Possibilism: An Approach to Problem‐Solving Derived from the Life and Work of Albert O. Hirschman

Albert O. Hirschman is the author of seminal, but prima facie unconnected contributions to the social sciences (‘exit–voice’, ‘linkages’). Yet, his main originality lies in his general approach to problem‐solving which is hidden behind the complexity of his oeuvre. This article intends to disentangle the intricacies of his work and to reveal his specific mode of investigation by making the multifaceted biographical influences on Hirschman's scholarly writings visible. Exhibiting the influence that decisive moments in his life had on his work not only allows us to identify and define his method of ‘possibilism’: it also shows that this approach remains a valid and useful multidisciplinary tool for unorthodox contemporary social analysis.     

Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality*

We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning national security, illegal immigration, and the threats posed by various foreign countries. Although these arguments sit within a long colonial tradition, they also indicate a crisis of modernity, as witnessed in the growing challenges to colonial masculinity, nationalism, and rationality. We conclude that Trumpism articulates a reaction to these challenges, and that Trump's rise to power is a symptom of the crisis of post-territorial coloniality in contemporary global society.     

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope

This article juxtaposes two prominent discourses accompanying the neoliberalisation of EUrope's borders. The first is the emerging notion of humanitarian ‘migrant-centredness’ found in the policies of elites and security professionals in the field of EUropean border security and migration management. The second is the use of animalised metaphors and imagery that pervade narratives of ‘irregular’ migrants' embodied experiences of detention across and beyond EUrope. It argues that what is at stake in this juxtaposition is more than simply a discrepancy between the ‘rhetoric’ of neoliberal bordering and the ‘reality’ of ‘irregular’ migrants' experiences. Such a view, which is commonly held among diverse critics of border violence, ultimately makes a problematic appeal back to the very humanitarian frame that has already been coopted by authorities associated with or even complicit in that violence. Seeking an alternative diagnosis and ground for critique beyond the ‘rhetoric/reality’ bind, the analysis draws on conceptual resources found in (post)biopolitical theory – particularly Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘zoopolitics’ – in order to identify and explore animalisation as a specific spatial technology of power. Understanding the work that the zoopolitical threshold does in shaping contemporary spaces of incarceration and producing animalised subjects offers new insights into both governmental logics of border security and the limits of humanitarian-based critiques.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

Loyalists and lairds: The politics and society of Upper Canada reconsidered

The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada: A Developing Colonial Ideology by Jane Errington. Kingston and Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1987. Pp.272. $30.00.

The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784–1850 by David Mills. Kingston and Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1988. Pp.x + 238. $27.95.

Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791–1841 by J.K. Johnson. Kingston and Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1989. Pp.ix + 277. $29.95.

Attitudes to Social Structure and Mobility in Upper Canada 1815–1840: ‘Here We Are Laird Ourselves’ by Peter A. Russell. Lewiston/ Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Pp.213. US$59.95.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Who speaks for Islam?: ‘authenticity’ and the interpretation of Islamic law in America's war on terror

Recognising that America's response to the events of 11 September would do well to maintain a sharp distinction between the ‘war on terror’ and a war ‘against Islam’, this article argues that American diplomatic rhetoric would benefit from an explicit effort to engage ‘frameworks of legitimacy’ within Islam, including the terms of Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic legal debate. The article examines the merits of such an approach in the context of several recent diplomatic dilemmas, including the Jyllens-Posten cartoon controversy. It concludes with an assessment of the American (domestic) political environment within which this approach tends to encounter its most ardent critics.     

Interest,Trade and ‘Character and Circumstances': John Campbell's (1708–1775) Earlier Work

John Campbell's (1708-1775) commercial theory in his early work demonstrates that he held more sophisticated views on British colonialism than previously thought. Campbell draws upon complex influences, which include Charles Davenant's notion of free trade and his ‘Old Whig’ arguments against corruption; Daniel Defoe's ‘new Whig’ arguments for progress and John Locke's arguments on industry and property; and Bolingbroke's Tory arguments for emphasizing common interest. By blending these ideas, Campbell offers a distinctive commercial theory that prioritizes the recognition of the interest and circumstances of all nations and peoples within an unconstrained and reciprocal exchange of commodities in order for the home nation simultaneously to resist corruption and flourish.     

‘These are not the best students’: continuing education,transnationalisation and Hong Kong's young adult ‘educational non-elite’

This paper examines the under-explored relationship between young people's transitions to higher education (HE) and the opportunities afforded by transnational education (TNE) programmes, with a focus on understanding the contemporary situation in Hong Kong. A fascinating association has developed, over the past decade, between the expansion of TNE in the territory and the government's commitment to providing ‘continuing education’. We explore what this relationship might mean for the young people directly affected by these new opportunities, by drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with students/graduates. Our sample is, what Brinton [2011. Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press] has termed (in another context), Hong Kong's ‘educational non-elite’. We ask: how does this ‘non-elite’ negotiate the shifting terrains of educational provision in an era where credentials (particularly at degree-level) are seen as ‘everything’? Our paper contributes directly to discussions around young people and (international) education, and considers frankly the specific role that transnational HE plays in the education/employment transition of thousands of (hitherto neglected) individuals in contemporary Hong Kong.     

Gellner redux?

The work of Ernest Gellner continues to be an influential part of nationalism studies. A recent appraisal has raised questions about the argument that Gellner offered in his central text on nationalism, Nations and Nationalism. This article takes up other issues in Gellner's work on nationalism. The article examines Gellner's influential definition of nationalism and the interpretation that he placed on that definition, as well as his treatment of ‘political cohabitation’. It also pays more attention to Gellner's later work, namely, Gellner's discussion of ‘the time zones of nationalism’. The paper draws on secondary literature but its primary purpose is to assess the coherence of Gellner's arguments.     

Oscar Wilde,Music, and the ‘Opium-Tainted Cigarette’: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play

This article shows how the musical references in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are important to the identity of the dandy, especially in relation to the literary-critical work of Matthew Arnold, whose guiding presence in Wilde's oeuvre has traditionally been somewhat underestimated. Wilde's male characters, although famously fond of music, reveal ‘disinterestedness’ in earnest musical pursuits, similar to the ‘Indian virtue of detachment’ outlined by Arnold in his exploration of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864, in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 26–51). Furthermore, the critical attitude of the dandy–aesthete intersects with the implications that we can read into the posture of the lounging opium smoker. Extensive scholarship has already established the relationship between the East and opium in fictional works by Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Music is an essential ingredient to this literature, too, both in terms of its narrative presence and because it is a key element in an ongoing, nineteenth-century British exploration of how stylistic innovations could be represented as ‘music’. After disclosing the close connections between dandyism and those nineteenth-century composers whose lives and works were often represented as dandyish (Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann), the essay builds from the tradition of opium-inspired fiction. It suggests Wilde's debt to Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), while also showing Wilde's innovations in making shifts in character and narrative voice into indicators of narcotic consumption.     

Consuming icons: nationalism and advertising in Australia*

ABSTRACT. In extension of Billig's (1995) and Edensor's (2002) contribution to the literature, this paper examines an often overlooked element in ‘mundane’ nationalism, company advertising. Through the development of a typology of advertising strategies, it examines the role of companies as nationalist actors, and highlights how advertisements can engage with and impact on wider national discourses. Nationalist company advertising is classified into types, depending on how associated the company is with nationalism in popular discourse, and whether the advertising campaign involves the company's participation in broader nationalistic political projects. The types developed in this typology include (1) ‘ordinary marketing/achieving nationalist credentials’, (2) ‘ordinary marketing/established nationalist credentials’ and (3) ‘activist marketing/achieving nationalist credentials’. Case studies from the Australian context are used to illustrate these types, how the different types use nationalism, and their varying impact on shaping wider nationalistic discourses.     

‘Chatham's Ghost’ and the Enduring Spectre of Lord Bute's Secret Influence: A Political Negotiation of 1778

Hints about the rise, fall, and reformulations of ministries were common currency in 18th‐century British political rhetoric. However, in 1778, chief among such rumours were three purported negotiations between the earls of Bute and Chatham, aimed at bringing one or both of them into administration. So damaging were these rumours to the political legacies of both individuals and their families, however, that they resorted to a ‘press war’ in order to absolve their respective kinsmen of any involvement. Drawing on previously neglected sources, this work examines these negotiations of 1778 and the subsequent press war in order to highlight the longevity, potency, and significance of the myth of Lord Bute's secret influence 15 years after his resignation from high office. In doing so, this work seeks to correct the common narrative that Lord Bute ceased to be a potent political symbol for constitutional issues following the publication of Edmund Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents in 1770. Far from being merely an anomalous and spontaneous revival of ill‐sentiments towards Lord Bute, this episode should be seen as a flashpoint in a process of vilification and traducement of the Scottish earl that had never, in fact, ceased and was symptomatic of the continuation of symbolic, or hieroglyphic, depictions of arguments concerning the significant constitutional issues which had been raised by Bute's political presence since the accession of George III.     

The Philosophy of a Persona

Summary

The essay collects Ian Hunter's central theoretical and methodological arguments from their various interpretative contexts and restates them in order to consider criticisms, real and imagined. Is Hunter's criticism of common forms of philosophical history itself open to such criticism, making its validity dependent upon prior adoption of a philosophical stance? Is his empirical intellectual history a form of ‘social’ reductionism?     

Book Reviews

Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson Alvin O. Turner (Ed.), 2001 Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press 320 pp., $34.90 hardback ISBN 0-8061-33-3 hardback The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935-43), Per Loretz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson's Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman's voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians' analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson's letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward. Educated at Mt Holyoke, Caroline Henderson ventured out onto the panhandle of Oklahoma to homestead in 1907 as a single woman, who ‘hungered and thirsted for something away from it all and for the out-of-doors’ (p. 33). She met her future husband Will when she hired a crew to dig a well on her land. Letters from the Dust Bowl captures Caroline's transformation from an idealistic young woman to a woman ‘worn by years of struggle with land and life’. Caroline's ‘letters’ are an amalgamation of letters to family and friends, and letters and essays written for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Letters begins with Henderson's optimism and delight in both life and landscape. Caroline's early writings capture the excitement of homesteading, of marriage, of being a young mother. Her writings eventually shift from purely personal letters to family and friends to being a source of additional income. Drought and failed crops led Caroline to begin writing for publication in 1913; her first published article was on her first years homesteading. She became a regular contributor to Ladies' World magazine, as their ‘Homestead Lady’, until its demise in 1918.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

Human Security as ontological security: a post-colonial approach

ABSTRACT

This article will critically interrogate the relationship between Human Security and Ontological Security from a broadly postcolonial perspective. The dislocation engendered by successive waves of neo-liberal globalisation has resulted in the deracination of many of the world's inhabitants, resulting in a state of collective ‘existential anxiety’ [Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991]. Under such conditions, the search for ontological security becomes paramount. However, conventional understandings of Human Security as ‘freedom from fear and want’ are unable – from a post-colonial perspective – to provide ontological security since they operate within a culturally specific, Eurocentric understanding of the ‘human’ as ‘bare life’ [Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]. It will then be argued that post-secular conceptions of Human Security [Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity and Human Security, London and New York: Routledge, 2014] by acknowledging the role which culture and religion can play in providing answers to existential questions concerning the ‘basic parameters of human life’ are better able to ‘protect’ ontological security in times of rapid global transformation given the centrality of religion to post-colonial subjectivity. This will be illustrated by the case of the global Sikh community. It will be argued that ontological, and therefore, Human Security rests on reintegrating the ‘secular’ and ‘temporal’ dimensions of Sikhi, which had been severed as a result of the colonial encounter.     

‘Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio’: The League of Nations' economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice 1

Abstract

The imposition of punitive sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations in November 1935 in response to the invasion of Ethiopia, a fellow league member, provided the fascist regime with an opportunity to mobilize the civilian population into ‘resistance’ against the ‘economic siege’ and to promote its ideals of nationalism, imperialist expansion and autarchy. This article examines the way in which the fascist authorities in Venice, aided by a supportive local press, sought to use the sanctions and ‘sanctions resistance’ to engage Venetians – especially women – in the fascist project and explores the effect of the anti-sanctions resistance measures on Venetians' daily lives. Placing importance both upon the regime's intentions as well as Venetians' reception of the anti-sanctions rhetoric, and drawing upon Michel de Certeau's observations on The Practice of Everyday Life, the article argues that Venetians' reception of such propaganda was characterized above all by confusion and by a multiplicity of personal choices and reactions, spanning a range of possible responses from unequivocal support through passive acceptance or indifference to outright rejection or subversion of the sanctions resistance measures that sought to elicit consent for the fascist project.     

Power in Australian foreign policy

The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper emphasises the importance of ‘maximising’ Australia’s power and influence. However, the White Paper and much of the commentary on Australian foreign policy do not clearly conceptualise ‘power’ or indicate how it ought to be increased. The Lowy Institute’s recent Asia Power Index implies one possible strategy via its resource-based approach to measuring power. We outline a different approach and argue that power should be conceptualised and evaluated as a specific relationship causing behavioural change, rather than as a general attribute of its wielder. To complement the Lowy Institute’s carefully catalogued database, and facilitate a more focused conversation about maximising power and influence in Australian foreign policy, we offer a typology identifying five pathways through which states can translate their material and non-material resources into outcomes that serve the national interest.     

Global cultural flows and the routes of identity: the imagined worlds of Celtic FC

In the study of sports and society, there has often been an excessive focus placed on the roots (i.e. origins) of collective identity. Drawing on Appadurai's [Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press] concept of ‘imagined worlds,’ this paper explores five global cultural flows and their influences on the diverse identities of Celtic Football Club supporters. While the historical ‘roots’ of these socially constructed identity attachments are important to understand, this article suggests that the ‘routes,’ or where these identities are being performed, maintained, and renegotiated on an everyday bases, provide a more complete understanding of collective identities in today's globalized world. Ultimately, this article highlights the reasons why people from around the world support a football team from Glasgow, Scotland by clearly demonstrating that the motivations that go into their decision are not as simple as one might initially imagine and are relentlessly renegotiated across both time and space.