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Showing papers in "Economy and Society in 2005"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that global value chains are becoming increasingly "buyer-driven" even though they are characterized by "hands-off" forms of co-ordination between "lead firms" and their immediate suppliers.
Abstract: Convention theory helps refine our understanding of the governance of global value chains through its analysis of ‘quality’. In this article, it is argued that global value chains are becoming increasingly ‘buyer-driven’, even though they are characterized by ‘hands-off’ forms of co-ordination between ‘lead firms’ and their immediate suppliers. This is because lead firms have been able to embed complex quality information into widely accepted standards and codification and certification procedures. As suggested by convention theory, their success in doing so has depended on defining and managing value chain-specific quality attributes that are attuned to broader narratives about quality that circulate within society more generally.

805 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that there are real limits to the pursuit of a full adult worker model based on the commodification of care and raised the issue of the terms and conditions on which such a shift in policy assumptions are made, particularly about the valuing and sharing of the unpaid work of care.
Abstract: There is evidence that policy-makers in most Western welfare states are moving towards a new set of assumptions about the contributions that men and women make to families, based on an adult worker model. This paper first examines this shift in policy assumptions at the EU level and goes on to argue that there are real limits to the pursuit of a full adult worker model based on the commodification of care. In respect of gender equality, this in turn raises the issue of the terms and conditions on which such a shift in policy assumptions are made, particularly about the valuing and sharing of the unpaid work of care. The final part of the paper examines the possibilities offered by the capabilities approach of addressing these issues.

419 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a critical appraisal of the recent turn by New Labour to community cohesion and social capital as a means of overcoming local poverty and disadvantage is presented, and an alternative designation of the local-social that is less instrumentalist, decidedly a-moral (though equally ethical), agonistically political, and geographically unconstrained.
Abstract: While plenty has been written about the reinvention of the social by the Third Way as a new governmentality of control, consensus, and social integration, less has been said about its subtle elision of social and the local, and the implications of this elision for urban and regional regeneration. This is the theme taken up by this paper, beginning with a critical appraisal of the recent turn by New Labour to community cohesion and social capital as a means of overcoming local poverty and disadvantage. It shows how the social has come to be redefined as community, localized, and thrown back at hard-pressed areas as both cause and solution in the area of social, political, and economic regeneration. The second half of the paper develops an alternative designation of the local-social that is less instrumentalist, decidedly a-moral (though equally ethical), agonistically political, and geographically unconstrained. It argues for a return to ideas of agonistic democracy and the society of commitments ...

329 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors make intensive use of international comparisons, challenge the role of market as the exclusive coordinating mechanism, and raise doubts about the existence of a 'one best way' for capitalism.
Abstract: The variety of capitalism school (VOC) and regulation theory (TR) are both analyses of the diversity of contemporary national economies. If VOC challenges the primacy of liberal market economies (LME) and stresses the existence of an alternative form, i.e. coordinated market economies (CME), TR starts from a long-term analysis of the transformation of capitalism in order to search for alternatives to the Fordist regime that emerged after the post-Second World War era. Both approaches make intensive use of international comparisons, challenge the role of market as the exclusive coordinating mechanism, and raise doubts about the existence of a 'one best way' for capitalism. Finally, they stress that globalization does deepen the competitive advantage associated with each institutional architecture. Nevertheless, their methodology differs: VOC stresses private firm governance, whereas TR considers the primacy of systemic and macroeconomic coherence. Whereas for VOC there exist only LME and CME, TR recurrently finds at least four brands of capitalism: market-led, meso-corporatist, social democrat and State-led. VOC seems to consider that the long-term stability of each capitalism can be challenged only by external shocks, but TR stresses the fact that the very success of a regulation mode ends up in a structural crisis, largely endogenous.

279 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions, including the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates.
Abstract: This paper engages with a wide range of social theories to argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions. The paper begins with a brief overview of modernist and postmodernist accounts, including the works of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux. These theories have provided a useful corrective to neoclassical economic accounts that distil the economic from society and culture, but they reinforce an understanding of money that is homogenizing, in that it is said to annihilate space by time. By contrast, network theories of money, which are reviewed in the following section of this paper, offer a more contextualized understanding of money's embeddedness in social relations, in particular vis-a-vis the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates. The spatial dynamics of monetary circulation are intrinsic to this model, but t...

112 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that the outsourcing of production from the metropole generated problems of monetary connectivity that motivated the banking sector to develop and market a new species of derivative: the financial derivative.
Abstract: The analysis argues that the outsourcing of production from the metropole generated problems of monetary connectivity that motivated the banking sector to develop and market a new species of derivative: the financial derivative. Virtually non-existent until 1973, such derivatives would soon become a 100 trillion dollar market. Making a market for these derivatives opened the door for speculative capital just as the attempt by this market to capture the risks embodied in local monetized relations led to emergence of a notion of abstract risk. The notion of abstract risk, embodied in the derivative and propelled by a self-expanding speculative capital, is globally significant because abstract risk functions as a social mediation, creating a new form of interdependence in the sphere of circulation even as circulation itself grows increasingly autonomous from production. We show that what makes the emergent culture of financial circulation historically new is that it is defined and determined through the obje...

100 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a conceptual vocabulary that enables us to take account of two apparently conflicting trends in the world's money flows: state-issued currency is undergoing a process of homogenization, while money in a generic sense is diversifying through the rapid growth of new monetary forms.
Abstract: This paper offers much-needed analytical refinement to the sociology of money. I argue that we need to develop a conceptual vocabulary that enables us to take account of two apparently conflicting trends in the world's money flows. While state-issued ‘currency’ is undergoing a process of homogenization, ‘money’ in a generic sense is diversifying through the rapid growth of new monetary forms. I move on to suggest that all forms of money (some currencies, others not) should be regarded as dual: as monies of account and as monetary media. This dualism sheds new light on a monetary form that sociologists have either ignored or misunderstood, namely the euro. It enables us to conceive of the euro as a highly unorthodox, or hybrid, currency. Moreover, it suggests that, by virtue of this unorthodoxy, the euro zone represents a special case of currency homogenization that may actually stimulate monetary diversification.

65 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation, drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, and demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions.
Abstract: This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics, consultants, journalists and practitioners, abstractions demonstrated considerable agency in the construction of e-commerce, and were used in an attempt to demonstrate that a new, and potentially hyper-profitable, form of capitalism was being born. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of these processes and draws attention to the neglected role of the cultural circuit of capital and a range of practical knowledges that are continually being revised and which we argue are equally constitutive of e-commerce. While it is easy to dismiss the promises of e-commerce as so much hyperbole, particularly in the wake of the dot.com crash, we argue that the success of e-commerce is signaled by the fact that it has lost much of its rhetorical power and has faded into the business background. E-commerce now constitutes an increasingly ambient set of technologies and practices.

53 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism and show how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration.
Abstract: This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism. It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on some universal ethical issues.

50 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article showed that money is constituted by social relations characteristic of credit, namely relations of 'promise to pay' and that these are commercial relations among "foreign" commodity owners, not credit relations.
Abstract: In a recent debate in Economy and Society, Ingham criticized Marxist theory of money on the grounds that it relates money to commodities through the labour theory of value, while ignoring credit money. Ingham suggested instead that money is constituted by social relations characteristic of credit, namely relations of ‘promise to pay’. Drawing on Marx, this article shows that, pace Ingham, it is necessary theoretically to relate money to commodities. Money is indeed constituted by social relations, but these are commercial relations among ‘foreign’ commodity owners, not credit relations. The social relations of money are successfully captured by Marx's concept of the universal equivalent, when that is interpreted as monopoly over the ability to buy. In this light, both commodity and credit money are forms of the universal equivalent, but qualitatively different from each other.

46 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: O'Malley as discussed by the authors explores the genealogy of liberal government and how it has made use of risk, uncertainty, and government to make use of uncertainty in its decision-making process.
Abstract: Text reviewed Pat O'Malley (2004) Risk, Uncertainty and Government, London: Glasshouse Press. In this book Pat O'Malley explores the genealogy of liberal government and how it has made use of risk ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the liberal government of "character" from the perspective offered by those practices, strategies and techniques I term "ethological governance" which is neither an ideology nor a tradition of thought, but denotes an orientation to human conduct that is organized by an explicit concern with character and its formation.
Abstract: This paper examines the liberal government of ‘character’ from the perspective offered by those practices, strategies and techniques I term ‘ethological governance’. Ethological governance is neither an ideology nor a tradition of thought, but denotes an orientation to human conduct that is organized by an explicit concern with character and its formation. The paper argues that ethological governance, especially in its Anglo-American strain, subscribes to a developmental notion of human conduct (i.e. character) and serves as a standard for liberal government by judging the responsible exercise of freedom. To this end, the paper examines how ethological governance establishes a context of government that harnesses character as a tool for social and political transformation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by (1) explaining how character establishes a normative scale against which the capacity for individuals to practise their freedom is measured and (2) offering a symptomatic reading of thos...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: By distinguishing monies of account from monetary media, then classifying variants of the two, Nigel Dodd makes a general contribution to monetary analysis as well as clarifying the location of the euro within the range of contemporary monies as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: By distinguishing monies of account from monetary media, then classifying variants of the two, Nigel Dodd makes a general contribution to monetary analysis as well as clarifying the location of the euro within the range of contemporary monies. So doing, he rejects common distinctions between genuine money – legal tender backed by national authorities – and other lesser forms of currency. His account suffers, however, from slighting the social relations and practices that inform people's actual uses of money, and therefore the distinctions built on relations and practices.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a case study of a newly created Brazilian research and technology capability is presented, where new organizational forms often transgress established scientific and organizational boundaries and arrangements, and new frontiers of science and technology can be opened up by the alternative trajectories generated by differences in socioeconomic, institutional and ecological conditions.
Abstract: The paper raises issues of analysis and policy for science and technology in developing countries within the global context of the post-genomic era. Based on a case study of a newly created Brazilian research and technology capability, it argues for an understanding of variety creation, where new organizational forms often transgress established scientific and organizational boundaries and arrangements. In particular, new frontiers of science and technology can be opened up by the alternative trajectories generated by differences in socio-economic, institutional and ecological conditions in ways that thereby reinforce those very differences. It stresses the inherent unevenness and heterogeneity of innovation processes. By focusing on the geopolitical significance of diverse pathways of science and innovation, the approach suggests an alternative vision to catch-up models of innovation and development in terms of variety creation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors look at the response of Western leftists to the unfolding of the Iranian revolution, considering, first, to what extent Marxist and class-based analyses helped explain the revolution and, second, why so many Western leftist groups and individuals defended the Khomeini faction even as it moved against secular leftists and liberals.
Abstract: The Iranian revolution of 1978–83 was a disaster for Iranian leftists, who, having worked for the overthrow of the Shah, soon found themselves being persecuted by the hard-line followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini. This paper looks at the response of Western leftists to the unfolding of the revolution, considering, first, to what extent Marxist and class-based analyses helped explain the revolution and, second, why so many Western leftist groups and individuals defended the Khomeini faction even as it moved against secular leftists and liberals. It concludes that an uncritical identification with Khomeini's declared ‘anti-imperialism’ distorted the views of those who would ordinarily have opposed his regime on class grounds, and that such a misreading was aided by an inadequate distinction between bourgeois democracy and dictatorship.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored the idea of suicide as an act which may legitimately be witnessed and indeed demands to be witnessed, making it a proper subject for literary/artistic representation, and showed that suicide might be honourable if it was felt to express the status of its agent as a moral witness.
Abstract: This paper explores the idea of suicide as, under some circumstances, an act which may legitimately be witnessed, indeed demands to be witnessed, making it a proper subject for literary/artistic representation. For ancient Romans, a suicide might be honourable if it was felt to express the status of its agent as a moral witness. The death of Cato in 46 bce was celebrated in antiquity as the prime example of such a suicide. Cato's death was the subject of a highly successful stage play by Joseph Addison first staged in 1713. Addison's uneasy handling of Cato's death betrays the difficulty of presenting suicide as an inspirational spectacle of virtue in the context of early eighteenth-century Britain, where deliberate self-killing was treated as a crime and an offence against religion.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The concept of risk occupies centre-stage in debates about individual and social responsibilities and, within a broadly neo-liberal regime, the paradigmatic form of risk management is insurance.
Abstract: The concept of risk occupies centre-stage in debates about individual and social responsibilities and, within a broadly neo-liberal regime, the paradigmatic form of risk management is insurance. Nevertheless analysis of these recent shifts in welfare politics appears curiously disconnected from dominant trends of normative political theorizing. The rise of ‘insurance as government’ and ‘risk management as responsibility and opportunity’ has not obviously been addressed even by prominent liberal political theorists. Similarly the analysts of neo-liberalism have devoted little attention to tracing these concepts through the literature on political theory. This article seeks to remedy this disconnection, by showing how Ronald Dworkin – perhaps the foremost liberal theorist writing today – offers us an account of equality which foregrounds the apparatus of insurance, and represents the management of risk within the welfare system as both an opportunity and a responsibility. Furthermore, his account inherits m...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In particular, the Adaman and Devine proposal for participatory planning lacks clear and operational criteria to distinguish those cases where (according to them) markets should, and should not, be deployed as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Fikret Adaman and Pat Devine (2001) responded to an article in which I criticized proposals by socialists to give markets a marginal role (Hodgson 1998). This present essay continues the debate, raises some additional issues and considers some later works by Adaman and Devine. A central problem in any economic system is the existence of conflicting plans, and some partial use of the market is required to deal with this problem. In particular, the Adaman and Devine proposal for participatory planning lacks clear and operational criteria to distinguish those cases where (according to them) markets should, and should not, be deployed. Their reference to the M-form firm does not help them in this regard. This reply further considers the inadequate treatment of tacit knowledge and innovation in that proposal. Their proposal also has the serious weakness that it allows little separation of powers and requires all but the most trivial of decisions to be submitted to an all-encompassing, unitary system of decision-making. Legitimate individual or group autonomy is thereby endangered.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Durkheim's classic suicide study as discussed by the authors still has many surprises and mysteries over 100 years after it was written: why was the order of analysis reversed in this study?Why did Durkheim have recourse to theory? Why did the study require dramatizations of its 'individual forms'?
Abstract: Durkheim's classic study Suicide still has many surprises and mysteries over 100 years after it was written: why was the order of analysis reversed in this study? Why did Durkheim have recourse to theory? Why did the study require dramatizations of its 'individual forms'? This paper tries to answer these questions with reference to Durkheim's failure to find a link between the way individual suicides are committed and social causation. This simple and unexpected finding suggested to Durkheim that analysis of suicide rates was more complex than he had anticipated. Because he could not establish a continuous causal chain via the means employed to commit suicide, he looked elsewhere and claimed to have established it in the emotional character of the act itself. This led him to a highly speculative construction of a set of ideal typical scenographies of suicide to save his conception of expressive causation, rather than restructure his theory of suicide to meet the complexity he had found, and particularly h...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that mainstream economics does have real tendencies conducive to expansion and that it has also been engaged in a process of eliminating alternatives within economics that have traditionally emphasised a broad pluralist/pragmatist philosophical position.
Abstract: The basic thesis of this paper is that Ben Fine and Grahame Thompson's 1999 exchange on economics imperialism illustrates two positions that talk across each other. Fine's approach to understanding the field of mainstream economics combines methodological analysis of theoretical innovation and a broad critical sociology. Thompson's response to Fine combines methodological analysis of practical and theoretical problems that currently inhibit the mainstream with a broad pluralist/pragmatist philosophical position. Analysing each position provides a useful way to develop the issues at stake in the debate – specifically, what are the potentials and ramifications of mainstream economics? We argue that mainstream economics does have real tendencies conducive to expansion. Its discursive constitution is dualistic (defining its limits but with an insignificant outside) and knows no genuine boundary. It has also been engaged in a process of eliminating alternatives within economics that have traditionally emphasiz...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the performative role of calculative devices and develop the notion of political markets by drawing upon an empirical case of the transfer of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS).
Abstract: The author inquires into the performative role of calculative devices, and develops the notion of political markets by drawing upon an empirical case of the transfer of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Drawing on the work of Michel Callon, the author claims the natural market to be a special case of the political market, its existence being highly dependent upon calculative devices. The aggregated simulation models and investment calculations of economics were instrumental in establishing the necessary conditions of the natural market. Yet, it remained only a temporally stabilized configuration. With the emergence of reflexive economic agencies, the market also underwent unexpected reorganizations. Finally, the author summarizes the theoretical and practical implications by proposing the twin notions of engineering-oeconomicus and the normalizing market residual.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The third volume of David Garland's trilogy as discussed by the authors attempts to characterize recent developments in the field of crime control and criminal justice in terms of the emergence of a 'culture of control' using the genealogical method developed by Michel Foucault.
Abstract: The third volume of David Garland's trilogy attempts to characterize recent developments in the field of crime control and criminal justice in terms of the emergence of a ‘culture of control’. For these purposes the author claims to use the genealogical method developed by Michel Foucault. This essay argues that Garland's selective reliance on this method amounts to an undoing of the Foucauldian ‘project’ insofar as it re-introduces the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy which Foucault had tried to subvert throughout his work. This undoing entails profound consequences for the politics of The Culture of Control, which concludes on a reformist proposition that forsakes a form of resistance grounded on the awareness of its own, intrinsic limitations.

Journal ArticleDOI
Vikki Bell1
TL;DR: This article argued that the politics of suicide bombings can be seen to operate through the aesthetic responses they produce, insofar as these responses are provoked and in that they necessarily mobilise further responses.
Abstract: It is argued here that the politics of suicide bombings can be seen to operate through the aesthetic responses they produce, insofar as these responses are provoked and in that they necessarily mobilise further responses. The article considers the scene of devastation created by a Chechen suicide bomber in Moscow in 2003. Drawing upon a reading of the political theory of Hannah Arendt that ties her to the tradition of thinking the sublime, it suggests that the 'aesthetic' impact of the scene dislocates the witness as well as simultaneously locating her/him in this world, a world in which such things happen. This location is a prompting to consider the world-in-common, the movements of the world, in a parallel sense to that in which the notion of the sublime has been employed to describe how the particular can have the ability to usher forth a feeling that there may be a super-sensible purposiveness to nature. At this prompting, the subject is humiliated and limited, since s/he becomes aware of the impossibility of adequately answering such questions, while 'ethically' her/his task is to nevertheless attempt some articulation of the connections so prompted. The article considers various ways in which that articulation might take place in relation to the Moscow bombing, and argues that these contested articulations constitute the 'political' level prompted in response to a scene of horror whose impact operates on the level of sensibility.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the relevance of suicide studies for moral and ethical questions of agency and autonomy has been explored, arguing against any too one-dimensional an uptake of this purely voluntaristic view of suicide.
Abstract: The topic of this paper turns upon the relevance of suicide studies for moral and ethical questions of agency and autonomy. The paper - for sociological reasons - focuses upon literary and artistic suicides, arguing that these afford some insight into the notion of the aesthetic problematic of suicide more generally, in other words those suicides that are held to be something like pure acts of autonomous will. Arguing against any too one-dimensional an uptake of this purely voluntaristic view of suicide, the paper attempts to explore the implications of the consideration that there is something inevitably passive and reactive about any act of suicide; a consideration which has consequences for the way in which we might regard suicide not just from literary and aesthetic but also from moral, ethical and social points of view.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which they attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective.
Abstract: In this paper I explore just a few of the issues that are raised by what seem to be some rather serious shifts presently occurring in the modern order of death. My main focus is on the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which I attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective. I argue that aspects of a new order of death are emerging around, and through, these debates: aspects that look back to the distant past as much as they look forward.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that the categories of "worldlessness" and "perversion" offered the most general way of formulating the concentration camps' inhumanity and of bringing these explanations together, and they used these categories to make sense of the world orientation of Adolf Hitler.
Abstract: Writings on the most extreme concentration camps offer a number of explanations for low rates of suicide. Drawing on philosophical anthropology, this article argues that the categories of ‘worldlessness’ – deprivation of the means of keeping reality at a distance – and temporal perversion – reduction of the capacity for retention and protention – offer the most general way of formulating the camps’ inhumanity and of bringing these explanations together. Following Blumenberg, it is argued that these categories may also be used to make sense of the world orientation of Adolf Hitler.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines the work of Richard Posner, with special attention to his rediscovery of Jeremy Bentham as a founder of law and economics, and suggests that civil society has been over-emphasized in the literature contrasting classical and contemporary liberalism.
Abstract: Law and economics is a prominent but understudied discourse of liberal government. This essay examines the work of Richard Posner, with special attention to his rediscovery of Jeremy Bentham as a founder of law and economics. Posner's new reading of Bentham accurately identifies Bentham as a fellow anti-juridical theorist of government and a fellow believer in the rule of economy. But Bentham's economy makes room for a range of disciplinary appropriations, and Posner's does not. Posner's economy is entirely defined and exhausted by a particular economic doctrine. The essay suggests that civil society has been over-emphasized in the literature contrasting classical and contemporary liberalism. Instead, it turns attention to a common understanding of law as a non-autonomous and flexible tactic of economic government and to the role of the various sciences that can inform it.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The notion of the individual is in no way opposed to the notions of society or the State as discussed by the authors, and the individual's own idea of himself is also affected by the power of the State when his selfimage, the relationship he has with himself when he obeys the State or society, is affected.
Abstract: By ‘‘individual’’ we will understand here a subject, a being attached to his own identity through self-consciousness or self-knowledge. Let us suppose that this subject, in this philosophical sense of the word, is also a subject in the political sense of the same word; let us suppose that he is the ‘‘subject’’ of a king. In this case he will not obey unconsciously, as animals probably do: he will think about his obedience and his master, and also about himself as the docile or rebellious subject of his king. In the sense agreed here, then, an individual is not an animal in a herd; he is, rather, someone who attaches a price to the image he has of himself. Concern for this image may push him to disobey, to rebel, but it may also, and even more frequently, push him to be even more obedient. Thus understood, the notion of the individual is in no way opposed to the notions of society or the State. We can say then that this individual is fundamentally affected by the power of the State when his self-image, the relationship he has with himself when he obeys the State or society, is affected. We would like to distinguish this effect on the individual’s self-image, which has always been one of the major stakes in historical conflicts, from other no less important stakes, such as economic stakes or those of the distribution of power. When an individual’s own idea of himself is thus affected, we can say that his relationship with the

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, the authors argued that what is defined as politics in different epochs is based upon presuppositions that escape the consciousness of the historical actors, and that they also elude a posterity that is too eager to recognise itself in its ancestors, even if this trivialises their features.
Abstract: The Greeks invented the words ‘‘city,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘oligarchy,’’ ‘‘liberty,’’ and ‘‘citizen.’’ So, if it were not for slavery, which would be the major difference between their democracy and true democracy, it is tempting to assume that they invented the eternal truth of politics, or of our politics. For then there would be an eternal politics about which we could philosophise, instead of just writing its history. Across the centuries we would find again an identical essence of the political; political regimes, despite their differences, would exhibit a functional analogy that could be represented in a number of ways: establishing justice, getting men to live together peacefully, defending the group, exercising class domination by the owners of the forces of production . . . But let’s suppose that this is all just appearance and that the words mislead us. Let’s suppose that what is defined as politics in different epochs is based upon presuppositions that escape the consciousness of the historical actors, and that they also elude a posterity that is too eager to recognise itself in its ancestors, even if this trivialises their features. Identical words and vague analogies would then conceal huge and invisible differences, like trees concealing the wood. We will try here to clarify some fragments of this hidden part of the iceberg. We will call the biggest of these fragments, which is not the only one, the ancient citizen’s ‘‘militantism’’; it roughly corresponds to what Claude Nicolet, in a fine book (1980), called the citizen’s profession. Because an ancient citizen does not have human rights or citizen’s rights, he has no freedoms or even freedom; he has duties. We won’t find the democratic semi-ideal of Western

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the formation of the re-remembering of the wartime rapes of Berlin women, and consider the implications of Beevor's account of the downfall of Berlin for how we understand sexual violence in armed conflict.
Abstract: Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall 1945 has been an international best-selling history of the fall of Berlin to Soviet troops in 1945. Now published in paperback, Beevor's magisterial narrative of Berlin's downfall has become a leading work of contemporary popular history. The public discussion of this book has been dominated by two themes: first, the ‘normalization’ of the suffering of German civilians and, second, the ‘disclosure’ of mass rapes by the liberating Soviet army in Germany. This review traces how key debates concerning the remembrance of the Second World War form these dominant readings of Berlin. In particular, it examines the formation of the re-remembering of the wartime rapes of Berlin women, and considers the implications of Beevor's account of the downfall of Berlin for how we understand sexual violence in armed conflict.