Forget English Freedom,Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law,Commercial Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy

Is the liberty to pursue individual self-interest in the capitalist market all that remains of the grand Enlightenment promise of human emancipation? The article addresses this question by returning to eighteenth century scholarship on the relationship between English common law and commercial law. Specifically, I explore the fundamental challenge posed to common law by the regulation, through commercial law, of enslaved Africans as labouring ‘things’. I show how key British scholars in the eighteenth century traditions of jurisprudence, moral philosophy and political economy struggled to address the radical unfreedom of the enslaved and the meaning of her/his radical emancipation. I explore how this Atlantic challenge was ‘indigenised’ to speak to the threat posed by enclosures in Britain, in particular, the possible destruction of the qualified unfreedoms and freedoms extant in the paternal social order upheld by common law. I explore how political economy traditions pre and post abolition and emancipation sought to deal with this challenge. And I conjecture on the significance of remembering the most radical process of commodifying labour – in Aimé Césaire's terms, thingification – for present day interpretations of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.     

A Critique of ‘Neoliberal Autonomy’: The Rhetoric of Ownership Society

The rhetoric of the Ownership Society defined by the Cato Institute has been integral to framing the motivation behind the Social Security reform introduced by George W. Bush. This motivational frame involves a fierce advocacy of what we will call ‘neoliberal autonomy’ in a Hayekian and Friedmanite sense. For Hayek and Friedman, the social adequacy component of Social Security is problematized in the name of self-reliance and individual choice, which rejects any authoritative standards as morally indefensible. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the Ownership Society, though it glorifies the neoliberal notion of autonomy, does not explicitly question the moral basis of Social Security. Rather, by defining the terms of debate, it frames the meaning of Social Security along neoliberal lines in an attempt to make a supposedly detached economic case for private retirement accounts. In this ‘pro-privatization’ framework, the social adequacy component of the Social Security system fades away as individual equity, or actuarial fairness, comes to the fore as the chief theme. We suggest a ‘pro-social’ rhetoric that recognizes the pursuit of social standards as providing the element of autonomy.     

The state as a creature of money

Recent social theories of money have challenged economic conceptions of it as first and foremost a medium of exchange. Writers such as Geoffrey Ingham and David Graeber have revived the chartalist position that money is essentially a creature of the state, whose primary function is to measure value or debt. In this paper, I argue that this is a wrong turning. I first clarify the conceptual underpinnings of Ingham’s treatment of money as an ‘institutional fact’, a concept drawn from Searle. I clarify the sense in which this argument establishes that the state ‘creates’ money – and show that this sense is quite limited. It is a theory of how something comes to be accepted as money, rather than a theory of why there is money in the first place, and it gives no account of money’s value. Finally, I sketch an alternative way of looking at the relationship between states and money. This recognises that modern states have been shaped in part by strategies with regard to monetary management, with state actors engaging strategically in a system they only partially constitute – so that states are ‘creatures of money’ as much as the reverse.     

Putting Culture in its Place? A Critical Engagement with Cultural Political Economy

Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop present Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as a project that seeks to deepen Critical Political Economy (C*PE) through an engagement with the cultural turn. This article critically assesses their success in such an enterprise. It begins by framing CPE within Jessop and Sum’s previous work on the Regulation Approach, in order to show why the former can only be understood as the result of a critical dialogue with the latter. Next, my reconstruction of the main elements of Sum and Jessop’s CPE is presented. After having carefully examined its main assumptions and concepts, I criticise CPE’s main novel element, an ontological cultural turn, due to the culturalist risks it engenders. In order to substantiate and exemplify that theoretical criticism, I review CPE’s application to the analysis of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. This article concludes by showing the main difficulties that CPE faces as an alternative for deepening C*PE and proposes the Amsterdam School of Transnational Historical Materialism as a more suitable direction in which that initiative could be advanced.     

Finance,power, and the British balance of payments

ABSTRACT

The Brexit referendum marks a critical juncture in Britain’s political economy. Benjamin Cohen argues that a nation’s monetary sovereignty lies in its balance of payments (BoP) flexibility (2008, 2015). I argue that a country’s position in the global financial régime must also be accounted for when explaining its BoP dynamics. This allows us to understand why, while sterling has long lost its ‘world currency’ status, Britain’s BoP exhibits some of the same features associated with American ‘exorbitant privilege’. To appreciate the UK’s own BoP flexibilities as well as to flesh out the Anglo-American axis in the international financial order, I compare the UK’s external balance sheets with those of the US. Given the complexities and uncertainties inherent in BoP analyses, I advise against micro-analyses of the BoP in favour of a broader approach that takes into account macro-dynamics as well as the International Political Economy (IPE) concerns outlined above. Elaborating such an analysis for the UK BoP, I explore the potential implications of Brexit for Britain’s external balance sheets and its political-economic future. While Britain’s financial power has helped insulate its balance sheets from external shocks, Britain’s impending departure from the European Union heralds a period of considerable uncertainty.     

Fiscal policy and capital mobility: the construction of economic policy rectitude in Britain and France

This research examines the regulatory response of the European Union to the global financial crisis, addressing the questions of whether, how and why the global financial crisis has changed the ‘old’ politics of financial services regulation in the EU and resulted in the emergence of a ‘new’ politics. It is argued that, with a good dose of political opportunism and ‘anti-free market’ rhetoric, a continental advocacy coalition sponsoring a ‘market-shaping’ regulatory approach has capitalised on the crisis, tipping the balance of regulatory power in the EU in its favour, as compared to the pre-crisis situation.     

Russkiy Mir: The Geopolitics of Russian Compatriots Abroad

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the instrumental reference to Russian ‘compatriots’ in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 served as a discursive framing to justify contradictions in Russian approaches to state sovereignty to an international audience. Contrary to teleological readings of Russian foreign policy, however, the paper argues that while Russian diaspora policies have been tapped into, the iterative and partially contradictory development thereof on a governmental level suggests that these were not the blueprint for a revisionist foreign policy by design. It contextualizes the evolution of Russian diaspora policies against the background of the evolution of the wider ‘Russian World’ conception and shows how the discourse about the protection of ‘compatriots’ was contextual and has translated into geopolitical boundary-making at a time when relations between Russia and the West deteriorated.     

The power of stereotyping and confirmation bias to overwhelm accurate assessment: the case of economics,gender, and risk aversion

Behavioral research has revealed how normal human cognitive processes can tend to lead us astray. But do these affect economic researchers, ourselves? This article explores the consequences of stereotyping and confirmation bias using a sample of published articles from the economics literature on gender and risk aversion. The results demonstrate that the supposedly ‘robust’ claim that ‘women are more risk averse than men’ is far less empirically supported than has been claimed. The questions of how these cognitive biases arise and why they have such power are discussed, and methodological practices that may help to attenuate these biases are outlined.     

中美新型大国关系：全球体系与力量转换理论的探究

作为新兴的全球性经济和地缘政治大国,中国对于一些大国而言,不论是在全球体系上,还是在次全球体系（区域）上都是一个政策性的困难抉择。对于如何构建与这些在中国外交总架构中居于＂关键＂地位的全球性大国的关系,中国新一代政治领导人提出了无论是在国际关系理论上,还是在近现代国际关系实践上都具有创新内容的＂新型大国关系＂的构想。这一构想在很大程度上是邓小平关于＂和平与发展是世界两大主题＂论断的逻辑性结果,也是在中国经济和地缘政治实力日益增长的情况下作出的蕴含着中国古代哲学＂和而不同＂和战略智慧的＂不战而屈人之兵＂的理性选择。这一构想有助于中国坚定和平发展的崛起新路径,同时也为其他新兴大国共同参与全球体系重塑和世界新秩序的构建打开了便捷之门。新型大国关系的构建有可能使美国在中国经济外交与外交攻势的双重作用下,接受中国的＂和平崛起＂的理念,弱化视中国为安全与战略＂威胁＂的观念,从而有利于世界力量的和平转移与全球体系的和平转型。在此层面上,新型大国关系的构想无疑有助于打破人类几千年历史上大国崛起与战争形影相随的宿命,对推动全球力量的和平转移有着深远的意义。     

China,India and the US Rebalance to the Asia Pacific: The Geopolitics of Rising Identities

The US rebalance to the Asia Pacific is consistently interpreted as a response to China’s material rise. While not entirely incorrect, this assumption – derived from an overriding faith in the explanatory significance of relative state capabilities – fails to explain why rapidly rising others, most notably India, remain absent from regional US security discourse, and why a heavy US presence in Asia predates China’s ascent of the 1970s onwards. To address these problems and offer an improved explanation of what the rebalance is, how and why it has come about, and what it is designed to achieve within the context of China’s rise, this analysis draws from critical geopolitics and postcolonial theory. It argues that the rebalance is best conceived as the (re)articulation of historical discourses which construct certain foreign Others like China as challenges to the ontological American self, making the rebalance an attempt to pacify a particular rising identity as much as a rising state actor. The analysis is motivated in part by the question of how the rebalance is enabled in its current form. From here, the article addresses an increasing yet regressive tendency of International Relations theory to deny studies of the ‘how possible’ explanatory value, encouraging their marginalisation in favour of examinations into ‘why’ political decisions are made.     

Crusoe,Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks

ABSTRACT

‘Crusoe’ and ‘Friday’ signifiers necessarily evoke a world of racialised hierarchies. Economics textbooks are perhaps the sole remaining medium to simply wish away their resulting relations of power. These are the teaching aids that inspire students analytically to think of markets as pristine economic institutions and persuade them politically that they should want to will such institutions into being. Yet they all-too-often rely on the pedagogical device of the so-called Robinson Crusoe Economy, where the main characters from Defoe’s most famous novel are required to instinctively recognise their equality within voluntary contracting agreements so that each can act as the neoclassical homo economicus. In other words, economists’ Crusoe and Friday figures must behave antithetically to what has historically been implied by the ‘Crusoe’ and ‘Friday’ signifiers. But how can this be so, given how commonplace it was when Defoe’s characters were first introduced into economic theory in the 1850s to justify white settler colonialism on the grounds that ‘savage’ societies lacked the capacity to be self-governing? The raced market frame that emerged in practice from this assumption continues to be reproduced uncritically today by Crusoe’s and Friday’s presence in the textbook explanation of the most basic model of market exchange.     

Trading Out of the Global Food Crisis? The World Trade Organization and the Geopolitics of Food Security

The geopolitics of the Global Food Crisis and international trade has received limited scholarly attention, a significant omission given the major roles of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in structuring world food production and trade flows and as a principal inter-state governing mechanism of the global agro-food system. Analysing recent international policy actions framing the WTO as a ‘fix’ to the Global Food Crisis, this article points to the value of a critical geopolitics of agro-power sensitive to the spatial reconfiguration of production and power in the global agro-food system, problematising geospatial categories such as ‘North’ and ‘South’, and that takes seriously contests for control of geopolitical agents such as the WTO.     

TARIFF POLICY AND WELFARE IN AN INTERNATIONAL DUOPOLY WITH CONSUMER‐FRIENDLY INITIATIVE

The purpose of this paper is to explore how strategic tariff policy and welfare are affected by the consumer‐friendly initiative of foreign exporting firms. We define a firm that is consumer‐friendly or non‐profit‐based if it considers both its own profit and consumer surplus. This paper extends Brander and Spencer by taking the consideration of consumer‐friendly firms into an international duopoly, and within such context examining the tariff policy and welfare. The consumer‐friendly initiative that leads to trade liberalization is a ‘Win‐Win‐Win’ solution in the sense that it is not only beneficial for foreign exporting firms, but also for the government and consumers of the importing country.     

Securitising the Unconscious: The Bush Doctrine of Preemption and Minority Report

Using Minority Report as its interpretive guide, this essay considers how the securitisation of the unconscious is performed in primarily fiction (film) but also ‘fact’ (US foreign policy). The essay makes two general arguments. Implicitly, it argues that American moralities and what I call US moral grammars of war are not only formulated in traditional realms of politics but in geopolitical moral imaginaries in which US foreign policy intersects with popular (often filmic) imaginaries as well as with narratives about the family. Elaborating on this final point about the family, the essay explicitly argues that the feminine is the keystone of the US moral grammar of war in the war on terror because it is the foundational figure upon whom a specific articulation of a moral US ‘we’ is constructed. What this means is that as the US ‘we’ looks ahead to who a future moral American US ‘we’ might become (which is the theme of Minority Report and a theme in everyday post-11 September American life), it ought to begin by understanding how the feminine both secures and insecures the complex relationship between justice and security, particularly as it functions in relation to the present-day Bush administration’s policies of securitising the unconscious.     

Cultural Identity and Securitising the Korean Peninsula: Transformations in the South Korean Security Narrative

In response to enlargement, the EU’s ‘Wider Europe’ initiative and emerging European Neighbourhood Policy envisage ‘positive interdependence’ with neighbouring countries of the ‘East’ and ‘South’. ‘Partnerships’ are seen as an alternative to direct EU membership and thus as a sustainable incentive for regional cooperation. In order to be effective, such regional partnerships must transcend market logics and accommodate heterogeneous economic and socio-political realities. However, Wider Europe is characterised, in terms of realpolitik, by competing rationales of ‘stability’, ‘prosperity’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘security’ and thus by considerable potential for exclusionary policies. It is unclear whether exclusion can be counterbalanced by multilevel and ‘de-centred’ forms of regional engagement that also define Wider Europe. Applying a pragmatic approach, discussion will centre on rationales, discourses and reconceptualisations of European space upon which the notion of Wider Europe is being constructed and on whether they signal gradual changes in the direction of a ‘post-Westphalian’ geopolitics.     

BREAKING OUT OF CO‐OPERATION'S ‘IRON CAGE’:FROM MOVEMENT DEGENERATION TO BUILDING A DEVELOPMENTAL MOVEMENT

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on co‐operative movements’ role in developing new firms and sectors. In contrast to ‘developmental movements’ which secure legislative, policy, program, and promotional, financial, and technical assistance supports for co‐operative development campaigns, this paper investigates the problem of co‐operative ‘movement degeneration’ – why some movements’ developmental commitments gradually erode. The paper next investigates the project of ‘movement regeneration’ – how mature movements become reoriented toward movement goals, including fostering successful co‐operative formations. This discussion includes the role of institutional intermediaries, educational and cultural interventions, and mobilizing networks in regenerative movement action.     

Personhood and Human Richness: Good and Well-Being in the Capability Approach and Beyond

This paper aims at developing the Capability Approach's (CA) underlying philosophical anthropology and ethics by focusing on the work of its major exponents, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. I first discuss CA's critique of happiness as subjective well-being and defend the idea of ‘flourishing’ which ultimately refers to the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia. I then focus on the notions of ‘good’ and ‘well-being’ and address the problem of the compatibility between a substantive notion of the Good (expressed through universal moral values) and individual preferences. I thus tackle the issue of adaptive preferences (which is investigated both from a methodological and an ethical perspective) and suggest that the process of adaptation should be thought in the dynamic frame of the constitution of the self. Therefore, in the second half of the paper I investigate the CA's idea of personhood and focus on some important assumptions behind its underlying anthropological model – above all the notion of ‘human richness’. As a result, I first point out the dynamic dimension of personhood, according to which individuals are ‘becoming themselves’ in search of self-realisation and construction of their identities. Second, I highlight its relational dimension, according to which every one is the expression of the anthropological richness and at the same time represents the highest possibility of richness for every other one.     

The Ethics of Swearing: The Implications of Moral Theories for Oath-Breaking in Economic Contexts

Many readers will share the judgement that, having made an oath, there is something morally worse about consequently performing the immoral action, such as embezzling, that one swore not to do. Why would it be worse? To answer this question, I consider three moral-theoretic accounts of why it is ‘extra’ wrong to violate oaths not to perform wrong actions, with special attention paid to those made in economic contexts. Specifically, I address what the moral theories of utilitarianism, Kantianism and a new communitarian-relational principle entail for the wrongness of oath-breaking. I argue that the former two do not adequately capture why it is extra wrong to perform an immoral action that one swore not to do, but that the latter appeal to a morality of communal relationship offers a promising account.     

Testing and applying a theory of utility: An attempt to decompose income in compensatory and scarcity rents

Data on income after tax, schooling completed, job held, age, and ‘level of satisfaction’ of 2663 members of the Dutch Consumer Union have been used to estimate regression equations of two types. Type I may be called a specification of a utility function, Type II an ‘earnings function’ (where income after tax was used as earnings). For both types a number of alternatives were estimated both with regard to mathematical shape and with regard to variables included. Defining equitable or justified income differences as differences which do not change the level of satisfaction, a formula for equitable incomes for given combinations of job, schooling and age can be derived from Type I equations. All regression coefficients are found to be lower than the corresponding earnings function coefficients. The latter can then be decomposed into a ‘compensatory’ component and a ‘scarcity rent’ component.