Suchergebnisse

Political Economy seminar
The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History
Speaker: Randall Germain, Carleton University
When: 3-4pm, Wednesday, 24 April, 2024
Where: A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 341, The University of Sydney
About the talk: The idea of history, although present throughout much of the traditional canon of political economy and its internationalized off-shoot – international political economy (IPE) – is today largely erased as a key theoretical feature of IPE research. Where it is included as a part of the research enterprise, it is most often formulated as either context for the problem under investigation, or as a linear unit of account such as t + 1. This represents a theoretical loss for the discipline of IPE, and my effort here is to recenter the idea of history as a core feature of IPE's broad research agenda. To do this, I first revisit how the idea of history is framed in the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber, to demonstrate that the idea of history was a critical element of the inspiration to political economy (and IPE). I then pick up how the idea of history informs what might be described as 'modern' IPE, most importantly in the work of foundational IPE scholars (Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, David Mitrany, E.H. Carr, Susan Strange and Robert Cox). This intellectual history reveals the important way in which the idea of history can frame the research enterprise of IPE as an examination of transformative change within the global political economy. In period marked by what appear to be deep and disruptive change, the idea of history is a necessary addition to the IPE conceptual and analytical toolkit.

About the speaker: Randall Germain is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. His teaching and research examine the political economy of global finance, issues and themes associated with economic and financial governance, and theoretical debates within the field of international political economy. His scholarship has been published in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, and Review of International Studies. He is also the author of The International Organization of Credit (CUP, 1997) and Global Politics and Financial Governance (Palgrave, 2010). Most recently he edited Susan Strange and the Future of Global Political Economy (Routledge 2016). His current research explores how the idea of history has informed disciplinary debates in IPE.
The post Seminar: Randall Germain, ‘The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

I've posted a few times over the years about a trip I made with my partner to Leipzig in East Germany back in 1984, and I confess that the now-defunct country retains a kind of fascination for me. My rather banal judgement then and now is that the country, though marked by annoying shortages and […]

ROAPE's Peter Dwyer interviews Hakim Adi about African history, Black history, teaching and the campaign to stop the University of Chichester from slashing his ground-breaking Masters by Research (MRes) in African history and the African diaspora.
The post Defending African history – campaign to support Hakim Adi & African history teaching first appeared on ROAPE.
The post Defending African history – campaign to support Hakim Adi & African history teaching appeared first on ROAPE.

My new book Class War is a literary history, but it is committed to literature as something more than a record of past events. With a textual archive comprising letters, slogans, songs, manifestoes, memoirs, and field manuals in addition to novels, poems, and other more obviously literary modes of expression, literature is to be understood here as an active participant in the revolutionary process.
The post Class War: A Literary History appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

"Die Tradition der Unterdrückten belehrt uns darüber, daß der Ausnahmezustand in dem wir leben, die Regel ist. Wir müssen zu einem Begriff der Geschichte kommen, der dem entspricht." Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, These VIII. On March 2022, a few days after the first strikes of the Russian army on Ukrainian territory began, […]
Der Beitrag The Return of History erschien zuerst auf Philosophie InDebate.

Call for Papers for a Volume of the Yearbook of Knowledge and Society. Deadline: May 1, 2024

Ein Interesse an Zeit, Zeitlichkeit und Verzeitlichung lässt sich bis auf die Anfänge der Queer Studies zurückverfolgen. Deren Theoriebildung hat sich unter anderem an der Gültigkeit von Kategorien in...

In commenting on this post comparing the post-Great Influenza and post-Covid period, Mr. Kopits asserts: …the US did not have a central bank at the time, which led to considerably greater volatility than we see today. To the best of my knowledge, the Fed came into existence December 23, 1913. I'm reminded of:

Peter Burke— Since the 1990s, a new kind of history has been flourishing: the history of knowledge—or better, the history of different kinds of knowledge, knowledges in the plural. Turning... READ MORE
The post Writing a History of Ignorance appeared first on Yale University Press.

Aaron Tang (University of California, Davis - School of Law) has posted Lessons From Lawrence: How "History" Gave Us Dobbs—And How History Can Help Overrule It (133 Yale L.J. Forum ___ (forthcoming 2023)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Dobbs...

Barry Buzan's Making Global Society: A Study of Humanking Across Three Eras is a big and an ambitious book. In this volume he tells us the story of 50,000 years of humankind by constructing a "world history" (p. xi) with the social structure of humankind as its object of study. In doing so, Buzan has undertaken two main tasks.
The post Global Society needs Global History appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Grad students with an interest in the history of economic thought should click here.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the "end of history" and of humankind's ideological evolution. The combination of Western liberal democracy and capitalism were seen as the final, convergent form of global human organization — surpassing geopolitical considerations.

As Russia invades Ukraine, history seems to have restarted. This time the tension is not between capitalism and socialism, but between liberal capitalism and autocratic capitalism, between globalism and nativism, between a state subordinated to economic interests and economic interests subordinated to the state. Amidst this unfolding situation, Luigi and Bethany discuss how sanctions, SWIFT, the energy sector, digital platforms, new geopolitical blocks, and more are coming together to possibly reshape the course of history.

 Troll is a fairly entertaining movie (but that is not what this post is about)To repeat something I have said before, if,  as it has often been claimed, philosophy begins with Socrates then it also begins with its particular antagonism, its particular anti-philosophy in the sophist and sophistry. It seems to me that if one wanted to read the history of philosophy in this way, with a founding event and founding antagonism, then one might want to consider who is our anti-philosopher today, who is the contemporary equivalent of the sophist? The answer would seem to have to be the troll. This is my preamble to what is now becoming an ongoing discussion of Florida's vanguard fight against knowledge and reason; or more to the point, destruction of knowledge and truth in order to preserve whiteness.  As it was revealed recently, the new curriculum of black history in Florida teaches middle schoolers that "slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." There is so much to unpack about this claim, as they say in grad school. First, there is the assumption that the people captured from Africa had no skills, no knowledge, no history, nothing but their bodies and skin. Such a claim not only follows from the mythology of a Dark Continent, outside of civilization and history, it confuses an effect from a cause. The people who became slaves were stripped of their knowledge, culture, and social relations. What Orlando Patterson calls a social death was also the reduction of a person to pure labor power, to a capacity to work and nothing else, an animate tool, as Aristotle put it. Second, as the architects of this change doubled down on this claim, since that is what trolls do, providing a list of individuals who gained "valuable job skills" during their "unpaid internship" on a plantation, they provided a list of mostly false claims, listing individuals who were never enslaved, or, in the case of Booker T. Washington, learned literacy and other skills after their emancipation. This "feel good" story about slavery is, like so many feel good stories about history, just not true. Of course there might be a case, or even a few, of people who learned a valuable skill during slavery--it could have happened. That does not defend the claim, or, more importantly does not defend its inclusion in a curriculum. It is, I would argue, an example of exception trolling, in which an isolated case or incident is used to obscure or confuse a general or structural tendency. Focusing on these isolated or unique cases, which often appeal to an anecdotal way of thinking that is predominant in our culture, is used to obscure what is generally the case. I would argue that part of gaining knowledge, part of thinking, is understanding the difference between an exception and a rule. Once, when I was in sixth grade, I think, I had the job of feeding the school's snake, a python or boa constrictor. I dropped the live rat in the tank with the snake, watched the snake coil and strike, and saw the rat bite the snake in the eye, blood spurting everywhere, eventually killing it. (This is probably why feeding live animals to snakes is no longer recommended. Not only is it cruel; It is also potential risky). This happened, I saw it with my own eyes, but I would still say that snakes kill and eat rats, and not the other way around. Exceptions exist as do rules, and the former does not negate the latter. Exception trolling is a persistent strategy of trolling, in which exceptions are made to obscure or conceal rules.I should say, as something of an aside, that this exception trolling has one of its conditions the transformation of all knowledge into discrete bits of information, facts, that can be found, cited and circulated independent of context, conditions, and larger implications. Joseph Vogl's book Capitalism and Ressentiment does an interesting job of charting the history of the current regime of contextless and thoughtless information, but that is for another time. (I just finished a review of that book.) In this reduction of all knowledge to isolated facts and bits of information any discussion of meaning or significance of this or that fact, its place within history or a system of values is impossible. As the clip below makes clear, anyone arguing against the claim that slaves learned skills is either an idiot or lying. Meaning, significance, and importance disappear in the absolute binary of facts. One exception is all that it takes to disprove any claim about systemic discrimination, exploitation, or marginalization. This is why the exception troll has a well stocked set of links and tabs of these exceptions, "reverse racism," false claims of sexual harassment,  happy slaves, etc., It is not facts and logic, as is often claimed, but the logic of the (singular and isolated) fact. This raises the question, what goal does this trolling serve? I think that trolling has to be understood as not just a failure to think, to distinguish exceptions from rules, but as itself the articulation of its own logic. In other words, trolling must be read symptomatically. It is necessary to see what is being said in what is not being said, or what is not being said by being said. In some sense these remarks about the virtues of slavery, and, if you watch the clip above, the holocaust could be understood as the culmination of "negative solidarity." Even the slave, the denizen of the concentration camp, cannot complain, they are gaining valuable job training, they just have to make themselves useful and everything will turn out fine. There is nothing to criticize, nothing to complain about. (I see culmination because I cannot imagine something worse than someone saying "slavery was not that bad, they were gaining job skills," but what I can imagine and what monstrosities history can produce are two different things). As such it also can be considered the culmination of "right workerism." Work is the ultimate meaning and justification of existence, those who do not work not only do not eat, but do not have a right to exist. The arguments about slavery and the holocaust are not just horrible distortions of a horrible past, they are alibis for a darker future. One in which the worst possible jobs, or unpaid internships, are seen as building valuable skills, or, if there are no skills involved, developing a solid work ethic. Anyone who praises slavery is preparing for you to become a slave. 

Historian Erika Dyck wants to document the deep roots of and battles over LSD, psilocybin, and other psychoactive substances.