Moralists, Pragmatists, and Rogues: Bureaucrats in Modern Mysteries

Many contemporary mysteries feature bureaucrats struggling with difficult ethical dilemmas. Should they lie? Disobey an order? Use physical force? Break the law in order to catch a criminal? In addition to their entertainment value, mysteries offer untapped opportunities to reflect on the moral conflicts faced by civil servants. In this article, the author analyzes the work of 12 modern mystery writers whose protagonists include police detectives, a medical examiner, a prosecutor, a park ranger, and a fire chief. Several types of bureaucrats are identified including moralists, pragmatists, and rogues. The author then links these types to broader ethical philosophies, such as actutilitarianism, rule‐utilitarianism, ethical egoism, and Kant's categorical imperative. He concludes that mysteries can be an effective teaching tool for courses in ethics and public administration.     

The rural proletariat and the problem of rural proletarian consciousness

‘The rural proletariat’ has been employed as a sociological category to describe Caribbean populations for nearly 25 years, but confusion about such populations persists. Proletarianisation, the definition of rural proletariats, and the Marxist conception of consciousness, as applicable to such groups, are discussed in the following paper. The Cuban case is described to exemplify the European bias of some analysts, and the difficulties created by an uncritical transfer of western conceptions of class and of class consciousness to a colonial agrarian situation. A special effort is made to conceptualise the rural proletariat in terms of its relationships to the peasantry, and of the ‘concealment’ of landless workers in peasant communities.