A global–historical sociology of power: on Mann's concluding volumes to The sources of social power

Michael Mann's long‐anticipated volumes, The sources of social power, volume 3: global empires and revolution, 1890—1945 and The sources of social power, volume 4: globalizations, 1945—2011 complete Mann's career‐spanning project. Compared to previous volumes in the series, these works are much more global in scope. They address topics such as global wars, empires, social citizenship across the industrialized world, economic recessions and climate change. In this way they rectify omissions in Mann's previous work, even while continuing to deploy Mann's previous IEMP (ideological, economic, social, political) model of power. However, three shortcomings remain: first, the books do not adequately deploy the concept of society as power networks; second, they do not offer a conceptualization of global systems or dynamics beyond the sum total of actions by individual states or actors; and third, they retain the standpoint of power in their analyses. Despite these shortcomings, these volumes offer a masterful global history of power over the past century and a half and make long‐lasting contributions to the historical sociology of power.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

Liberté, égalité, fraternité?: Views from the far‐right fringe in France (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The current financial, economic, social, and political crisis is widely thought to benefit far‐right parties in many European states. The Front National party, a fixture in French politics for more than two decades, achieved its best result ever in the 2012 presidential elections. This article explores far‐right voters’ accounts of their political life‐stories, analyzing the factors that trigger people's “conversions” to the right, and examining the ways in which this increasing, yet diverse minority views French history, society, and politics. Far‐right supporters legitimize their political convictions and actions in different ways. Some believe that they are part of a “resistance movement”, others draw on what they believe to be sociological or anthropological insights. Many pretend to advocate Republican ideals such as equality and freedom. Democracy stands to gain from drawing this growing part of the population back into mainstream debate, and social scientists may have a role to play in this effort.     

Gypsy‐Travellers and Welfare Professional Discourse: On Individualization and Social Integration

Abstract: This paper examines the subtle ways in which welfare professionals in the UK construct Gypsy culture as subordinate to the dominant Western concept of “civilization”. Qualitative empirical evidence is presented to show how notions of a resistance to processes of individualization and social integration—which draw on conflicting interpretations of childhood and a perceived lack of aspiration among Gypsy‐Travellers—are seen as legitimate grounds for state and social welfare intervention. The paper argues that a strong group orientation and a more marked gendered division of labour are constructed as being at odds with these dominant social processes. It is posited that the “civilizing” project against Gypsy‐Travellers ignores cultural norms and values resulting in the perception that they are undeserving. The paper suggests that theoretical accounts of social processes at a society wide level require revision in order to understand their varying impact on peripheral minorities in specific spaces.     

2. WRITING POLITICS BACK INTO HISTORY1

This essay examines the writing of history and historiography in early modern south India as discussed in the book Textures of Time. The book argues that a historical and historiographical awareness was prevalent in south India prior to the arrival of a European field of knowledge under colonial rule. However, this essay maintains that the book unwittingly reproduces some of the very same Eurocentric formulations of the writing of history and modernity that it seeks to refute. A liberal conception of modernity is at the core of how society, history, and politics have been imagined in this book. These attributes of modernity, such as history as a set of causal relations, as presentation of facts, as a realm of the real cannot escape their prior formulation in Europe. The liberal social order also underpins the relationship between writing and the world. In Textures, early historians merely represent reality; they are not authors whose practices are constitutive of politics and identity. The conception of modernity overlooks the constitutive role colonial empires played in the very creation not only of the West and non‐West, but also in conceptions of the real, the modern, the universal, and the historical.     

Social Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance

That democratic societies do not fall into conflict has become an axiom of contemporary international relations. Liberal societies, however, do not properly exist along the troubled margins of the global order. This absence has lent urgency to present efforts at social reconstruction. Whereas a couple of decades ago the principle of non–interference prevailed, this unfinished business has shaped a new will to intervene and transform societies as a whole. This article critically analyses the international will to govern through three interconnected themes. First, it examines accepted views on the nature of the new wars. These representations usually portray conflict as a form of social regression stemming from the failure of modernity. As such, they provide a moral justification for intervention. Second, an alternative view of the new wars — as a form of resistant and reflexive modernity — is developed. Made possible by the opportunities created by globalization, this resistance assumes the organizational form of network war. The essay concludes with an examination of the encounter between the international will to govern and the resistance of reflexive modernity. This encounter is the site of the post–Cold War reuniting of aid and politics. One important consequence has been the radicalization of development and its reinvention as a strategic tool of conflict resolution and social reconstruction. The use of aid as a tool of global liberal governance is fraught with difficulty; not least, the equivocal and contested nature of its influence. Rather than reconsideration, however, policy failure tends to result in a fresh round of reinvention and reform. The increasing normalization of violence is but one effect.     

Spatial inequality in children's schooling in Gansu,Western China: reality and challenges

China has experienced considerable economic growth following the economic reforms of 1978, while simultaneously facing dramatic increases in regional inequality. China is becoming a polarized society—a phenomenon that is at the heart of a multitude of serious problems that are threatening sustainable development, as well as social cohesion within the country. Among the key reasons for this polarization are the quality of and accessibility to basic education for children. Since the establishment of the law for nine‐year compulsory education in 1986, children's education has progressed remarkably in most parts of China. It has, however, remained persistently problematic in the western provinces, particularly in remote regions, rural areas and minority communities. Even though some studies on child education in China have been carried out, very little existing research examines spatial inequality in children's schooling or accounts for the importance of sociocultural and geographic contexts. Using the example of Gansu, one of the poorest provinces in Western China, our research emphasizes the two main aspects that have led to high nonschooling rates for children: an unfavourable sociocultural milieu and inadequate educational resources.     

Examining social inclusion among pedestrian plans in Canada

Canadian policymakers promote walking to meet several goals related to transportation demand management, public health, and economic welfare. However, unequal pedestrian outcomes stubbornly persist across Canadian society. Recent debates at the intersection of social inclusion and transportation policy underscore the responsibility of stakeholders to address such inequalities and promote social engagement among excluded groups in planning procedures and their outcomes. Pedestrian plans are rare opportunities to strategize across the disparate stakeholders impacting walkable spaces—private developers, transit, parks and recreation—yet the social inclusion measures of pedestrian plans remain understudied in Canada and elsewhere. We examine pedestrian plans from 27 municipalities across the country using a social inclusion framework with participation and policy criteria. Results include that Canadian pedestrian plans fall short in promoting social inclusion with infrequent opportunities for collaborative contributions by the public; lacklustre outreach to socially‐excluded stakeholder representatives; and oversight of socioeconomic groups among accountable policies. We discuss recommendations to augment social inclusion in plan development such that socially‐excluded groups can more substantially benefit from accessible and safe walkable spaces conducive to personal well‐being and engagement with society.     

‘The Birthplace of Australian Multiculturalism?’ Retrospective Commemoration,Participatory Memoralisation and Official Heritage

In Australia, the authorised heritage discourse contributes to shaping the stereotypically Australian. It actively engages in creating a contemporary national story which glosses over the more shameful or distasteful episodes and themes in Australian colonial and post‐colonial history which is presented as being by‐and‐large progressive and benign. While the process of forging national history has become more complex and increasingly fraught, given globalisation and the emergence of new histories, nation and nationalism remain culturally persistent. The turn to multiculturalism from the 1970s as the principal way of defining Australianness and the nation lead some conservatives in politics and the heritage industry to appropriate the new social history, using it to present diversity as an indicator of a fair and open society. In this process, both history—an evolving academic discipline—and the past—lived experience which has meanings and uses in the present—were transformed into heritage.     

My Paradigm or Yours? Alternative Development,Post-Development,Reflexive Development

Alternative development has been concerned with alternative practices of development—participatory and people-centred—and with redefining the goals of development. Mainstream development has gradually been moving away from the preoccupation with economic growth toward a people-centred definition of development, for instance in human development. This raises the question in what way alternative development remains distinguishable from mainstream development—as a roving criticism, a development style, a profile of alternative positions regarding development agency, methodology, epistemology? Increasingly the claim is that alternative development represents an alternative paradigm. This is a problematic idea for four reasons: because whether paradigms apply to social science is questionable; because in development the concern is with policy frameworks rather than explanatory frameworks; because there are different views on whether a paradigm break with conventional development is desirable; and finally because the actual divergence in approaches to development is in some respects narrowing. There is a meaningful alternative development profile or package but there is no alternative development paradigm—nor should there be. Mainstream development is not what it used to be and it may be argued that the key question is rather whether growth and production are considered within or outside the people-centred development approach and whether this can rhyme with the structural adjustment programmes followed by the international financial institutions. Post-development may be interpreted as a neo-traditionalist reaction against modernity. More enabling as a perspective is reflexive development, in which a critique of science is viewed as part of development politics.     

The Politics of Knowledge: Anthropology and Māori Modernity in Mid-Twentieth-Century New Zealand

This article argues that growing confidence in anthropology as a tool for managing the adaptation of a resurgent Māori population to modernity shaped a “politics of knowledge” regarding New Zealand's indigenous people in the mid-twentieth century. We examine the relationship between anthropological discourse, state policy, and the Māori struggle to uphold traditional ways, through the prism of Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole's psycho-ethnographic study entitled Some Modern Māoris (Beaglehole, E., and P. Beaglehole. 1946. Some Modern Māoris. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research). This paper demonstrates that the study was the product of a nexus between concerns for Māori welfare, a perceived need for empirical research that could be applied to the “problem” of indigenous adjustment to contemporary conditions, and American philanthropy. For this reason, and as a detailed record of a small community when Māori society was on the cusp of post-Second World War transformations, we contend that the study deserves to be recovered from historical obscurity.     

Looking to the past,uncertain about the future: Japan's politics in an era of disaster and stagnation

The Japanese state and society face major challenges due to more than 20 years of economic stagnation and steady political transformation. The books reviewed here dissect a nation in the midst of change: its politics, political economy, and response to the triple disaster of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear incident (commonly referred to by the Japanese as 3.11) in 2011. John Dower considers Japanese difficulty in confronting its wartime past, while Frances Rosenbluth and Michael Thies lay out the broad sweep of Japan's political history. Ellis Krauss and Robert Pekkanen focus an institutional lens on the evolution of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from hegemonic to merely dominant party, while Leonard Schoppa and colleagues examine the emergence of a two‐party system since the political shakeup of 1993–1994. Robin LeBlanc employs a gender approach to parse the nature of male values and show how they shape the actions of political candidates and activists. Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill provide an on‐the‐ground view of individuals reacting to the 3.11 calamity. The McKinsey & Co. collection includes varied articles, from optimistic pieces urging Japan towards a quick rebound to more sober assessments of long‐term national decline. Together, these books provide an excellent snapshot of Japan at a metaphorical turning point.     

Capitalism and the Fall of Market Morality: How Piketty,Sandel, and the Skidelskys Vindicate R. H. Tawney's Economic Ethic

This article reappraises the thought of the British economic historian, writer on political economy, Christian socialist, and great intellectual of the Labour Party, R. H. Tawney on market morality. It extracts and synthesizes moral insights from Tawney's two most influential books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Equality in order to present his economic ethic, its political implications, and Christian theological roots. Tawney's ethic, which holds that market morality, social ethics, and politics are inseparably linked, is then evaluated in the light of contemporary economists and philosophers, including Thomas Piketty, Michael Sandel, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, and Harry Frankfurt. Tawney's ideas are found to be insightful and useful, particularly in linking unrestrained capitalism with inequality, exploring capitalism's opposition to market morality, finding synergies between theological and secular humanist critiques of capitalism, and in addressing criticisms of the moral significance of equality itself.     

A HISTORY OF THE SPECIES?1

By rejecting the old divide between prehistory and history, the group of scholars behind Deep History opens a new window on the problem of the unity and diversity of human experience over the very long run. Their use of kinship metaphors suggests not only a link between modern society and the deep past, but also perhaps a way to imagine the common legacy of the human species. But what emerges from Deep History is hardly a sunny story about the distant origins of social justice and ecological harmony. The other central metaphor of the book—the fractal—uncovers the slow prelude to the Anthropocene. Rather than seeing a sharp break in the Industrial Revolution from an “organic” to a fossil fuel‐burning economy, these scholars stress the history of environmental destruction that has accompanied human expansion. My critical reading presents an alternative understanding of deep history as an arena for a new politics of species. Here a cornucopian understanding of human adaptation clashes with a new pessimism about the climatic fragility of Neolithic civilization.     

Demagoguery as Pathology: Interpreting European Politics Today

The End of Europe by James Kirchick and The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray evince many of the very same political and discursive pathologies which they successfully diagnose in European politics. Both authors have discovered that Europe’s current situation is as much a result of irresponsible public policies and mismanaged crises as of a decay in European political thinking, a decay manifested in Europe’s ever-more simplistic, anti-deliberative—in a word, demagogic—public discourse. And yet, Europeans of today find themselves in a social, political, and economic crisis in part because they lack the discursive means to recognize and deliberate on the very crisis they are in. The result is a damaging political state of affairs which makes escape from itself nearly impossible—a political pathology. Kirchick and Murray do a fine job of capturing the true character of this discourse in their books, yet they do so by unwittingly reproducing it themselves, thereby revealing the difficulties inherent in reforming a political culture from within.     

Whence nationalism?

ABSTRACT. There is widespread agreement that nationalism emerged in the historical fountainheads of modernity, and was subsequently diffused outwards. Contrary to that, there is a long standing view that nationalism precedes modernity even in the broadly accepted cradles of both modernity and nationalism, such as England or France, neither of which was modern when it engendered nationalism. Besides, some emergent nationalisms ran concurrent with their English or French counterparts, with little evidence of having been spawned by diffusion. Such early or protonationalisms often sprang from resistance to foreign conquest, putting in doubt the invention‐diffusion hypothesis. I am therefore suggesting that nationalism has not emerged in few societies, but in many, and that it was engendered by social interactions, not by a particular social formation. While nationalism emerges within society, its genesis occurs in‐between social groups and societies, making it a product of their interactions. That makes it u‐topic, its cradles socially diverse, and its conception interactional, not gestational.     

Space Invaders in Barcelona: Political Society and Institutional Invention Beyond Representation

In the contemporary neoliberal urban dynamics, those agencies that are on the margin of society constantly disrupt the boundaries of civil representation and forge new institutional relations within the dynamics of urban governance. I explore how this process was enacted at the turn of the century in Barcelona, looking at two coeval social mobilisations: the lock‐in of undocumented migrants in the Iglesia del Pi (2001), and the project of las agencias at the Museum of Contemporary Arts (1999–2003), both of which unfolded in the central neighbourhood of Raval. The invasion of the boundaries of civil society emerges here as a double phenomenon—one that develops both within society and in relation to institutions, instituting new modes of urban politics.     

Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes

Abstract: If according to Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990:28), the aesthetic is from the start “a contradictory, double‐edged concept”, how are seemingly innocent acts of viewing and consuming aesthetically pleasing landscapes implicated in the neoliberal politics of urban restructuring? Using contemporary Shanghai as a case study, this paper critically examines the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban segregation in post‐Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and commodification of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the rapid development of private “middle‐class” gated enclaves. A central objective of this paper is to excavate the underlying cultural politics of neoliberalism and demonstrate how the aestheticization of urban spaces in Shanghai has become increasingly intertwined with and accentuated by neoliberal ideologies and exclusionary practices in the city. Imbricated in the pristine neighborhoods of Shanghai's gated communities are the fault lines of social division and class distinction that are rapidly transforming urban China.     

The transformation of the Italian party system

Abstract

This article analyses the political and social changes that occurred in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s in ways that bring economic and sociological models together in a historical perspective. It argues that the rise of the new Right following the disintegration of the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party was the result not only of the changed international situation (which was none the less important) but of the changes that had been taking place within the Italian political parties and the growing importance of neo‐patrimonial tendencies over the previous fifteen years. Increasingly open forms of corruption (on the part of the political classes rather than the industrial bourgeoisie, even though they too were to some extent accomplices) are interpreted as a sign of the crisis and disintegration of the political system that had taken shape in the postwar period. Hence the nexus of anguish and politics for both the upper classes and the rest of Italian society that has become one of the most important features of the situation in Italy today.     

Accordism and the environment: The resource assessment commission and national environmental policy‐making

This paper explores the reform of environmental policy‐making by the Hawke government through its creation of the Resource Assessment Commission (RAC). The paper pursues two themes. First, it argues that this reform must be seen within the broader context of the Hawke government's approach to public policy generally. The paper argues that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has instituted a model for policy politics based on key strategic and normative approaches—a model this paper refers to as ‘Accordism’. Secondly, this paper looks at the RAC and in so doing argues that, on the basis of the norms that underpinned the reform of environmental policy‐making based on this body, the Commission may be placed squarely within the ‘Accordist’ paradigm.