Penicillin and the European response to post-war American hegemony: the case of Leo-penicillin

In post-war years, penicillin played a fundamental role in radically changing the system of pharmaceutical research and production, with US firms and research centres taking the lead. As with other areas of science and technology it also became a domain in which European actors sought to adapt to and counter US policies and practices of hegemony, becoming part of a broader pattern of US–European relationships during the Cold War. Three European companies succeeded in catching up with the Anglo-American companies and became large antibiotics producers. This paper reconstructs the story of one of them, Løvens Kemiske Fabrik (now Leo Pharma), and of its Leo-penicillin, focusing on previously unexplored material from Leo Pharma corporate archives and on other archival sources. Løven’s case is particularly interesting, because the Danish firm had no substantial pre-war expertise in fermentation, the key technical skill required in penicillin production. More specifically, the argument is that the choices of pharmaceutical companies played a major role in the European answer to the invasion of American penicillin, finding market, rather than state-sponsored, methods to counter US hegemony. This response, though, also highlighted the limits of European capabilities in the 1940s and the early 1950s.     

The New Economics of North American Arctic Oil

Over the past five years there has been a remarkable resurgence in oil and gas exploration in the North American Arctic. From completed disinterest only a half a decade ago the region has attracted billions of dollars in new investments from a host of different international oil companies. Unlike the past booms in the region, which inevitably ended in busts, this new wave of development is different. This article examines the changes in both the Arctic itself as well as the global energy environment and concludes that the North American Arctic will see slow bust sustained development over the coming decades, ultimately becoming one of the last great oil producing regions in the world.     

A Crocean critique of Gramsci on historicism,hegemony and intellectuals

Although Gramsci's debt to Croce is well known, most commentators simply accept his criticisms of Croce and his claim to have overcome certain lacunae in the Neapolitan's thought. This article argues that many of these criticisms misfire, and mounts a Crocean critique of Gramsci. Through a comparison of their respective views of historicism, hegemony and intellectuals, it is argued that the radical democratic and libertarian theory many post-Marxists claim to find in the Sardinian is more appropriately associated with Croce. Sebbene il debito di Gramsci verso Croce sia risaputo, molti commentatori tendono semplicemente ad accettare le critiche di Gramsci verso Croce, in particolare il primato da parte di Gramsci stesso nell'aver colmato certe lacune nel pensiero del filosofo napoletano. Questo articolo pone in rilievo che molti di queste critiche risultano essere prive di significato, ed inoltre, tende a far emergere una critica crociana di Gramsci. Dal tentativo di porre in relazione le idee di entrambi su concetti quali lo storicismo, l'egemonia, ed infine l'identitÀ degli intellettuali, si evince che la teoria libertaria e democratico-radicale che molti post-marxisti tendono ad attribuire all'intellettuale sardo, tende ad essere in buona parte il prodotto del pensiero di Croce.     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

Bringing hegemony back in: the United States and international order

Hegemony suffers from a bad press. It is currently used to refer simply to United States primacy. Thus presented, the US is considered to have been hegemonic since 1945, or at least since 1990. Instead, hegemony is presented here as a legitimate institution of international society in which special rights and responsibilities are conferred on the hegemon. No such hegemony exists at present. However, given today's constellation of power, a circumscribed US hegemony potentially has a distinctive contribution to make to contemporary international order. To map out such a hegemonic institution, this article reviews some historical precedents. It finds that, rather than uniform, these have taken a variety of forms, especially with respect to the scope of the legitimacy and constituency within which they have operated. A scheme of hegemonies—singular, collective and coalitional—is set out as a more realistic way of thinking about hegemony's present potential.     

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.     

Mad cow militancy: Neoliberal hegemony and social resistance in South Korea

Massive protests shook South Korea through the summer of 2008. This political eruption which exhibited many novel and unexpected elements cannot be explained by pointing to basic political conditions in South Korea (strong labor unions, democratization, and so forth). Neither does the putative reason for them – to protest the new President’s decision to reopen South Korea’s beef market to the U.S. – adequately explain the social dynamics at play. In this paper, we examine the political geography of the ‘candlelight protests’ (as they came to be known), focusing in particular on their novel aspects: the subjectivities of the protesters, fierce ideological struggles, and differentiated geography. We argue that the deepening of neoliberal restructuring by the new conservative regime formed the underlying causes of these intense conflicts. In other words, the new protests should be seen as a response to the reinforced contradictions engendered by neoliberalization and a new alignment of social groups against the prevailing hegemonic conditions in South Korea. In this view, the huge demonstrations revealed vulnerabilities in conservative hegemony but failed to produce a different hegemony. To advance these claims, we examine three aspects of the protests: first, the neoliberal policies of the new conservative regime; second, the intense ideological conflicts around the media; and finally, the spatial materialization of the protests.     

The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the "American way of life"

Abstract:  While the critical literature has focused on the geography of oil production, the politics of "outrageous" gasoline prices in the United States provide a fertile path toward understanding the wider geography of petro-capitalism. Despite the deepening contradictions of US oil consumption, "pain at the pump" discourse projects a political sense of entitlement to low priced gasoline. I use a value-theoretical perspective to examine this politics as not only about the quantitative spectrum of price, but also the historical sedimentation of qualitative use-values inscribed in the commodity gasoline. Gasoline is analyzed both as a use-value among many within the postwar value of labor power and as a singular use-value fueling broader imaginaries of a national "American way of life." While use-value still represents an open site of cultural and political struggle infused within value itself, the case of gasoline illustrates how use-values are not automatically mobilized toward politically savory ends.     

The disciplinary effects of communicative planning in Soufriere, St Lucia: governmentality, hegemony and space-time-politics

Communicative planning initiatives are being increasingly implemented across both the North and South of the globe. Influenced by Habermas' theory of communicative rationality, this form of planning concentrates upon consensus building between different signified interest groups. The paper explores how communicative planning in the eastern Caribbean country of St Lucia disciplines people's conduct from the perspectives of Foucault's concept of governmentality and Laclau and Mouffe's theorization of hegemony. Linking the latter to an analysis of Massey's non-bounded conceptualization of the local, it is argued that, as geographers, we may do better to concentrate less upon the deterministic effects of common styles of government and more upon the moments which bring their themes temporarily and spatially into being. In doing so, some initial steps are made toward proposing the concept of space-time-politics, drawing upon Wittgenstein's work on 'aspect-seeing'. In concluding, I argue that we should not see terms such as 'consensus', 'empowerment' and 'the local' as pre-existing moral justifications for political action, but instead as the product of relations of space-time-politics.     

Masculine hegemony,the state and the incorporation of gender equity discourse: The case of Australian sport

Although the impact of affirmative action, equal opportunity and gender equity programs on the lives of Australian women have been explored in a number of areas, state interventions related to sport have received scant attention from public policy analysts. This paper examines how the Australian Sports Commission has framed its gender equity policy in the mutually reinforcing hegemonic discourses of masculinity and corporate managerialism. It is argued that the Commission's articulation of gender equity policy in terms of ‘market‐oriented individualism’ is both constituted by, and constitutive of, the shift from a ‘patriarchal‐welfare state’ to a ‘patriarchal‐managerial state’ in Australia. The paper also provides an example of the tensions between bureaucratic and feminist discourses in the state sphere.     

A critical approach to discipline of human geography as an apparatus for state hegemony in Turkey

This study examines the hegemony of political power on the discipline of human geography in Turkey. Throughout the history of the country, human geography curricula have been aligned with the nationalist and hegemonic power politics of state authorities instead of being guided by universal norms, thus ignoring Turkey’s sociopolitical and cultural geography. This is reflected in the contents of human geography text books at the high school and college level. Similarly, the subjects of articles that have appeared in the 12 academic geography journals published in Turkey within the last 71 years also support this claim. The intervention of political power in the academic identity of human geography and the efforts to align human geography curricula with a certain ideological view have resulted in the emergence of apolitical geographers, who remain deaf and blind to social issues. This study analyzes the negative features of human geography education curricula and their political implications in Turkey, and proposes several recommendations.     

American neurophysiology and two nineteenth-century American Physiological Societies

This article contrasts two American Physiological Societies, one founded near the beginning of the nineteenth century in 1837 and the other founded near its end in 1887. The contrast allows a perspective on how much budding neuroscience had developed during the nineteenth century in America. The contrast also emphasizes the complicated structure needed in both medicine and physiology to allow neurophysiology to flourish. The objectives of the American Physiological Society of 1887 were (and are) to promote physiological research and to codify physiology as a discipline. These would be accomplished by making physiology much more inclusive than traditionally accepted by raising research standards, by giving prestige to its members, by providing members a source of professional interchange, by protecting its members from antivivisectionists, and by promoting physiology as fundamental to medicine. The quantity of neuroscientific experiments by its members was striking. The main organizers of the society were Silas Weir Mitchell, John Call Dalton, Henry Pickering Bowditch, and Henry Newell Martin. The objective of the American Physiological Society of 1837 was to disperse knowledge of the “laws of life” and to promote human health and longevity. The primary organizers were William Andrus Alcott and Sylvester Graham with the encouragement of John Benson. Its technique was to use physiological information, not create it as was the case in 1887. Its object was to disseminate the word that healthy eating will improve the quality of life.