Re-naturalizing sugar: Narratives of place,production and consumption

This article analyses the inter-relationships among food consumption practices, marketers' representations of sugar, and the history and political economy of sugar production. It focuses on the 'supermarket narratives'--stories regarding place and production that appear on commodity packaging--used to market sugar in the USA. It explores how competition within the sweetener industry, as shaped by the material qualities of sweeteners, has given rise to supermarket narratives that seek to differentiate sugars on the basis of ideas of place, freshness and environmental sustainability. It also examines how, at the same time, sweetener users have co-operated to maintain and increase consumption in the USA. The article begins with a discussion of historical patterns of sweetener consumption in the USA, and then looks at the genesis of the primary sugar industry lobbying organization. The case study of Florida sugar producers is used to demonstrate the historical antecedents of supermarket narratives and the contemporary geographical specificity of the political economy underlying supermarket narratives.     

Antebellum Southern Political Economists and the Problem of Slavery

This article seeks to contextualize the political economists of the antebellum South. The article analyzes them both as members of a transatlantic set of economic thinkers and as southern defenders of slavery. As such, they paired a commitment to the fundamental precepts of classical economics with a defense of chattel slavery. Some historians have claimed that the simultaneous commitment of the southern political economists to political economy and slavery compromised both their social science and their defense of slavery. In contrast, this article finds that the southern political economists exploited the gaps and tensions in classical political economy on the topic of unfree labor to build a coherent and popular economic defense of slavery. Key to the defense was a view of planters as profit‐seeking capitalists and a racism that necessitated the control of black laborers. In the process of developing the defense, some of the southern political economists championed the prospect of industrializing the economy of the South with surplus slave labor.     

Correcting Europe's political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid

The article provides an analysis of Georg Ludwig Schmid's ‘Reflexions sur l’Agriculture’, which was published as the first essay in the first issue of the publications of the Oeconomical Society of Berne, founded in 1759. Schmid connected the agricultural improvement movement of the time to the logic of international power competition that caused the 7 Years’ War and wished to preserve political economy as agronomy for the cause of peace and virtuous economic progress. In his essay on commerce and luxury, he devised a patriotic political economy based on the notion of a marche naturelle, or a natural progress of opulence, which enabled statesmen and political economists to separate the productive from the pathological features of economic development, healthy and necessary growth from luxury. Adam Smith deployed a similar model in the Wealth of Nations but argued that Europe's retrograde development was so fundamental and comprehensive that it made it impossible to use this kind of natural progress model on its own as a meaningful guide for comprehensive economic and political reform.     

Kant on Hobbes,peace, and obedience

Kant's essay ‘On the common saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice”’ contains a chapter ‘On the relationship of theory to practice in political right’ to which he added, in brackets, ‘(Against Hobbes)’. The problem is that Kant leaves his Hobbes-criticism implicit. The main point seems to be the Hobbes's citizens are without any rights. We explore the differences and similarities between Kant's and Hobbes's political views and evaluate the effectiveness of Kant's criticism. We pay attention to Nominalism and Platonism, the idea of happiness in social life, the use and role of the Golden Rule (Categorical Imperative) in political thought, the quest for freedom, and the principle of political non-resistance. Especially freedom of speech is important for Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. This is the only right Kant's citizens may have, independently of the sovereign's will. Our conclusion is that both Kant and Hobbes emphasize peace and order under sovereign power although they do not agree on how such an ideal can be achieved.     

The Austrian idea: An idea of nationhood in the kingdom and realms of the emperor Franz Joseph I

This article considers the nature of communitarian thought in late twentieth century Anglo-American political philosophy. It argues that communitarianism arose out of a critique of modernist theories of justice such as that of John Rawls shared by a group of writers committed to idealist principles that emphasised narrative approaches to the study of political thought, the importance of historical context, and popular participation in political life. It then focuses on one particular American strand of communitarian thought, exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel, which draws on a tradition of radical democracy and, in so doing, helps both to create and to transform a new American republicanism. An important connection between Walzer and Sandel is that they share the view that egalitarian politics must draw on shared traditions of social criticism rather than on the abstract individualism that they associate with Rawls. A key difference is that Walzer's vision of American life is pluralist and enthusiastic about difference, whereas Sandel's is republican and concerned above all with fostering civic virtue and identification with the state and political community.     

1848 1 and All That

Conserving built heritage involves competition for land and ongoing costs. The incentive to preserve is thus particularly low in areas where economic considerations prevail and conservation mechanisms are centralised. This used to be the case in Hong Kong. However, a series of civil conservation efforts since 2003, featuring judicial review, civil disobedience and private donation, have contested the official definition of monument and highlighted the values of local heritage in the public discourse. A recent case, namely the campaign to save Dragon Garden through private donations, reveals the roles of voluntarism in built heritage conservation when neither the state nor the market has the incentive or commitment to do so. Based on this case study, this article also examines the sustainability of civil action in an unfavourable institutional setting, which only managed to evoke perfunctory conservation measures from the government.     

Representations of an Imagined Past: fairground heritage villages

This paper is concerned with groups of historic vernacular buildings, assembled and displayed as 'villages' at agricultural fairgrounds. These are grassroots versions of open-air museums and heritage sites developed by public institutions and private foundations. The fairground heritage village structures are usually collected by volunteers and moved to existing county or state fairgrounds, then used in similar ways as professionally managed sites. The location and situation offer certain advantages, but also present problems that stem from being authentic structures presented as a fictional village. Because narrative, scale and editing are factors in the conflict, adding an outward-directed layer of interpretation would visually reconnect the dislocated buildings with their original sites. This is intended to destabilise the past as a fixed, isolated place, and link the village display to landscape change in the region.     

The arts of memory revived: The re‐interpretation of old parliament house

Abstract

The authors discuss the interpretation of Old Parliament House in Canberra, which ceased being the site of the Australian Federal Parliament in 1988 and is now an historic building and open to the public. The challenge lies in a building, which is not only an historic piece of architecture, which contains the National Portrait Gallery, but also the site of all Australian federal political life for sixty years. How to tell such a plethora of stories to a variety of visitors remains a daunting proposition.     

Myths and the political use of religion in Christian Democratic culture

Abstract

In this essay, the author will attempt to analyze the overall relationship established between the party of Christian Democracy (so named for its affiliation with a traditional religion) and the phenomena of the sacralization of politics that have so profoundly shaped the character of mass parties in the twentieth century. The quest for consensus led the Catholic party to adopt a new language, based on mythical thinking and profoundly indebted – in content and mode of communication – to the experiences of totalitarianism. The active rivalry with political religions marked, both in the phase of development and in the process of communication, the forms of mass political expression of Christian Democracy. De Gasperi's proposal concerning the definition of new identities and political affiliations, both on the national level and on the broader Western level (both in European and Atlantic terms) was the product of a unique ideological development in keeping with the requirements of modern mass politics.