Suchergebnisse

Examines defense self-sufficiency and rationales for alliance with the US, both in East Asian regional context and the war on terrorism. Some focus on Australian policy orientations toward the Middle East, particularly Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Under the impact of `postcolonial' critique, it is increasingly assumed in radical social theory that traditional disciplines like sociology remain palpably Eurocentric. However, this important challenge is typically advanced at a very general level, often lacking adequate instantiation. In this article some general formulations of the problem of Eurocentrism are connected to the work of three pairs of theorists in historical sociology. Foregrounding recent approaches to the classic `rise of the West' question, these authors are probed for either substantive or `meta-theoretical' expressions of Eurocentrism. Overall I argue that charging sociology with Eurocentrism is problematical, partly due to continuing uncertainty about the status of the concept of ideology in social science.

"Naïve" Condorcet Jury Theorems automatically have "sophisticated" versions as corollaries. A Condorcet Jury Theorem is a result, pertaining to an election in which the agents have common preferences but diverse information, asserting that the outcome is better, on average, than the one that would be chosen by any particular individual. Sometimes there is the additional assertion that, as the population grows, the probability of an incorrect decision goes to zero. As a consequence of simple properties of common interest games, whenever "sincere" voting leads to the conclusions of the theorem, there are Nash equilibria with these properties. In symmetric environments the equilibria may be taken to be symmetric.

Revisits sociology as a discipline that has been conceived both of as a scientific system for studying social structural patterns & a method for comprehending totalizing meanings in order to assess intellectual & academic developments relating to Marxist traditions & the multiplicity that has become sociology. After establishing an historical & intellectual context for the preeminence of sociology as a human science & cultural framework, a few current important sociological thinkers (Charles Leimert, Stephen Seideman, & Craig Calhoun) are assessed who eloquently address themselves to sociology's predicament & the important work of Jeffrey Alexander & his engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu that embodies many of the currents & complexities faced by sociologists & other generalists. Concludes that the emphasis on multidimensional sociology exhibits limits that do not adequately address its own ambivalent & critical response to modern sociology's totalizing & monological qualities with a necessary coherent, assertive practice. R. Rodriguez

Examines evolution of China's foreign policy and strategic interests, responses to Chinese pressures from ASEAN member states, and US policy towards China. Argues that the US should pay more attention to other countries in the region besides China: Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

This paper addresses some of the underlying issues around "post-Marxism" in contemporary social theory, using just one exemplar of this emerging framework, namely Michele Barrett's book The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. One of the overarching themes is to suggest that post-Marxist critiques of historical materialism and class analysis tend to be couched as rejections of the type of theory that Marxism is thought to represent, or as drastic temperings of its explanatory scope, rather than being outright dismissals of substantive Marxist propositions and analytic concerns. The second component of the argument is to point out that although these discursive effects of "modernist" theorizing-reductionism, essentialism, and so on-are nowadays treated in the post-Marxist literature almost as unpardonable gaffes or 'sins', they are seldom analyzed in a fine-grained way. The third and final emphasis in this paper is to say that there is a deeper continuity of concern between classical Marxism and post-Marxism than many on either side are willing to admit. 43 References. T. K. Brown

Feminism's eminent position in critical social science is now beyond question, and a range of substantial texts on feminism, epistemology and social theory have reworked the dominant male images of knowledge and society. However, within feminist discourses, some key epistemological questions - such as `is feminist standpoint epistemology viable?' - remain unresolved. Indeed, they have become compounded by the anti-epistemological impetus of postmodernism. In this paper I draw attention to some general problems in the area of feminism and epistemology, and conduct a close textual analysis of some key writings by feminist theorists to see whether a specifically postmodernist philosophical ambience suits feminism better than an enlightenment ambience.

I outline and examine the reassertion by Nicos Mouzelis of some `traditionalist' elements in the idea of sociological theory, following what he sees as an excess of philosophising in the discipline. I argue that Mouzelis's recent work constitutes a weighty response to the prevailing climate of ambivalence about the purpose and type of social theory that is required today, and in so doing it also interestingly reflects a loose but noticeable neo-traditionalist revival, `after postmodernism'. At the same time, there are some conservative elements in the `back to sociological theory' movement which are decidedly questionable, and in any case Mouzelis's conceptual apparatus is more entangled in contemporary dilemmas and complexities than his more headline statements about the nature of sociology indicate.