Power and Class in Africa
About: This article is published in Foreign Affairs.The article was published on 1977-01-01. It has received 42 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Class (computer programming).
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TL;DR: In this article, a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership is made.
Abstract: It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership.
156 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that these political decisions have marginalized the role and contribution of professionals and thus impacted negatively on policy formulation and implementation, and blame politicians for the crises in the education sector in Kenya today.
124 citations
TL;DR: The role of the state in forming new classes and in structuring the possibilities of class action was explored by both Marx and Weber as discussed by the authors, who saw the vital role the state could play in consolidating the class position of a dominant social group.
Abstract: As the state has moved back to the centre of analysis of political change and conflict, increasing attention has focused on its role in forming new classes and in structuring the possibilities of class action. As Nelson Kasfir notes, both Marx and Weber ‘saw the vital role the state could play in consolidating the class position of a dominant social group’.1 Neither, however, saw the state as the inherent locus of the process of class formation and of class domination. For Marx, the state was typically the instrument of a ruling class whose origin and basis was in control over the means of production. For Weber, power, class, and status were potentially independent dimensions of stratification.
113 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an overview of the history of black history as a research field in the 19th-century economic and social systems, focusing on the differences between the main competing schools, rather than their similarities.
Abstract: In this paper, I am less interested in the differences between the main competing schools, than in their similarities. The differences were often artificially emphasized at the expense of basic common assumptions. All approaches we have used in African studies are deeply rooted in 19th-century epistemology since the neo-Marxist epistemological break never materialized (Jewsiewicki, 1987). Notwithstanding the fundamental importance of Marxist approaches to the transformation of academic knowledge about societies in Africa, there was no intellectual revolution. The modern world system approach that belongs to the radical paradigm partially accounts for this failure. As knowledge is socially produced and strongly related to the power relationships, one cannot expect a radical epistemological break to occur in a society that is a historical product of 19th-century economic and social systems. In radical paradigm terms, how can one expect a capitalist mode of production to produce an epistemology and a theory that would be a “Copernican revolution” (Sahli quoted in Jewsiewicki, 1986: 5) in knowledge? As Martha Gephart (1986: iii) stated recently, “An overview paper is a fortuitous marriage of an important topic and… individual.” Such is the case of this paper initially commissioned as an evaluation of Marxist African studies. The final result mediates my personal history as an African scholar and my perception of the growing difficulties of African studies with ‘Africa,’ their invented object. (Mudimbe, 1988) In many respects the ambitions of this paper are similar to the goals of Meier and Rudwick (1986: xi): We grew less interested in analyzing specific works than in understanding the interrelations between the trajectory of a scholarly specialty and developments in the changing social milieu and in the profession at large . … Thus, this volume is not a standard historiography, but an examination of several topics that illuminate the rise and the transformation of black history as a research field.
84 citations
TL;DR: This essay provides a kaleidoscope of this ominous decay of health and health services in Africa as Africa totters under an excruciating debt burden and accompanying austerity programmes.
47 citations