The disambiguation of the Royal Academy of Arts

This article uses Jeremy Bentham's notion of disambiguation, which links language to power and ‘sinister interest’, to analyse criticisms of the Royal Academy of Arts by Benthamites and Philosophic Radicals at the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6. This practice of disambiguation aimed to produce a distinction between the Royal Academy of Arts and the publicly funded art school. I situate this activity within the linguistic turn taken by Bentham's ethics, and its relevance to a dilemma of pedagogy in commercial society framed by Adam Smith. Smith's dilemma turns on the conflict between the requirement for a pedagogy that conforms to the principle of free trade, and an equally binding requirement for a virtue ethical model of pedagogy that offers a remedy for the corrupting effects of commerce on character. Adam Smith's support for private academies of art asserted a hierarchy of virtue ethics over utility, thus safeguarding autonomous ethical reasoning within capitalist forms of social life. Bentham's thought, in contrast, eschews the link between ethics and character, and places ethics itself within normative rules of language and cognition.     

The Problem of the Missing Harbour of Evagoras at Salamis,Cyprus: a review of the evidence and pointers to a solution

This article summarises the archaeological evidence for the existence of Evagoras' naval harbour at Salamis in North Cyprus, which ancient texts credit him with building c.410–400 BC. Based on a critical examination of previous surveys and his own on‐site observations, the author concludes there is indicative evidence of a constructed harbour c.800 m long, which was divided into two basins by a stone jetty, separated from the city by a stone wall and with some evidence of ship‐sheds at its north end. © 2012 The Author     

Foucault, fields of governability, and the population–family–economy nexus in China

It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so on—as an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population–family–economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault's studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the “family-responsibility system” in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as part—mutatis mutandis—of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.     

The Murders in Maupassant's “En Voyage”

The term futurism was used in aesthetic circles during the first decade of the twentieth century throughout Europe. The broad use of the term has sometimes led to critical attempts to link the various "futurisms" together into a coherent whole. In my article, I compare and contrast Alomar's Catalan futurism with the Italian futurism associated with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). Although the two futurisms share the name and, to some extent, similar philosophical backgrounds, their foundational documents or manifestos are more different than they are similar, and Alomar's futurism cannot and should not be critically subordinated to Marinetti's Italian one. My article addresses what is futurist in Alomar's thought as well as its unique regionalist underpinnings that find no analogue in other European futurisms.     

The legacy of Atatürk: Turkish political structures and policy-making

Turkey occupies a peculiar position in both international relations and economic policy-making. On the international front, the country is still in many senses a frontier state defining a major part of its policy outlook in terms of a political metaphor that has as much to do with the Cold War of the past as the east/west divide of the present. In the economic arena, Turkey is still one of the increasingly rare emerging markets which has never really broken free from the high growth/high inflation spiral. This article seeks to explain these apparent anomalies in terms of political structures within Turkey. The problems facing Turkish policy-makers and their inability to triumph over them is related to the weakness of political institutions within Turkey itself. Turkish political parties lack the legitimacy, policy coherence or firm base of public support easily to embrace programmes which might be perceived to threaten either the historic international position of the state or the well-being of the clients of the large state-controlled part of the economy. This weakness derives from the manner in which modern Turkey was created in the first half of the last century, a process that produced flaws in political structures which the following fifty years of democratic experience has not entirely erased.