In response to the discussants this essay places Wages of Destruction in its historiographical context. In dialogue with Riley’s call for a reading of Nazi Germany in terms of a theory of imperialism, it calls for an account of the ‘variable geometry’ of regime-business relations. In conclusion, however, we must insist on the ‘vacuum’ of causal logic that is a defining characteristic of the history of the Nazi regime.

This article critically engages a recent essay Jeffrey Alexander has published on ‘societalization’, whose conceptualization it finds problematic; first, because in contrast to the impression conveyed by the essay, the term itself is anything but new (as shown in a summary of six theories of societalization which precede Alexander’s by decades, in two cases, by more than a century), and, second, because the way Alexander employs the term is highly aporetic, while also being emblematic of much deeper problems that afflict (...) the whole discipline. Following a reconstruction of the term’s morphology and the transmutations it underwent during its gradual incorporation into the English language, the article identifies an undertheorized concept of society as the root cause behind the difficulties into which Alexander maneuvers himself. It concludes with a brief sketch of an alternative that can contribute to overcoming these difficulties. (shrink)

The capacity to classify social groups legally is a central characteristic of modern states. Social groups, however, often resist the classificatory schemas of the state. This raises the following question: how do modern states exercise symbolic power in social fields beset by acute classification struggles? While existing scholarship has demonstrated that states exercise symbolic power, there has not been a concomitant effort to systematize and theorize the various strategies through which they do so. This article addresses this lacuna through examining (...) classification struggles centered on a number of “heterodox” religious groups that have historically been perceived as deviant from mainstream religions. Specifically, it looks at Falun Gong in China, Mormons in the United States, and Baha’is in Egypt. The analysis draws attention to three strategies through which states exercise symbolic power: coercive classification, wherein the deviant group is forcibly fixed as such in law; juridical normalization, whereby the deviant group is allowed to enter the mainstream by shedding “problematic” ritual practices; and legal erasure, whereby the deviant group is kept out of the official classificatory system so that it becomes a legal non-entity. In summary, this article both identifies the religious field as a critical domain in which states of various ideological orientations exercise symbolic power and deploys this analysis to identify distinct strategies through which they do so. (shrink)

In recent years, actor-network theory (ANT) has become an increasingly influential theoretical framework through which to analyse economic markets and organizations. Indeed, with its emphasis on the power of social and natural concrete ‘things’ to become contingently enrolled in different networks, many argue that ANT successfully draws attention to the complex intermeshing of new technologies and social actors in organizations and markets across spatial divides from the local to the global. This article argues, however, that within its own method of (...) abstraction and research methodology, ANT separates ‘concrete’ and ‘contingent’ economic markets and organizations from their abstract, necessary and virtual capitalist form. This means that ANT will tend to over-identify with how concrete-contingent actor-networks are performed in empirical economic markets and organizations at the expense of analysing how such empirical contexts are also internally mediated through abstract capitalist processes such as that of surplus value extraction. This, in turn, creates a number of difficulties in how ANT investigates economic markets and organizations. These critical points are made by recourse to the Marxist poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari as well as through conventional Marxist ideas. (shrink)

We are in an era of uncertainty over whose rules will govern global economic integration. With the growing market share of Chinese firms and the power of the Chinese state it is unclear if Western firms will continue to dominate transnational governance. Exploring these dynamics through a study of contract rules in the global cotton trade, this article conceptualizes commodity chain governance as a contested process of institution-building. To this end, the global commodity chain/global value chain framework must be revised (...) to better account for the broader institutional context of commodity chain governance, institutional variation across space, and strategic action in the construction of legitimate governance arrangements. I provide a more dynamic model of GCC governance that stresses how strategic action, existing institutions, and dominant discourses intersect as firms and states compete for institutional power within a commodity chain. This advances our understandings of how commodity chain governance emerges and changes over time. (shrink)

This article opens with a brief analysis of key features of the Mexican semi-authoritarian regime. It then moves to a discussion of the critical realist positions and features that inform the strategic-relational approach. Attention is paid to social interactions and causal relations that enable the SRA to trace patterns of punctuated evolution and to highlight the processes of transformation. Since ideal types serve to highlight key characteristics in specifc phenomena, processes and actors, some features of ideal types of the state (...) and of the transition from one type to another are also discussed. In particular, attention is paid to the Keynesian welfare national state and to the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime ideal types elaborated by Jessop. For it is contended that the specific features of these ideal types could be of great help in broadening the debate on economic restructuring and political reforms in countries such as Mexico. Moreover, the SRA approach provides an insight into the endogenous features of social change and stresses the importance of networking for a strategic agenda as well. For the never-static dynamics of the processes of change the role of situated agents in context is fundamental, as it injects intentionality and acknowledges the contingency of the conditions that surround them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis contribution seeks to develop some reflections on Marx as an analyst of the economy. I argue for a discursive Marxism that makes the integration of Foucauldian ideas into a Marxian framework possible. Three distinctive but interrelated questions will be addressed. First, what is specific about a Marxian understanding of the economy, especially compared to certain tendencies in economic sociology and political economy? Second, how is a Marxian understanding of the economy reflected by current Marxist studies and how have these (...) studies contributed to a discursive-cultural turn in Marxist and neo-Marxist analysis of the economy? Third, while the discursive-cultural turn became increasingly important, what is the contribution of discourse studies of the economy to a Marxian framework? The paper concludes with the idea of a Discursive Political Economy approach in order to grasp the cultural and institutional complexity of power. To put discursive processes into a Marxian framework, a combined analysis of discursive-imaginary as well as institutionalized-sedimented power positions is required. (shrink)

Ovaj clanak se bavi znacenjem zivota, i mogucnostima ukljucivanja zivota u okvire politicke filozofije. Postoje dva odgovora na ovo pitanje. Prvi odgovor se vezuje za H. Arent, a drugi za M. Fukoa koji je skicirao genezu biopolitike, to jest, razlicitih mehanizama optimalizacije kapaciteta zivota pocev od "klasicne epohe". Autor clanka posredstvom kriticke interpretacije H. Arent i Fukoa tvrdi da postoji opravdanost istovremenog tretiranja biomoci i suvereniteta. Time on namerava da zadobije perspektivu u odnosu na suverenitet koji tretira kao neizostavan u (...) artikulaciji politickih odnosa sto znaci drugacije u odnosu na pristupe H. Arent i M. Fukoa. Istovremeno autor clanka kritikuje koncept biopolitike smatrajuci da on dovodi do depolitizacije tela i zivota, cime se, delimicno, prihvataju odredjena upozorenja H. Arent. Politickoj filozofiji zapravo se pripisuje zadatak da tretira biomoc i suverenitet kao ireducibilne, ali i komplementarne okvire kao i da tretira njihov dinamicki medjuodnos. Tek ukoliko istovremeno tematizujemo suverenitet i biomoc dobijamo sliku o dinamici modernih politickih odnosa u Evropi. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of the quantification of higher education by introducing a theoretical framework for power relations and agency within this process. Instead of treating evaluation regimes as external and imposed on the sector, it argues for a relational approach to the problem of exercising power over the higher education sector through means of evaluation. To develop such an approach, the article draws on two sources: Guy Neave’s account of the evaluative state and Bob Jessop’s strategic–relational approach (SRA) (...) to the state. By using the latter to further develop our understanding of the logic under which the evaluative state operates, the article offers a general framework for inquiring about the conditions that shape power relations and impact the degree of agency at the disposal of the actors involved in the evaluative state. For this purpose, the article operationalises the six general dimensions of the state developed on the grounds of the SRA in the context of the evaluative state. In turn, to demonstrate its heuristic value, the article refers to the emergence of the evaluative state in Poland and how scholarly communication was quantified and made commensurate in this process. (shrink)

This article traces a line of theorisation regarding the state-civil society relationship, from Marx’s early writings to Gramsci’s conception of the integral state. The article argues that Marx developed, through his critique of Hegel, a valuable understanding of the state-civil society connection that emphasised the antagonism between them in capitalist societies. Alternatively, Gramsci’s conception of the ‘integral state’ posits an interconnection and dialectical unity of the state and civil society, where the latter is integrated under the leadership of the former. (...) The article argues that while Marx and Gramsci’s positions are, at first, seemingly incongruous ideas – as to the ‘separation’ in Marx and ‘integration’ in Gramsci – this tension can be bridged when the integral state is understood as being always necessarily unstable. The article argues that this framework can help us understand the contemporary breakdown of political rule in the phenomenon known as ‘anti-politics’. (shrink)

This article discusses the metatheoretical foundations of a critical realist approach to critical discourse analysis and counterposes them to insufficiently realist tendencies in Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, on the one hand, and anti-realist post-Marxist discourse theory on the other. The first section argues that Fairclough's approach is progressive in many ways, but lacks metatheoretical rigour with respect to important demarcation problems. These mainly concern CDA's understanding of discourse as mediating entity, its underlying dialectical-relational approach and overarching concept of social (...) practices. The discussion of Fairclough's approach necessitates a treatment of the relation of discourse and epistemology, in which the heritage of Foucault plays a crucial role and a brief engagement with ideology, in which Althusser is a major point of departure. The thesis is advanced that, among other things, Althusserian and Foucauldian residues in CDA's metatheory esta.. (shrink)

Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, (...) offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline. (shrink)

Recent theories of the state often draw attention to states’ autonomy from social preferences. This paper suggests that the phenomenon of public ignorance is the primary mechanism responsible for state autonomy in democratic polities. Such theorists as Skocpol and Poulantzus, who do not take account of public ignorance, either underestimate the state's autonomy or stress causal mechanisms that are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its autonomy. Gram‐sci's concept of ideological hegemony is promising, even though it is far too insistent (...) on the penetration of ideology of any kind beyond relatively small numbers of political sophisticates. (shrink)

Contemporary developed western economies are commonly referred to as ?knowledge-based? economies, which compete through drawing on the innovative and creative capacities of their local populations. Economic policy-makers must invest in and conserve the social, cultural and public resources that underpin dynamic and disruptive competitive activities, namely technological innovation and entrepreneurship, which bring new ideas and products to market. But these resources defy orthodox forms of economic knowledge and quantification. Their trajectories and outcomes are intrinsically uncertain. The paper draws on interviews (...) with experts who advise governments on innovation and competitiveness, to understand what expert strategies are used to deal with this epistemological problem. Such experts must project and retain epistemological authority, but without lapsing too far into quantitative, economistic and bureaucratic forms of reason. The paper identifies three ways in which knowledge of the future can be validated, but without disguising uncertainty: it can be presented as practically useful; as aesthetically appealing; and as hinting at some ?ultimate? form of ontological knowledge. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on domestic trade policies and practices. It shows that protectionist measures, including those practiced by the United States, have been effectively challenged, and consequently restricted, due to the WTO strengthened dispute settlement procedures. I show that the new procedures affected the substantive policy outcomes by changing the political influence of competing actors. Specifically, I identify four transformations affecting the political influence of participants: the re-scaling of political authority, the judicialization (...) of inter-state relations, the institutionalization of the international organization, and the structural internationalization of the state. Based on this case, the article offers a view of globalization as an institutional project. This view emphasizes the political dimension of the process of globalization; it suggests that this project was facilitated by transforming the institutional arrangements in place; and it identifies the contradictions inherent in it both to U.S. hegemony and to the globalization project itself. (shrink)

What allows theories to evolve, to progress? A contentious notion, progress still haunts a number of contemporary theories. However, little research invites us to rethink progress in a comprehensive way. In this article, I contribute to this issue by considering the paradigmatic case of David Harvey’s Marxism. A pathbreaking thinker in geography, sociology, and urban studies, Harvey claims his theory intrinsically surpasses its inherent contradictions. However, numerous authors suggest otherwise, as it fails to engage with essential urban processes such as (...) those based on state, gendered, racial, or environmental dynamics. These aspects of social life challenge his dialectical ambition. I argue that Harvey’s attachment to an orthodox Marxism ultimately limits his claim to theoretical progress. Reviewing Harvey’s overall body of work, I focus on his metatheory regarding space and his examination of the Paris Commune. I argue that his ideas on the progress of theory follow from his dialectical assumptions, which in turn inhibit his portrayal of practical realities and a continuous dialogue with concrete cases. (shrink)

1. The Covid-19 pandemic has made strikingly visible both the essential role of care work in societies and worrying symptoms of a care crisis (Dowling 2021; Rao 2021). These symptoms have become ma...

Oriented, descriptively, by recent liberal definitions of populism, this essay pursues a historical-materialist definition that grounds populist antagonisms in class struggles as ‘crystallised’ in the capitalist state. A critical assessment of Laclau’s early equation of populism and socialism inaugurates the reading of Poulantzas’s relational account of class and state as a nascent framework for a theory of populism, centred on the state and its ideological crystallisation of individualisation, the mental/manual-labour division and the ‘people-nation’. This framework is then expanded to articulate (...) the political-economic core of populist antagonisms, the specific character of ‘neoliberal populism’ today, and the potential, in relation to theories of ‘popular politics’ and a ‘communist people’, that left-wing populism might hold as a process of new political productions of class. This reading provides for a more expansive account of such movements’ potentials, beyond a threat to or correction of pre-determined democratic or Marxist schemas. (shrink)

Abstract An analysis of welfare?state restructuring under conservative governments during the 1980s undermines the notion that the nation?state is being rendered obsolete by economic globalization. The nation?state is still the principal site of political conflict. Yet this conflict has to be analyzed in light of global economic and cultural pressures. Conservative attempts to restructure the welfare state were parallel events within a larger transition in the world economy, but they had decisively distinct national trajectories.

Malcolm Quinn’s book,Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is an historical study of the birth pangs of the state-funded art school that interrogates the politics of art’s reproduction within the context of Victorian reformism in which the art school was proposed as a mechanism to improve the standards of taste of manufacturers and factory workers, as well as of artists, designers, art teachers and others. The review locates the political and cultural transition from the academy to the art (...) school as the construction of a specifically bourgeois institution of art. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to advance an analytical approach that systematically seeks to identify social mechanisms that generate and explain observed associations between events. In spite of recent contributions to animate the search for explanatory mechanisms, most of these monographs extol the theoretical while eschewing its application to applied research. This study emphasizes a systematic approach to identifying causal processes derived from critical realism by applying a realist template to research projects that claim to have identified causal mechanisms. (...) A critical realist framework serves as an independent standard in order to evaluate whether two proposed mechanisms, identified in applied research, adequately explain the phenomenon under study. The Disciplinary Revolution and The Familial State are used as sources of data since each work attempts to explain the emergence of the modern Dutch state yet by differing causal mechanisms. Realism’s approach to understanding causation emphasizes structural analysis which depends on abstract conceptualization in order to identify ontologically constituent properties, utilizes abductive and retroductive logic, and an emic interpretation of historical events. Findings suggest that research that intuitively emphasizes realist principles is more likely to identify causal processes. (shrink)

Abstract This essay provides a critical engagement with neo?Gramscian perspectives on European integration, dealing with their core theoretical assumptions as well as empirical analyses of individual aspects of European integration. It is argued that by drawing on Gramsci's rejection of economic determinism, his thinking on the agency?structure problem, as well as his work on how to conceptualise the role of ideas, neo?Gramscian perspectives as a critical theory are able to analyse the social purpose of European integration. The conclusion identifies several (...) shortcomings in the neo?Gramscian literature on European integration, namely (1) the neglect of national and European institutions and their structural impact on social forces as main collective actors; (2) the related oversight of possibilities for change within the existing institutional structure; (3) the neglect of studying resistance to neo?liberal restructuring in Europe; and (4) the missing analysis of trade unions and labour as potential actors within movements of resistance. (shrink)

Abstract In criticising the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce ? described by Eric Hobsbawm as the first ?post?Marxist? ? Antonio Gramsci elaborated a distinct theory of history. For Gramsci, philosophers such as Croce developed a subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than problems posed by historical development. This essay develops a ?double reading? of Gramsci. First, it presents an overview of a dominant post?Marxist reading of Gramsci?s approach to historical materialism, which constructs a closed (...) and particularistic understanding of his theory of history. Second, it offers a reading that exposes and unsettles problems within post?Marxism by demonstrating how Gramsci?s focus on changes in social relations threatens the assumptions about both traditional idealism and materialism. It is this theory of history that throws into relief certain features necessary to understanding history as more than just a completely contingent system of articulatory practices. The method of a double reading therefore affords insight into the internal tensions and questionable assumptions of history understood as an association of discourses (first reading). It also avoids developing an account that relies on an ?extrinsic history? of objective forces by combining an appreciation of ethico?political principles alongside economic factors within the struggle over hegemony relevant to contemporary global political economy (second reading). (shrink)

This dissertation shows how initial conditions play a special role in the explanation of contingent and irregular outcomes, including, in the form of geographic context, the special case of uneven development in the social sciences. The dissertation develops a general theory of this role, recognizes its empirical limitations in the social sciences, and considers how it might be applied to the question of uneven development. The primary purpose of the dissertation is to identify and correct theoretical problems in the study (...) of uneven development; it is not intended to be an empirical study. Chapter 1 introduces the basic problem, and discusses why it has become especially salient in debates concerning uneven development. Chapter 2 develops an argument for the importance of initial conditions in the philosophy of science, developed specifically in the context of the Bhaskar/Cartwright ‘open systems’ (and by extension, ‘exogenous factor’) emphasis on the ubiquity of contingency in the universe and rejection of explanation based on laws of nature (regularity accounts) of causation. Chapter 3 makes three claims concerning the concept of contingency, especially as related to the study of society: 1) that there are eight distinct uses of the word contingency, and its many meanings are detrimental to clarity of discussion and thought in history and the social sciences; 2) that it is possible to impose some order on these different uses through developing a classification of contingency into three types based on assumptions concerning possible worlds and determinism; 3) that one of the classes is a special use of the word without relevance to the social sciences, while the two remaining classes are nothing more than a variety of the ‘no hidden factors’ argument in the debate on indeterminism and determinism (and thus related to the concept of spacetime trajectories caused by initial conditions and the interference of these in the form of ‘exogenous factors’ with ‘open systems’). Chapter 4 The concept of explanation based on initial conditions together with laws of nature is widely associated with determinism. In the social sciences determinism has frequently been rejected due to the moral dilemmas it is perceived as presenting. Chapter 4 considers problems with this view. Chapter 5 considers attitudes among geographers, economists, and historians towards using geographic factors as initial conditions in explanation and how they might acceptably be used, in particular their role in ‘anchoring’ aspatial theories of social processes to real-world distributions. Chapter 6 considers the relationship of the statistical methods common in development studies with the trend towards integrating geographical factors into econometric development studies. It introduces the statistical argument on ‘apparent populations’ that arrives at conclusions concerning determinism consistent with Chapters 2 and 3 of the dissertation. The need for the visual interpretation of data with descriptive statistics and maps and their utility in the study of uneven development is discussed with a number of examples. Chapter 7 applies these concepts to the ‘institutions versus geography’ debate in development studies, using Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson’s 2002 ‘reversal of fortune’ argument as a primary example. Chapter 8 considers possible directions for future work, both theoretical and empirical. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of additional possible objections to the use of initial conditions as exogenous factors in explanation. (shrink)

Recent events impel us to rethink fundamentals: to bring political economy, historical materialist theory, state theory, and the theory of nations and national consciousness together, and to bear on the core questions: How mature is world capitalism today? What stadial — stage-theoretic — elements must be invoked to explain the present? A rigorous stadial approach to capitalist evolution suggests that, contrary to much popular wisdom, capitalism's conquest of the world is far from complete. This understanding does not mechanically postpone significant (...) social transformation; to the contrary, it points toward the possibility of getting a better fix on what is possible in the short term, so as to bring longer range goals into clearer focus and relevance. (shrink)

Una vez completado el ciclo de ajuste estructural y de reformas estatales pro-mercado de corte neoliberal de los años noventa, en América latina ha comenzado una nueva etapa. Ya en el contexto de la globalización, problemas clásicos como el desarrollo, la dependencia y el papel del estado nacional vuelven a tener vigencia teórica y práctica. En estas páginas pasamos revista a una muy rica tradición crítica, que va desde la visión del desarrollo de la CEPAL hasta la “teoría de la (...) dependencia” –incluyendo las contribuciones de autores marxistas y neo-marxistas-, que ha hecho un aporte importante para analizar los límites y las posibilidades del estado nación para establecer un espacio de autonomía frente al capitalismo global. Veremos, entonces, cómo viejos debates se entroncan hoy con nuevas configuraciones políticas y experiencias en diversos países de la región y reintroducen en la agenda cuestiones tan vigentes como el desarrollo y la dependencia. (shrink)