‘A willing Odysseus’: The life and times of Albert O. Hirschman

Abstract

In this review essay of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O. Hirschman, A worldly philosopher, supplemented by references to other secondary works on Hirschman, I take the opportunity to discuss the relationship between the economist's life and his main publications. I argue that in times of crisis more attempts like Hirschman's political economy are needed. I further argue that Hirschman has given us a good idea of what a new moral economy, which really deserves this name, would look like.     

Spinoza Now

Abstract

This discussion of Infinitely Demanding explores the terms of the paradox with which Critchley is centrally concerned: how an ethico-politics can at once begin in disappointment and yet allow for engagement, the infinite renewal of commitment and optimism. Placing this in critical relation to the paradox Rorty meets with his account of the "private ironist and public liberal" in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I argue that Critchley's ethico-politics invokes the possibility of a non-ironical categorical imperative, at the meeting point of finitude and the infinite and at the heart of what is also a political space of intersubjectivity. I examine the logic of humour and of commitment within the Kantian frame thus suggested, arguing for their relevance to certain aspects of anarcho-activism, but also for their limitations in desperate circumstances, posing the risk that Critchley's preferred politics falls back into liberal complacency.     

‘Whatever it takes’: Polanyian perspectives on the eurozone crisis and the gold standard

Abstract

The parallels between the monetary politics of the gold standard and that of the eurozone crisis are striking and have informed contemporary debate about the future of European integration. The eurozone crisis has been widely interpreted as the result of a mismatch between international monetary integration and a concomitant lack of fiscal integration, or more broadly as the result of a European Union which is economically integrated, yet politically fragmented. The prospect of a 1930s-style descent into division and nationalism has formed the backdrop against which moves towards extensive integration at the supranational level have been made. Polanyi diagnosed the political effects of monetary integration through his analysis of the gold standard system in The great transformation, making it important that we unpack his analysis and consider carefully how a Polanyian perspective might apply to the eurozone today. I argue that Polanyi encourages us to look beyond ‘monetary vs. fiscal’ and ‘economic vs. political’ characterizations of European integration, and instead to examine how such oppositions are formed in the first place and how they constrain political debate, particularly in terms of how ‘sound money’ is established as the highest policy concern. Through a re-reading of Polanyi's distinction between ‘all-purpose’ and ‘special-purpose’ money, I highlight how, despite the huge efforts undertaken to preserve the identity of the euro as an all-purpose currency, the eurozone crisis has rendered visible a series of latent conflicts between the different functions of money. This analysis moves us away from the ‘monetary vs. fiscal’ integration view of the eurozone crisis and towards a more open study of how the various possible purposes of money are being articulated and challenged, offering some limited hope for alternatives to the current eurozone policy agenda.     

The great transformation and progressive possibilities: the political limits of Polanyi's Marxian history of economic ideas

Abstract

Polanyi's The great transformation remains one of the stand-out texts of twentieth-century political economy, yet it contains important conceptual ambiguities. Perhaps most significantly, the later chapters reveal the influence of Polanyi's own notion of an ‘always embedded economy’, whereas the earlier chapters are constructed around a much more abstract notion of ‘economy’ derived from an essentially Marxian history of economic ideas. Marx worked within the basic Ricardian conception of economy as a method of immanent critique, but then proceeded also to project that same conception backwards onto pre-Ricardian traditions of economics. Polanyi did likewise, I argue, consequently missing the opportunity to connect his own ideas about the non-market influences on all market outcomes to pre-Ricardian studies of the substantive basis of functioning economic relations. I use the following pages to try to restore one such link, in this instance to Adam Smith's account of the moral ‘sympathy’ underpinning the process of market co-ordination. This reconstruction also has implications for progressive possibilities today. Polanyian responses to the ongoing crisis have tended to be framed by the basic Ricardian conception of economy and have accordingly been restricted to a discussion of more market or less, more social protection or less, more austerity or less. By contrast, tracing the lineage from pre-Ricardian concerns to Polanyi's notion of an always embedded economy allows the potentially much more radical question to be asked of what sort of economic relations today best serve essential human needs.     

Untimely ripped

In this essay, through an examination of its cultural situation, narrative style, and cinematic structure, I hope to explain the controversy that surrounded Roman Polanski's 1971 film version of Macbeth. With both complex cinematic semiology and poignant sociohistorical mediation, Macbeth brings to a critical juncture the philosophies of the 1960s’ peace‐love—revolution hippies, Vietnam war protestors and civil rights activists, the reified mainstream American populace, and the ruling conservatives, as well as society's preoccupation with aestheticisation. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth manifests what Gilles Deleuze calls the “crystal‐image,”; and, by extension, realises Antonin Artaud's “Theater of Cruelty,”; and, in effect, constitutes a terrorist intervention into a discursive cultural and ideological struggle. Ultimately, I argue that Macbeth itself, in totality, is a “crystalline narration”; that is shot through with various allusions to actual and virtual circumstances particular to the cultural environments from which it initially emerged in Renaissance England and then re‐emerged in the US of 1971. In the first of what is a three‐part analysis, I compare these cultural environments. The second section explicates Deleuze's theories on cinema and discusses them in conjunction with an analysis of the film's Theater of Cruelty. Finally, I contemplate the film ‘s sociopolitical implications.     

The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle Revolution

Abstract

I argue that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exemplifies the concept of mourning play that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While others have interpreted the play in various ways, no one has attempted to understand Timon in a Benjaminesque manner that seeks to show the emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with, and liberated from, classical tragedy's mythical foundation and instead premised on historical time and progress. In my discussion, I question the view that Timon possesses inheritable or transmissible human social bonds that can be the subject of annihilation as is the case in Shakespeare's other tragedies. Rather, Benjamin sees in allegory, as illustrated by Timon of Athens, the social condition of modernity replete with suffering, chaos, and violence, but devoid of real human bonds; indeed, it is without human meaning.     

Toleration,neutrality, and exemption

ABSTRACT

I focus on some controversial features of Peter Balint’s stimulating and provocative reassessment of the place of toleration in contemporary diverse societies. First, I question his argument that we must enlarge the concept of toleration to include indifference and approval if toleration is to be compatible with state neutrality. Secondly, I suggest that his idea of active neutrality of intent risks encountering the same difficulties as neutrality of outcome, although these will be mitigated the more the state’s neutrality takes a ‘hands-off’ form. Thirdly, while accepting his claim that exemptions depart from neutrality insofar as they attribute a significance to religious and conscientious convictions that they deny to mere preferences, I argue that that departure is not arbitrary and remains within the spirit of neutrality of intent.     

Herbert’s Herbivore: One-Dimensional Society and the Possibility of Radical Vegetarianism

Abstract

Careful reading of Herbert Marcuse’s texts, including Counterrevolution and Revolt, One-Dimensional Man, An Essay on Liberation, and Eros and Civilization, reveals his subtle attention to the human–animal dialectic and its role in human liberation. More specifically, animals mark the irrationality of advanced industrialized society for Marcuse, and his subtle but keen treatment of the animal question in politics provides an opening to radically rethink politics for animals and humans. Working from Marcuse’s critical theory, I explore the contemporary one-dimensional animal, which I argue imbricates both animals and humans in the violence and destruction that characterizes advanced industrial society. Using Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional society and his discussion of animals as my theoretical framework, I specifically consider vegetarianism in its capacity to militate against the contemporary political economy of meat. I conclude that Marcuse’s insights point to a radical vegetarianism aligned with anti-capitalist politics that offers the development of sensuous, pleasurable, life-affirming sensibilities that support true liberation for both animals and humans.     

The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi

Abstract

A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the ‘functional theory’ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's ‘evolutionary socialism’ and charts his ‘double movement’ vis-à-vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ‘revision’ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation.     

The Gordon Brown Problem: New Labour and the Two ‘Adam Smiths’

As is well known, New Labour is often presented as an alternative to the conventional preferences of the left and right in British politics. Less commented upon is Gordon Brown's self‐conscious appeal to the thought of Adam Smith in doing so. Brown claims to have rescued Smith from those on the right that interpret his ‘invisible hand’ metaphor from The Wealth of Nations to represent dogmatic advocacy of free markets. Rather than interrogate this view, Brown attempts to complement it with the ‘helping hand’ that Smith supposedly proffers in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in order to stress New Labour's resolution of ‘enterprise and fairness.’ I argue that Brown instead reiterates the academically discredited Adam Smith Problem, in which the moral ‘Smith’ is deemed subordinate to the economic ‘Smith,’ and that his use of these erroneous characterisations highlights his commitment to a set of preferences usually associated with the right.     

Examining Honneth’s Positive Theory of Recognition

ABSTRACT

In this article I examine Axel Honneth’s positive theory of recognition. While commentators agree that Honneth’s theory qualifies as a positive theory of recognition, I believe that the deeper reason for why this is an apt characterisation is not yet fully understood. I argue that, instead of considering only what it is to recognise another person and what it means for a person to be recognised, we need to focus our attention on how Honneth pictures the practice of recognition as a whole, which according to him works to make societies into places of greater freedom. This conception of recognition as a freedom-enhancing practice is supposed to provide a solution to a key problem of Frankfurt School critical theory, namely of how to determine the emancipatory practice in which critical theory is rooted, which becomes apparent as soon as one turns to the context in which Honneth originally develops his theory of recognition. At the end of the article, I offer a few reasons for doubting the overly positive picture of the practice of recognition that Honneth provides us with.     

John Dewey on experience: a critical resource for the theory and practice of youth civic engagement

Research on youth civic engagement often sees the everyday lives of young people as barriers to civic engagement. Recent qualitative approaches have drawn attention to the civic and political dimensions of young people's everyday lives. This is a crucial insight, but cannot – by itself – answer a key question: just how is it that everyday experience can be transformed into civic engagement? I argue that John Dewey's theory of experience makes two key contributions toward answering this question. First, Dewey's situational understanding of experience directs us to the concrete conditions of everyday life as the necessary groundwork and starting point for civic engagement. Second, his concept of reflective experience helps us understand how taken for granted assumptions about political and social life can be transformed into more active forms of engagement. I illustrate this argument by drawing on selected findings from a qualitative study of young people's experience in Public Achievement, a civic engagement initiative.     

Introduction: A post-Polanyian political economy for our times

Abstract

2014 is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation and the fiftieth anniversary of its author's passing. This special issue celebrates these markers by bringing together a collection of critical engagements with Polanyi's work which, whilst sympathetic to his intellectual aims, ward against any straightforward application to contemporary issues. In so doing, it suggests that part of the value of Polanyi's work lies not in its ability to be recited, repeated and re-applied in its original form, but rather in its openness and its susceptibility to alteration and transmutation. In this introductory article, I consider the return to intellectual ‘voices from the past’ in the post-2008 landscape. I suggest that the distinctiveness of Polanyi's voice comes from his attempt to problematize, challenge and re-imagine the very notion of ‘economy’ itself, a theme which underpins all of his most important ideas, and one which reverberates across contributions to this special issue. I suggest that, beyond his immediate critique of free-market ideas, the desire to de-centre the notion of an autonomous economic sphere – and to challenge abstract modes of thought that address such a notion, regardless of their political sensibilities – is his most valuable legacy, and one which might encourage us to seek out new innovations and engagements in future Polanyian scholarship.     

Falling into the justice gap? Between duties of social and global justice

The literature on cosmopolitan justice has yet to address what principles to adopt when duties of global justice and duties of social justice are in conflict. In this paper, I address David Miller’s contention that some may fall into the justice gap since we need to prioritize duties of social justice in cases of conflict. I argue that Miller’s analysis depends on three stipulations: the incommensurability of the values underlying duties of social justice and those of global justice; the need to justify duties of justice to their holders; and the need to consider the necessary institutions to realize and implement justice obligations. I argue against the incommensurability clause by showing that both conceptions of justice pursue moral equality as the underlying and commensurate value. Instead, I propose that the currencies of justice we employ in the two contexts of justice are different. Discussing the justifiability clause I agree with the stipulation that we have to justify decisions that affect the realization of justice to those who have to carry the burden of realizing them. This implies, however, that we may have to accept that some prioritize duties of global justice over duties of social justice. If this is the case, it seems as though the state has little recourse to prioritize duties of social justice. Finally, discussing Miller’s institutional clause I ask why the justice relevant institutions can only be those of the state. It is plausible to say that in our current world, institutions of humanitarian aid are effective means to satisfy duties of global justice.     

When Decentralization Leads to Recentralization: Subnational State Transformation in Uganda

Abstract

Among other shortcomings of decentralization reforms undertaken by developing countries since the 1980s, recent research finds that the reforms' primary aim—devolution of authority to localities—has often not been achieved in practice. This article builds on that insight, examining an understudied pathway through which states that have undertaken decentralization can ultimately recentralize power: administrative unit proliferation. Rapid creation of numerous new subnational administrative units is an increasingly common occurrence in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. This phenomenon, I argue, allows for recentralization by reducing the intergovernmental bargaining power and administrative capacity of each subnational unit, as well as by substantially expanding both the reach of the national executive's patronage network and its ability to monitor emergent security threats on its periphery. The article illustrates these mechanisms with evidence from Uganda.     

Conspicuous Consumption,Croyance, and the Problem of the Two Timons: Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens

The article investigates the astonishing volte-face that Timon performs in Shakespeare and Middleton's Timon of Athens. The main character is not, as is often claimed, unaware of what is going on around him, he is not simply the naïve victim of his avaricious guests, but rather complicit in his own delusions. My reading is informed by two different theoretical concepts: Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” on the one hand (supported by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital), and Octave Mannoni’s concept of “croyance” (belief) on the other. By combining these two distinct theories, I want to account for the characteristics of both Timon’s individual (psychological) and public (economic) behaviour, and its radical change between Acts 1–2 and Acts 3–5 of the play. I argue that in Timon of Athens, Shakespeare and Middleton explore the different forms of capital and its limited convertibility in the early modern mercantilist society.     

Radical Protestantism and doux commerce: the trials and tribulations of Nantucket's Quaker whaling community

Abstract

This paper discusses the complex relationship between morals and markets and uses the case of Nantucket as an illustration. I argue that it was a specific Protestant work ethic promoted by Quakerism that facilitated the rise of Nantucket to become the capital of the American whaling fleet for more than a century. However, I also argue that the same morals and values that helped to give birth to the Quaker whaling empire contributed significantly to the downfall of the Quaker community, decades before whaling in general got into crisis. In more general terms this paper attempts to be a historical case study that illustrates the complexities of Albert O. Hirschman's doux commerce argument and particularly the way the Protestant spirit fits into Hirschman's explanation.     

Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).     

The Classical Trinity and Kant's Aesthetic Formalism

Abstract

I identify two mutually exclusive notions of formalism in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: a thin concept of aesthetic formalism and a thick concept of aesthetic formalism. Arguably there is textual support for both concepts in Kant's third critique. I offer interpretations of three key elements in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement which support a thick formalism. The three key elements are: Harmony of the Faculties, Aesthetic Ideas and Sensus Communis. I interpret these concepts in relation to the conditions for theoretical Reason, the conditions for moral motivation and the conditions for intersubjectivity, respectively. I conclude that there is no support for a thin concept of aesthetic formalism when the key elements of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement are understood in the context of his broader critical aims.     

Philosophy,Social Hope and Democratic Criticism: Critical Theory for a Global Age

Abstract

The attempt to connect philosophy and social hope has been one of the key distinguishing features of critical theory as a tradition of enquiry. This connection has been questioned forcefully from the perspective of a post-philosophical pragmatism, as articulated by Rorty. In this article I consider two strategies that have been adopted by critical theorists in seeking to reject Rorty's suggestion that we should abandon the attempt to ground social hope in philosophical reason. We consider argumentative strategies of the philosophical anthropologist and of the rational proceduralist. Once the exchanges between Rorty and these two strands of critical theory have been reconstructed and assessed, an alternative perspective emerges. It is argued that philosophical reasoning best helps to sustain social hope in a rapidly changing world when we consider it in terms of the practice of democratic criticism.