All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 395 pp., £19.99 pb. (ISBN 978-06312319682) The Threat of Race is an extraordinarily wide...

The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism

Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space

The aim of our paper is to offer a reading of the systemic significance of Hegel’s inclusion of the concept of the sign in the ‘Psychology’ of his Philosophy of Mind. We hope to explain why it is that the Hegelian system positions a specific form of sign, the meaningless utterance, at the point of Mind’s transition from ‘mechanical memory’ to ‘Thinking’. Rather than analyse the subtle advancements in the unfolding of the self-determining activity of ‘Theoretical Mind’, our strategy will be to focus attention on what we take to be some central aspects of the philosophical system’s wider developmental logic and of the general treatment of language in speculative philosophy. We do this by arguing that, according to Hegel’s Logic, language provides the element in which persons are drawn together out of their independent subjectivity into a unity that gives expression to their universal nature as in process and, ultimately, as a project to be realized. This argument is supplemented by a reading of the general nature of the movement of Spirit within Hegel’s system that draws attention to the significance of what we call ‘the absolute potentiality’ of Spirit. We argue that the transition from Mechanical Memory to ‘Thinking’ relies upon the activity of producing the meaningless utterance because this product of Mind reveals its universal nature to be its essential unity with its object. This transition allows us to show how Mind must be understood to return to itself out of its self-loss in Mechanical Memory. Finally we argue that the production of the meaningless utterance fulfils the requirement of reformulating the elementary idea of Spirit through an incorporation of the naturalness of the natural.

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On the systemic meaning of meaningless utterances : the place of language in Hegel's speculative philosophy.

Castoriadis explains racism as a mode of hatred of the other and as a feature of the self-institution of heteronomous societies built on ethnocentrism. At the level of the psychical human being he ...

Castoriadis, racist and anti-racist ontologies:

Asylum seekers and the concept of the foreigner

Education for global citizenship is one of many of strategies adopted by higher education institutions. We share the findings of a qualitative study in one Australian university that examined the i...

Toula Nicolacopoulos

Papers

On the systemic meaning of meaningless utterances : the place of language in Hegel's speculative philosophy.

Castoriadis, racist and anti-racist ontologies:

Asylum seekers and the concept of the foreigner

Conceptualising and educating for global citizenship: the experiences of academics in an Australian university

Indigenous and white Australians : the ontological encountering and the betrayal of thought