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The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Theory and History

Jane Whittle

in The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440-1580

This chapter focuses on the academic debate about the transition from pre-capitalist society and economy to capitalism. This debate, known as the ... More

This chapter focuses on the academic debate about the transition from pre-capitalist society and economy to capitalism. This debate, known as the transition debate, has produced a variety of complex and challenging theoretical schemes for understanding how long-term economic change occurs in the society.Less

Creative Destruction, Economic Insecurity, Stress, and Epidemic Obesity

Kevin W. Capehart and Jon D. Wisman

in Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies

The past three decades have witnessed a substantial increase in insecurity and stress as capitalism's creative destruction has become ever-more pervasive. A link between insecurity, stress and ... More

The past three decades have witnessed a substantial increase in insecurity and stress as capitalism's creative destruction has become ever-more pervasive. A link between insecurity, stress and obesity is strongly suggested by the negative social gradient of obesity. This chapter begins with a survey of the dominant explanations of the obesity epidemic and their limitations. The second section surveys research that is supportive of a relationship between insecurity, stress and obesity. The third section provides evidence of the rise of insecurity and stress as creative destruction has gathered momentum over the past three decades. The fourth section examines the anomalously stable obesity rates between 1960 and 1980. The fifth section notes evidence of the worldwide relationship between rising insecurity and obesity. The chapter concludes with a reflection that, should the argument be correct, the obesity epidemic may be symptomatic of a social disorder in modern capitalist society.Less

The Workers and the Word: Why Marx Had the Right to Think He Was Right

G. A. Cohen

Jonathan Wolff (ed.)

in Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy

This chapter defends Karl Marx against the criticism that he lacks the right to regard his theory as true, insisting that he had the right to think that he was right. To this end, it advances four ... More

This chapter defends Karl Marx against the criticism that he lacks the right to regard his theory as true, insisting that he had the right to think that he was right. To this end, it advances four arguments intended to show that if Marx's theory serves and represents the working class, then it is reasonable to think that it is correct. The first argument relates to Marx's thinking that every class which makes a revolution does so in order to advance its own material interests; the second deals with the suffering of the proletariat in capitalist society; the third concerns the workers' revolutionary struggle, a socialist revolution; and the fourth argument is based on the premise that when a class is secure in its position it needs no illusions. The chapter also considers Reinhold Niebuhr's views on how the proletariat can effect its revolution.Less

Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse

Albert O. Hirschman

in The Essential Hirschman

This chapter takes up several critiques on the early nineteenth-century social and economic order—capitalism—and their interrelations. First, the chapter shows the close relationship and direct ... More

This chapter takes up several critiques on the early nineteenth-century social and economic order—capitalism—and their interrelations. First, the chapter shows the close relationship and direct contradiction between an early argument in favor of market society and a subsequent principal critique of capitalism. Next, the chapter points to the contradictions between this critique and another diagnosis of the ills from which much of modern capitalist society is said to suffer. And finally the tables are turned on this second critique by yet another set of ideas. In all three cases, the chapter reveals an almost total lack of communication between the conflicting theses.Less

The freedom to care

Wendy Luttrell

in Children Framing Childhoods: Working-Class Kids' Visions of Care

This chapter reflects on distorted visions of education, care, and freedom. It revisits the contours of the kids' perspectives of care as they played out over the course of the project, examining ... More

This chapter reflects on distorted visions of education, care, and freedom. It revisits the contours of the kids' perspectives of care as they played out over the course of the project, examining what these young people have to say about care—its value, its rewards, its invisibilities, and contradictions. Against this backdrop, the chapter considers the current realities of care in a neoliberal capitalist society, limited and structured by gender-, race-, and class-bias; institutional racism and anti-Blackness; and economic strictures that narrow people's conceptualizations of time, productivity, and human value. The young people's visions offer much-needed hope—and in their understandings, one can locate possibilities for a new narrative of care. Drawing on the continuing challenges that the Park Central School students identified and the insights that they offered, the chapter then imagines an alternative social orientation in which care and care work take their rightful place at the center of everyday life—highly visible and highly regarded not only in the spheres of family and school, but in the very fabric of democratic society and in the fundamental understanding of freedom and social justice itself.Less

Time use in capitalist societies

Valerie Bryson

in Gender and the politics of time: Feminist theory and contemporary debates

This chapter looks at how people spend their time in capitalist societies today. Focusing first on free time as a scarce resource, it considers how this should be distributed and whether citizens' ... More

This chapter looks at how people spend their time in capitalist societies today. Focusing first on free time as a scarce resource, it considers how this should be distributed and whether citizens' lack of time is damaging political life, before exploring recent research on ‘time-use regimes’. The final section considers whether long-hours working is an inevitable product of capitalist competition or whether it can be resisted; despite the increased pressures of global competition, it finds some grounds for optimism.Less

Time culture(s) and the social nature of time

Valerie Bryson

in Gender and the politics of time: Feminist theory and contemporary debates

The idea that time has variable meanings leads into this chapter's more detailed discussion of time cultures and the establishment of the commodified clock time of capitalist societies. While this ... More

The idea that time has variable meanings leads into this chapter's more detailed discussion of time cultures and the establishment of the commodified clock time of capitalist societies. While this operates as a form of control on a global scale, the chapter also finds that ‘other’ times persist, and that resisting the dominant time culture can be an important political act. It also considers Emile Durkheim's views on the social functions of time, traditional to modern time, modern time to postmodern times, issues of power and control, and resisting capitalist time.Less

Affective Citizenship and the Death-State

Eugene W. Holland

in Deleuze and the Contemporary World

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of desire as it figures in schizoanalysis, and addresses the issues of affective citizenship and Death-State. It explores how ... More

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of desire as it figures in schizoanalysis, and addresses the issues of affective citizenship and Death-State. It explores how economic and familial determinations in a modern capitalist society reinforce one another and state politics along with it, and argues that the sovereign state is long gone, and that what prevails in its place is the biopower state. The chapter explains that the biopower state represses death in order fully to exploit the production of surplus, which capital in turn appropriates in order to generate more capital, and shows the connection between the Death-State and the current war on terrorism.Less

Women and time use in contemporary capitalist societies

Valerie Bryson

in Gender and the politics of time: Feminist theory and contemporary debates

This chapter considers whether quantitative time-use studies support feminist claims that women's unpaid work represents a major economic contribution in capitalist societies, that they continue to ... More

This chapter considers whether quantitative time-use studies support feminist claims that women's unpaid work represents a major economic contribution in capitalist societies, that they continue to do significantly more of this work than men, that women have less disposable time than men, and that policies in the Nordic nations are producing a more equal distribution of time use. It reports that the evidence clearly supports the first two claims, but at first sight undermines the third and fourth. However, the chapter also finds that the studies have been based on particular temporal assumptions that cannot capture important aspects of many women's time use and which seriously misrepresent their experience of ‘free’ time. It also finds that more-detailed studies largely confirm feminist claims about women's disadvantage and the negative consequences of this.Less

Gilbert Simondon

Alberto Toscano

in Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage

This chapter evaluates the influence of Gilbert Simondon on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that attention to Simondon's presence in Deleuze's thought permits us to move beyond the ... More

This chapter evaluates the influence of Gilbert Simondon on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that attention to Simondon's presence in Deleuze's thought permits us to move beyond the false alternatives presented by the recent debate on French Thought and cybernetics. The chapter discusses how Deleuze's use of the notion of the disparate compares with political interpretations of Simondon's understanding of the powers of the pre-individual. It also analyses Deleuze's statement that he parted company with Simondon only in drawing conclusions in light of the two thinkers' estimations of the role of ethics in capitalist society.Less

The schlock1 and the new: risk, reflexivity and retirement2

Kirk Mann

in Social Policy Review 15: UK and international perspectives

This chapter addresses some questions of agency and social structure, in relation to pensions policy and retirement. It contrasts some sociological accounts of risk, reflexivity, consumption, ... More

This chapter addresses some questions of agency and social structure, in relation to pensions policy and retirement. It contrasts some sociological accounts of risk, reflexivity, consumption, ‘lifestyle’, and identity with the structural features of contemporary capitalist societies. It claims that there are tensions between the ‘new’ sociological approaches and the ‘older’ ideas and traditions within social policy.Less

Partners for Progress?: Liberals and Radicals in the Long Twentieth Century

Doug Rossinow

in Making Sense of American Liberalism

This chapter argues that from the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s through the anti-Vietnam War movement and the “new politics” of the 1960s and 1970s, liberals and leftists worked together to ... More

This chapter argues that from the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s through the anti-Vietnam War movement and the “new politics” of the 1960s and 1970s, liberals and leftists worked together to strengthen individual political and social rights. They sought to advance the interests of the industrial working class within the framework of liberal capitalist society, and to oppose war and empire. The chapter also describes the left edge of the liberal political tradition across the broad sweep of industrial U.S. history, revealing both the way in which the radical left provided idealistic, sometimes utopian fuel for liberal reform projects, as well as the broad influence of liberal ideas on the political left in the United States.Less

The Privatization of Terror: U.S. Drug Enforcement Aid, Transnational Corporate Expansion, and Human Rights Repression

Horace A. Bartilow

in Drug War Pathologies: Embedded Corporatism and U.S. Drug Enforcement in the Americas

Building on the arguments presented in the previous chapters, this chapter is motivated by the following question: How does the drug enforcement regime’s addiction to increasing counternarcotic aid ... More

Building on the arguments presented in the previous chapters, this chapter is motivated by the following question: How does the drug enforcement regime’s addiction to increasing counternarcotic aid facilitate the expansion of American and other transnational corporate investments in Latin America and, in the process, create the conditions that give rise to corporate-induced repression? In answering this question, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that draws insights from the literature on foreign aid and its effect on foreign capital flows and then integrates these insights into theories of repression in dependent capitalist societies. It is argued that, in addition to combating drug trafficking, U.S. counternarcotic aid facilitates the expansion of American and other transnational corporate investments in Latin America by financing countries’ infrastructure development. In conjunction with neoliberal economic reforms, drug war infrastructure financing in Latin America is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples. And, in response to Indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with local security forces, private security firms, and paramilitary death squads to repress and eliminate resistance to capital accumulation.Less

Empowerment or ‘cooling out’? Dilemmas and contradictions of Integrated Transition Policies1

Andreas Walther

in Young people and contradictions of inclusion: Towards Integrated Transition Policies in Europe

This chapter can be read as an overarching bridge between the three sections. By way of summarising the earlier chapters and integrating the reactions and comments made by policy makers during the ... More

This chapter can be read as an overarching bridge between the three sections. By way of summarising the earlier chapters and integrating the reactions and comments made by policy makers during the Madrid conference, it becomes clear that policies themselves are driven by contradictory objectives or dilemmas which undermine their efficacy. One perspective in this regard may be the limited scope of empowering social and transition policies in modernised capitalist labour societies. Another perspective, which does not necessarily contradict the first, suggests that such dilemmas stand for a decreasing linearity between policies and effects in late modernity. This requires a fundamental shift from policies for social integration that rely solely on formal institutions and programmes towards policies which are open to complementary informal strategies and resources as well. This, however, implies the acceptance of uncertain policy outcomes.Less

Space, Revolution, and Science

Peter Dear

in Geography and Revolution

In its broadest sense, historians and others use “revolution” to indicate some sort of discontinuity, or rupture, as E. J. Hobsbawm noted. But as Hobsbawm also observed, it sometimes takes quite a ... More

In its broadest sense, historians and others use “revolution” to indicate some sort of discontinuity, or rupture, as E. J. Hobsbawm noted. But as Hobsbawm also observed, it sometimes takes quite a long time to certify whether a revolution really did occur at some particular time in the past. From this point of view, the political-social historian—or, to be more precise, the Marxist or crypto-Marxist historian—is reluctant to regard revolutions as being of central, driving importance in the ongoing processes of history. The real historical changes are macrosocial ones, such as the transition from feudal to capitalist societies, and revolutions are simply what Hobsbawm called “incidents in macro-historical change,” the moments at which the rupture of an old and increasingly insupportable system occurs and a new system comes into being to take its place.Less