Exploring the Political Potential of the Local State: Building a Dialogue with Sheffield in the 1980s

This article explores the political potential of the local state through an engagement with the case of Sheffield City Council in the 1980s. The new municipalism movement has generated renewed interest in the “local” and “urban” as transformative projects. The local state holds a pivotal if problematic role in these debates, often seen as the decisive force facilitating or impeding transformation. In building a dialogue with 1980s Sheffield, we provide a less certain account of the local state's potential. Sheffield occupies an ambiguous position within and beyond traditional municipal labourism and therefore provides a potent example to explore tensions within municipalism between state and autonomist visions of politics. In Sheffield, radical intent turned into a more cautious governmental programme in the city, notwithstanding glimpses of political alternatives. The experience of those years provides insights on the contingencies of bringing movements and state politics together in what was then called “local socialism”.     

Zur Historisierung der Staatswissenschaften Von der Kameralistik zur historischen Schule der Nationalökonomie

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the mostly practically orientated and speculative patterns of economic theory of the eighteenth-century cameralists result with interrupted (but on the whole remarkable) traditional bands in the German Historical School of National Economy, which prevailed most of the German universities after 1870. This school of thought developed, although in the Germany of the beginning nineteenth century the cameralist encyclopedias and the reception of traditional theories of economic liberalism declined. The school of National Economy proved to be determined by traditional professional impacts (training of government officials), regional differences and specific regional changes of the English model, by the historical attitude of National Economy in relation to the arts sciences - this was however not a defined economic science concerning method and contents -, and by continuing the aims of a welfare state within late industrialized authoritarian governments.