Sociology and Social Theory for Fun and Profit

Haley shares LeFlouria’s account of events and the general outlines of her argument. She too sees Jim Crow as a modernizing force, and the penal labor system as exemplary of that modernity. No Mercy Here, however, goes a step further: the destruction of black womanhood by the carceral system was, Haley argues, a necessary component in the construction of white womanhood. The chain gang did not simply reflect the gender ideology of Jim Crow; it produced it. What the punishment factories produced was not so much bricks or roads as it was white womanhood, built upon the destruction of black women. White womanhood, in turn, was one of the main ideological struts of the Jim Crow regime overall—one need only think of the central place of the imagined rape threat in racist ideology. “The malleability of the black female subject in the white imagination reinforced the fixity of the white female subject and her traditional social role as politically, economically, and socially subordinate to white men.”

Policing, Haley shows, produced black criminality. Black women were more than five times as likely to be arrested in 1880s Georgia as white women. Commonly, they received chain-gang sentences after being unable to pay fines for profanity, drunk and disorderly conduct, failing to abate a nuisance, or occupying a house of ill repute—in other words, lifestyle crimes. The point of broken windows policing in turn-of-the-century Atlanta, as in today’s neoliberal New York, was to reinforce white racial superiority and power by targeting people of color with state repression and eliminating them. (Southern belle then, urban gentry now.) “The sight of black women on the streets in black neighborhoods,” Haley writes, “perhaps with their voices raised, was an assault on the model of a docile black woman in the white domestic sphere, and therefore subject to punishment.” Haley sees this in the moment when locals in Griffin, Georgia, attempted to break a white woman free from the chain gang at the sight of her toil; one wrote to the local newspaper that “to make a white woman work with manacles, on the public street, and amongst negro hands, is a crime against that chivalrous regard for the sex which the south especially claims to hold.” A white woman could not be on the chain gang, because to be on the chain gang was not to be a woman. “Georgia’s Jim Crow carceral regime produced women every day, and all of the women were white.”

Wars and migrants

The foreign-policy stances of the new oppositions cover a similar spectrum. The six countries are all nato members, but occupy widely divergent places within its ranks. The us not only commands a historically unprecedented war machine—an estimated 900 military bases, including transit and refuelling stations; huge garrisons in Europe, East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East; an armed presence in over 130 countries—but operates as a law unto itself, demonstrated by its international torture network and programme of deadly drone attacks, under Obama’s personal command. Sanders has no truck with America’s anti-imperial tradition and has never called for us bases to be shut down and all the troops brought home. He was on the centre-right of the movement against the Vietnam War, calling for an end to hostilities rather than support for the NLF, and has occupied roughly the same position ever since, tending to favour hostilities launched by Democratic presidents and oppose those of Republicans: against Reagan’s Contra policy in Central America, for Clinton’s war on Yugoslavia and 1998 bombings of Iraq; against Bush’s invasion of it, though in favour of his attack on Afghanistan; for Israel’s 2006 assault on Lebanon; cavilling only that Obama hadn’t consulted Congress before launching his war on Libya; for the ouster of Assad and broadly supportive of Obama’s undeclared war in Syria, with its CIA operations, air strikes and special missions; an admirer of the Jordanian, Saudi and Kuwaiti monarchs, whom he encourages to take up arms against ISIS.

Of the other states, while France and Britain have alternated in the role of Washington’s most belligerent ally, as NATO members, all have been involved in the occupation of Afghanistan and assault on Libya, ‘air policing’ Russia’s borders and patrolling the Med. Corbyn has been a staunch opponent of all of this: ‘The aim of the war machine of the United States is to maintain a world order dominated by the banks and multinational companies of Europe and North America’, he wrote in 1991. In 2001, when Sanders gave his backing to Operation Rolling Thunder, Corbyn helped found Stop the War, probably the largest anti-war movement today in any NATO country. Like Grillo, he opposed Obama’s war on Libya—both of them pointing to the double standards of ‘humanitarian interventionists’, who didn’t call for a no-fly zone over Gaza in 2008 when Israeli phosphorus rained down on a largely defenceless civilian population. By contrast, the Parti de gauche and Izquierda Anticapitalista, the left group that would work with Iglesias’s circle in founding Podemos, both rallied to the onslaught on Libya.

Labour’s new defence policy is still under review, but Corbyn has backed down on leaving nato since becoming leader—as has Podemos, which now claims that membership of the Atlantic alliance can help democratize the Spanish Army. Tsipras refused to play the NATO card in his negotiations with the Eurogroup, though the threat to close the base at Souda Bay might have been a trump; since July 2015, Syriza’s Middle East policy has been to the right of AIPAC’s, with Tsipras naming Israel’s capital as Jerusalem. Sanders’s only complaint about nato is that its European members don’t pay enough. Of the six, only the Five Star Movement and Parti de gauche have put quitting NATO on the table; Mélenchon calls for France to carve out its own sovereign, alter-globalist, multi-polar defence policy, based on a citizens’ army. But this is conjoined to an extraordinary idealization of the United Nations—also shared by Corbyn, and even Grillo—which is invoked as the ultimate font of legitimacy; a pipe-dream in which the reality of American hegemony disappears in a puff of smoke. None of these oppositions seem to have looked too closely at the actually existing UN, in which countries’ votes can be bought and sold, or at the process by which the us State Department converted the popular longing for world peace into a monopoly over policy-making for a handful of permanent member states on the Security Council. Sanders has no need for such illusions and barely mentions the UN.

On immigration, the new oppositions diverge again. Grillo insists on the link with EU foreign policy—‘the flow of refugees is the result of our wars and our weapons’—and calls for an end to Western intervention in the Middle East and to the Mediterranean region’s subordination to American interests. Immigration should be controlled—‘we should work out a compromise’—and a ‘Merkel Plan’, modelled on the Marshall Plan, should invest in health and infrastructure in the countries from which the refugees are fleeing; a classic social-democratic position. Sanders, too, wants controlled immigration, with a ‘path’ to legal status but no automatic right to citizenship. Mélenchon has argued for the legalization of sans papiers’ status and the restoration of 10-year residence permits. By contrast, Podemos’s 2014 programme called for full citizens’ rights for all immigrants. Syriza switched from an avowed policy of anti-racism—closing down the previous government’s notorious detention centres—to rounding up refugees for forcible deportation, in line with the EU’s new policy. Labour’s position, again, is under review, but Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham wants to take a tough line—Brown’s Minister of Immigration Phil Woolas had called for ‘war on illegal immigrants’—whereas Corbyn’s first act as leader was to attend a ‘Refugees Welcome’ demo, where his speech was very much in the spirit of a low-church tradition dating back to campaigns against the slave trade: ‘Open your hearts, your minds, your attitudes’ to those worse off than yourself. In fact, English grumbles about immigration now centre not on war-zone refugees but on fellow EU members: 3 million arrivals, nearly half of them since the financial crisis—one of the reasons, along with renewed household debt, for the UK’s superficially healthy post-crash GDP.

Statisticism: the erroneous notion that computing is doing research

Notes on Social Measurement: Historical and Critical is a major and insightful book by a distinguished American sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan (1921-2004) published in 1984. Duncan has introduced many statistical techniques to sociology, and mainly studied social status and intergenerational occupational mobility. In a paper “Otis Dudley Duncan, quantitative sociologist par excellence: Path analysis, loglinear methods, and Rasch models“, a statistician Leo Goodman referred to Duncan as “the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the 20th century” (2007: 131). In a concluding chapter of the book, which is an erudite history and critical account of measurement and its current state in science, Duncun elaborates the term ofstatisticism. The more I mull over this concept, the more I realize the necessity of its inculcation and substantive absorption into nowadays social sciences in general, and in economics in particular. Why? I respectfully leave the floor to Professor Duncan:

GUYS THIS IS AMAZING

SERIOUSLY

6000 YEARS

STORIES THAT ARE OLDER THAN CIVILIZATIONS

STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW

STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME

From the time of Hobbes, one of the leading attributes of sovereignty has been the right of the state to define what threatens a people and how that threat will be responded to. In the state of nature, Hobbes wrote in Elements of the Law, “every man…is judge himself of the necessity of the means, and of the greatness of the danger” he faces. But once we submit to the state, we are forbidden “to be our own judges” of the threats we are facing and how to respond to them. Except in cases of immediate physical threat to ourselves, we must now accede to the sovereign’s assessment of and decision about these threats. The sovereign, as Hobbes says in Leviathan of the state’s control over matters theological, is he “to whom in all doubtfull cases, wee have submitted our private judgments.”

This is why Ali’s challenge to the Vietnam War was so formidable. He wasn’t merely claiming conscientious objector status, though he was. He wasn’t simply claiming the authority of a higher being, though he was. He was asserting the right of the citizen to be the final judge of what threatens or endangers him. In asserting that right, Ali was posing the deepest, most fundamental challenge to the power and authority of the state.

That he also claimed to be more threatened by his own fellow citizens and government than by an officially declared enemy of the state only added to the subversiveness of his challenge. Against the state’s axis of fear, which claims that one’s enemies invariably belong to another country and thus are part and parcel of the international state system, Ali sought to rotate that axis along a different dimension: away from the international state system to the domestic system of social domination and civil subjection.

The nature of money, or why Bitcoin’s philosophical suggestiveness is not the whole story – by John Lanchester

Capitalism and the media: Market cannot serve democracy’s need for an informed citizenry. Can crowdfunding help? An interview with Prof. Julia Cage (video, 20 min)

Prof. Ha-Joon Chang on economics which is a political argument, the 2008 crisis, the rise of China, innovation and jobs

by Gary Gutting

Many philosophers at leading American departments are specialists in metaphysics: the study of the most general aspects of reality such as being and time. The major work of one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, is “Being and Time,” a profound study of these two topics.  Nonetheless, hardly any of these American metaphysicians have paid serious attention to Heidegger’s book.

The standard explanation for this oddity is that the metaphysicians are analytic philosophers, whereas Heidegger is acontinental philosopher.  Although the two sorts of philosophers seldom read one another’s work, when they do, the results can be ugly.  A famous debate between Jacques Derrida (continental) and John Searle (analytic) ended with Searle denouncing Derrida’s “obscurantism” and Derrida mocking Searle’s “superficiality.” The distinction between analytic and continental philosophers seems odd, first of all, because it contrasts a geographical characterization (philosophy done on the European continent, particularly Germany and France) with a methodological one (philosophy done by analyzing concepts).  It’s like, as Bernard Williams pointed out, dividing cars into four-wheel-drive and made-in-Japan.  It becomes even odder when we realize that some of the founders of analytic philosophy (like Frege and Carnap) were Europeans, that many of the leading centers of “continental” philosophy are at American universities, and that many “analytic” philosophers have no interest in analyzing concepts.

Some attention to history helps make sense of the distinction.  In the early 20th century, philosophers in England (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) and in Germany and Austria (Carnap,  Reichenbach, Hempel — all of whom, with the rise of the Nazis, emigrated to the United States) developed what they saw as a radically new approach to philosophy, based on the new techniques of symbolic logic developed by Frege and Russell… [read more]

As an example: the micro-industry surrounding ‘translating’ continental philosophers into the language of analytic philosophy, without the corresponding analytic ==> continental translations, can’t be explained through any metaphysical category like ‘clarity’ (as if there were a universal standard to adhere to outside of this disciplinary production), despite this article’s attempt to do so. It’s explained by the academic dominance of analytic philosophy, which is treated as the universal language of philosophy and which other forms of thought have to be 'translated’ into. This isn’t an innocent procedure, either: continental works are only deemed worthwhile if this translation project is undertaken, otherwise they’re considered willfully obscure because they don’t adhere to this discipline of language. This is why the recent acceptance of phenomenology and some post-structuralists isn’t a sign of the breakdown of the analytic/continental divide. Instead, this acceptance is only insofar as these continental thinkers are taught in the language of analytic philosophy, thus removing them from their own historical and linguistic context.

At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group.

The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.

The co-authors, Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood, found that administrative expenditures at the highest-paying universities outpaced spending on scholarships by more than two to one. And while adjunct faculty members became more numerous at the 25 universities, the share of permanent faculty declined drastically.

“The high executive pay obviously isn’t the direct cause of higher student debt, or cuts in labor spending,” Ms. Wood said. “But if you think about it in terms of the allocation of resources, it does seem to be the tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases and more administrative spending.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the report found, the leaders of the highest-paying universities fared well, largely at the expense of students and faculty.

The term ‘neoliberalism’ has become increasingly familiar over recent years. The term was relatively unheard-of until the 1990s, but was then adopted principally by the critics of a perceived free market orthodoxy, which was spreading around the world under the auspices of the ‘Washington Consensus’. The ‘anti-globalisation movement’, which rose to prominence with the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation, further advanced the pejorative sense of neoliberalism as a form of market fundamentalism, imposed upon developing nations by the United States government and multilateral institutions. The assumption underlying this account of neoliberalism was typically that it arose with the elections of ‘new right’ political leaders, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in particular, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. But there was relatively little scholarly work done at this time on the longer history of neoliberal thought preceding that political shift.

The beginning of the global financial crisis in the summer of 2007 drew fresh attention to the meaning and history of neoliberalism, while also highlighting the priority that neoliberal policy accords to financial markets and financial institutions. The fact that this crisis emanated from an apparent centre and driver of neoliberalism, namely Wall Street, shifted the focus away from the neo-colonial, globalising aspects of neoliberal reform, towards the question of neoliberalism’s core rationalities and genealogy. Partly for this reason, no doubt, a wave of new scholarly work appeared, which paid far closer attention to the longer history of neoliberal thought, as far back as the 1920s. This includes work on think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, and academic traditions, such as the Chicago School of economics.

In an effort to get away from the simply pejorative use of the term neoliberalism, which can be attached indiscriminately to various forms of anti-democratic or pro-corporate power, the more historicist approach to the concept highlights its fluidity and contingent development. However, this approach also risks lapsing into pure historical description, without critique or an account of how ideas translate into policies and strategies. Others apply a more sociological and critical method, which aims to examine which aspects of neoliberalism are at work amongst elites and governments today. This poses the question of precisely how much of neoliberalism has survived the global financial crisis, and through what means this survival has been achieved.

Definitions of neoliberalism across these literatures are various. But they tend to share four things:

Victorian liberalism is viewed as an inspiration for neoliberalism, but not a model. Neoliberalism is an inventive, constructivist, modernizing force, which aims to produce a new social and political model, and not to recover an old one. Neoliberalism is not a conservative or nostalgic project.

Following this, neoliberal policy targets institutions and activities which lie outside of the market, such as universities, households, public administrations and trade unions. This may be so as to bring them inside the market, through acts of privatization; or to reinvent them in a ‘market-like’ way; or simply to neutralize or disband them.

To do this, the state must be an active force, and cannot simply rely on ‘market forces’. This is where the distinction from Victorian liberalism is greatest. Neoliberal states are required to produce and reproduce the rules of institutions and individual conduct, in ways that accord with a certain ethical and political vision.

This ethical and political vision is dominated by an idea of competitive activity, that is, the production of inequality. Competition and inequality are valued positively under neoliberalism, as a non-socialist principle for society in general, through which value and scientific knowledge can best be pursued.