‘A strong and prosperous condition’ — the geography of state building and social reform in Peter the Great's Russia

The point is often made that the rise of the modern state in Europe provided models which have been influential, if not actually copied, across much of the rest of the world. In Russia during the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), not only was the tsar aware of the European experience of state building, but consciously strove to base many of his political and social reforms on European models. Peter aimed at sweeping reform of the Russian state and society in the attempt to bring them into the modern world. The paper argues that the reforms were necessarily geographical, involving an attempt radically to reconstruct the country's economic and social geography. The focus is upon the spatial implications of reform, including the founding and development of the city of St. Petersburg as an experiment in social reconstruction. In the event, Peter's success was only partial, and the end product quite different from the models which had influenced his reforms. It is argued that this relative failure derived not only from the widespread resistance to reform but also from geographical, social and cultural circumstances peculiar to Russia. Greater scholarly sensitivity to the social and cultural contexts in which state building occurs might stimulate more cross-cultural and comparative perspectives and enrich this important area of social theory.     

‘The Cow is Still the Most Important Figure in Indian Politics!’: Religion,Imperial Culture and the Shaping of Indian Political Reform in the 1930s

This essay assesses the impact of imperial culture, particularly constructions of India and hinduism, on British responses to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s. The essay draws on personal and governmental papers, paying special attention to the language and vocabulary employed by British policy makers concerned with Indian affairs. The major issue addressed here is the British presumption that the 1935 Government of India Act, a plan for a federated India with British central control, would defuse nationalist agitation. Such a sanguine view of this proposal seemed misplaced, given the popular success of the nationalists, especially Gandhi, and given the explicit demands of Indians for full self‐government. However, such an optimistic assessment drew on presumptions about Indian political and social behaviour, and especially on conceptions of hinduism. Policy makers in Britain and India argued along well‐established lines, that hinduism inculcated moral and physical weakness, among other deficiencies, and that a British offer of compromise would attract many Indians who feared continuing confrontation with the Raj. Moreover, colonial advisors relied on a belief that social and caste divisions within hinduism would recur within the nationalist ranks as well. This sense that Indians would respond to half‐measures of reform persisted until the 1937 provincial elections. Though British administrators predicted only a moderate showing by the Indian National Congress, the polling proved otherwise, as Congress took power in the majority of the provinces. The Raj lasted another decade, but the confident cultural assumptions sustaining it took a fatal blow.     

‘The invisible chain’: Jeremy Bentham and neo-liberalism

ABSTRACT

Bentham's thought cannot be reduced to the usual oppositions between ‘natural freedom’ and government interference. For Bentham, freedom in a political society is determined by the existence of a legal system that creates obligations for some people and rights for others. The government's task does not directly consist in respecting a sacred natural right, but aims at producing the ‘arrangements’ that are to direct the interests of the greatest number towards beneficial goals for the community as a whole. The legislator is to know, form and guide the individual interests. For this purpose, he has to summon public opinion in order to control individual action. On this point, we should reiterate, contrary to what Michel Foucault contended, that the main form of power in modern society is not exerted by a central state, but by each individual on others. That is the meaning of a very important idea in Bentham's theory, which appears in his writings on indirect legislation under the metaphor of the ‘invisible chain’. The habit of watching and judging others in the permanent Public Opinion Tribunal is the best way to learn self-discipline. Bentham's ideal is the self-government of individuals by the calculation of pleasures and pains.     

The preliminary transition of the grass-roots government functions in the border areas jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong during the first half of the twentieth century

During the first half of the twentieth century, the social administrative functions of the grass-roots governments in the border areas Jiangxi, Fujian and Guangdong provinces showed apparent differences from the traditional government. There appeared a gradual transitional tendency to the modern society in aspects such as the specialization of administrative bodies, the communalization, corporation and trade orientation of the mass organizations, and the social control as well as attaching importance to conducting, serving and constructing the social communal facilities in the social economic context. Consequently, the transformation should be regarded as one of the stages in the progress of the social transition since the Late Qing dynasty. __________ Translated from: Wenshizhe 文史哲 (Journal of Literature, History and Philosophy), No. 1, 2004     

世界近代史断限问题新探

历史时期的划分不同于社会形态的演变。世界近代史不能同资本主义史画等号。划分历史时期,应以社会经济发展为主要依据．同时也要考虑到政治和思想文化方面的情况。世界近代史是人类进入工业社会和工业社会发展的历史。它的上限可以定在18世纪60年代．下限可以定在20世纪40年代。     

Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy

In the essay, 'Of Other Spaces', Michel Foucault contends that every society constructs sites which can be defined as effectively enacted utopias (heterotopias), sites where social policies are articulated and where ideals of social ordering are physically performed. The article examines how a number of places in Fascist Italy, which conformed entirely to the principles of the heterotopia that Foucault sets out, were perceived by a selection of prominent writers and journalists. It examines the recorded journeys to the cemeteries of the First World War, to various renovated prisons within Italy and finally to the new towns south of Rome. It explores the kind of mental and physical sensations which the different writers evoked as well as examining the ways in which their written accounts of their imaginative experiences interacted with the myths of identity and social control which were central to Fascist ideology.     

Obama's “Smart‐Power” Strategy,One Year On: The Case of the Middle East

A year ago, President Obama was cheered into the White House. His election represented hope for many, not just in the United States, but around the world. Charged with such force and charisma, unprecedented in U.S. Presidential history, he promised the much needed change that America and the world are waiting for. Obama's election was more of a rebirth that represented hope, “Yes We Can,” to regain the credibility of the United States lost during the last decade.     

Post‐9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war‐promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault’s Biopolitics (Foucault, The birth of biopolitics), in which he correlates between territorial control and the violence inherent to any hegemony’s preoccupation with the body (i.e., the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body) and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necroplotics and its designation of who “may live” and who “must die” (Mbembé, 2003:11–4). I argue that in the post‐9/11 era, the world has witnessed a globalist civilizational masculinist incursion on its demonized Middle Eastern/Islamic Other. The militaristic discourse at work seems to be self‐appropriating the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body as a site of sexual oppression and (mis)using it to its own means. The impetus of the 9/11 necropolitics, aggressively transposes gender dialog/conflict in the Middle East/Muslim countries from a benign social and intellectual interface, where different alliances may be negotiated, to an aggressive militaristic zone, where the “bogeyman” must “die.”     

Foucault and Technology

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) employed the terms ‘technology’ and the ‘technique’ over the course of his intellectual career. His use of these words in his mature writings, it is argued, reflects a profound ambivalence: Foucault sought to denounce the pernicious effects of what he called modern ‘technologies of power,’ but also deliberately evoked the more positive values associated with ‘technology’ to develop a philosophical standpoint shorn of the ‘humanist’ values he associated with existentialism and phenomenology. The article situates Foucault’s condemnation of power technologies within the broader skepticism towards ‘technological society’ that pervaded French intellectual circles following World War II. In the first phase of his career (1954-1960), Foucault built on these attitudes to articulate a conventional critique of technology’s alienating effects. Between 1961 and 1972, the theme of ‘technology’ fell into abeyance in his work, though he often suggested a connection between the rise of technology and the advent of the ‘human sciences.’ Between 1973 and 1979, ‘technology’ became a keyword in Foucault’s lexicon, notably when he coined the phrase ‘technologies of power’. He continued to use the term in the final stage of his career (1980-1984), when his emphasis shifted from power to ‘technologies of the self.’ The essay concludes by addressing Paul Forman’s thesis on the primacy of science in modernity and of technology in modernity, suggesting that in many respects Foucault is more of a modernist than a postmodernist.     

论张謇的"无终山都邑"式社会理想

因兴办工业企业而获得成功的张謇按照他的理想 ,自清末起在南通开始营造一个“新世界”。民国初年 ,这一有着“新村落”等数种称谓的“新世界”吸引了国内外社会的较多关注 ,而又得“模范”之称。张謇所设计的这一理想社会的源头是汉末田子泰经营的“无终山都邑” ,张謇将其演绎成自己的“村落主义”和地方自治。随着张謇对海外世界的进一步了解 ,他在其社会理想中增添了来自于西方的内容 ,但他始终没有放弃过从早年起就奉为圭臬的田子泰式的村落主义。也正是由于这一社会理想的制约 ,张謇设计和经营的近代自治社会没有实现民主化和法治化 ,而专权式的自治窒息了社会活力 ,再加上其它因素 ,最终影响了社会的经济基础 ,阻碍了南通早期现代化的进程。     

Foucault's and Arendt's "insider view" of biopolitics: a critique of Agamben

This article revisits Arendt's and Foucault's converging accounts of modern (bio)politics and the entry of biological life into politics. Agamben's influential account of these ideas is rejected as a misrepresentation both because it de-historicizes biological/organic life and because it occludes the positivity of that life and thus the discursive appeal and performative force of biopolitics. Through attention to the genealogy of Arendt's and Foucault's own ideas we will see that the major point of convergence in their thinking is their insistence upon understanding biological thinking from the inside, in terms of its positivity. Agamben's assessment of modern politics is closer to Arendt's than it is to Foucault's and this marks a fascinating point of disagreement between Arendt and Foucault. Whereas Arendt sees the normalizing force of modern society as being in total opposition to individuality, Foucault posits totalization and individuation as processes of normation, which casts a light upon the relative import they place upon politics and ethics.     

The anxiety of cultural authenticity in Turkish communitarian thought: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Peyami Safa on Europe and modernity

The uneasy tension between ongoing disputes about Turkey's Europeanisation and an emphasis on cultural authenticity has characterised much of Turkish social and political thought over the last two centuries. This article explores conceptions of Europe, modernity and tradition contained in the writings of two twentieth-century Turkish writers, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) and Peyami Safa (1899–1961) whose writings express an anxiety of cultural authenticity. Varieties of communitarian thinking, coupled with an emphasis on a ‘synthesis’ between past and future, tradition and modernity, Turkey and Europe, had been invoked and advocated by many writers and scholars who sought to come to terms with the challenges surrounding Turkey's Europeanisation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tanpınar and Safa are widely considered to be among the most influential representatives of this deeply rooted communitarian tradition in modern Turkish social imaginary. By drawing on Tanpınar's and Safa's essays on politics, society, culture and the East–West distinction, this article demonstrates the radical divergences between their perspectives and draws out the political implications of their views of Europe, modernity and tradition. Although he appears to be one of the advocates of Turkey's Europeanisation and the idea of a civilisational synthesis, Safa's conservatism is based on a sketchy theory of radical particularity and cultural essentialism that reflects a repudiation of universalism and cosmopolitanism, and which shows a tendency bordering on a celebration of all collectivist self-assertions and struggles against liberal democracy. Tanpınar's communitarian vision, on the other hand, with its emphasis on ‘tradition’ and ‘continuity’, aims to reconcile the political ideals of European modernity with a restored cultural tradition. One of the primary purposes of this article is to fully work out the originality of Tanpınar's thought by highlighting the intimations of a distinctively hermeneutical dimension that figure prominently in his writings, and which have largely gone unnoticed.     

The end and renewal of ideology in Central Europe and in Hungary

Society has to be understood as a process of fast changes (revolutions) and slow transformations (reformism). This is what has been happening in Central Europe, where the big changes of 1989–1990 were preceded by several small social, political and ideological transformations. When analysing Central European societies, one should also remember that there is an ‘official’ society and a ‘hidden’ society.In addition, the relation of state and civil society is deformed since in most cases the civil sphere is repressed and undeveloped due to the predominance of the ‘official state’. In such societies, you cannot find real hegemony but only dominance, which is practiced by the state not only in the sphere of economy, society and culture, but also in and through ideology.The essence of modern totalitarian society cannot be understood without addressing the permanent existence of unofficial, ‘civil’ ideologies penetrating the ‘hidden’ society at the same time as the ‘official’ ideology. Apart from the slow transformation of ideologies and the crisis of ‘official’ ideology, the strengthening of ‘hidden’ ideology is also required for revolutionary changes. This is how a historically new situation with new ideologies can come into being, in clear contrast to the renewal of old ideologles, which generates a mixture of the old and the new. A look at what happened in Central Europe, but particularly Hungary, should clarify the point.     

Aby Warburg's Hamburg Comedy: Wilhelmine Culture from the Perspective of a Pioneering Cultural Historian

This article examines an unpublished play written by Aby Warburg(1866–1929), entitled Hamburg Conversations on Art: HamburgComedy, 1896. The play offers a glimpse into Warburg's viewson modern art and into his thinking on the various processesof modernization. It demonstrates how his enthusiasm for innovativeart forms emerged, in part, as an expression of his rebellionagainst the religious, social and professional conventions ofthe German–Jewish economic élite into which hewas born. As with many of his generation, Warburg claimed socialand cultural progress under the banner of artistic innovation.The play also provides a focus for a discussion of the waysin which Warburg's interest in modern art was closely alliedwith pioneering research into the role of symbolism and artin European history. To this end, the article explores Warburg'sconcern about the prospect of a culture in which symbolic andmythical thinking was replaced by a technology that destroyedhumanity's contemplative bond with the world. It also demonstratesthat Warburg's perspective on social and cultural modernizationcombined seemingly different attitudes: it blended the future-orientatedoptimism of an urban, liberal and cosmopolitan outlook withthe nostalgic pessimism of an ardent patriot whose life wasshaped by traditional values and who was uneasy about the increasinglyrationalized and materialistic society in which he lived. Inconclusion, the article suggests that this attitude was notuncommon among the Bürgertum and points to the difficultiesof conceiving of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’in Imperial Germany in terms of mutual exclusivity.     

近三十年印尼华人族群文化适应初探

印尼为世界各国华人最多的国家。近三十年来印尼政府实施一系列同化政策,华人族群适应环境,继承中华传统文化,吸收原住民文化精髓,融合现代西方文化,形成华人族群新型文化以融入当地主流社会。但由于印尼华人总是成为当地各种社会矛盾的牺牲品,使本来就存在的种族隔阂因此而加深,极不利于民族间的融合。论文概要回顾了这方面的历史原因,分析了华人族群以本民族思维和行为准则在社会生产、医疗、体育、社团、宗教等方面积极主动为当地社会繁荣和进步作出的贡献;并指出,印尼华人族群能否以少数民族的资格,享受民族平等的权利,受到尊重和保护,印尼政府的政策、作用和有目的地正确引导是关键。     

试论魏玛"福利国家"的早期实践(1918-1920)

一战结束后,德国社会遭遇了政治、经济与社会的多重危机,政府权力亟待合法性认同,社会期稳定。魏玛政府力图把福利国家作为控制与解决危机的一种手段。1918-1920年间,魏玛的福利国家建设曾规范劳动市场、协调劳资关系、改革保险和救济政策、解决住房问题以及调整经济运作模式等方面掀起高潮从短时段看,这些实践活动确立了基本的福利国家原则,维护了政府权威,初步解决了战后德国的社会危机然而从长时段看,这一时期的福利实践存在许多问题,埋下了日后经济危机、社会危机乃至民主危机的隐患。     

A Preamble to Family Policy: Issues of the Past and Present

The subject of family appears appropriately related to social policy, since family functions interface with society so closely. Moreover, U.S. families have been changing rapidly enough in this decade to warrant new attention to policy development. Public and political interest in family policy has been growing. Yet, historical barriers to government targeting family issues for policy development abound. While some intellectual, organizational, and bureaucratic mobilization has occurred, producing broad family policy declarations, interest groups are in the process of positioning themselves differentially, and disagreement about the value of explicit family policy is on the increase. The author believes that family policy will develop slowly in the D.S., and that comprehensive and cohesive family policy can better be considered a goal rather than a readily implemented public activity.     

Space and the Structuring of Disciplinary Power: An Interpretive Review

This paper is an attempt to provide an organizing framework for understanding geographic (and related) research that deals with modern social control. The basic panoptic logic of what Foucault termed disciplinary power can be understood to operate at a variety of scales, from that of buildings to that of national territories. But the particular way in which disciplinary power plays out, the way in which the logic of visibility interacts with other forms of power, varies systematically with scale and context. Thus I offer a more scale- and context-sensitive typology of "disciplines", and the bulk of the essay is devoted to explaining the categories of this typology with reference to existing research. The larger purpose of this paper is to improve our understanding of how modern social control is bound up with larger socio-spatial relations.