barriers to growth in the Brazilian economy, conducted by McKinsey's São Paulo office in 2005, there are two major root causes that lead to the relatively slower productivity growth. The first one refers to the modest per capita income, which promotes consumption of the lower-priced products and services. An example is the automotive industry, which produces primarily small and inexpensive cars. For the higher-priced vehicle section it relies on imports from other countries. The second cause is related to the first one – labour is cheaper than capital – which inhibits investment in new machinery that, in turn, would improve productivity levels. These barriers, however, will naturally fade once the government is able to resolve the social and economic problems by a policy shift. Labour and tax laws, price controls, product regulations, trade barriers and subsidies, among others, are present obstacles that limit productivity. Also, the unemployment rate, the level of inequality, the state of the educational system, are all factors that influence productivity levels and play a role in the performance studies. Potential markets for management consulting companies: After having identified the target sector and the level of productivity in the country, the next important step to defining a suitable market entry strategy is to determine specific markets in Brazil that yield the best prospects. Three different variables will influence the decision-making. These are the major Brazilian companies, the strongest regions and the most promising branches that are interesting for a management consulting company. Consequently, this will then lead to the establishment of the target branches as well as companies for LEAN business in Brazil and serve as a basis to formulate the entry strategy.
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Ann Tickner on Feminist Philosophy of Science, Engaging the Mainstream, and (still) Remaining Critical in/of IR
Feminist IR is still often side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearing as one of the last chapters of introductory volumes to the field, despite the limitless efforts of people such as Cynthia Enloe (Theory Talk #48) and J. Ann Tickner. She has laboured to point out and provincialize the parochialism that haunts mainstream IR, without, however, herself retreating and disengaging from some of its core concerns. In this Talk, Tickner elaborates—amongst others—on the specifics of a feminist approach to the philosophical underpinnings of IR; discusses how feminism relates to the distinction between mainstream and critical theory; and addresses the challenges of navigating such divides.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?
I think the biggest challenge for IR is that it is relevant and helps us understand important issues in our globalized world. I realize this is not a conventional answer, but too often we academics get caught up in substantive and methodological debates where we end up talking only to each other or to a very small audience. We tend to get too concerned with the issue of scientific respectability rather than thinking about how to try to understand and remedy the massive problems that exist in the world today. Steve Smith's presidential address to the ISA in 2002 (read it here), shortly after 9/11, reminded us of this. Smith chastised the profession for having nothing to say about such a catastrophic event.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?
I've gone through quite a few transformations in my academic career. My original identity was as an International Political Economy (IPE) scholar; my first academic position was at a small liberal arts college (College of the Holy Cross) where I taught a variety of IPE courses. In graduate school I was interested in what, in the 1970s, we called 'North-South' issues, specifically issues of global justice, which were not the most popular subjects in the field. So I always felt a little out of place in my choice of subject matter. In the 1980s when I started teaching, IR was mostly populated by men. As a woman, one felt somewhat uncomfortable at professional meetings; and there were very few texts by women that I could assign to my students. I also found that many of the female students in my introductory IR classes were somewhat uncomfortable and unmotivated by the emphasis placed on strategic issues and nuclear weapons.
It was at about the time when I first started thinking about these issues, I happened to read Evelyn Fox Keller's book Gender and Science, a book that offers a gendered critique of the natural sciences (read an 'update' of the argument by Keller here, pdf). It struck me that her feminist critique of science could equally be applied to IR theory. My first feminist publication, a feminist critique of Hans Morgenthau's principles of political realism, expanded on this theme (read full text here, pdf).
Teaching at a small liberal arts college where one was judged by the quality of one's work rather than the type of research one was doing was very helpful—because I could follow my own, rather non-conventional, inclinations. So I think my turn to feminism, after ten years in the field, was a combination of my own consciousness-raising and feeling that there was something about IR that didn't speak to me. Later, I was fortunate to be hired by the University of Southern California, a large research institution, with an interdisciplinary School of International Relations, separate from the political science department. When I arrived in 1995, the School had a reputation for teaching a broad array of IR theoretical approaches. The support of these institutional settings and of a network of feminist scholars and students, some of whom I discovered were thinking along similar lines in the late 1980s, were important for getting me to where I am today.
What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
It depends on the level of the student: at the undergraduate level, a broad array of courses in global politics including some economics and history. Language training is very important too, and ideally, an overseas experience. We need to encourage our students to be curious and have an open mind about our world.
At the graduate level, this is a more complicated question. The way you phrased the question 'to understand the world in a global way,' can be very different from training to become an IR scholar, especially in the United States. I would emphasize the importance of a broad theoretical and methodological training, including some exposure to the philosophy of science, and to non-Western IR if possible, or at least at a minimum, to try to get beyond the dominance of American IR, which still exists even in places outside the US.
Why should IR scholars incorporate gender in the study of world politics? What are the epistemological and ontological implications of adopting a feminist perspective in IR?
Feminists would argue that incorporating feminist perspectives into IR would fundamentally transform the discipline. Feminists claim that IR is already gendered, and gendered masculine, in the types of questions it asks and the ways it goes about answering them. The questions we ask in our research are never neutral - they are a choice, depending on the researcher's identity and location. Over history, the knowledge that we have accumulated has generally been knowledge about men's lives. It's usually been men who do the asking and consequently, it is often the case that women's lives and women's knowledge are absent from what is deemed 'reliable' knowledge. This historical legacy has had, and continues to have, an effect on the way we build knowledge. Sandra Harding, a feminist philosopher of science, has suggested that if were to build knowledge from women's lives as well, we would broaden the base from which we construct knowledge, and would therefore get a richer and more complex picture of reality.
One IR example of how we limit our research questions and concerns is how we calculate national income, or wealth—the kind of data states choose to collect and on which they base their public policy. We have no way of measuring the vast of amount of non-remunerated reproductive and caring labour, much of which is done by women. Without this labour we would not have a functioning global capitalist economy. To me this is one example as to why putting on our gender lenses helps us gain a more complete picture of global politics and the workings of the global economy.
Feminists have also argued that the epistemological foundations of Western knowledge are gendered. When we use terms such as rationality, objectivity and public, they are paired with terms such as emotional, subjective and private, terms that are seen as carrying less weight. By privileging the first of these terms when we construct knowledge we are valuing knowledge that we typically associate with masculinity and the public sphere, historically associated with men. Rationality and objectivity are not terms that are overtly gendered, but, when asked, women and men alike associate them with masculinity. They are terms we value when we do our research.
In one of the foundational texts of Feminist IR, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists' (1997, full text here, pdf), you highlighted three particular (gendered) misunderstandings that continue to divide Feminists and mainstream IR theorists. To what extent do these misunderstandings continue to inform mainstream perceptions of Feminist approaches to the study of international politics?
I think probably they still do, although it's always hard to tell, because the mainstream has not engaged much with feminist approaches. I've been one who's always calling for conversations with the mainstream but, apart from the forum responding to the article you mention, there have been very few. In a 2010 article, published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, I looked back to see if I could find responses to my 1997 article to which you refer. I found that most of the responses had come from other feminists. The lack of engagement, which other feminists have experienced also, makes it hard to know about the misunderstandings that still exist but my guess would be that they remain. However I do think there has been progress in accepting feminism's legitimacy in the field. It is now included in many introductory texts.
The first misunderstanding that I identified is the meaning of gender. I would hope that the introduction of constructivist approaches would help with understanding that gender is social construction - a very important point for feminists. But I think that gender is still largely equated with women. Feminists have tried to stress that gender is also about men and about masculinity, something that seems to be rather hard to accept for those unfamiliar with feminist work. I think it's also hard for the discipline to accept that both international politics as practice and IR as a discipline are not gender neutral. Feminists claim that IR as a discipline is gendered in its concepts, its subject matter, the questions it asks and the way it goes about answering them. This is a radical assertion for those unfamiliar with feminist approaches and it is not very well understood.
Now to answer the second misunderstanding as to whether feminists are doing IR. I think there has been some progress here, because IR has broadened its subject matter. And there has been quite a bit of attention lately to gender issues in the 'real world' - issues such as sexual violence, trafficking, and human rights. Of course these issues relate not only to women but they are issues with which feminists have been concerned. Something I continue to find curious is that the policy and activist communities are generally ahead of the academy in taking up gender issues. Most international organizations, and some national governments are under mandates for gender mainstreaming. Yet, the academy has been slow to catch up and give students the necessary training and skills to go out in the world and deal with such issues.
The third misunderstanding to which I referred in the 1997 article is the question of epistemology. While, as I indicated, there has been some acceptance of the subject matter, with which feminists are concerned, it is a more fundamental and contentious question as to whether feminists are recognized as 'doing IR' in the methodological sense. As the field broadens its concerns, IR may see issues that feminists raise as legitimate, but how we study them still evokes the same responses that I brought up fifteen years ago. Many of the questions that feminists ask are not amenable to being answered using the social scientific methodologies popular in the field, particularly in the US. (I should add that there is a branch of IR feminism that does use quantitative methods and it has gained much wider acceptance by the mainstream.) The feminist assumption that Western knowledge is gendered and based on men's lives is a challenging claim. And feminists often prefer to start knowledge from the lives of people who are on the margins – those who are subordinated or oppressed, and of course, this is very different from IR which tends toward a top-down look at the international system. One of the big problems that have become more evident to me over time is that feminism is fundamentally sociological – it's about people and social relations, whereas much of IR is about structures and states operating in an anarchic, rather than a social, environment. I find that historians and sociologists are more comfortable with gender analysis, perhaps for this reason. I'm not sure that these misunderstanding are ever going to be solved or that they need to be solved.
Although Feminist methodology is often conflated with ethnographic approaches, in 'What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions' (2005, pdf here), you argued that there is no unique Feminist research methodology. Nonetheless, Feminist IR is well known for using an autoethnographic approach. What does this approach add to the study of gender in IR? What might account for the relative dearth of autoethnography in other IR paradigms?
I think it is important to remember that feminists use many different approaches coming out of very different theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, socialism, constructivism, postpositivism, postcolonialism and empiricism. So there are many different kinds of feminisms. If you look specifically at what has been called 'second-generation feminist IR,' the empirical work that followed the so-called 'first generation' that challenged and critiqued the concepts and theoretical foundations of the field, much of it, but not all, (discourse analysis is quite prevalent too), uses ethnographic methods which seem well suited to researching some of the issues I described earlier. Questions about violence against women, domestic servants, women in the military, violent women, women in peace movements– these are the sorts of research questions that demand fieldwork and an ethnographic approach. Because as I stated earlier, IR asks rather different kinds of questions, it does not generally adopt ethnographic methods. Feminists who do this type of ethnographic research tell me that their work is often more readily received and understood by those who do comparative politics, because they are more comfortable with field research. And since women are not usually found in the halls of power – as decision-makers. IR feminists are particularly concerned with issues having to do with marginalized and disempowered peoples' lives. Ethnography is useful for this type of research.
I see autoethnography as a different issue. While the reflexive tradition is not unique to feminists, feminism tends to be reflectivist. As I said earlier, feminists are sensitive to issues about who the creators of knowledge have been and whose knowledge is claimed to be universal. Most feminists believe that there is no such thing as universal knowledge. Consequently, feminists believe that being explicit about one's positionality as a researcher is very important because none of us can achieve objectivity, often called 'the view from nowhere'. So while striving to get as accurate and as useful knowledge as we can, we should be willing to state our own positionality. One's privilege as a researcher must be acknowledged too; one must always be sensitive to the unequal power relations between a researcher and their research subject – something that anthropology recognized some time ago. Feminists who do fieldwork often try to make their research useful to their subjects or do participatory research so that they can give something back to the community. All these concerns lead to autoethnographic disclosures. They demand a reflexive attitude and a willingness to describe and reassess your research journey as you go along. This autoethnographic style is hard for researchers in the positivist tradition to understand. While we all strive to produce accurate and useful knowledge, positivists' striving for objectivity requires keeping subjectivity out of their research.
Robert W. Cox (Theory Talk #37) famously distinguished two approaches to the study of international politics: problem-solving theory and critical theory. How does the emancipatory project of the latter inform your perspective of IR and its normative goals? And is this distinction as valid today as it was when Cox first formulated it, over 3 decades ago?
Yes I think it's still an important distinction. It's still cited very often which suggests it's still valid, although postmodern scholars (and certain feminists) have problems with Western liberal notions of emancipation. I see my own work as being largely compatible with Cox's definition of critical theory. Like many feminists, I view my work as explicitly normative; I say explicitly because I believe all knowledge is normative although not all scholars would admit it. What Cox calls problem-solving theory is also normative in the conservative sense of not aiming to changing the world. A normative goal to which feminists are generally committed is understanding the reasons for women's subordination and seeking ways to end it. It's also important to note that the IR discipline was borne with the intention of serving the interests of the state whereas academic feminism was borne out of social movements for women's emancipation. The normative goals of my work are to demonstrate how the theory and practice of IR is gendered and what might be the implications of this, both for how we construct knowledge and how we go about solving global problems.
Much of your work addresses the parochial scope and neopositivist inclination of International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially in the United States. What distinguishes other 'Western' institutional and political contexts (in the UK, Europe, Canada and Oceania) from the American study of IR? How and why is critical/reflectivist IR marginalized in the American context? What is the status of these 'debates' in non-Western institutional contexts?
With respect to the parochial scope of US IR, I refer you to a recent book, edited by Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver, International Relations Scholarship Around the World. It contains chapters by authors from around the world, some of whom suggest IR in their country imitates the US and some who see very different IRs. The chapter by Thomas J. Biersteker, ('The Parochialism of Hegemony: Challenges for 'American' International Relations', read it here in pdf) reports on his examination of the required reading lists for IR Ph.D. candidates in the top ten US academic institutions. His findings suggest that constructivism accounts for only about 10% of readings and anything more radical even less. Over 90% of assigned works are written by US scholars. The dominance of quantitative and rational choice approaches in the US may have something to do with IR generally being a subfield of political science. Critical approaches often have different epistemological roots. And I stress 'science' because while IR is also subsumed in certain politics departments in other countries, the commitment to science, in the neopositivist sense, is something that seems to be peculiarly American. Stanley Hoffman's famous observation, made over thirty years ago, that Americans see problems as solvable by the scientific method is still largely correct I believe (read article here, pdf). I find it striking that so many formerly US based and/or educated critical scholars have left the US and are now based elsewhere – in Canada, Australasia, or Europe.
Biersteker sees the hegemony of American IR extending well beyond the US. But there is generally less commitment to quantification elsewhere. This may be due to IR's historical legacy emerging out of different knowledge traditions or being housed in separate departments. In France, IR emerged from sociological and legal traditions and, in the UK, history and political theory, including the Marxist tradition, have been influential in IR. And European IR scholars do not move as freely between the academy and the policy world as in the US. All these factors might encourage more openness to critical approaches. I am afraid I don't know enough about non-Western traditions to make an informed comment. But we must recognize the enormous power differentials that exist with respect to engaging IR's debates. Language barriers are one problem; having access to research funds is an enormous privilege. Scholars in many parts of the world do not have the resources or the time to engage in esoteric academic debates, nor do they have the resources to attend professional meetings or access certain materials. The production of knowledge is a very unequal process, dominated by those with power and resources; hence the hegemonic position of the US that Biersteker and others still see.
As methodological pluralism now retains the status of a norm in the field, John M. Hobson (Theory Talk #71) recently argued that the question facing IR scholars no longer revolves around the debate between positivist and postpositivist approaches. Rather, the primary meta-theoretical question relates to Eurocentrism, that is, 'To be or not to be a Eurocentric, that is the question.' To what extent do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
Given my answer to the last question, I am not sure that methodological pluralism has reached an accepted status in the US yet. However, John M. Hobson has produced a very thoughtful and engaging book that asks very provocative questions. Unfortunately, I doubt many IR scholars in the US have read it and would be rather puzzled by Hobson's claim. But certainly the Eurocentrism of the discipline is something to which we should be paying attention. I find it curious how little IR has recognized its imperial roots or engaged in any discussion of imperialism. As Brian Schmidt and other historical revisionists have told us, when IR was borne at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism was a central preoccupation in the discipline. Race also has been ignored almost entirely by IR scholars.
To Hobson's specific claim that the important question for IR now is about being or not being Eurocentric rather than about being positivist or postpositivist, I do have some problems with this. I am concerned with Hobson's painting positivism and postpostivism with the same Eurocentric brush. Yes, they are both Eurocentric; but postpositivists or critical theorists – to use Cox's term – are at least open to being reflective about how they produce knowledge and where it comes from. If one can be reflective about one's knowledge it does allow space to be aware of one's own biases. Those of us on the critical side of Cox's divide can at least be reflective about the problems of Eurocentrism, whereas positivists don't consider reflexivity to be part of producing good research. Nevertheless, Hobson has made an important statement. He has written a masterful and insightful book and I recommend it all IR scholars.
Last question. Your recent work is part of an emergent collective dialogue that aims to 'provincialize' the Western European heritage of IR. In a recent article entitled 'Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities for Dialogue in International Relations' you highlight the need for non-Eurocentric approach to the study of IR. In IR, what are the prospects for genuine dialogue across methodological and geographical borders? Where do you see this dialogue taking place?
This is a very tough issue. There are scholars like Hobson who talk about a non-Eurocentric approach, but given what I said about resources, about language barriers, and about inequalities in the ability to produce knowledge, this is difficult. As I've said at many times and in many places, the power difference is an inhibitor to any genuine dialogue. So, where is dialogue taking place? Among those, such as Hobson, who advocate a hybrid approach that takes other knowledge traditions seriously and sees them as equally valid as one's own. And mostly on the margins of what we call 'IR', where some very exciting work is being produced. Feminism is one such site. Feminist approaches are dedicated to dialogic knowledge production, or what they call knowledge that emerges through conversation. Feminists believe that theory can emerge from practice, listening to ordinary people and how they make sense of their lives. I also think that projects like the one undertaken by Wæver and Tickner (which is still ongoing) that is publishing contributions from scholars from very different parts of the world is crucial.
J. Ann Tickner is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University. She is also a Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California where she taught for fifteen years before coming to American University. Her principle areas of teaching and research include international theory, peace and security, and feminist approaches to international relations. She served as President of the International Studies Association from 2006-2007. Her books include Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (Columbia University Press, 2001), Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia University Press, 1992), and Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States (Columbia University Press, 1987).
Related links
Faculty Profile at American University Read Tickner's Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation (Millennium, 1988) here (pdf) Read Tickner's You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists (1997 International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) Read Tickner's What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions (2005, International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf)
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more. — Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. — Franz Kafka, The Trial INTRODUCTION How ought we characterise the exercise of power in our societies? Are they societies that confine and discipline our bodies, or ones that control us in potentially subtler ways? This article adopts the framework for analysis used by twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his short but defining essay on the subject, 'Postscript on Societies of Control'.[1] It firstly considers the background to the concept of control, then provides a definition of the concept, and, finally, asks whether our society is one of control. It argues that Deleuze is correct to say control has replaced discipline as the primary mechanism of power in our era. ORTHODOXY In order to address the question of whether societies of control are increasingly replacing disciplinary societies, it is imperative first to understand what disciplinary societies are. Discipline is a concept developed most powerfully by Deleuze's contemporary, Michel Foucault.[2] Foucault's philosophy primarily concerns the technologies of power operating within society and their effect on human autonomy. He pursues this study via a genealogical approach; that is, he employs a historical critique to interrogate the workings of powers at play in modern society. In this way—despite his vocal opposition to Hegel—Foucault is very much Hegelian in his belief that close examination of historical parallels and events can clarify and deepen our understanding of present-day technologies of power and how they shape or restrict our autonomy.[3] Through his historical work, which spans various societal and public institutions, Foucault identifies a fundamental change in the mechanisms of power exercised by the state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He articulates this shift as a transition away from sovereign power to technologies of discipline. This notion of discipline and disciplinary society is perhaps best exemplified by Foucault's enquiry into the French penal system in his Discipline and Punish.[4] The book opens with vivid depictions of public torture and execution in pre-eighteenth century France. Foucault explains that the physicality and the public nature of punishment in the French criminal system up until then was an essential aspect of the exercise of sovereign power. Yet, while brutal public spectacle instilled fear and awe, it also provided public fora for communities to revolt against the perceived injustices of the sovereign. By moderating power through the benevolent reform of the criminal, by the discipline of the docile body, and by the fragmentation of public space into discrete, segregated institutions, state power could be obscured and, thus, maintained. These forces are the hallmarks of a disciplinary society. REVISION In his 'Postscript', Deleuze—building on the work of Foucault—argues that the twentieth century has marked a shift from disciplinary societies to societies of control. A precise definition of control and societies of control has proven to be elusive;[5] it is therefore helpful to consider both the antecedents and critiques of Deleuze's analysis in addition to his work itself.[6] Antecedents Deleuze has attributed the concept of control to William Burroughs.[7] Burroughs, in turn, provides not a definition of control, but brief observations as to its exercise; in truth, his analogies are of only limited assistance when read in the context of mechanisms of power within society at large.[8] Nevertheless, there are two salient points to note. Firstly, Burroughs establishes that when one maintains total or absolute power over the actions of another, they can more accurately be said to be using them rather than controlling them. Secondly, Burroughs shows that control requires concessions and illusions: controllers must make concessions to the controlled in order to maintain the illusion of choice and free agreement, obscuring their true motives in order to avoid revolt. In contrast to Burroughs, Félix Guattari provides an analogy of control that usefully supports the conception Deleuze comes to advance: the gated home and community accessed and exited via electronic cards.[9] This has elements of discipline, as movement being granted or denied constitutes a form of confinement. But, as Deleuze argues, it also represents a departure from the disciplinary society, as 'what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position […] and effects a universal modulation'.[10] Among his identified influences, Deleuze contends that Foucault sees as 'our immediate future' societies of control.[11] Deleuze particularly emphasises that Foucault's work on discipline is historical (focused on the exercise of power in the nineteenth century); we should, therefore, not be so naive as to assume Foucault would not have recognised the possibility of further historical change. Indeed, Deleuze says that Foucault concludes his Discipline and Punish with the explicit recognition that a prison as a physical space is becoming less important in the exercise of power. This, Deleuze suggests, presages a fuller analysis of a new sort of power.[12] Deleuze makes these forceful arguments as to Foucault's understanding of power in response to a critique by Paul Virilio that Foucault did not understand the nature of modern power. Ironically, that critique is also an important precursor to Deleuze's analysis. Virilio argues that the patrolling of the highway—and not the prison—exemplifies the exercise of police power. Deleuze concurs, adding that modern authorities possess predictive technologies that anticipate the movement of subjects and consequently have less need for confining subjects. Deleuzian societies of control That predictive power is a hallmark of control. In his 'Postscript', Deleuze fleshes out this position polemically. It must be noted that Deleuze never attributes any concrete definition to the notion of control itself; he is primarily concerned with how a society of control operates. This section will similarly consider the features and modes of operation that constitute a Deleuzian society of control. Much like with the disciplinary society, the technologies of power that govern a society of control cannot be boiled down to one single technology or mechanism. Instead, there are targeted and multi-faceted ways in which societies of control manage the lives of their subjects. Most fundamentally, there are no enclosures or strictly delineated confined spaces (like, for instance, the disciplinary society's schools, barracks, and factories, which are all subject to clear separation from one another). Instead, there is a single modulation, which allows for the coexistence and connection of various states (the corporation, the education system, and the army are all connected, one flowing into the other). This brings us to the next point: exploring how these spaces or states are connected. The disciplinary society operates on the basis that its subjects start over when they move from one space to another. Though it does recognise analogies between the spaces (the discipline of the school may be similar to the discipline of the army), the spaces and norms are ultimately distinct from each other, with one having little bearing on the other. Societies of control, on the other hand, are predicated on connection between spaces, such that 'one is never finished with anything.'[13] These connections encourage a culture of constant progression or improvement. The question this cultural attitude begs (to what ends is progression and improvement directed?) admits no answer. There are also differences in the conceptualisation and treatment of the person. The disciplinary society takes the individual and subjugates her through discipline so that she will conform to the mass. No such subjugation is necessary in societies of control. The individual is not viewed as a member of a mass, but as a data point, a market audience, a sample. This allows for targeted control to take shape, where compliance is not forced upon the individual (as with discipline) but facilitated. There are no overarching aims or requirements outlined by societies of control (no 'watchwords'). The society is governed merely by way of codes that function as 'passwords'; these can allow or deny the individual access to certain information or amenities. The control of access is presumably based on the conduct of the individual and is a means of exercising control over individuals' choices: the individual self-disciplines because of incentives and disincentives encoded within herself as a data-point. This, in turn, suggests (perhaps even necessitates) a degree of technological surveillance that goes beyond that of the comparatively simple model of the Benthamic Panopticon Foucault famously employs. Additionally, there are no clear hierarchies, if there are any at all. Unlike in disciplinary societies, power is not centralised or in the hands of a single 'owner' or state. Rather, control is exercised by a corporation—invested with its own personhood—comprising stockholders. The make-up of this corporation is transitory and fundamentally transformable. All of these technologies—singular modulation across singular space, an ethos of the relentless pursuit of progress, the 'dividualisation' or 'data-fication' of the individual, the facilitation of compliance, the use of codes as passwords, technological surveillance, and the absence of clear hierarchies of power—together create a society of control. Critiques Here we will explore three critiques of Deleuze's thesis: the privatisation of public space, the role of surveillance in control, and the telos of control. Privatisation Michael Hardt deals at length with the Deleuzian conception of societies of control, both in his joint work with Antonio Negri on Empire, as well as more specifically, in a piece titled 'The Global Society of Control.' Here, Hardt contends that there is an incompleteness to Deleuze's work on control, and proceeds to elaborate on the operation of societies of control to fill in these purported gaps. He does so by situating these societies within his and Negri's broader framework of Empire. The study is multifaceted, but here only one aspect of the critique will be considered: the erasure of the dialectic between public and private. 'There is no more outside,' insists Hardt.[14] This is to say, there are no longer any meaningful or permanent divisions between private and public spaces. Nikolas Rose, similarly, argues that inherently public spaces (like public parks, libraries, and playgrounds) are being abandoned in favour of privatised and privately secured places (like shopping malls and arts centres) for acceptable members of the public.[15] Those who have no legitimate, consumerised reason to occupy these new privatised 'public' spaces are denied access to them. Populations and classes of people deemed 'dangerous' or 'undesirable' are excluded from the private-public spaces and, so, from society itself. Deleuze touches on this idea of exclusion as well, in saying that 'three quarters of humanity', who are too poor for debt (as in, those who cannot be managed through the mechanisms of 'control', because these mechanisms rely on monetary and consumerist incentives or 'passwords') and too numerous of confinement (which makes it logistically difficult to subject them to technologies of 'discipline' that rely on confinement) will have to face exclusion to shanty towns and ghettos.[16] From this, we can take two points. Firstly, that neither the societies of control, nor disciplinary societies are or have ever been able to exercise control or discipline over every individual; when they are unable to, they simply exclude these potentially unpredictable and uncontrollable threats to order. Secondly, there is the implicit acknowledgment that technologies of control and discipline can coexist; to conceive of discipline and control as dichotomous notions would be inaccurate.[17] In fact, the question posed by this essay itself may fall victim to a false dichotomy between Foucauldian discipline and Deleuzian control. These mechanisms of power are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We should, therefore, be wary to adopt a view that control represents a natural or irreversible progression (from discipline) in the exercise of power (as Hardt and Negri may be suggesting in saying that control is an intensification of discipline),[18] because they are contingent historical realities. That is what Foucault's work—and Deleuze's analysis of it—suggested of discipline, and it is no less true in the case of control. Thus, we can qualify our thesis by saying that while societies of control are increasingly replacing those of discipline, technologies of discipline (and even of sovereignty) are still employed in certain contexts. Surveillance Surveillance is implicit within Deleuze's conception of control (in the understanding of the individual as a mere data point, not the member of a mass), but Oscar Gandy articulates this technology more explicitly.[19] Such an emphasis on surveillance is problematised, however, by Rose, who posits that societies of control are not predicated on surveillance but on the instilling of self-discipline and self-regulation in their subjects. That rather misses the mark, because, as we have seen, societies of control employ a range of technologies to exercise power. Nothing suggests an emphasis on self-discipline ought to exclude the technology of surveillance, which is implicit in the incentivisation of labour and use of passwords. Telos But Rose's critique of surveillance does helpfully inform another point of discussion: the odd ideas prioritised within societies of control. Deleuze makes brilliant and incisive concluding remarks about this telos of self-improvement and self-actualisation. But what are the motivations behind this ethos of motivation? That is the question Deleuze poses in his conclusion, and it is a question that largely remains unanswered. In some ways, one can only hazard a guess at the mechanisms at work here. That is rather the point. Societies of control have evolved such that their technologies of power and their telos can be more obscure than that of disciplinary societies. VALIDATION With definitions—or, rather, understandings—of both disciplinary societies and societies of control to hand, this essay considers whether it can be said that the latter are replacing the former. The institutions of the disciplinary society Foucault identifies in his body of work—the home, the school, the prison, the barracks, the factory—are all still extant. However, as we have noted above, there need be no 'either/or' as between societies of discipline and of control; the question is more accurately one of degree and we must identify whether a general movement may be occurring. Again, that movement need not be total or irreversible. Such a movement seems to be taking place all around us. For example, remote working and learning, which Deleuze identified as increasing in the 1980's and which has skyrocketed in light of the coronavirus pandemic, has weakened substantially the disciplinary segregation of physical space.[20] At the same time, it has strengthened the all-encroaching productivity ethos of societies of control by placing work or study (itself little more than a preparatory step towards work) within the walls of the private family home. Whilst coronavirus may have accelerated a shift towards societies of control, this trend runs much deeper still. Below, we shall seek to validate the shift Deleuze identifies by employing and analysing four impressionistic vignettes. Vignette A In April 2021, Chinese state television broadcast an exposé of intolerable working conditions faced by food delivery drivers—long hours, meagre pay, algorithms that encourage dangerous driving and heavily fine lateness, and harassment from customers who have full and 'live' access to drivers' locations and contact details. China's couriers are estimated to contribute to close to 1% of the country's economic activity, but the undercover government official earned just £4.52 over a 12-hour shift.[21] The courier works in no strictly delineated or confined space, but everywhere, openly. He is the subject of constant surveillance. Customers have his precise location, his 'ETA', the corporation's promised delivery slot, and his personal mobile phone number at their fingertips. The threat of an angry call or harsh review might appear in those circumstances to operate rather like a panopticon unconfined by space, enforcing conformity. But that is only a minor part of this story; it is secondary to the algorithmic surveillance and control in which both the courier and the customer are merely variables. Drivers will be set timescales in which to complete a delivery determined by the average speed at which drivers have previously made that journey or a similar journey. If they beat that timeframe, they may be rewarded with bonus pay. If they fail, their pay will be docked. Both processes—the incentivisation of speed and disincentivisation of slowness—are automated. The algorithm does not care how the driver gets from A to B, only that he does so quickly and does not damage the customer's goods in the process. So, drivers will travel recklessly in order to beat the clock to boost their meagre pay, but this only shortens the average time of journey completion, making pay boosts harder to achieve and pay docks more likely and contributing to an insane culture of paranoia and uncertainty. Compliance with the requirements of speed in this system is facilitated, not forced. In paying the less perfect worker less and the more perfect worker more, the corporation is nudging the courier to an (ultimately ephemeral) standard of compliance. But it need take no further punishing or corrective action: it knows that the courier, impacted by these forces, will correct himself. The password operating here is that of a courier 'score' that determines the level of pay afforded for work done. This is ripe terrain to consider Deleuze's challenge as to whether the unions will be able to resist forces of control upon the breakdown of the workplace. China, where organised labour is met with fear and hostility, shows that the communist party will intervene by challenging monopolies and exposing low pay. They may moderate the technology of power, but they will not extinguish it; the work is too economically important for that. In the UK, there have been increased efforts by unions to protect insecure, 'gig-economy' labourers and they have had some success.[22] But here too the overall system of algorithmic control is not removed, but mollified. Vignette B A London-based junior employee at Goldman Sachs, one of the largest investment banks in the world, has complained that staff face 18-hour shifts that mean they are earning less than the UK living wage and regularly take sick leave due to burnout. In 2015, US employee Sarvshreshth Gupta, who had been working 100-hour weeks, took his own life.[23] The company has a £50,000 entry-level base salary.[24] The company's average employee takes home about £260,000 per year.[25] It is at first blush surprising that employees at Goldman Sachs could be said to be subjects of control by twenty-first century technologies of power, and even more surprising to suggest that their situation is comparable to that of couriers in China. But this is precisely the sort of topsy-turviness that is to be expected from (and ultimately serves to legitimate) societies of control, where we all 'work hard'. The impetus to 'get ahead' is central to the ethos of self-improvement and motivation instilled by societies of control. That is perhaps nowhere more evident than amongst the new, highly-remunerated, highly-overworked, 'meritocratic', professional or upper class of managers, bankers, and lawyers.[26] Previously, elite status was maintained through generations by inheritance. That method of status-maintenance has now mostly been displaced by investments in 'human capital'. This can be achieved directly—through funding private schooling, tuition, and even work placements paid for by the volunteer—or indirectly, through covering children's rent and paying for their goods. The crucial factor in bringing about this shift has been the rise of 'meritocracy', which purports that success (i.e. the rate of remuneration for one's work) is a result and marker of an individual's inherent drive and talent but which in reality allows 'a relatively tiny segment of the population […] to transmit advantage from generation to generation' because elite parents stack the odds in favour of their children's advancement from birth.[27] This is the society of control in action: demanding, inequitable and possessing an obscured, democratically-papered-over telos, drive and skill directed at productive activities. But the elite class are not spared from the brutalities of this system, as the above vignette suggests. Since societies are increasingly meritocratic (in the sense that the most skilled and driven will generally be remunerated the most, not in the sense that the system promotes a level playing field) young elite professionals still have to work incredibly hard to 'climb the ladder'. Even if they reach seemingly secure positions of employment, they will still want to continue to reap the rewards of their labour, still need to work intensively to secure funds to invest in their children's human capital, and still be motivated by the overwhelming and corrupting cultural ideal of self-improvement and motivation. The name of Goldman Sachs' personnel team, 'Human Capital Management', is telling. It has been noted, '[l]ives are things that people have; capital has rates of return.'[28] Vignette C About one in every hundred adults in Britain has been trained as a 'mental health first aider' by the MHFA.[29] They advertise their 'proactive' services thus: 'for every £1 spent by employers on mental health interventions, they get back £5 in reduced absence [.] and staff turnover.'[30] The second of five listed responsibilities for first-aiders is to communicate concerns about 'anyone in your workplace, for example to an appropriate manager.'[31] Separately, the UK government is providing '£1 million for innovative student mental health projects' that offer targeted support to those identified statistically as being at highest risk of mental ill-health.[32] Deleuze argued the hospital was being replaced by 'neighbourhood clinics, hospices, and day care'.[33] Similarly, the above vignette suggests that the power that would in a disciplinary society be exercised by the asylum has, in our societies of control, been exercised dispersedly by employers, with the aim being to improve profit-margins and productivity rates. The actual mental wellbeing of employees—or, rather, of human capital—is a means to that end that may give rise to some incidental good. But even these incidental goods are monetised, such as when companies compete on their 'work-life balance' or their inclusion of private therapy in 'healthcare plans' so as to attract the most human capital. Under these conditions, the public healthcare officials sectioning or supporting a member of the public who risks harm to herself or others are reduced in their significance. In their place, the anxious employer preempts possible harm to the corporation by proactively addressing and preventing harm to the employee. Similarly, 'mental health teams' in schools and universities are encouraged by the government to anticipate, based on a series of data-sets, those students who are 'more at risk' and provide targeted interventions to safeguard their health (and, by extension, their productivity). Deleuze says that 'the socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control […] would have to be categorical'. By this it is meant that we must look to each institution of power—the healthcare system, the corporate system, the educational system—and describe the power being exercised there. The above vignette shows that that has become an artificial mode of analysis in this era of control. The healthcare system has been radically dispersed, with detection, prevention, and mitigation (recovery being ancillary) of illness now increasingly undertaken by the corporation and its agents, including crucially the employee herself qua employee or human capital. She will contact her mental health first aider colleague or her employer (though any difference between the two seems doubtful). She will purchase products—self-help books, meditation apps, tickets to motivational talks—with a view to her greater productivity and, hence, 'employability'. In fact, the monetary value she attributes (through her valuable spare time as much as through her pay-power) to her own productivity and employability may reduce the corporate system's nascent role in facilitating compliance; her self-improvement becomes her guiding, internalised ethos as a consumer-employee and she will discipline herself, knowing this self-improvement will be coded and rewarded. Thus, technologies of power in the modern, mental health context cannot be identified within a healthcare system, a corporate system or an education system, nor even within what might be dubbed a 'consumer system'; there is no single system of operation of which we can speak. This conceptual challenge itself demonstrates the ultimate annihilation of the institutions Deleuze anticipates in societies of control. Vignette D In May 2021, the UK government proposed halving state funding for university courses they do not regard as 'strategic priorities', such as music, drama, visual arts, and archaeology. It is estimated that such courses would run at a deficit of £2,700 per enrolled student, and many courses may therefore have to close if the plans go ahead. The government says the decision is 'designed to target taxpayers' money towards the subjects which support the skills this country needs to build back better'.[34] They also say universities should "focus [.] upon subjects which deliver strong graduate employment outcomes in areas of economic and societal importance".[35] Deleuze foretold the 'effect on the school of perpetual training, and the corresponding abandonment of all university research'.[36] Alarming an idea as this may be, the above vignette should at least discourage us from dismissing it altogether. The government's proposal betrays a deeply production-oriented approach to higher education that sees knowledge and learning as purely instrumental to the development of concrete 'skills' to be directed at the most economically valuable production of goods and services and, correspondingly, the strongest employment outcomes. The UK education system no longer possesses its own watchwords (save, perhaps, 'instilling British Values'). Instead, all activity is directed at the future employment prospects of the student. The privatisation of schools (through academisation in England) has allowed for corporate sponsorship that makes this close instrumentalism perfectly plain: the corporation's senior managers become senior managers of underperforming schools and they are expected to foster students' 'aspirations'. Here, the corporate and educational systems are blended together, the former funding the latter, the latter supplying labour to the former. The physical spaces in which learning occurs can at times barely be distinct from the corporate, whether a company name is printed across the school entrance ('Bridge Academy in partnership with UBS') or affixed to laptops donated to school students studying remotely. CONCLUSION There is a great deal of truth to Deleuze's thesis that societies of control are replacing disciplinary societies. We have noted the destruction of swathes of confined and discrete spaces; the intermixing of institutions; the pervasive power of technology to tweak and modulate behaviour through coding; and the pointless but universal ethos of motivation. As Deleuze ably demonstrates, analyses of discipline, confinement, hierarchy, and masses can only take us so far in understanding these forces. More necessary in our quest to uncover the telos we are being made to serve is a socio-technological study of control and its methods. However, this essay has also sought to demonstrate the limits of Deleuze's proposed methodology. For a 'categorical' socio-technological study of control becomes more elusive the more deeply a society succumbs to control. Schools, prisons, barracks, hospitals, factories, offices, and homes are increasingly blended (and so less discrete) environments. The office educates, entertains, protects, and diagnoses its employees. The school is a business, its pupils are prospective employees. University is a career stage. Beds, dining tables, and lounges are workstations. For those on 'home detention' during coronavirus in the United States or under TPIMs (Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures) in the United Kingdom, these same spaces are prison cells. The gradual annihilation of the disciplines as physical and conceptual spaces—which Deleuze foresaw—also renders obsolete our existing methods of understanding power. We are in need of new tools to respond to these developments; the study of categories must be replaced with the study of networks and systems. We must explore with curiosity and thoroughness the complex web of relations operating through spaces and lives. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams R, 'English universities must prove "commitment" to free speech for bailouts' The Guardian (16 July 2020) accessed 6 May 2021 Bakare L and Adams R, 'Plans for 50% funding cuts to arts subjects at universities "catastrophic' The Guardian (6 May 2021) accessed 6 May 2021 Burroughs WS, 'The Limits of Control' in Grauerholz J and Silverberg I (eds), Word Virus: The William S Burroughs Reader (4th edn, Fourth Estate 2010) Collini S, 'Snakes and Ladders' London Review of Books (London, 1 April 2021) 15 Deleuze G, 'Foucault: Lecture 17' (University of Paris, 25 March 1986) accessed 9 May 2021 — — 'Foucault: Lecture 18' (University of Paris, 8 April 1986) accessed 9 May 2021 — — 'Foucault: Lecture 19' (University of Paris, 15 April 1986) accessed 9 May 2021 — — 'Postscript on Societies of Control' (1992) 59 October 3 Department for Education and others, '£1 million for innovative student mental health projects' UK Government (5 March 2020) accessed 11 May 2021 Ewald F, The Birth of Solidarity: The History of the French Welfare State (Cooper M ed, Johnson TS tr, Duke University Press 2020) Feng E, 'For China's Overburdened Delivery Drivers, The Customer—And App—Is Always Right' NPR (Beijing, 1 December 2020) accessed 7 May 2021 Foster M, 'Guess How Much Goldman's Average Salary Is (GS)' Investopedia (25 June 2019) accessed 10 May 2021 Foucault M, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79 (Senellart M ed, Burchell G tr, Palgrave Macmillan 2008) — — Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Sheridan A tr, 2nd edn, Vintage Books 1995) Hardt M, 'The Global Society of Control' (1998) 20(3) Discourse 139 — — and Negri A, Empire (Harvard University Press 2001) Makortoff K, 'Goldman Sachs junior banker speaks out over "18-hour shifts and low pay' The Guardian (London, 24 March 2021) accessed 7 May 2021 MHFA, 'Being a Mental Health First Aider: Your Guide to the Role' accessed 10 May 2021. — — 'Workplace Info Pack' accessed 10 May 2021. Morar N, Nail T and Smith DW (eds), Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh University Press 2016) Muldoon J, 'Foucault's Forgotten Hegelianism' (2014) 21 Parrhesia 102 Nealon J, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford University Press 2008) Negri A, Interview with Gilles Deleuze: 'Control and Becoming' (Joughin M tr, Spring 1990) Rice-Oxley M, 'UK training record number of mental health first aiders' The Guardian (2 September 2019) accessed 11 May 2021 Roffe J, Gilles Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh University Press 2016) Rose N, 'Government and Control' (2000) 40(2) The British Journal of Criminology 321–339 Wallin J, 'Four Propositions on the Limits of Control' (2013) 39(1) Visual Arts Research 6–8 Wise JM, 'Mapping the Culture of Control: Seeing through The Truman Show' (2002) 3(1) Television & New Media 29–47 Yang Y, 'China's food delivery groups slammed after undercover TV exposé' Financial Times (London, 29 April 2021) accessed 11 May 2021 — — 'How China's delivery apps are putting riders at risk' Financial Times (London, 26 January 2021) accessed 11 May 2021 [1] Gilles Deleuze, 'Postscript on Societies of Control' (1992) 59 October 3–7. [2] On their complex relationship before and after Foucault's death, see François Dosse, 'Deleuze and Foucault: A Philosophical Friendship' in Nikolae Morar, Thomas Nail and Daniel W Smith (eds), Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh University Press 2016). [3] James Muldoon, 'Foucault's Forgotten Hegelianism' (2014) 21 Parrhesia 102. [4] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan tr, 2nd edn, Vintage Books 1995) [5] Michael Hardt, 'The Global Society of Control' (1998) 20(3) Discourse 139. [6] Deleuze cites these authors in his 'Postscript': (n 1). [7] Gilles Deleuze, 'Foucault: Lecture 19' (University of Paris, 15 April 1986). [8] Burroughs himself concedes his analogy of the life-boat is a 'primitive' one: William S Burroughs, 'The Limits of Control' in James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (eds), Word Virus: The William S Burroughs Reader (4th edn, Fourth Estate 2010). [9] 'Postscript' (n 1) 7. [10] ibid. [11] 'Postscript' (n 1) 4. [12] Foucault refers to it as 'biopower'. Biopower is not something that this essay will address, but we can observe that it may be that the Foucauldian notion of biopower and the Deleuzian notion of control are broadly similar or even the same: for a fuller discussion of that relationship, see Thomas Nail, 'Biopower and Control' in Between Deleuze and Foucault (n 2). [13] 'Postscript' (n 1) 5. [14] Hardt (n 5) 140. [15] Nikolas Rose, 'Government and Control' (2000) 40(2) The British Journal of Criminology 331. [16] 'Postscript' (n 1) 7. [17] JM Wise, 'Mapping the Culture of Control: Seeing through The Truman Show' (2002) 3(1) Television & New Media 29. [18] Nail, 'Biopower and Control'. [19] Wise, 'Culture of Control' 33. [20] Deleuze, 'Foucault: Lecture 18'. [21] Yuan Yang, 'China's food delivery groups slammed after undercover TV exposé' Financial Times (London, 29 April 2021). [22] For instance, many will now be recognised as 'workers' rather than as 'self-employed', with greater protections: Uber v Aslam [2021] UKSC 5. [23] Kalyeena Makortoff, 'Goldman Sachs junior banker speaks out over "18-hour shifts and low pay' The Guardian (London, 24 March 2021). [24] ibid. [25] Michael Foster, 'Guess How Much Goldman's Average Salary Is (GS)' Investopedia (25 June 2019). [26] Stefan Collini, 'Snakes and Ladders' London Review of Books (London, 1 April 2021) 15. [27] ibid 22. [28] ibid. [29] Mark Rice-Oxley, 'UK training record number of mental health first aiders' The Guardian (2 September 2019). [30]MHFA, 'Being a Mental Health First Aider: Your Guide to the Role'. [31] MHFA, 'Workplace Info Pack'. [32] Department for Education and others, '£1 million for innovative student mental health projects' UK Government (5 March 2020). [33] 'Postscript' (n 1) 4. [34] Lanre Bakare and Richard Adams, 'Plans for 50% funding cuts to arts subjects at universities "catastrophic' The Guardian (6 May 2021). [35] Richard Adams, 'English universities must prove "commitment" to free speech for bailouts' The Guardian (16 July 2020). [36] 'Postscript' (n 1) 7.
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Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape? The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk
