Interdisciplinary research is frequently viewed as an important component of the research landscape through its innovative ability to integrate knowledge from different areas. However, support for interdisciplinary research is often strategic rhetoric, with policy-makers and universities frequently adopting practices that favour disciplinary performance. We argue that disciplinary and interdisciplinary research are complementary, and we develop a simple framework that demonstrates this for a semi-permanent interdisciplinary research field. We argue that the presence of communicating infrastructures fosters communication and integration between disciplines (...) and the interdisciplinary research field to generate innovative knowledge. We apply this to the experience of economic history in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century to demonstrate the life cycle of a semi-permanent interdisciplinary research field. (shrink)

In the summer of 1998, the Wisconsin State legislature amended its child protection laws. Under new child abuse provisions, Wisconsin judges can confine pregnant women who abuse alcohol or drugs for the duration of their pregnancies. South Dakota enacted similar legislation almost simultaneously. The South Dakota statute requires mandatory drug and alcohol treatment for pregnant women who abuse those substances and classifies such activity as child abuse. In addition, the South Dakota legislation gives relatives the power to commit pregnant women (...) involuntarily for two days; a court order can place the pregnant women in custody for up to nine months. These recent legislative “successes” follow scores of failed attempts by legislators in other states to establish fetal protection laws aimed at women who use and abuse drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. (shrink)

In the summer of 1998, the Wisconsin State legislature amended its child protection laws. Under new child abuse provisions, Wisconsin judges can confine pregnant women who abuse alcohol or drugs for the duration of their pregnancies. South Dakota enacted similar legislation almost simultaneously. The South Dakota statute requires mandatory drug and alcohol treatment for pregnant women who abuse those substances and classifies such activity as child abuse. In addition, the South Dakota legislation gives relatives the power to commit pregnant women (...) involuntarily for two days; a court order can place the pregnant women in custody for up to nine months. These recent legislative “successes” follow scores of failed attempts by legislators in other states to establish fetal protection laws aimed at women who use and abuse drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. (shrink)

In this paper, we challenge the usual argument which says that competition is a fair mechanism because it ranks individuals according to their relative preferences between effort and leisure. This argument, we claim, is very insufficient as a justification of fairness in competition, and we show that it does not stand up to scrutiny once various dynamic aspects of competition are taken into account. Once the sequential unfolding of competition is taken into account, competition turns out to be unfair even (...) if the usual fairness argument is upheld. We distinguish between two notions of fairness, which we call U-fairness, where ‘U’ stands for the ‘usual’ fairness notion, and S-fairness, where ‘S’ stands for the ‘sequential’ aspect of competition. The sequential unfairness of competition, we argue, comprises two usually neglected aspects connected with losses of freedom: first of all, there is an ‘eclipse’ of preferences in the sense that even perfectly calculating competitors do not carry out a trade-off between effort and ranking; and second, competitive dynamics leads to single-mindedness because the constraints on the competitors’ choices always operate in the sense of increased competitiveness and, therefore, in the direction of an increased effort requirements. We argue (1) that competition is S-unfair even if it is U-fair, (2) that as S-unfairness increases, the ethical relevance of U-fairness itself vanishes, so that (3) by focusing as they usually do on U-fairness alone, economists neglect a deeper aspect of unfairness. (shrink)

Capitalism is back. Three decades ago, when all alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets appeared discredited, talk of capitalism seemed passé. Now, after a decade of political and economic turmoil, capitalism and its temporal critique of progress and decline again seems an indispensable category to understanding a world in flux. Among the social sciences, historians have led both the embrace and critique of this ‘re-emergent’ concept. This roundtable discussion between leading and emerging Australian scholars working across histories of economy, (...) work, policy, geography and political economy, extends this agenda. Representing the outcome of a workshop convened at La Trobe University in November 2018 and responding to questions posed by conveners Huf and Rees, five participants debate the nature, utility and future of the new constellation of ‘economic’ historical scholarship. While conducted well before the outbreak of COVID-19, the ensuring discussion nevertheless speaks saliently to the crises of our times. (shrink)

During the publication process of above mentioned article the Notes to Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 were erroneously deleted from the figure legends. The correct versions are given below.

The roots of the « Bolivarian revolution » are located in the fall of the dictatorship in 1958. The role of the armed forces in the history of the Venezuelan left considerably predates Chavez’s accession to power in 1998. If we are to understand the political process involved here, we must grasp the nature of the historical bonds between the radical left and certain sectors of the armed forces. The article reviews this history, examining the achievements of the Chavez governments (...) in power since 1998; It then addresses certain current debates in the country, notably on the question of the construction of a socialism for the twenty-first century and the role of the armed forces in the struggles of the country. (shrink)

Much of our knowledge about the nineteenth-century natural history boom resides with the collectors themselves and their collections. We know much less about the conduct of the global trade that made collecting possible. That such a trade occurred in the face of significant obstacles of distance, variable prices, inadequate information, and diverse agents makes our knowledge deficit the more significant. William John Macleay, based in Sydney, built his significant natural history collection by trading locally as well as across the globe. (...) Our study of Macleay measures his complete set of trading transactions at a time of rapid expansion of his collection. It analyses how he chose between different forms of exchange and agreed fair value in order to complete long-distance specimen trading. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)