THEORY AND ESSENTIALISM IN MARXIST GEOGRAPHY

Many Marxist geographers are involved in the current attempt within human geography to create nonessentialist forms of social explanation. This project has been carried forward with great, though uneven, success. I argue that the concept of ‘theory’ is an area of our discourse where essentialism tenaciously persists. I explore some essentialist meanings of ‘theory’ in Marxist geography and offer a nonessentialist alternative meaning, embedded within an explicitly nonessentialist Marxism.     

镀金酒店

最后,这个仙境般的楼宇用一种特别的方式把我们带回了平凡生活：我们被告知要每人支付100Dhs（折合人民币约225元）的参观费用——帆船酒店实在是太特别了,即使我们想要饱一下眼福也需要付出代价……     

GOD,CAESAR AND MAMMON AT CORONATION HILL

Australia is on the brink of a recession, and we have platinum, palladium and 350,000 ozs of gold locked up in Coronation Hill but we cannot go ahead and mine it because, all of a sudden, it has become a sacred site. It was not a sacred site fifty years ago. Barry Coulter, Treasurer of the Northern Territory, 27/8/86     

基于演化理论的我国城市合作机理研究

全球化和区域竞争引发了广泛的城市合作实践。城市合作是特定地域空间中城市共生演化的动态过程,城市合作的形成与发展,是多种行为主体在多种环境因素和历史因素作用下互动博弈的结果。以新近兴起的演化经济学和演化经济地理学为基础,建构了一个城市合作研究的演化分析框架,探讨了城市合作的本质和内容,分析了我国城市合作模式的类别、演化过程和不同模式的有效性。城市合作的本质在于追求包括分享、匹配和学习三大效应的更高层级的集聚经济,演化理论可以为研究城市群的演化过程,探索适合我国国情和区域发展实际的城市合作模式。     

THE CITY OF GOD AND AFTER: RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND ORGANISATIONAL DECLINE IN GREAT ENGLISH TOWNS SINCE C. 1850

Abstract

The demands and effects of warfare have not been one of the traditional concerns of historians of early modern English towns. This essay looks at the way in which the townsmen of York, Hull and Beverley responded to the demands of war. It explores the level of urban involvement in the king's wars, mainly but not exclusively against the Scots, and the way in which the pressure of war acted to transform relations within towns and relations between towns and their neighbours. In a period when towns were experiencing rapid economic, social and religious change, war provided one means of renegotiating power relations and allowed urban elites to expand their authority, through partnership with the Crown, vis-à-vis their fellow citizens and non-urban elites. The balance between profiting from war and being ruined by its demands was a fine one, however, exemplified by the experience of Hull in the 1540s.     

1. DECOLONIZING HISTORIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION

This is a reflection on the close relations of the writing of postcolonial histories and recent decolonial critiques, and on the tensions between them. Postcolonial historical analysis often has been preoccupied with hybridity and mixture, conjugation and adaptation, exchange and interaction—with subversions of sovereignty in contact zones, borderlands, and on the beach. As a structuralist formulation, decolonial historical binarism in contrast echoes Indigenous politics of self-determination, even suggesting at times an ontological decoupling of settler and Indigenous histories and practices. Stringent decolonization of historical inquiry—implying the sabotage and superseding of settler colonial linguistic, narrative, and temporal conventions and the disturbing of standardized assumptions about evidence, agency, and authorship—would give us an epistemic assemblage perhaps not recognizable as “history.” Even if desirable, is that imaginable now except as metaphor or ideal?     

CRITICAL THEORY AND PUBLIC POLICY

In the confines of the study of politics, public policy analysis involves a shift from pure to applied research, a shift which intensifies the problem of the fact-value split inherited from positivist behavioralism. While early public policy literature concentrated on empirical policy-making processes bypassing moral criteria, some recent writings have elaborated on policymaking and policy evaluation as a type of normative inquiry; significant steps in this direction have been undertaken by Duncan MacRae and especially by Jurgen Habermas in the context of “critical theory.” According to Habermas, policy evaluation requires a critically reflective “practical discourse” open not only to experts or policy analysts but to the public at large. The paper argues that such discourse is a valuable remedy against the technical-instrumental bent of applied science, but that recovery of a fully non-instrumental “practical” judgement presupposes an evaluation not only of concrete policies but of the status of “policy” itself.     

THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF EMPIRES

Contemporary histories and theories of empire generally remain within boundaries inspired by varieties of liberalism, and by Marxian theory and its hybrids, in which changing modes of production determine the forms of power, including empire. Liberal theorists and historians of empire generally trace a complex process in which expanding imperial power systems led ultimately to nation‐states, democracy, and market economies. For Marxists and postmodern theorists, the formal aspects of empire remain unimportant compared to the broader workings of modes of production and particularly, the global power of capitalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use the word “empire” to describe the workings of contemporary capitalism and its myriad forms of power. Whether they rely upon the formal definitions of empire or the Marxian‐postmodern one, theories of empire often descend from modern utopian visions: perhaps the Kantian variety emphasizing a peaceful union of states and collective learning, or the Marxian one, although now taking into account changes in the mode of production and victims unattended to by Marx and Engels. New technologies and communications networks impress all contemporary theorists. Some proclaim the end of modern power systems and empire; others find empire in a new, postmodern form. Nonetheless, there are stubborn continuities with the modern in the very persistence of modern utopias, the dominance of nation‐states, the pursuit of democracy, and the durability of capitalism. Theorists of power and empire have to explain these and other continuities, alongside the disappearance of the more than 400‐year‐old balance‐of‐power system in which imperial powers in the European core finally delivered vast power to the United States and the Soviet Union, and created new technologies that strengthen human connection as well as threaten vast destruction. The question of the power of the United States and its imperial status commands the center of attention.