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The Labyrinth of Human Rights
Dogmatic foundations as an invariant of all civilizations, and the religious origins of the contemporary doctrine of human rights in the West. Can, despite its undemonstrability, a particular creed become a common resource of humanity, appropriated in different ways across the planet?
The Social and Political Economy of Global Turbulence
In a landmark engagement with Robert Brenner’s account of the long downturn of the world economy since the 70s, Giovanni Arrighi lays out a social and political economy of the roles of labour unrest, national liberation and corporate financialization in the crisis of the post-war order, and the prospects for a militarized US hegemony today.
The Infancy of Tarzan
Should collective identity be considered an essential feature of the modern world, and if so is it a neutral marker of belonging? Lutz Niethammer takes a critical look at the fables, popular and political, that the concept of identity has generated since the aftermath of the First World War.
Reinventing Geography
Interview with the leading practitioner of a materialism Marxists forgot. What happens when space, not time, becomes the axis of radical analysis? From post-war planning to the cities of European literature, the limits of over-accumulation to the flux of postmodernity, David Harvey talks about his work and what it has tracked.
Inequality and Unemployment in Europe: The American Cure
“What is the relationship between inequality and unemployment? This question is perhaps the most important issue in the political economy of Europe, and it has relevance for other regions with developing transnational ties, including the United States and the North American region.” read more
Social Theory Put to the Test of Practice: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens
“The 1990s have presented a particularly contradictory aspect to social theorists. On the one hand, the ideological climate was dominated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European extensions. While the most widely noticed intellectual trends took different forms—for example, Fukuyama’s announcement of the End . . .” read more
Changing Cities in Post-Soviet Russia
“Since at least 1992, successive Russian governments have been pressed by the imf to cut public spending, and, in particular, to eliminate the large public subsidy to housing inherited from the Soviet-era ‘communal economy’ of housing provision. Indeed, the Yeltsin presidency has witnessed a steady erosion of the . . .” read more
The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing
“The twentieth century’s death-toll through genocide is somewhere over sixty million and still rising. Yet most scholars and laypersons alike have preferred to focus on more salubrious topics. If they think about genocide at all, they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of . . .” read more
Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City
“Sometime during 1996, at the very latest, Latinos surpassed Blacks as the second largest ethno-racial group in New York City. (They long have been the largest census group in the Bronx.) There were no street celebrations in El Barrio or Washington Heights, nor did the mayor hold a . . .” read more
A New Social Evolutionism?
“Neo-Darwinism is one of the most dynamic and successful research programmes in contemporary science. New developments in theory and method—including molecular biological investigations of genetic structures and processes, and computer-simulations of the competitive interactions of organisms within an environment—have greatly increased the scope and power of evolutionary explanations. . . .” read more
The New Collectivism: Pension Reform, Grey Capitalism and Complex Socialism
“With the advent of a Social Democrat-Green coalition in Germany, with socialists or social democrats in the governments of thirteen out of fifteen members of the eu and with Communists in the French and Italian Cabinets, the European Left faces an historic opportunity. The swing to the . . .” read more
Grand Narratives of Prehistoric Europe
“Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe consists of twenty papers written by Andrew Sherratt over the past quarter of a century. Taken together, these articles represent a uniquely coherent and consistent vision of Old World prehistory. They present the Neolithic and the Bronze Age periods in Eurasia . . .” read more
LETS: An Eco-Socialist Initiative?
“Local Exchange Trading Systems (lets) have been welcomed by many as a possible solution to the poverty, disempowerment and social exclusion suffered by the unemployed, as a practical and inexpensive stimulus for local economic regeneration, as the basis for stable, sustainable, and self-reliant community economies, and as . . .” read more
The Question of Eurocentricism: A Comment on Immanuel Wallerstein
“In his critique of Eurocentrism, Immanuel Wallerstein has provided a useful discussion of a major issue for contemporary left politics and critical social science. By contrast with the higher-profile subject of ‘multi-culturalism’, to which it is of course related, the Eurocentrism question has received less considered debate. Wallerstein’s . . .” read more
Questioning Eurocentricism: A Reply to Gregor McLennan
“Gregor McLennan says he is replying to my article on ‘Eurocentrism and its Avatars’. It seems to me what he is doing is taking off from my article to criticize ‘post-colonial theorists’, who are also characterized as ‘maximal anti-Eurocentrics’. The justification seems to be that ‘in places Wallerstein . . .” read more
Fin de Sociologie? The Dilemmas of Multidimensional Social Theory
“The discourse of sociology, though never at the heart of modern bourgeois culture, has always seemed pivotal to the critical self-understanding of modernity. Unlike the other major disciplines, sociology has presented itself simultaneously as a special science of structural patterns and as a totalizing search for social meaning. . . .” read more
Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler
“Judith Butler’s essay is welcome on several counts. It returns us to deep and important questions in social theory that have gone undiscussed for some time. And it links a reflection on such questions to a diagnosis of the troubled state of the Left in the current political . . .” read more
A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism
“To the town of Ludwigshafen, its mayor, Mr Wolfgang Schulte, and the Ernst Bloch Institute, my warmest thanks for the honour I have been awarded, which associates my own name with that of one of the German philosophers whom I most admire. My thanks also to Mr Ulrich . . .” read more
Merely Cultural
“I propose to consider two different kinds of claims that have circulated recently, representing a culmination of sentiment that has been building for some time. One has to do with an explicitly Marxist objection to the reduction of Marxist scholarship and activism to the study of culture, sometimes . . .” read more
Sterilization and Propaganda
“Late in August this year, a message was widely broadcast by the international media. Filing their reports out of Stockholm, journalists from around the world presented their readers and viewers with the news that between 1934 and 1976, tens of thousands of people—more than 90 per cent of . . .” read more
Eurocentricism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science
“Social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history, which means since there have been departments teaching social science within university systems. This is not in the least surprising. Social science is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of the modern . . .” read more
Secularism and the State: Towards Clarity and Global Comparison
“Debates about the process of secularization have, in recent years, centred on the work of a group of sociologists and historians, mostly British, who have put forth and debated what is known as ‘the secularization thesis’. This correlates modernization with secularization, and generally measures secularization primarily through declining . . .” read more
The Siege of German Social Market
“The paradox of post-war European politics is that the most democratic economy in Europe, the German Social Market Economy, has underpinned the stability of continental currencies. The rights available to German workers and citizens both individually and collectively have been, and remain, amongst the most extensive of any . . .” read more
Utopia
“The Callaghan administration once toyed with the idea of having a Minister of the Family. What with the débâcle of back-to-basics and other such mantras, the arrival on these shores of Fourier in translation is perhaps timely. The Fourierist utopia does not have a Minister of the Family, . . .” read more
Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism
“Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are well aware of the key role played by the notion of the ‘typical’: truly progressive literature should depict ‘typical heroes in typical situations.’ Writers who presented a bleak picture of Soviet reality were not simply accused . . .” read more
From Inequality to Difference: A Severe Case of Displacement?
“When considering the shifts in left thinking over the past fifteen years, it is hard to avoid some notion of displacement: the cultural displacing the material; identity politics displacing class; the politics of constitutional reform displacing the economics of equality. Difference, in particular, seems to have displaced inequality . . .” read more
A Rejoinder to Iris Young
“Iris Young and I seem to inhabit different worlds. In her world, there are no divisions between the social Left and the cultural Left. Proponents of cultural politics work cooperatively with proponents of social politics, linking claims for the recognition of difference with claims for the redistribution of . . .” read more
The Theory of Post-Communist Managerialism
“The most distinctive characteristic of post-communist social structure in East Central Europe is the absence of a capitalist class. Private property rights are in place, markets in labour and capital exist, these economies are open to world markets, and they have strong relationships with international financial institutions. However, . . .” read more
Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory
“Have theorists of justice forgotten about political economy? Have we traced the most important injustices to cultural roots? Is it time for critical social theory to reassert a basic distinction between the material processes of political economy and the symbolic processes of culture? In two recent essays, Nancy . . .” read more
Communitarianism and Morality: In Search of the Subject
“‘No society can function well’, writes Amitai Etzioni, ‘unless most of its members “behave” most of the time because they voluntarily heed their moral commitments and social responsibilities’. The importance of strong families, caring neighbours, a flourishing sector of self-help groups, voluntary associations, churches, trade unions and social . . .” read more
Honneth’s New Critical Theory of Recognition
“Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts represents at once an intriguing and revealing turn in the post-Habermasian tradition of the Frankfurt School, an important and original development in critical social theory more generally understood, and an ambitious and stimulating, if still inadequate, . . .” read more
The New Politics of Ownership
“The political economy of the Left has always aimed at combining social justice and economic efficiency. The goals have not changed, but the best way to achieve them has increasingly come under scrutiny. For most of the twentieth century, the favoured means has been a single measure, the . . .” read more
Women, Class and Family
“The problems with the study of the family by Europeanists are two-fold. Firstly the terms they use like ‘family’ are often vague and unsatisfactory for analytic purposes—though they may serve as general signposts. Secondly, there is little comparative perspective. Yet this is needed not only to define terms . . .” read more
Information as Gift and Commodity
“‘The current phase of capitalist development’, says Gareth Locksley, ‘is one characterized by the elevation of information and its associated technology into the first division of key resources and commodities. Information is a new form of capital’, and as such it undergoes a change of form: rather than . . .” read more
The Social Ownership of Capital
“Over the last twenty years a number of governments have sought to reconcile the competing claims of capital and labour by encouraging employees to acquire ownership of capital in lieu of wage or salary increases. In the post-Keynesian world of stagflation, this has often been a trade-off between . . .” read more
Post-Marxism and the 'Four Sins' of Modernist Theorizing
“In this paper, I want to tackle some of the underlying issues around ‘post-Marxism’ in contemporary social theory, using just one exemplar of this emerging framework, namely Michèle Barrett’s book The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. The rationale for this limited focus is that the field . . .” read more
Misreading Gorz
“André Gorz’s work has been described as ‘pop sociology’, ‘journalistic impressionism’, and ‘sociological punditry’. He has been accused of both ‘bourgeois individualism’ and ‘backward-looking romanticism’. Depending on the critic, Gorz is an erstwhile ‘quasi-Stalinist’ or a reformed ‘anti-Stalinist’, an advocate of ‘postmodern politics’ or simply an ‘intellectual charlatan’. . . .” read more
Identity Politics and the Left
“My lecture is about a surprisingly new subject. We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political . . .” read more
Christopher Lasch and the Moral Agony of the Left
“Christopher Lasch, cultural historian and scourge of the politically correct, died last year and so his final book is published posthumously. Like his earlier works, its range of subject matter is immense. Small-town populists and urban reformers, feminists and misogynists, gay militants and redneck militiamen, H. Ross Perot . . .” read more
Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth-Century Marxism
“Students of parliamentary history are familiar with the idea of ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’. Marxism, as a social-historical phenomenon, has been Her Modern Majesty’s Opposition to modernity. Always critical of and fighting against her predominant regimes, but never questioning the legitimate majesty of modernity and, when needed, explicitly . . .” read more