Suchergebnisse

In an age of extreme political polarization and waning of reasoned debate across political divides, Capitalism for Realists carefully explores the inner workings of capitalism in a consciously non-partisan and balanced way. Does the modern capitalist economy alleviate poverty and exploitation, or exacerbate them? What, exactly, is neoliberalism,' and how well or poorly has it performed in the past 40 years? Does capitalism undermine democracy, or is it rather one of its key necessary conditions? How have altruism, cooperation, tolerance, violence, and trust fared under the influence of the modern market society? Should we analyse capitalism through the mainstream economic lens or a more critical Marxist perspective? This book offers answers to these questions. Synthesizing decades of research across disciplines, Capitalism for Realists offers an overarching perspective on the modern economy by theoretically unifying many of the claims and conclusions about it offered by various traditionally rivalrous social science paradigms, such as institutional, neoclassical, and public choice economics on the one hand, and Marxist sociology on the other. The book presents and critically assesses the latest data and debates on such crucial contemporary issues as the relationship between poverty, exploitation, inequality, and capitalism, the nature of neoliberalism' and the successes and failures of both state-led industrial policy and the Washington consensus, capitalist peace theory, historical origins of modern capitalism, and more. What emerges is a clear picture of the merits and demerits of the modern economy too nuanced to be simplified and categorized by the prevailing political discourses. Rich in empirical detail, this lively, accessible book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students with interests in sociological theory, political theory, economics, and political and economic sociology.

Against romanticising democracy -- Wealth: the path to freedom? -- Voters are not stupid, but we do not know much -- Politicians are people, not angels -- For and against democratic peace -- Conclusion: Fukuyama's 'the end of history?' in social scientific retrospective.

AbstractHow have broad patterns of violence and war changed from the dawn of humanity up to present time? In answering this question, researchers have typically framed their arguments and evidence in terms of the polarized debate between Hobbes (or hawks) and Rousseau (or doves). This article moves beyond the stalemated debate and integrates the most robust existing theoretical developments and empirical findings that have emerged from various disciplines over the past 20 years– primarily sociology, political science, anthropology, and archaeology– to answer the question. Drawing on carefully curated violent lethality data for pre historically appropriate hunter-gatherers, as well as historical pre-state and state societies, it shows that simple narratives of violence and war decreasing through history from ostensibly high levels in the human state of nature, on the one hand, and the obverse insistence that the once mostly peaceful communities became highly belligerent with the transition to modernity, on the other, are both wrong. Instead, multiple lines of existing evidence and theoretical perspectives suggest a complex, non-linear, Kuznets-style relationship between violence and the passage of history.

This article presents and critically assesses the latest anthropological and archaeological research on the chronology, lethality, and frequency of violence and war in human history. Stepping back from the rhetorically polarized dispute between 'Hobbesians' and 'Rousseauans', the article examines the methods and findings of the latest research in a conceptually novel way, i.e. by dropping the existing and widely used polarized terms that have inevitably framed the literature so far. The article demonstrates that multiple sources of evidence point more in the direction of the modal human prehistoric social organization, i.e. nomadic hunter-gatherers, likely having warfare only in a minority of cases, or war even being virtually non-existent (with interpersonal violence being more common). The dispute over this claim so far is found to stem, at least in part, from the varying definitions of war and the grouping together of nomadic with complex foragers. More significantly, the disagreement is due to different sampling and sourcing techniques of different researchers, the biggest divide being between self-selection/systematic sampling and first-best/second-best sources. Important potential warlike exceptions are also noted and discussed in the article from multiple angles (Jebel Sahaba, Nataruk, Aboriginal Australia, etc.), as are the discovered precursors and enabling conditions of war, such as the complexification of (nomadic) hunter-gatherer societies with the transition to settled life.

AbstractSpencer Dimmock has produced a convincing restatement, defence and update of Robert Brenner's influential work on the origin of capitalism in England. The book productively engages with many Marxist and non-Marxist critics of the so-called 'Brenner Thesis', and presents fresh secondary and primary evidence in favour of it. This review sketches the theoretical background of Brenner's intervention, summarises Dimmock's take on Brenner, and comments on a few notable contemporary critiques of Brenner's general framework which are not explicitly engaged with by Dimmock.

AbstractAfter World War II, Yugoslavia as a state was reconstituted by a small communist elite. Since this was an ideocratic rule, ideology was taken seriously by the elite and treated enthusiastically. One of the elite's initial goals was to speedily develop Yugoslavia, so that a Western level of economic development be achieved. Economic disparities among regions were also to have been overcome. For various reasons, this objective was never close to being achieved, although in certain periods economic development was strong. The elite tried to speed up growth by various incentives, including worker self‐management. Failure to achieve this goal and various economic troubles first precipitated mutual acrimony within the elite along national lines, while at the next stage, it brought about ethnic segmentation of the elite itself. By 1972, the elite had dissolved into national, although still communist, elites. The major reasons for this process are found in the very failure to achieve the developmental goal, in the consociational nature of the political system, and in the nature of the political elites, which were national ones. Elite segmentation sheds important light on the dissolution of the Yugoslav state.