The re‐equilibration of democracy in inter‐war Ireland

This article examines the process of democratic stabilization in inter‐war Ireland. The Irish case is a classic example of what Linz calls re‐equilibration. Re‐equilibration is a political process that, following a crisis which has seriously endangered democratic institutions, results in their continued existence at the same or higher levels of effectiveness and legitimacy. The contention of the article is that the Fianna Fáil party's transformation of the democratic institutions of the Irish Free State in the 1930s constituted a case of democratic re‐equilibration, whereby the institutions of independent Ireland were given a greater degree of effectiveness and legitimacy. Indeed, since the main Irish parties had only recently been involved in a civil war, the Irish example could well be the classic case of re‐equilibration this century. The analysis of democratic re‐equilibration between 1922 and 1937 focuses on the Fianna Fáil party's transformation from being a semi‐loyal opposition party to being a party of government, emphasizing the impact on those political actors who remained hostile to the existence of the Free State.     

Sex offender programmes: New technology coping with old ethics

Abstract

Sex offender treatment programmes offer new technologies for dealing with a serious social problem but demand the sacrifice of many traditional principles of mental health ethics, such as the therapist's obligation to give primacy to the client's interest and the therapist's duties to maintain confidentiality, use non-coercive treatment and offer a choice of therapies in all but exceptional circumstances. Recognizing that such programmes are, in fact, a form of punishment enables the formulation of more consistent and practical ethical guidelines for therapists attempting interventions with sex offenders. An example of how such guidelines could be developed uses a consequentialist justification for punishment which targets the protection of human rights, rather than crime prevention, as its goal.     

“When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin

This paper investigates the semiotics of Bitcoin, an electronic cash system that uses decentralized networking to enable irreversible payments. For enthusiasts, Bitcoin provides an alternative to currencies and payment systems that are seen to threaten users' privacy, limit personal liberty, and undermine the value of money through state and corporate oversight. Bitcoin's promise lies in its apparent capacity to resolve these concerns not through regulatory institutions or interpersonal trust, but through its cryptographic protocols. We characterize this semiotics as a “practical materialism” and suggest it replays debates about privacy, labor, and value.     

Boundary riding: Cross‐cultural analysis,national cinema and genre

This paper addresses the relation between rhetoric and politics through a reading of the term ‘queer’ as it circulated in three different communities in the 1990s: the activist group Queer Nation; the (American) field of study now known as Queer Theory; and an underground queer‐punk press (fanzines'). Reflection on the specific uses of the term ‘queer’ indicates widely divergent and conflicting meaning‐making processes. For some people, the term ‘queer’ signifies all people outside of normative heterosexuality, while for others, the term only refers to lesbians and gay men. Within both Queer Nation and Queer Theory, a metaphorical association is established among ‘queers’ and ‘lesbian/gays’. By contrast, queer‐punks employ the term catachrestically, as a metaphor for which no literal referent exists. Rhetorical theory can clarify these different employments of the same term. Theories of metaphor and catachresis help us to understand how relations of association are established among queers and lesbian/gays, and how particular rhetorical strategies relate to specific political agendas.     

Repressed futures: financial derivatives' theological unconscious

Financial derivatives are credited with bringing to the fore a number of sociological and metaphysical problems for modernity, from the instantiation of particular modalities of risk to the destabilization of referentiality in knowledge-claims about the world. This essay argues that derivatives can take on the particular power they hold in such accounts only through a repression of their mathematical technique. Opening up the black box of the mathematical technique through a history of statistics, it argues that the founding trauma animating derivatives' discursive power is the separation of religion from the technical procedures of mathematics and the stochastic models that give form to trading in derivatives. Derivatives' indexical power is a symptom of this trauma. That symptomatology reveals derivatives to be a moral, not just mathematical, problematic.