Pluralism or isolation of Civilisations? Russia's foreign policy discourse and the reception of Huntington's paradigm of the post‐cold war world

This paper studies the effects of Samuel Huntington's ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis on Russian foreign policy discourse. In response to Huntington's thesis, two major currents of Russia's foreign policy thinking ‐ Liberals and Nationalists ‐ are identified, both of which are critical of the thesis. The two groups offer diametrically opposed alternatives to Huntington's paradigm of the post‐Cold War world. The Liberal‐Nationalist controversy reflects Russia's debates about its own political identity and provides us with a rich and informative understanding of the process of identity formation. By identifying Russia's various reactions to the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis, the paper identifies potential influences of various currents in Russian foreign policy thinking on the country's future foreign policy. It also suggests some implications for further studies of cultures/civilisations in international politics.     

Territory as a Psychosomatic Device: Gottmann’s Kinetic Political Geography

Without denying the importance of his contributions to regional, economic, historical and urban geography, a rediscovery of Jean Gottmann’s political geography and its current geopolitical relevance has been taking place in Europe since the 1990s. The relative absence of his name in most of the subfield historical accounts, in contrast to the international reputation of his book Megalopolis has inspired this article, which attempts a survey of Gottmann’s key contributions to political geography, with emphasis on those in French. A bio-bibliographical analysis, enhanced by original references to archival source, was necessary for reconstructing the genesis and development of his political geography. Specifically, Gottmann states that territory is a psychosomatic device because its political partitioning is produced by the psychological oscillation in pertinent communities between search for security and search for opportunities. In the conclusions, a few questions are raised about how his theories could be applied to improving our understanding of the contemporary geopolitical scenario.

The concept of territory, with its material and psychological components, is a psychosomatic expedient necessary to preserve freedom and the variety of separated communities in an interdependent and accessible space.

— Jean Gottmann, ‘The Evolution of the Concept of Territory’, Social Science Information 14/3–4 (1975) pp.29–47.

     

Responses: Geography as space and geography as place: The divide between political science and political geography continues

Steven Spiegel's article ‘Traditional Space vs. Cyberspace’ exemplifies the divide between political science and political geography. In trying to incorporate geographic factors into his consideration of post‐Cold War geopolitics, Spiegel equates his view with distance and less explicitly with territory. The attempt to position geography as central to international politics has failed once again because of the equation of spatial analysis with the field of geography. Ignorance and neglect of the place tradition, prominent in contemporary geography, is the most important factor in the continued failure of communication between Geography and International Relations.     

Capitalism Unleashed: Finance,Globalization, and Welfare

Andrew Glyn, who died from a brain tumour in December 2007, aged 64, had been a key figure in socialist political economy since the 1970s. His seminal book with Bob Sutcliffe, British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze, published in 1972, inspired a generation of political economists. It offered an arresting empirical analysis of the predicament of British capitalism, and occasioned a fierce and wide-ranging debate among socialist economists over its empirical accuracy, its theoretical approach and its political implications. It was one of the first and most important expressions of Ricardian Marxism in the 1970s, emphasising the importance of distributional struggles for the future economic and political development of capitalism.

He was actively engaged in politics and he was always ready to put his intellectual skills to practical use, as during the British miners' strike in 1984–5, when he provided a detailed critical analysis of the economic case being advanced by the employers and the Government against the union. At the same time he sought to understand the trends that were shaping the development of capitalism, and wrote two very influential books, Capitalism Since World War II: the Making and Breakup of the Great Boom (1984, with Philip Armstrong and John Harrison), and Capital Unleashed (2006), his analysis of the recent neoliberal phase of capitalist development.

He will be remembered for his skills as a teacher, his humane and tolerant approach to intellectual debate, and his lasting contributions to our understanding of contemporary capitalism.     

The age of the universal consumer: a reconsideration of Ricardo's politics *

This paper reconsiders Ricardo's political thought, its relationship with his political economy and, more generally, Ricardo's connection with the ‘philosophical radicalism’ of Bentham and James Mill. It is arguedinter alia, that Ricardo's politics were utilitarian and individualistic; that he developed a notion of a shared, homogeneous interest; that he believed that individuals should know their ‘real’ interests as a condition for their suffrage; and that he subscribed to a doctrine of virtual representation. It is also argued that Ricardo was considerably less ‘radical’ in his political views than some previous commentators have recognized.     

Towards an understanding of the geopolitics of cyberspace: Learning,re‐learning and un‐learning

Spiegel classifies the world's states as high‐tech, nationalistic, or transitional in character, along with some fluidity. His thesis is that ‘traditional geography’ has declined in importance in international politics and has been replaced by information and communications technologies (ICT). He seems unaware of recent developments in political geography, especially to the manner in which geographers consider space, cyberspace and ICT. Territory is one element of political space; others include identities, networks, regionalism, transboundary processes and non‐state actors in regional and global politics.     

Civilisation as Paradigm: An Inquiry into the Hermeneutics of Conflict

This article examines Samuel Huntington's claims that his civilisational theory rises to the level of paradigm and is not merely social science theory. This claim is examined in light of Huntington's focus on Islamic civilisation and its relationship to the ongoing war on terror. The specific manifestations of Islam that have been relevant to this war are placed within the context of what Jeffrey Herf refers to as reactionary modernism, which views violent reactions to modernity as alternative expressions of modernity. While Islam has civilisational characteristics, as Huntington suggests, the violence that gives rise to terror is a result of time- and region-specific reactionary modern variables, and is not inherent in Islam itself. Second, though civilisation-as-social science might shed light on policy options to deal with the problem of terror, civilisational theory is not equipped to supersede the interest-orientation of realism.     

Firm location,political geography and environmental information disclosure

As the subjective and objective factors that influence corporate behaviours, political region and firm location are of great importance to environmental information disclosure (EID). With spatial and political geography as a research perspective, this article makes a study by using the samples of manufacturing listed companies from 2009 to 2011. As a result, we determine that regulatory distance and political geography had negative effects on EID, while political geography weakens regulatory distance’s function. After considering an enterprise’s administrative rank, we determined that when the rank is higher, regulatory distance has negative effects on EID; when the rank is lower, the effects are the opposite. Regarding political geography, it always weakened the regulatory distance’s function. Moreover, the effects are significant only when the enterprises had low governmental regulation. The study shows the effects that firm location and political geography have made on EID. At the same time, this study also gives theoretical and empirical evidence to the necessity of raising governmental regulatory effectiveness.     

The Anglo-Irish context for William Edward Hearn's economic beliefs and the ultimate failure of his Plutology

Abstract

William Edward Hearn is generally regarded as Australia's first economist of international note and his Plutology ([1863]1864) is invariably deemed to be Australia's first economics text. In this paper I argue that it is more appropriate to describe Hearn as an Anglo-Irish economist and, to this end, provide the Anglo-Irish context for the economic doctrines that he expressed in Plutology and elsewhere. I also argue that the failure of Plutology in the market place was, in part, due to a campaign waged against Hearn in London by John Elliot Cairnes, who was an undergraduate contemporary of Hearn's at Trinity College, Dublin.     

Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent

Geopolitical events and developments can hardly be detached from the mundane lives where people confront politicised and politicising matters, share meaningful experiences, build attitudes, and take action. To contribute to understanding how large-scale geopolitics connect with the everyday, this article draws attention to political subjectivity as the condition of possibility of political agency and polis as the geosocial context of political life as experienced, conceived, and practised. Empirically, the paper engages with the tragic end of Mohamed Bouazizi’s life and scrutinises his role in the events and developments generally known as the Arab Spring. Our analysis contests both the dominant interpretation that postulates political import to his acts, and the alternative account that underscores his apolitical stance. Instead, we propose that the international politicisation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s agency unfolded as an accomplishment of many individual and collective actors, including Bouazizi himself in his struggle to cope with emergent aspects of his everyday life.     

Foucault on the Marginal Revolution in Economics: Language and the Cartesian Legacy

Scholars have long debated the ‘revolutionary’ character of the ‘Marginal Revolution’ in economics, focusing on theoretical foundations, methodological devices, social context and political aspects. This article offers a new perspective by investigating ontological and epistemological conditions of that intellectual movement. This requires, in turn, a characterization of those conditions, for which purpose we will draw on Foucault's configurations of thought into ‘epistemes’ in The Order of Things. Although not mentioning those conditions, there have been few references in economics to Foucault's approach. They have mainly claimed that he neglected its importance because he did not see it as a ‘revolution’ in The Order of Things. It is argued here that he actually considered it a ‘revolution’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge. A revision of Foucault's account provides some ideas regarding deep philosophical conditions of the emergence of neoclassical theory and defies some usual interpretations of the circumstances that led to the mathematization of economics. The main conclusion is that its revolutionary character did not stem from a change of ontological beliefs, but—just as many historians of economics have defended—it was a methodological revolution. This study suggests a reinterpretation of that event, claiming that it resulted from a new conception of language and a crisis of Descartes's project of a mathematical unifying science. Going beyond that debate, these reflections proffer ideas that deserve an appraisal in economics.     

Economists on Darwin's theory of social evolution and human behaviour

Abstract

This article analyses Darwin's image among economists with a specific focus on his theory of social evolution as presented in the Descent of Man (1871). We propose an analysis of the way and context in which economists refer to Darwin, mention his name and quote his writings. It then appears that Darwin is most of the time viewed as a biologist only, who never developed his own theory of social evolution. He is thus quoted as a biologist who either borrowed concepts from economists who developed a theory of social evolution, or laid the basis for biological theory of social evolution developed by others, Spencer, in particular. It is only recently that eventually the twofold dimensions—biological and social—of Darwin's general theory of evolution are considered together by bioeconomists.     

From the Encyclopédie to the Tableau économique : Quesnay on freedom of grain trade and economic growth

This paper investigates the evolution of Quesnay's economic thought between his Encyclopédie articles and the first edition of the Tableau économique. The rediscovery of a forgotten piece Quesnay included in an agricultural treatise — the Essai sur l'amélioration des terres — leads us to reconsider the origins of the first edition of the Tableau. This forgotten piece of writing is the missing link between Quesnay's first economic writings and the Tableau. It improves on the theory of grain trade liberalization Quesnay presented in his first writings on two levels. First, it reconstructs of his previous argument in order to give it a more coherent shape. Second, this text complements the Encyclopédie articles by a growth mechanism. Through a reconstruction of Quesnay's growth mechanism, we show that his argument is a significant analytical step toward the first edition of the Tableau.     

Culture and Economics: On Values,Economics and International Business

In his Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen compares the two basic approaches to evaluating institutions, transcendental institutionalism and realization-focused comparisons. Referring to Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator, he argues in favor of the latter and proposes the principle of open impartiality. However, this cannot solve the tension between universalism and contextualization of values that Sen has inherited from Smith. Based on recent Hegel scholarship, we argue that some of the difficulties can be resolved, considering the role Smith played in the development of Hegel's thinking. Hegel's concept of recognition plays an essential role in establishing the possibility of impartiality both on the level of consciousness and on the level of institutional intersubjectivity. Hegel's critique of Kant's formalist ethics (also considered as transcendental institutionalism by Sen) and his analysis of the civil society in the Philosophy of Right, especially his focus on associations and Estates, can serve as a model for making Sen's focus on public discourse theoretically more concise and pragmatically feasible. Hegel shows that universalistic attitudes can only emerge in specific institutional contexts.     

National borders,the global economy and geopolitics: A view from Yemen

The wider geographic scales of the new interdependencies called ‘globalisation’ are not new to peripheral states such as Yemen. In the colonial and post‐colonial world sensitivity to international developments has always been important in the course of local events. What is new is the particular configuration of political and economic institutions at various levels including, critically, the national level. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the new geography of economic and political ‘globalisation’ has left Yemen with distinctly ‘old’ forms of economic integration into world markets, but that, on the other hand, regional geopolitics have opened certain opportunities for Yemen's political elite to refashion itself as a strategic geopolitical player so as to maintain international flows of military and economic aid. The end result is the continued national dominance of these same elite. ‘Globalisation’ in this sense is a national political project.     

The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy

Most intellectuals would be pleased to have one major debate named after them. The Marxist economic historian Robert Brenner has managed the remarkable feat of unleashing two significant intellectual controversies. The first, in the historical journal Past & Present during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was provoked by his interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. More recently, however, Brenner has switched his attention from the longue durée of European history to the economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In a massive journal-length article published in New Left Review in 1998 he offered a comparative analysis of the three major Western economies—the USA, Japan and Germany—from 1945 onwards, tracing the development of a protracted crisis of profitability that, Brenner contended, explained the ‘long downturn’ experienced by global capitalism since the early 1970s.     

From the laws of human nature to capital accumulation: James Mill's analysis of the states of society in the Elements of Political Economy

Abstract

James Mill's Elements of Political Economy is usually treated as a textbook of Ricardian political economy. Although this might be justified, there is a passage in this Ricardian textbook that is not Ricardian. The passage deals with Mill's analysis of the states of society, in which he underlines the laws of human nature conducive to capital accumulation. This paper investigates such states.     

Strange brew: The antinomies of distribution in W.S. Jevons' Theory of Political Economy *

Abstract

In the Preface to the second edition of his Theory of Political Economy (1879), W. Stanley Jevons announced an extraordinary turn in his analysis as he abandoned much of the explanatory framework used in the body of the text to explain cost of production and distribution. It is shown here that, when the Theory is read in the context of the objective and structure of Jevons' distribution analysis, the turn can be explained as Jevons' response to the realization that he was only able to reconcile his analysis of cost of production and of distribution in a special case.     

Sarantis Archigenes (Serandi Arşizen), Pellegrino Rossi and the spread of the classical approach in the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Although he succeeded Say at the College de France as chair in 1833, Pellegrino Rossi is not considered a great economist nor has he been appreciated as an original one. However, his lectures in the College de France inspired a young Ottoman-Greek, Sarantis Archigenes, who wrote a political economy book which discussed the economic problems of the Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. This article provides an account of the traces of Rossi's ideas in the formation of Archigenes' views, with an aim to present Rossi's role in the dissemination of Classical political economic ideas in the Ottoman lands.     

Thoreau's economic philosophy

Abstract

This paper provides an encompassing portrayal of Thoreau's economic thought. It is analyzed against the background of the history of economic thought and the economic thinking of his time. Thoreau's economic thought is an extensive examination of the ideas of classical political economy, and particularly of Jean-Baptiste Say, and it is a fundamental critique thereof. Thoreau recognizes that some aspects and foundations of the modern conception of the economy lead to an alienation of the human being from itself as well as to an alienation from nature. I demonstrate that this critique is a result of Thoreau's specific approach to the economy, which, based on his particular understanding of the human being and his philosophy of nature, seeks the meaning of the economy for human life and for nature. In this philosophical approach, which I characterize as an economic philosophy, Thoreau's deeper defiance of classical political economy and his original place within the history of economic thought are grounded. It leads Thoreau to an alternative conception of an economy of moderation, which is identified and described in detail. I conclude with considerations on the potential meaning of Thoreau's thought for current economic research.