On the Prospects of a Return to Keynes: Taking Keynes’s Political Philosophy Seriously

This article addresses the prospects of a “return to Keynes” in terms of Keynes's own philosophy. It shows that Keynes's moral and political philosophy provide little guide to how Keynesian economics might now be achieved. Keynes's gradualist reformism, derived from both Burke and Moore, leaves a gulf between his economic agenda and the means of its implementation, which is widened in attempts to transpose his proposals onto the global political economy of the 21st century. Keynes's faith in elite intuition and enlightened rule are never securely established and are undermined by his own insights into uncertainty. However, the priority of the short-run and Keynes's depictions of organic unity suggest potential if underdeveloped avenues for alternative social choices and policy re-direction.     

In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization

This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as "naturalizing" some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to "choose" babies while others must abandon them; and challenging the practices through which small states tweak transnational financial systems while allowing multinational corporations privileges denied small states. Legitimation work (re)configures jurisdictionality, transparency, and sovereignty–the constructs on which debates over globalization's consequences hinge. Examining how these constructs order, include, and exclude persons, goods, and practices sheds light on the boundaries, slippages, and connections between the legitimate and the illegitimate within global processes.     

'An effective mask for terror': Democracy,death squads and Northern Ireland

Defining terrorism solely as anti-state activity is in the ascendant in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet the existence of death squads – paramilitary groups involved in state-sponsored or state-tolerated terror against political opponents – reveals that the state can also be terrorist. Most commonly, death squads exist in non-democratic states, and most of the literature on death squads focuses on such societies. This article seeks to examine the circumstances in which death squads and democracy can coexist, looking specifically at the case of loyalist paramilitary violence and state collusion in Northern Ireland.     

The Consistency of the U.S. Supreme Court's "Pro-State" Bloc

This article examines the bloc of U.S. Supreme Court justicesthat produced the "pro-state" decisions in United States v.Lopez, Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, and Printz v. UnitedStates. We are concerned primarily with the bloc's coherenceand consistency across other cases of interest to state governmentsover the 1994–1996 terms. The labeling of individual justicesand the Court in general as "pro-state" depends in part on thecases subjected to analysis; the greater the inclusiveness ofthe list of "cases of interest to the states, " the more thebloc seems to fray and the less coherent the Court's direction.     

UK Government Policy,Credit Unions,and Payday Loans

This article outlines how successive UK governments’ policies first created a three-tier system of credit unions and then posited credit unions as alternatives to payday lenders. The three-tier framework is used for an analysis of loans offered on credit union websites. The findings indicate that while the first two tiers of credit unions now offer loans to people who have not saved with them previously, they do so in ways consistent with credit unions’ original character, rather than in ways that replicate commercial payday loans. The other tier of credit unions appears unable to offer such loans.