Social structure,psychoanalysis, and collective aggression

This article considers Kierkegaard's contribution to our understanding of the political. Building on previous scholarship exploring the social dimensions of Kierkegaard's thought, I argue that for Kierkegaard the modern understanding and practice of politics should be understood as ‘despair’. Thus, whilst Kierkegaard's criticisms of politics might have been produced in an ad hoc fashion, this article argues that there is an underlying principle which guides these criticisms: that politics is subordinate to, and must be grounded in, spiritual or religious selfhood. In this way the modern phenomena of democracy, liberalism, the press, and the crowd can all be seen as representative of a form of community which falls far short of the potential that human beings can and should achieve. Such a community would see individuals recognising themselves and each other as spiritual beings, and taking responsibility for themselves and others. That modern politics fails to understand the human being as an essentially spiritual entity related to others through God can only lead us to conclude that, from Kierkegaard's point of view, modern politics suffers from the sickness of despair. Whilst Kierkegaard might be criticised for failing to provide us with a more detailed picture of a polity shaped by the religious contours he promotes, he clearly offers an intriguing and suggestive contribution to our understanding not only of the limitations of politics, but also the relationship between a normative human and political ontology, with the former providing the basis for the latter.     

Presumption,policy and practice

This article aims to analyse the basis for the construction of current policy designed to use museums and galleries as agents of social inclusion in Great Britain. It does this by first analysing their social role and their historical contribution to social policy. The article then goes on to present the findings of a research project that compared the rhetoric surrounding this issue with practice. It concludes that a series of issues are preventing the successful construction and implementation of policy. These are: a lack of policy coherence across different parts of the British Government; an inability to successfully measure social impact; a lack of institutional clarity about how to respond to policy guidance; and a lack of understanding about what constitutes social exclusion. The final and most significant difficulty is the lack of clarity about what can be expected from museums and galleries in this respect. The underlying question of how they function in society remains largely unanswered and means that policy is not based upon firm foundations.     

Social control and the hue and cry in two fourteenth-century villages

This paper seeks to explore aspects of peasant community policing and keeping order in two fourteenth-century villages. The raising of the hue and cry was not only an important tool for policing local communities, it was also a communal ritual. The cases which caused the hue and cry to be raised, and which were then recorded in the manorial court rolls, can reveal a great deal about peasant attitudes to different types of offending behaviour, as well as local mechanisms of social control. At the same time such cases can be explored for peasant attitudes to gender, gender roles as well as peasant attitudes to seigniorial authority. Discrepancies in offending behaviour between men and women can be evaluated and compared between two manorial communities. Similarly peasant communities appear to have applied some degree of discretion in their dealing with particular offences, by, for instance, not drawing attention to some of them by raising the hue and cry. These issues allow us important insights into peasant mentalities and attitudes to order, disorder, gender and seigniorial authority.     

On Language, Culture, and Social Action

This article outlines the theoretical developments experienced in historical studies over the last two decades. As a consequence of the growing critical reconsideration of some of the main theoretical assumptions underlying historical explanation of individuals' meaningful actions, a new theory of society has taken shape among historians during this time. By emphasizing the empirical and analytical distinction between language as a pattern of meanings and language as a means of communication, a significant group of historians has thoroughly recast the conventional notions of society, experience, interests, culture, and identity, and has developed a new concept of social action. Thus, historiographical debate seems to have started to transcend, for the first time, the longstanding and increasingly futile contest or dilemma between objectivism and subjectivism, between materialism and culturalism, between social and intentional explanation, or between social constraints and human agency. The groundwork has now been laid for an alternative to the declining paradigm of social history that does not entail a revisionist return (be it partial or complete) to idealist history but opens a quite different path.     

Space,Social Relations,and Contestation: Transformative Peacebuilding and World Social Forum Climate Spaces

The 2013 and 2015 World Social Forums in Tunis, Tunisia hosted thematic “climate spaces” for the first time. This article examines the extent to which these spaces are constitutive of a form of “transformative peacebuilding” aiming to transform social relations and eliminate the structural violence of the world capitalist economy. Both the theoretical and practical activities of civil society at the climate spaces are shown to be transformative but only to the extent that they contest broad processes of trasformismo which transcend differences and obscure the lived realities of governance and resistance. In this sense, civil society groups and movements at the climate spaces are shown to engage with global capitalism to potentially produce new global understanding and action. This generates new understandings of civil society as constitutive of directly resistant modes of social relation that push for radically different visions of climate justice and governance.     

Gender,Memory and Social Power

Two books are reviewed here, the first, by a historian of western Europe, Elisabeth van Houts, the second by a Byzantinist, Lynda Garland. Aspects of van Houts's book discussed are: the complementary roles of women and men in the production of historical writing; the role of women in the transmission of oral testimony, especially on genealogies and on property rights claimed through women; and the gender‐specificity of women's transmission of valued objects. The book's contributions to the history of the family are stressed. Lynda Garland's treatment of a series of Byzantine empresses is appreciated as informative, but criticised for lack of reference to historiography on medieval female rulership in western Europe, and insufficient analysis of structural features of the Byzantine polity. A brief conclusion reflects on gender and power in early medieval east and west.     

General Social Capital,Education‐Related Social Capital,and Choosing Charter Schools

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities—which we shall call education‐related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education‐related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non‐choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education‐related social capital could be spurious—due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education‐related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school‐related home resources that parents may provide.     

Globalization, Corporate Social Responsibility and poverty

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a major focus of interest for development practitioners in recent years. While development NGOs have been critical of voluntary corporate initiatives, official development agencies have taken a more positive view and in some cases encouraged CSR. This article locates the growth of CSR in the context of global deregulation since the early 1980s, highlighting the key drivers that have led to its adoption by many leading transnational corporations. It then describes the factors that have led to the recent emphasis given to CSR by both bilateral and multilateral development agencies and the United Nations. A framework for analysing the links between foreign direct investment and poverty is developed focusing on the impacts on the poor as producers, consumers and beneficiaries of government expenditures. This framework is used to illustrate the limitations of CSR in terms of likely impacts on poverty reduction through each of the channels identified and also to point to areas in which CSR may have some positive benefits. Overall, the article concludes that it is unlikely to play the significant role in poverty reduction in development countries that its proponents claim for it.     

Violence,Social Differentiation and the Self

The article considers aspects of violence in everyday life among the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands. It briefly compares the role of violence in bureaucratically and juridically mediated forms with self-help and social regulation in Aboriginal societies, focussing on the expressive or performative aspects of violence in everyday interaction. Myers' discussion of violence among the Pintubi posits a dialectical polarity of relatedness and differentiation, corresponding with the affective poles of compassion and anger. This is compared with Sansom's account of semi-ritualized forms of violence in Aboriginal fringe-camp life, where a point of commonality in Myers' and Sansom's approaches is found: this consists of the attunement of action, of violence, self-violence and destructiveness to the witnessing public. In Tiwi life too, conflict is dynamically shaped by actors' attempts to impinge upon, to seek to arouse and in some cases to manipulate, compassion or concern in the witnessing group as defence or as a form of moral attack. Open, dramatic ‘appealing’ violence, often in the form of a more or less controlled loss of self-control, seeks to parry indirect interpersonal tension and antagonism, to reassert or restore social distance and protect or privilege important relationships from intrusive demands. However, these violent appeals in rhetorical threat, in self-violence, destructiveness or sometimes in dramatic suicidal gestures also invariably indicate extreme personal difficulty displaced into open forms of confrontation. The article proposes that the generative moment of violence for social differentiation be sought in an examination of dynamic interrelationships between individual life-history, inner group processes and their articulation with external social forms.     

Journalists,Social Scientists and Public Affairs

Grossman, Michael B., and Martha J. Kumar, Portraying the President: The White House and the News Media. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Pp. x, 358. $26.50 hard-bound; $9.95 soft-bound. Hess, Stephen. The Washington Reporters. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981. Pp. 173.. $17.95 hard-bound; $6.96 soft-bound. Paletz, David L., and Robert M. Entman, Media Power Politics. New York: The Free Press, 1981. Pp. xii, 308. $16.95 hard-bound; $9.95 soft-bound. Robinson, Michael J., "Three Faces of Congressional Media," in Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, eds., The New Congress. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981. Pp. 400. $9.50 soft-bound.