Steve Fuller has replied to my critique of his endorsement of a post-truth epistemology. I trace the divergence in our approach to social epistemology by examining our distinct responses to the principle of symmetry in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Fuller has extended the concept of symmetry and challenged the field to embrace a post-truth condition that flattens the difference between experts and the public. By contrast, I have criticized the concept of symmetry for policing the field to rule ideology (...) critique out of court. I argue that a focus on post-truth populism obscures the role of counter-elites and ideologies that restrict political choice. A better way to promote democracy would be to support minority positions within science that promise to open up suppressed political possibilities and to seek the coordinated use of different disciplines to address significant public problems. (shrink)

Taking a critical perspective more political than that usually adopted by classicists, John Alvis demonstrates in this study that the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid each present a distinct political teaching regarding human ends and the form of civil society most conducive to the realization of those ends. Referring to the mysterious "plan of Zeus" announced in the opening lines of the Iliad but never explained, Alvis argues that both Homer's Zeus and Virgil's Jupiter guide their heroes to embody (...) principles of natural justice that in turn found political constitutions. The Political Plan of Zeus represents the first comprehensive theory of the meaning of Zeus's providence in both Homeric poems, a new interpretation of the muse in Homer, and the first attempt to compare the Aeneid with Platonic-Aristotelian teaching on the nature of man and the problem of empire. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and scholars of politics, philosophy, and the classics. (shrink)

Recent empirical work has offered strong support for ‘biased pluralism’ and ‘economic elite’ accounts of political power in the United States, according a central role to ‘business interest groups’ as a mechanism through which corporate influence is exerted. Here, we propose an additional channel of influence for corporate interests: the ‘policy-planning network,’ consisting of corporate-dominated foundations, think tanks, and elite policy-discussion groups. To evaluate this assertion, we consider one key policy-discussion group, the Council on Foreign Relations. We first (...) briefly review the origins of this organization and then review earlier findings on its influence. We then code CFR policy preferences on 295 foreign policy issues during the 1981–2002 period. In logistic regression analyses, we find that the preferences of more affluent citizens and the CFR were positive, statistically significant predictors of foreign policy outcomes while business interest group preferences were not. These findings are discussed with a consideration of the patterns of CFR ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ for the issues in our dataset. Although a full demonstration of a causal connection between corporate interests, the policy-planning network and policy outcomes requires further research, we conclude that this has been shown to be a plausible mechanism through which corporate interests are represented and that ‘biased pluralism’ researchers should include it in their future investigations. (shrink)

The Second World War and its associated political events of a national and global scale brought new circumstances, which was considerably influenced the development processes of Tehran. During World War II, Iran hoped that Washington would keep Britain and the Soviet Union from seizing control of the country’s oil fields. In 1951 and 1952 Truman worked with Iranian Prime Minister, though unsuccessfully, to regain some of those lost oil rights for Iran. By the late 1950s and President Kennedy’s presidency, (...) he used aid as leverage for social reform. During the early years of 1960s, the Kennedy Administration was urging its allies in the third world to carry out necessary reforms in order to prevent popular discontent and enhance the dominant ideology of ‘modernism’. In 1968, a major piece of legislation, the Urban Development and Renewal Act, enabled the municipality to implement Tehran’s Comprehensive Plan (TCP 1968), which integrated all the elements of a 1960s’ American city such as the separation of functions, highways, suburbs, shopping centers and housing area. The export of these American cities principles can only be understood from the background of the Cold War period, in which the east and west were both competing for cultural colonization of Middle Eastern strategically important cities like Tehran. During this period, the new developments supported by the oil boom of 1970s, were built in different forms to constitute an expanding metropolis. In 1974, the second “International Congress of Architecture” with the theme of “Toward a Quality of Life” held at Persepolis and brought together all leading world architects and planners to review Iran’s progress in its professional response to the challenges posed by increasing oil revenues. This research aims to represent the export of planning as a political means of cultural colonization of the Third World during the cold war period. (shrink)

The term ‘Third World’ was first used in 1952 by the French economist ­Alfred Sauvy­ in order to stress the division between the liberal ‘First’ world, the communist ‘Second’, and the rest of the non­aligned ‘Third’ world. During the 1970s and 1980s, the confrontation between the East and the West polarized the dissemination of the architecture and planning concepts. The export of ‘Modernism’ and its adaptations to the conditions of ‘Third World’ from Socialist and Capitalist countries introduced the new (...) paradigms of reconstruction and resettlement policies that create new urban identities in these countries. Rendering the importance of the complex relationship between interrelated politics in the geopolitical matrix of world war responses to a series of problematic questions on actual architectural concepts and meta­political strategies that frame social life in an oppressive frame. In cold war politics, urban planning was considered to be a powerful instrument, and that the export of architecture and planning functioned as a political apparatus by non­ government aid organizations, philanthropic foundations, corporations, and individual professionals. Through archival materials including historical documents, drawings, photographs, maps, planning transfers, and reconstruction strategies, this paper aims to show how we can re­conceptualize architecture and urban planning as a political apparatus of transnational transfer during the Post­war reconstruction projects to create a new urban identity. (shrink)

Drawing on models of the interaction order, we describe how planning is an inherently social activity. We argue that planning as a practice involves five core elements: mirroring, identifying, coordinating, timing, and surmounting. Specifically, planning depends on (1) a realization of likely responses of others, (2) a recognition of communal understandings, grounded in local cultures, (3) a commitment to collaborative engagements with allies, (4) an adjustment to temporal sequences involving the use of “in time” strategies and tactics, (...) and (5) an ability to overcome or avoid obstacles and blocking moves set by competitors and adversaries. Planning is evident in micro-, meso-, or macro-level domains. To demonstrate how planning is a social accomplishment, we analyze three distinct ethnographic sites: the world of competitive chess, dependent on the micro-interactions of two competitors; the meso-level process of homebuying, requiring the aid of real estate agents as allies; and macro-level structures in directing social movement activism in a contentious action field. Planning extends beyond cognitive achievement and is central to a sociology of the future. (shrink)

In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush called for the U.S to commit $15 billion over five years to address the international HIV/AIDS epidemic. For several reasons, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief caught many people by surprise. The surprise quickly was followed by excitement, tempered by skepticism.

As overdevelopment, noise pollution, and land use become considerations in modern life, we become more thoughtful of the quality of our environments, whether the space is for recreation, education, or residential living. Demonstrating how such tenets as "to each his own" have contributed to the demise of our public spaces, Environmental Aesthetics is the first integrated study of this emerging field. Beginning with a brief history of aesthetics, the author explores the concept of landscape, the psychology of human-environment relations, the (...) influences of literary, artistic and legal activism, and the roles of public policy and of planning. Clearly written and lavishly illustrated, the book will prove invaluable to anyone interested in how the physical environment can and should be improved. (shrink)

Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics is the first in the 10-volume series, Lynchburg College Symposium Readings, 3rd edition. Each volume presents primary texts organized around an interdisciplinary, liberal arts theme such as education, politics, social issues, science and technology, morals and ethics. The series has been developed by Lynchburg College faculty for use in the Senior Symposium and the Lynchburg College Symposium Readings Program (SS/LCSR). While these programs are distinctive to Lynchburg College, the texts are used on many college (...) campuses across the nation, as well as by readers interested in significant original texts on important topics. Addressing Education: Purposes, Plans, and Politics offers primary source readings on a wide range of topics in education. Here are the original writings that readers often only read about. In this volume, the educators speak for themselves in selections and excerpts from Plato (360 B.C. E.) to Paolo Freire (1968). Familiar luminaries Mann, Rousseau, DuBois, Keller, Jefferson, 21 in all gather together all in one volume to deliver these pivotal ideas with incomparable impact. Whether consumed cover-to-cover or piece-by-piece, the volume invites useful, critical debate on this important topic. (shrink)

AtPol.7.12, 1331a19–20, Aristotle states it as a matter of fact that the citizenry of the best city should be divided into ‘public messes’ (syssitia). His primary concern in the rest of the chapter is to uncover the optimal way in whichsyssitiashould be organized, and the way in which they should be situated in relation to other facilities, public buildings,agoraiand temples in the city. The proposed plan is roughly as follows.Syssitiawould be divided into three main sections. First, thesyssitiaof soldiers would be (...) held at the guardhouses located at strategic points along the walls surrounding the city (1331a20–3). Next come ‘the most supremesyssitiaof the magistrates’ (τὰ κυριώτατα τῶν ἀρχείων συσσίτια: 1331a24–5) and thesyssitia‘of the priests’ (τῶν ἱερέων: 1331b5). These would be held at a place appropriately having ‘an appearance directed at establishing virtue and [being] more strongly positioned than the neighbouring parts of the city’ (1331a28–30), that is, the highest place in the city. This envisioned acropolis would also house temples (1331a24–5). Situated below it would be the ‘freeagora’, which would include gymnasia (1331a35–7) and would be generally directed at leisurely activity (1331b12). Finally, below the freeagora, a ‘necessaryagora’ and buildings of officials entrusted with legal, commercial and municipal duties would be established, at a location conducive to importing and exporting goods (1331b6–12). (shrink)

After decades of postcolonial development planning in the former colonies of Africa, one question that has been asked over and over again concerns how much has changed in Africa since the launch of what used to be called the first, second, third and other development decades. There is no doubt that national development policies and plans have played significant roles in influencing the direction of the post-political-independence development processes in Africa. This paper argues, however, that far more serious (...) attention needs to be paid by the African public to the important contributions that the nature of their development plans can make in the transformations of their lives. This paper uses development plans as an exemplar of social mechanisms in critical realist philosophy and argues that the development planning authorities in Africa need to take seriously the nature of the relations between their ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ sectors in the formulation and implementation of their development plans. (shrink)

In China, the transformation from a centrally planned economy to one dominated by market forces has been characterized by the devolution of authority from the center to localities. This is as true of the enormous state bureaucracy associated with the control of fertility as it is with the economic bureaucracies more often studied in transitional societies. Using observations from several field sites, the authors document how county-, township-and village-level family planning cadres have gone from being agents of the state (...) to autonomous actors who must negotiate between the ongoing demands of the central bureaucracy and the new opportunities available in the locales in which they work and dwell. They suggest that any serious change in the draconian restrictions on fertility that have obtained in China for almost thirty years is likely to derive from initiatives at the local level. Local actors have already begun to adjust to the tensions between responsibilities and available resources that have tended to induce paralysis in the upper levels of this long-standing state bureaucracy. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to explore "the highly contested nature of [decision-making through adopting] a historically comparative and interdisciplinary approach." Internalist history of game theory treats decision theory as a science of making choices to maximize expected gain. Game theory is applied to nuclear deterrence and military strategy, building markets and designing institutions, analyzing collective action, developing jurisprudence, and addressing crime and punishment. This essay draws on recent historiography of Cold War decision-making to draw into focus the constructive (...) aspects of decision theory to argue that the perceived need to avoid worst-case scenarios has instead contributed to a world in which the worst outcome is probabilistically assured to occur over the long duree timeframe. (shrink)

This book examines the relevance of modern medicine and healthcare in shaping the lives of elderly persons and ageing societies. Combining individual and social dimensions, Planning Later Life discusses the ethical, social, and political consequences of increasing life expectancies and demographic change in the context of biomedicine and public health. By focusing on the field of biomedicine and healthcare, the authors engage readers in a dialogue on the ethical and social implications of recent trends in dementia research and (...) care, advance healthcare planning, or the rise of anti-ageing medicine and prevention. Bringing together the largely separated debates of individualist bioethics on the one hand, and public health ethics on the other, the volume deliberately considers the entanglements of envisioning, evaluating, and controlling individual and societal futures. The process of devising and exploring the various positive and negative visions and strategies related to later life is rarely reflected systematically from a philosophical, sociological, and ethical point of view. As such, this book will be crucial to those working and studying in the life sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, particularly in the areas of bioethics, social work, gerontology and aging studies, healthcare and social service, sociology, social policy, and geography and population studies. (shrink)

The use of participatory methods has become increasingly popular in agricultural research and development and natural resource management. A range of approaches are being used at the grassroots level in order to involve local citizens and groups in projects. Many of these activities remain peripheral and isolated from conventional development agencies and policies. However, recent efforts are evolving to link participatory approaches into wider planning and policy-making processes and to increase the influence of such methods in resource management initiatives. (...) Main lessons from these innovative participatory experiences in addressing policy issues for sustainable development are summarized. (shrink)

The political developments in post-socialist countries are taken as a general frame for discussing rural development in the transition from centrally planned to market economies. Rural communities and agriculture in post-socialist countries are facing major problems related to decollectivization of property, the stimulation of effective private agricultural units, and the building up of integrated rural communities and their local autonomy. After presenting the developments in Slovenia in detail, the author comes to the conclusion that no foreign/western development model can (...) be literally applied to any post-socialist state. These nations must define their own goals and formulate the strategies to reach them based on the analysis of their specific situations, and in doing this they must engage their own scientists/professionals and take foreign experts only as occasional advisors. (shrink)

Among all forms of city planning, the grid plan appears, historically, to be the most measurable and recognizable system of civic geography. This paper will explore how and why different social groups have been able to define the symbolism of the grid to suit their own political purposes and how governments and patrons have utilized the grid as the spatial manifestation for their political ideologies. This paper will be based on case studies of cities operating under very (...) dissimilar political systems, i.e., the cities of ancient China and the city of Chicago in the Unites States. I argue that the American grid plan focuses on its peripheries, and that the expansive instinct of the American grid was effective in building a coherent American nation, transcending regional and class divisions. By contrast, the Chinese grid plan emphasizes the center, and the practices of urban planning in ancient China symbolized the evaluative tactics of the elite. (shrink)

Our capacity for planning agency is a core capacity that underlies interrelated forms of mind-shaped practical organization: cross-temporal organization of individual agency, shared agency, social rules, and rule-guided organized institutions. A function of our capacity for planning agency is the support of these forms of practical organization. I highlight Peter Godfrey-Smith's contrast between the ‘Wright function’ of something as ‘the effect it has which explains why it is there’ and ‘Cummins functions’ that ‘are capacities or effects of components (...) of systems, which are salient in the explanation of capacities of the larger system’. Drawing on Paul Grice's strategy of ‘creature construction’, I articulate a sequence of nested constructions: from temporally extended planning agency to shared agency to shared policies to social rules to rule-guided organized institutions. We see our capacity for planning agency as part of an explanation of how we achieve such practical organization, and as having nested Cummins functions of supporting those forms of organization. This sheds light on related ideas in H.L.A. Hart's theory of law, a challenge from J. David Velleman, the centrality of such forms of organization to the philosophy of action, and the moral and political significance of our capacity for planning agency. (shrink)

Within the planning discourse two poles have materialised over the last decades: a participatory ideal guided by substantive rationality, opposed to an algorithmic governmentality subordinated to instrumental reason. This rift within socialist thought is also observable when it comes to the discovery of needs. The paper understands this discovery procedure primarily as a forecasting problem and demonstrates how many authors dedicated to a participatory planning process call for consumers to write down their desires in the form of wish (...) lists. As a response to this epistemically questionable discovery procedure, the state of the art in capitalist demand-forecasting at enterprises like Amazon is presented, where machine-learning algorithms excel at modelling interrelated time series on a global level by extrapolating demand patterns in real-time. The paper closes with a proposal to reconfigure this predictive apparatus for socialist ends and raises questions concerned with the political implications of centralising decision-making in black-box algorithms. (shrink)

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in _A Theory of Justice_ but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines--religious, philosophical, and moral--coexist within the (...) framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls ' plans to revise _Political Liberalism,_ which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on _A Theory of Justice_...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." --_Times Literary Supplement_. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the Canberra Plan is ill-equipped to offer a satisfactory theory of gender. Insofar as the Canberra Plan aims to provide a general and unified approach to philosophical theorising, this is a significant problem. I argue that this deficit in their method stems from the robust role assigned to pre-theoretical beliefs in constructing philosophical analyses. I utilise a critical conception of ideology to explain why our pre-theoretic beliefs about certain social kinds are likely to deliver (...) politically dubious metaphysics of the social world. The first half of the paper is dedicated to exercising this theoretical shortcoming. In the second half, I suggest a way in which the Canberra Plan can address and rectify this problem, with a view to maintaining the theoretical viability of the Canberra Plan with respect to politically important concepts. (shrink)

Tout au long des années 80, Derrida a exploré le thème de l’invention et étudié en particulier sa conception cartésienne. Derrida récuse avec force cette dernière pour montrer qu’elle dissimule une conception théologico-politique du sujet, accomplissant sur le plan politique la thèse métaphysique du logocentrisme. Mais, à partir de Psychè. Inventions de l’autre, cette vision est infléchie pour développer la signification positive de ce qu’il finit par appeler « l’invention du même » qui constitue l’un des courants majeurs de l’invention (...) techno-scientifique au sens moderne. Solidaire d’une certaine « politique de la recherche », Descartes voit l’une de ses inventions, la « langue universelle », être pour la première fois « contresignée » par Derrida. Cette reconnaissance ne doit pas toutefois cacher un désaccord où se révèle l’originalité de la pensée derridienne de l’invention : résolument anticartésienne, elle propose une inventio qui, en tant qu’elle confond avec le jeu même de la « différance », s’exclut de la cogitatio. Événement immanent à la res extensa qui, pour cette raison, ne saurait être entièrement rationalisé et qui, c’est significatif, en même temps qu’il s’ouvre à la chance, renvoie à une autre conception de l’être-ensemble. L’invention porte dans son excès, selon Derrida, l’annonce d’un temps nouveau. (shrink)

Historically the plan has been about much more than economic planning. By plan-based thought I mean a concept of social governance that requires a multiple but structured articulation of social, economic, administrative and political forces and institutions and aims at shaping new forms of integration and social control using a specific scientific discourse.The following essays provide an analysis of global planning starting from different historical and geographical situations and different disciplinary perspectives. The broad picture that emerges shows (...) points of continuity and discontinuity between different contexts and theories but also reveals a common theme: the conflictual relationship between economics and politics which not only reflects the hierarchies between state and society but also shows the dialectic between different forms and conceptions of power and their social reproduction. Plan-based thought does not only concern temporary institutional transformations, but reacts and is connected to the management of social conflicts over time. (shrink)

The centrally-planned Soviet command economy was one of the twentieth century’s most radical and complex economic, political and social experiments. Its establishment did not coincide with the onset of Soviet power across the former Russian Empire in 1917-1918, but instead resulted from fifteen years of shifts, readjustments and breaks, and through experiments with both quasi-socialist market economics and centralised administrative command practices. The present article surveys the conflictual relationship between Soviet planning and Marxism in this period. It demonstrates (...) how the Stalinist command economy contradicted much of the theory and practice that the Bolsheviks themselves had thought ought to characterise the new economic system. (shrink)

How we live our lives depends on how we relate to our past, present and future. The article focusses on the relation to our future. The target of my critique is a “planning conception” that imagines the future as a realm that we can rationally plan and form in light of our ends. In the first section I present an outline of the planning conception, building on Bratman’s planning theory and Rawls’ idea of a life plan. The (...) second section highlights the attractions of the planning conception. I argue that this conception offers a prima facie intriguing view of the temporality of human life. It promises a life in which we can control the passage of time. The third section reveals severe limitations of the planning conception. I question the claim that plans are central to our self-understanding and to a good life. The planning conception tends to distort the temporality of human life with respect to past, present and future. Given this diagnosis, I sketch an alternative in the last section of the paper. I explore the temporal specifics of ways of understanding oneself as a person and argue that both the formation and the very form of these ‘ways of being’ do not follow the logic of planning. (shrink)

Watershed planning has typically been approached as a technical problem in which water quality and quantity as influenced by the hydrology, topography, soil composition, and land use of a watershed are the significant variables. However, it is the human uses of land and water as resources that stimulate governments to seek planning. For the past decade or more, many efforts have been made to create democratic planning processes, which, it is hoped, will be viewed as legitimate by (...) those the plans regulate. This article uses a case study of the Cache River watershed in southernmost Illinois to analyze the complicated historical and political economic context of a specific watershed planning process that occurred from 1993 through 1995. This article assesses the claims made about the democratic, grass-roots, deliberative nature of the planning process and casts doubt on the legitimacy of its outcomes. It also proposes an alternative form of governance that would be both democratic and capable of generating outcomes viewed as legitimate by most affected parties. (shrink)

Like in all industrial societies, in the United States economic planning was a prominent political-economic ideal in the wake of World War II. Paying attention to the postwar decades, this article focuses on how and why private American industrial corporations appropriated the practice and rhetoric of planning, in the context of the outbreak of the Cold War. This corporate appropriation displaced debates about planning into a social and cultural register in the United States. Paradoxically, the outward-looking (...) U.S. state accepted robust state planning regimes abroad even as the Cold War hampered the legitimacy of state-centered economic planning at home. The paradox helped set the stage for the global crisis of industrial societies after 1968 that brought the postwar era to a close and would ultimately undermine economic planning everywhere. (shrink)