From expectations to aspirations: State modernisation,urban policy,and the existential politics of welfare in the UK

The form and character of the British welfare state is undergoing another round of reform. Welfare modernisation now focuses on the creation of ‘aspirational citizens’ in deprived areas or communities, individuals, and groups who will ‘better’ themselves and become more like an imagined social ‘mainstream’. Old-fashioned policies that promoted expectations of improvement have been replaced by this focus on encouraging new forms of self-reliant, aspirational citizenship. This paper interrogates the nature of this discursive shift. It argues that an existential politics, built around notions of aspiration, is being rolled-out across the British welfare state and that this has significant material and political implications. It begins by critically assessing the terms aspiration and expectation. It then draws on recent urban and spatial policy agendas to empirically explore the nature of this shift and its wider effects on urban societies, economies, and environments before concluding with a discussion of possible future research directions and agendas.     

Classes,elites and Iranian politics: an exchange

The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes and Modernization. By James Alban Bill. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1972. ix + 174 pp.     

Globalising the consumer: Doing politics in an ethical register

Consumerism is often held to be inimical to collective deliberation and decision-making of the sort required to address pressing environmental, humanitarian and global justice issues. Policy interventions and academic discourse alike often assume that transforming consumption practices requires interventions that address people as consumers. This paper questions the assumption that the politics of consumption naturally implies a problematisation of consumer identities; it argues that this connection between consumption and consumers is a contingent achievement of strategically motivated actors with specific objectives in the public realm. This argument is developed through a case study of ethical consumption campaigning in the UK. Existing work in geography on alternative food networks, commodity chains and fair trade acknowledges the political intentions of such initiatives but also expresses unease about the registers of ‘consumption’, ‘ethics’ and ‘responsibility’ in which they are embedded. Focussing on the discursive interventions used in ethical consumption campaigns, we argue that these are not primarily aimed at encouraging generic consumers to recognise themselves for the first time as ‘ethical’ consumers. Rather, they aim to provide information to people already disposed to support or sympathise with certain causes; information that enables them to extend their concerns and commitments into everyday consumption practices. These acts of consumption are in turn counted, reported, surveyed and represented in the public realm by organisations that speak for the ‘ethical consumer’. These campaigns also provide supporters and sympathisers with narrative storylines. We focus on one of these storylines, which re-inscribes popular discourses of globalisation into a narrative in which people are ascribed various responsibilities by virtue of their activities as consumers but also empowered to act ethically and politically in and through these activities. We conclude that ethical consumption campaigning is a political phenomenon in which everyday consumption practices are reconstituted as the sites for citizenly acts that reach beyond the realm of consumption per se.     

Biofuels and the politics of mapmaking

On a world scale companies and governments are acquiring tracts of land from rural communities across the developing world in what some describe as a global “land grab.” Yet looking into local settings reveals that negotiations and arrangements are often piecemeal and halting, with little resemblance to a coordinated seizure of land. Conflicting maps, overlapping territorial claims, and unclear acquisition processes are creating land disputes, mistrust, and ambiguity. Resulting cycles of contention are enabling companies to obtain—even appropriate—some land. Still, in at least some locales the process is doing more to undermine development opportunities for all parties.To probe into these local politics of mapmaking, this article draws on fieldwork from 2010 to 2011 in Tanzania's Rufiji District, located in the lower floodplain of the Rufiji River. Companies, one might surmise, should be able to exploit information asymmetries to wrest control of land from local villagers. Interviews, primary documents, and field observations reveal, however, that this is not occurring as much as one might expect along the lower Rufiji River. The politics of such land acquisitions, we argue, would seem to be better understood in terms of cycles of contentious politics, as an ongoing process in which movements and counter-movements vie for control through the strategic use of images, maps, and discourse.This research extends the understanding of the processes changing global agriculture and energy production by bridging the frames of the “politics of mapping” and “cycles of contention” to more fully reveal how and why control over land and resources is shifting in the global South.     

The family as the foundation of political rule in western philosophy: a comparative analysis of Aristotle's politics and Hegel's philosophy of right

For both Aristotle and Hegel, the family is the foundation in which the universalized rule of law is validated according to the political structure of the 'Polis' or 'State' itself. This composite whole or structure of society (Ancient Polis/Modern State) is the political end of humanity for both philosophers, which in turn finds its primordial beginning in the family. For Aristotle, it is in the kingly rule of the household that the property-based distinction of citizenship is set for the rule of his ideal Polis. For Hegel, it is in the love affirmed through caring affection within the nuclear family that the dialectical framework for the freedom of civil society, and the rational unity of a congregational 'spirit' in the State, finds its foundation. For both thinkers, the family sets the base for a political theory that defines citizenship in a manner that transcends the particularities of kin bonds.     

Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

This essay analyses the influence of the work of Franco Venturi on Italian studies of the eighteenth century over the last fifty years. Venturi's ‘model’ has certainly been of fundamental importance in stimulating new research on the connections between Enlightenment and reform in the eighteenth-century Italian states and is still an essential point of reference for all research in the field. But the direction of eighteenth-century studies in Italy has been shaped also by the contributions of many other scholars. Starting in the 1970s Italian historians became increasingly interested in new questions that were being posed by historians in France and Britain, which contributed to a more general shift away from the biographical focus on individuals characteristic of much of Venturi's work in favour of more collective topics, new types of sources and new ways of interpreting them. This article describes the different themes around which relations between culture and politics in eighteenth-century Italy have been studied, from civil, military and ecclesiastical institutions to the administrative and reform elites, the world of salons and sociability, publishing, religious beliefs, gender differences and science.     

Rumour and politics

This article contends that rumour—the circulation of unverified information —is an important form of political communication which deserves more attention from political scientists. To illustrate this claim a study is made of the part played by rumour in the ‘destabilisation’ of Malcolm Fraser's position as leader of the Liberal Party in August to October 1981. Health is a natural subject of rumour, and rumours about Mr. Fraser's health were used as the basis for speculation about a possible leadership challenge by Mr. Andrew Peacock. The collective character of parliamentary party politics, the artificial nature of media ‘facts’ and the predominance of certain types of news value in the media all encourage such rumours to flourish. The rumours had the effect of destabilising Mr. Fraser's position by creating and then enlarging a climate of uncertainty and anxiety within the Liberal Party and the electorate. Mr. Peacock was thereby enabled to test the strength of his potential support without being obliged to risk an open challenge. The author concludes that the most apt model of rumour to this case is that of ‘milling’, on the analogy of a ‘milling crowd’.     

Patrons and politics

Arnold Strickon and Sidney Greenfield, eds. Structure and Process in Latin America: Patronage, Clientage, and Power Systems. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973. vii + 256 pp. Figures, tables, references, and index. $10.00.     

Children and politics

R. W. Connell, The Child's Construction of Politics, Melbourne University Press, 1971, pp. 251, $3.75.     

Foucault and the politics of our selves

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault's analyses of technologies of domination -- the ways in which the subject is constituted by power-knowledge relations -- and of technologies of the self -- the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom -- this article endeavors to make two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault's own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and second, the constructive claim that Foucault's analysis of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory.     

Theory and the analysis of Australian politics

Sharman's 1989 APSA Presidential Address is a welcome critique of the interpretation of Australian politics, but the questions that it raises need to be taken further. The importance of Australian political experience in the formation of an indigenous political tradition is recognised, but it is misleading to see it as stemming from the desire to limit executive power. This article explores the nature of this indigenous governmental tradition, and goes on to consider what we learn from this debate about the nature of constitutional theory, and the relationship of academic debate to constitutional models.     

Intellectuals and politics

ABSTRACT. By imagining their audiences, intellectuals invented and constructed the collective identities of nations and transnational communities like Europe or humankind. Four ideal types of intellectuals are outlined by describing them in their relation to politics: the intellectual as cosmopolitan ascetic; the intellectual as enlightened legislator; the intellectual as revolutionary; and the intellectual as the voice of a traumatic memory. These ideal types change over time in response to their focus of attention and their mode of communication. Because of changes in their media (from handwritten to printed books) and changes in their written language (from Latin to French and Italian, and further to vernacular languages), intellectuals were able to change views on past, present and future times. Today, they are involved in (civic) resistance but rarely in politics per se. By renewing the tension of the sacred and profane – the so‐called axial‐age revolution – contemporary intellectuals in Eastern Europe are decoupled from direct political power.     

World politics and the behavioural revolution

Davis B. Bobrow, International Relations: New Approaches, Free Press, New York, 1972, pp. 95.

Robert J. Lieber, Theory and World Politics, George Allen and Unwin, 1973 pp. 166.

Ralph Pettman, Human Behaviour and World Politics, Macmillan, London, 1975, pp. 343.

Steven Rosen and Walter Jones, The Logic of International Relations, Winthrop, Cambridge (Mass.), 1974 (1st edn.), 1977 (2nd edn.), pp. 390.     

The politics of the diarist

Peter Howson, The Life of Politics: The Howson Diaries, ed. Don Aitkin, Melbourne, The Viking Press, pp. 1013. $39.95