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.     

Can George dance? Biosemiotics and human exceptionalism with a lyrebird in the viewfinder

Are the movements of the Australian Albert’s lyrebird “George” best identified as dance, “dance,” proto-dance, or functional gestures? I draw on the tools of biosemiotics to shed light on human signifying practice vis-à-vis dance – specifically, how humans make sense of avian dance, how they compare and contrast it with human dance, and what a definition tells us about its makers. In both the natural sciences and humanities, competing discourses abound to the contention that animal movements could fruitfully be considered as dance. A trend emerges in some definitions of dance (which may also invoke human exceptionalism) of characterizations that ignore extant reports of animal abilities – of a classificatory rather than an evaluative posture. I argue that in overcoming the limitations of human exceptionalism in analytic frameworks by explicitly incorporating animal efforts into theory development, validation, and revision (theories often dominated by human and elite Western concerns), we will arrive at a less-distorted version of the multimodal behavior we call dancing.     

Aesthetics and politics in North Korean socialist realist painting: On approved ways of seeing

This paper inquires into aesthetics and politics in North Korean socialist realist painting by way of an examination of North Korean journalist Han Chol Ju's article series “Visit to Korean Art Gallery” and three paintings in Korea Today (2010–2011). The paper explains late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's national-Stalinist conception of Juche socialist realism in On Fine Art (1991); considers one Korean painting (Chos?nhwa), two oil paintings (yuhwa), and one jewel painting (pos?khwa); and addresses approved ways of seeing in political-aesthetic experience and response in the North Korean situation.     

The Power of the Pen: Human Rights Ombudsmen and Personal Integrity Violations in Latin America, 1982-2006.

Recent scholarship has focused on the effects of institutional design and constitutional provisions on human rights protections. Democratic institutions, like other manifestations of credible commitment to human rights, seem to play a role in human rights provisions across the world. Yet, there is still a great deal that we do not know about domestic institutions like the human rights ombudsman, an institution created specifically to protect human rights, on human rights provisions. We conduct an examination of the effects of the human rights ombudsman (which may go by the name Defensor del Pueblo, Procurador de Derechos Humanos, or Comisionado Nacional de Derechos Humanos), on personal integrity violations across Latin America, 1982–2006. We find evidence that this understudied institution had significant and positive impacts on reducing such violations.     

‘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.     

Homeless families,singles, and others: Findings from the 1996 national survey of homeless assistance providers and clients

Abstract

The first question people typically ask about homelessness is, “How many people are homeless?” After that, questions usually turn to characteristics: “What are they like?” Basic demographic characteristics such as sex, age, family status, and race have always been of interest, in part because the homeless population appears to be very different from the general public and even from most poor people who are housed with respect to these characteristics. Often, because these differences are so dramatic, demographic characteristics are overinterpreted as representing the reasons for homelessness.

But as various studies have documented, most demographic factors quickly disappear as proximate causes when other factors representing personal vulnerabilities are available for examination. The underlying causes of homelessness, the structural conditions of housing and labor markets that turn vulnerabilities into loss of housing, do not lie within individuals at all and are thus difficult to include in analyses based on individual data.     

The Tragic and the Political: A Parallel Reading of Kostas Papaioannou and Cornelius Castoriadis

Abstract

The fundamental difference between Castoriadis' and Papaioannou's accounts of the link between tragedy and the political is that Castoriadis insists on a political form (the democratic regime) whilst Papaioannou insists on a social actor (the masses). The starting point for this essay, then, are two thinkers: one whose main interest was a political and philosophical reflection on the social-historical and one whose main interest was a philosophical reflection on the arts. Surprisingly, however, the end situation is one where Castoriadis gives us a political explanation of the link between tragedy and the political whilst Papaioannou gives us a social explanation of the same phenomenon. How can this difference be accounted for? First, distinguishing their respective conceptualisations of the political allows us to see that where one thinker privileges restlessness and revolution, the other privileges law and regime. Second, looking at their depictions of the essential aspects of tragedy places them on opposing sides of the couple hubris-dike, in a way that leads to two radically different conceptualisations of the relation in question.     

How can we better align private security with the public interest? Towards a civilizing model of regulation

How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking to cleanse the market of deviant sellers, the other to communalize the market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical economic conception of how market transactions map onto the public interest. This article makes the case for a new model of regulation, one that seeks to civilize the market. Drawing upon the insights of economic sociology, our model regards the market for security as a moral economy in which commodity and non‐commodity values jostle and collide. On this basis, we propose a regulatory architecture where buyers and sellers are cast not only as economic actors but also as moral actors, revealing new avenues through which to encompass private security within the democratic promise of security.     

Conflicts of Values and Political Forgiveness

Citizens have a right to be governed by officials with an acute awareness of the conflicts between the constitutional values of liberal democracy. Such an awareness is an integral part of a public official's integrity. That is why citizens should have a say in deciding whether to remove from office an official with such integrity. In this article, this type of conflict between constitutional values is translated into the terms of an individual official's decision making with the help of moral theory. This yields two paradoxes: one focusing on the decision maker and the other on the object of his or her decisions: the citizen. These paradoxes lead to the following questions: If running a liberal democratic constitution essentially involves moral complexity, should we not try to have it run by officials with a sensitivity to that complexity? And if officials with that sensitivity are bound to commit moral wrongs because of complexity, do not we owe them something like political forgiveness? The paradoxes are used to formulate conditions for political forgiveness.     

Beyond Heterodoxy: Dwight Waldo and the Politics–Administration Dichotomy

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) is commonly known as a “heterodox” critic of the dichotomy between politics and administration. But is this reputation supported by his writings? It seems to be primarily based on The Administrative State (1948) and other early publications, in which he conceptualized politics/administration narrowly as deciding/executing and, indeed, sharply criticized it. Waldo’s later publications, by contrast, offer much broader conceptualizations and a more ambivalent, even positive appraisal of the dichotomy. Such conceptualizations are also found in an important unpublished book Waldo worked on during several phases of his career. On the basis of these published and unpublished writings, we should reconsider Waldo’s reputation and, pursuing his line of reasoning, reconceptualize the politics–administration dichotomy as a layered construct and reappreciate it as a constitutional doctrine.     

Why (not) arrest? Third-party state compliance and noncompliance with international criminal tribunals

Why do some states comply with their legal obligations to arrest suspects indicted by international criminal tribunals (ICTs) while others do not? Research on this question has mostly focused on “target” states, like the former Yugoslav republics, where ICTs have intervened. In contrast, this article offers the first test of theories regarding ICT arrest-warrant compliance and noncompliance by third-party states. I examine the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and 26 third-party states implicated in the pursuit of the court's 91 indicted suspects. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, I find support for the procompliance influence of liberal democratic norms and foreign aid dependency on third-party states. I also find that noncompliance?—?something existing studies tend to leave untheorized?—?can be explained by the presence of either non- compliance constituencies or high official corruption. By testing several theories of compliance and noncompliance on a so far understudied class of cases, these findings provide support for the generalizability of a number of explanations in the broader literature on compliance with human rights obligations. The analysis also shows that problematizing noncompliance?—?and not merely reducing it to an absence of procompliance factors?—?can help us develop fuller explanations of compliance behavior.     

The Dating Preferences of Liberals and Conservatives

American politics has become more polarized. The source of the phenomena is debated. We posit that human mate choice may play a role in the process. Spouses are highly correlated in their political preferences, and research in behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and endocrinology shows that political preferences develop through a complex interaction of social upbringing, life experience, immediate circumstance, and genes and hormones, operating through one’s psychological architecture by Hatemi et al. (J Theor Politics, 24:305–327, 2012). Consequently, if people with similar political values produce children, there will be more individuals at the ideological extremes over generations. This said, we are left with a mystery: spousal concordance on political attitudes does not result from convergence over the course of the relationship, nor are spouses initially selecting one another on political preferences. We examine whether positive mate assortation—like seeks like—on non-political factors such as lifestyle and demographics could lead to inadvertent assortation on political preferences. Using a sample of Internet dating profiles we find that both liberals and conservatives seek to date individuals who are like themselves. This result suggests a pathway by which long-term couples come to share political preferences, which in turn could be fueling the widening ideological gap in the United States.     

Collateral times

Abstract

Today’s financial system essentially relies on the pledge of collateral. A closer look at this uniquely cross-disciplinary instrument not only reveals a remarkable absence in the modern disciplines but also a close relationship with money. This connection is brought into theoretical perspective by analysing the role of pledge in three historical configurations. In ancient Greece, symbola and horoi stones emerge as two distinct devices to secure contract that become entwined in seventeenth–eighteenth century pledge-theories of money as witness and object of exchange. Together these throw new light on the contemporary form of shadow money as a distinct marriage of security and safety.     

Family‐Friendly Human Resource Policy: Is It Still Working in the Public Sector?

The balance between work and family plays a pivotal but evolving role in human resource policy. Ensuring that human resource policy responds to rapidly changing American family demographics, particularly the recent sharp increase in single unmarried Americans, is a major challenge. Compensation policy long has focused on family‐oriented values by promising increased capacity to provide for a family in exchange for higher work performance. Now, employees are voicing concerns about matters such as quality time with family, and, in turn, employers are responding by implementing more benefits to achieve a better work–family balance. Strong counterarguments against human resource goals targeted only at families advocate personal policies that emphasize work–life balance for all employees. How well has personal policy kept pace with the shifting compensation preferences of public employees? Results suggest that implementation policies are keeping pace with employee satisfaction. However, levels of employee satisfaction often differ widely by demographic characteristics.     

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.     

The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race

This study argues that President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross‐sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2010 are also pooled together to show that with African Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Obama's legislative proposals, the racial divide in health care opinions was 20 percentage points greater in 2009–10 than it was over President Clinton's plan back in 1993–94.     

Politics as usual? Assessing the extent and content of candidate-level online campaigning at the 2015 UK general election

There has been much work done investigating the adoption of online campaigns in UK general election campaigns. Although some research has focussed on the candidate-level (Gibson, R., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward. 2008. “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain.” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4: 15–30; Lee, B. 2014. “Window Dressing 2.0: Constituency-level Web Campaigns in the 2010 UK General Election.” Politics 34 (1): 45–57; Southern, R. 2015. “Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election.” Journal of Information Technology &; Politics 12 (1): 1–17), this is an under-researched area. This is despite early web-campaign scholars (Margolis, M., and D. Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution. Sage) maintaining that e-campaigning could provide the most important advantages to campaigns at the candidate level. In light of this, the paper aims to provide the most comprehensive study of candidate-level online campaigning carried out in the UK to date. This paper employs original data, measuring website and social media use by candidates during the 2015 UK general election campaign. These data allow for a detailed explanation of the normalization thesis, one of the leading theories in the field of e-campaigns. The findings here are significant as there are several instances where normalization does not hold, suggesting that online tools are contributing to campaign change. Green Party candidates subverted normalization to a significant degree, particularly on social media. Assessing the campaign content, a quarter of candidates adopted more than one interactive feature on their website and furthermore, interactive use of Twitter was the most common type of Twitter use.     

Working Twice as Hard to Get Half as Far: Race,Work Ethic,and America’s Deserving Poor

Attitudes toward racialized and redistributive policies like welfare are often thought of as a function of both principled ideological positions and the underlying racial attitudes a person holds. Kinder and Sanders (1996) look at racial resentment as one explanation, while Sniderman and his colleagues look to principled conservatism and authoritarianism as viable alternatives, claiming that racial resentment is merely proxying a legitimate race‐neutral commitment to equality of opportunity. This article engages this debate through an experimental design which tests whether “hard work” is rewarded in a color‐blind manner. The experimental design also affords scholars the opportunity to separate the effects of the two components of racial resentment: principled values and racial animus. The results show that American norms and implicit racism serve to uniquely privilege whites in a variety of ways.     

Vorzugstemperatur und Vorzugsluftfeuchtigkeit der beiden Schabenarten Periplaneta Americana und Blaberus trapezoideus (Insecta: Blattaria)

Zusammenfassung Von adulten M?nnchen der beiden SchabenartenPeriplaneta americana undBlaberus trapezoideus wurden gleichzeitig Vorzugstemperatur und Vorzugsluftfeuchtigkeit ermittelt. Für beide Arten konnten in ihren Vorzugstemperaturen gewisse Akklimatisationserscheinungen festgestellt werden. BeiP. americana steigt die Vorzugstemperatur von 26°–29° nach einem einmonatigen Aufenthalt bei 20° auf etwa 29°–30° nach einerer Exposition bei 35° an.B. trapezoideus hat eine um etwa 3° niedrigere Vorzugstemperatur. Nach einem Aufenthalt bei 20° betr?gt sie etwa 23°–26°. Sie steigt auf etwa 26° nach einer Exposition bei 32° an.P. americana bevorzugt stets ein trockenes Milieu (geboten wurden 18% r.L.),B. trapezoideus such h?here Luftfeuchtigkeit auf (45%–93% r.L.) und meidet trockenes Milieu. Ein Gewichtsverlust von 15%–18% veranla?tP. americana eine um 1°–3° niedrigere Vorzugstemperatur, aber vor allem eine sehr hohe Luftfeuchte aufzusuchen. Ein Gewichtsverlust von 20%–25% des K?rpergewichtes hat keinen Einflu? auf die Vorzugstemperatur vonB. trapezoideus; jedoch halten sich die Tiere nur ebenfalls l?nger in sehr hoher Luftfeuchte auf.

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Summary The combined temperature and humidity preferences were investigated in adult males ofPeriplaneta americana andBlaberus trapezoideus. Both species show an acclimatization effect. After spending one acclimatization at 20°B. trapezoideus preferred 23°–26°, after spending one month at 32° the preference was about 26°.P. americana prefers the lowest available humidity (18%).B. trapezoideus avoids dry air and is equally distributed in the steps provided of 45%–93% r.h. After desiccation to 15%–18% of the total body weight,P. americana prefers a temperature 1°–3° lower than that before desiccation, but in this case most of all it prefers a very high humidity. Desiccation has no influence on the temperature preference ofB. trapezoideus, but the animal spends more time in very high humidities.