The convergent cycles of the prevalence of interventionist or laissez-faire concepts have alternated in economics, politics, & political & economic theory. Hayek's theory of Western rationality & liberal & democratic order is based on two communicational arguments: the price-earnings ratio enables maximum mobilization of resources & the optimal use of information. The author's opinion is that the current cycle will bring about the integration of the liberal communicational argument with the new concepts of regulation, & not the universalization of the liberal order. 42 References. Adapted from the source document.
The author deals with the new cycle of multilateral trade negotiations that started in Doha in 2001. Since then, the main question has remained to be how to overcome the radically different priorities of developed & developing countries. ED insists on expanding the WTO regulation system. Developing countries were against broadening of the negotiations, especially not to development that is not directly related to the trade dimension. The clash appeared in the form of a crisis of the multilateral system but also in the form of a crisis of confidence in WTO. The general agreement signed by the members of WTO in July 2004 was of great importance for the future of multilateralism. It remains to be seen if that will be confirmed at the conclusion of the Doha cycle envisaged for the end of 2006. References. Adapted from the source document.
The author analyzes fundamental concepts of the school of rational expectation (RATEX, an offspring of the Chicago school of economics). Theoretical foundations of the neoclassical macroeconomy are set out: the hypothesis of rational expectations in the circumstances of perfect competition & the principle of strategic interdependence. Central to these are the hypotheses of variants, misallocation of resources, & neutrality of economic policy. Outlined are rent-seeking & direct unproductive profit-seeking as well as alternative models in the new theoretical economy: economic constitutionalism, deficitarians, the theory of political business cycles, & supply-side economics. 22 References. Adapted from the source document.
The use of policy networks in the research of public policies includes identifying policy actors (both state & non-state actors) & determining the type of their relations, with the purpose of description & analysis of the policy process. The basic assumption of the approach is that contemporary policy-making is characterized by sharing of responsibilities for policy-making among state & the non-state actors. The approach is faced with a critical charge that it doesn't make a clear distinction between dependent & independent variables, & that it does not contain an implicit causal logic that could be falsified. Even though this criticism is partly justified, the policy networks approach should not be dismissed, albeit it should not be understood as a theory (in the sense of E. & V. Ostrom's level of theoretical discourse). Furthermore, the criticism mostly affects the 'interest intermediation school', which understands policy networks as generic term for different forms of state-society relations. Thus, the 'governance school' is much more fruitful for the development of policy networks idea. The 'Governance school' of policy networks approach can be understood as a framework &/or a model. Firstly, the policy networks approach has most similarities with the cycle model of policy process & the two approaches are closely related frameworks of public policy research. The characteristics of contemporary policy-making calls for adding policy networks to the cycle model &, in this perspective, the policy networks approach becomes an analytical tool-box for organizing empirical material. Secondly, policy networks are conceived as a specific form of governance, which becomes dominant in the recent literature. Within this perspective, ideas about policy networks have bigger theoretical ambitions, but are still developed at a level of a model, & not theory. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.
The author regards his book Karl Marx and the Political Economy of Modernity, as a summarized polemical autobiography. For him, above all, Marx is an extremely successful key for a new understanding of the classical political and political-economic theory and for its applicability in future analysis and projections of ways out from the actual world crisis. Even though in his book he documented and elaborated ways of completing Marx's critique of political economy in accordance with Marx's plan from Das Kapital, and demonstrated also the possibility of founding a critical political theory on the basis of the critique of political economy. For Dag Strpic, a critical political theory, contradictory to Marx's planning, would be required already in building a concretized theory of markets and prices in the "competition of a multitude of capitals" on the "surface of civil society" -- based on Marx's methodology. Somewhat aside from that, in this article Strpic is focused on an extended clarification of the Modern Normal's meaning. The Modern Normal (MN) in his book was constructed in an analysis based on a combination of classical modern and contemporary political and political-economic theory. But also on analytical use of results of all social sciences and humanities in principle, and science as a whole -- especially by necessity of problem-solving public policy. With a fundamental and implementational focus on an integral political science. In this, Strpic holds on to the basic scheme of the Modern Normal, Fl, from his book. Strpic's Modern Normal in this basic form is designed as a cross-section view of a corridor of cyclical movements of changing orders and fluctuating processes in mutually structurized elements of modern nation-states and their world-system. Those orders and elements developed various foundations on classical modern political and political-economic principles. With various centers of gravity or normals and different formating dominants in a structure of sequential political/political-economic counterpoints of development in series of historically different variants of the Modern Normal. Strpic observes the conjunctures and crises of development of those processes and orders, and also the actual worldwide economic, political, social and cultural crisis, through cycles of the Modern Normal as a whole. This is most evident in semi-centennial and (multi)centennial cycles, and most striking in great crises and pics of conjunctures. Adapted from the source document.
The authors analyze the constitutional position of the Polish parliament after the democratic revolution of 1989, as well as its internal political dynamics. The parliament has two houses, endowed with different constitutional competences: Sejm (lower House) & Senate (upper House). The 460 members of the Sejm were elected in three electoral cycles (1989, 1991, & 1993) by means of majority & a proportional electoral system with various prohibitive clauses, while the 100 senators were elected by the majority electoral system. The changes in the electoral rules resulted in the altered parliamentary party system. While in the "contractual" Sejim, the seats (in accordance with a political agreement) were divided between the ruling communist bloc & the oppositional "Solidarity," the first freely elected Sejm had an extremely fragmented party structure, with 28 parties, while the second Sejm is moderately pluralist, with two parties of the government coalition & four opposition parties. The most remarkable feature of Polish political culture is an increasing professionalization of the parliament members as well as a growing political apathy of the general public & a meager turnout at the polls. 4 Tables, 19 References. Adapted from the source document.
Austerity has in recent years become established as the European response to crisis. The necessity of fiscal consolidation is often expressed with a vocabulary evocative of guilt and imagined pleasure. It should therefore not surprise us that austerity recently became subject to Lacanian psychoanalysis, building on Todd McGowan's thesis on the transition from the society of prohibition to the society of commanded enjoyment. The current literature recognizes the dichotomy of spirits of capitalism: the first, ascetic and thrifty spirit demanding private sacrifice and the second, consumer spirit demanding specifically private enjoyment in the name of social duty. These spirits of capitalism are strategies for dealing with the loss of jouissance necessitated by the acceptance of symbolic order through socialization. The Phallic fantasy of full, uncastrated enjoyment is channelled through the strategy of deferral, aiming for full enjoyment in undetermined future (first spirit) or the repetitive attempt of immediate fulfilment (second spirit). Author supplements the existing argument in two crucial ways. Firstly, he traces the ways in which spirits of capitalism are mirrored in the changing positions of the political-economic mainstream. Secondly, using Arrighi's analysis of systemic cycles of accumulation, the author offers an additional structural component to the spirits of capitalism pendulum. Adapted from the source document.
The European entrepreneurial undertaking, in the form of an equipped & armed merchant ship ready to circumnavigate & conquer the globe, created the modern world with one side only: the globalized West. Contemporary global liberal interventionism & governmental entrepreneurship are segmented today into a dangerously simplified multitask global pyramid of governance through unidirectional cascades. For real globalization, this process has to be bidirectional at least: from the center to the periphery, but also from the periphery to the center. Otherwise, at the beginning of a new "centennial trend" & a "great cycle," there is the risk that the collapse of the liberal civilization of the 19th century could be repeated -- once again because of the weakness of the world-system peripheries. The question of how to strengthen the "anonymous" global economic, cultural, & political processes of the bidirectional kind is becoming the central global & strategic issue for today's politics & political science. It has turned out that this kind of state & its processes in the real global environment could be successfully analyzed & effectively made use of only with the complete unreduced methodical front of all the fields of political science together -- & more. As such, they could be practically surmounted only with a very complex political & economic action through a whole set of expertly managed public policies. From the historically based Croatian point of view, a possibility of integration into the world center was always in founding a world market "niche," & never in making even a mini-empire or in controlling a globalized or a mega-national net. Without a methodically global political science approach, also leaning on Central European & Mediterranean cultural & politological traditions, such Croatian interests will not be accomplished. 41 References. Adapted from the source document.
The actual recession/depression is a radicalized continuation of a cyclical forty years long transformational slowdown of growth through basically stagnant fluctuations. With this slowdown is connected a serial of controversial, crisis-generating & finally unsuccessful general politics- & policy-change unprecedented in the contemporary world. An analysis of the societal history through sequences of developmental counterpoints & through the logic of great societal, political-economic & political cycles demonstrates that causes of cyclical economic & societal movements in general, & of actual stagnation & crisis especially, are mostly noneconomical. They are mainly political. In short, their political foundation is in a radical actual & previous change in the equilibrium of a dynamic tendency of the modern political space. This equilibrium is here called "modern normal." The modern normal (MN) is for us a tendentional space/structure of equilibria in the middle of (1) the political, (2) the personal/individual, (3) the whole world space, & (4) the space of the state/society. The actual kind of that disequilibrium or denormalization of modern normal indicates a process which is usually called totalitarian. In our actual case, the focal point is moved toward financial corporations as pseudo-statal regulators of economy, politics & society. Here, this is the Matrix-capitalism as a feedback of an urban legend & an analytical pattern. Generally, in the long run it is also a process of denormalized or bad & unsuccessful public- & business-policy, especially as development-, growth- & transformation-policy. This Matrix-capitalism, which is dominated by global financial corporations, is developing itself in a cyclically denormalised tendentional space/structure between: (1) the unpolitically "economical," (2) the unindividually "personal," (3) the unwholly "global," & (4) the unstately, unsocially, & anti-economically "denational." The Matrix-capitalism is functional only in a virtual world of ideologized economics & casino-business operations with derivatives etc. Cyclically interfaced with economic, social, cultural, political, personal, & national/world's reality, Matrix-capitalism will every time be more unsustainable even for its mega-corporative core. Adapted from the source document.
