John Macmurray and the politics of rationality in interwar Britain

This article proposes a new approach to understanding the interwar work of the philosopher John Macmurray. Because Macmurray stood outside the main currents of twentieth-century British philosophy and cultural critique, scholars have sometimes struggled – as did many of his contemporaries – to assess his significance as a thinker. This article suggests that we can understand much of Macmurray’s work as a sustained exercise in the ‘politics of rationality’. That is, he was attempting to shift public understanding of the nature of reason itself, as part of a broader effort to address the roots of modern social ills. When we approach Macmurray’s work in this way he begins to seem a much less idiosyncratic figure, and we can situate him in the context of broader concerns about an escalating crisis of reason. Moreover, the notion of a politics of rationality helps reframe how we appraise key themes of twentieth-century British intellectual history, allowing us to see Macmurray as part of an important but under appreciated tradition that aimed to integrate the intellectual and emotional aspects of human personality in order to revive and fortify British democracy.     

Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making

Behavioural approaches have become mainstream in economics,supported by the research of cognitive scientists and psychologists,yet their findings have attracted little attention from geographers.This article argues for a renewed behavioural economic geographythat builds on research in behavioural economics but also addressesone of its main shortcomings: a lack of engagement with thesocial context of decision-making. I outline a research agendathat bridges the gap between the disciplines in the area ofpension decision-making, using the example of choice in UK occupationalplans to argue for a mixed methodological approach to meet thechallenge of taking context seriously.     

The changing role of the FIRB and the politics of foreign investment in Australia

ABSTRACT

Australia’s policy on foreign investment aims to achieve both the liberal goal of maximising capital inflows and the statist one of ensuring that those inflows are in ‘the national interest’. This article analyses the tensions between these goals through interviews with policymakers who have direct knowledge of the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), which has functioned as an ‘offstage’, pre-market regulator for capital inflows to Australia. The tensions between these policy goals were manageable because the FIRB exercised its powers rarely, decisively and quietly, and the government believed that foreign investment did not threaten the national interest. The emergence of state-owned enterprises as foreign investors, however, significantly altered this calculus, and the FIRB has been tasked with assessing the national security implications of proposed investments. Instead of working offstage, as in earlier decades, the FIRB has become central to debates about how Australia should respond to the rise of China.     

The effect of the telegraph on law and order,war, diplomacy,and power politics

Abstract

Until the invention of the electric telegraph in the 1830s, transferring messages at speeds greater than that of a galloping horse was on the whole an unreliable process and one that could produce ambiguous results. The electric telegraph was pioneered on the Continent, but commercialisation was left to the Englishmen Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke, who built the first public line in 1839. From that date until well after the end of the First World War, the British dominance of worldwide telegraph cable production and ownership was overwhelming. This article traces some of the more significant effects of the telegraph in general, and of the British telegraphic hegemony in particular, in the spheres of politics, international diplomacy, and law and order.