This article connects the sociology of science to discussions of academic freedom and scientific autonomy, asking how social science is shaped by politics and extrascientific forces and how this understanding of the social determination of social science should inform social research and political critique. The focus is present-day American academic social science, particularly sociology. The first section reconstructs the relations between social science and political power in theoretical terms and argues that relative autonomy is a necessary condition for scientific knowledge and responsible political interventions by academic intellectuals. The second section constructs the space of scientists’ views of the proper relations between political power and social scientific work. The third section turns to the American university, focusing on actors and organizations that shape social research. The goal is to identify these major actors and organizations and to provide a framework for identifying past and present threats to scientific autonomy.
{"title":"Scientific Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Social Research in the United States","authors":"G. Steinmetz","doi":"10.1086/699925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699925","url":null,"abstract":"This article connects the sociology of science to discussions of academic freedom and scientific autonomy, asking how social science is shaped by politics and extrascientific forces and how this understanding of the social determination of social science should inform social research and political critique. The focus is present-day American academic social science, particularly sociology. The first section reconstructs the relations between social science and political power in theoretical terms and argues that relative autonomy is a necessary condition for scientific knowledge and responsible political interventions by academic intellectuals. The second section constructs the space of scientists’ views of the proper relations between political power and social scientific work. The third section turns to the American university, focusing on actors and organizations that shape social research. The goal is to identify these major actors and organizations and to provide a framework for identifying past and present threats to scientific autonomy.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699925","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45973366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
labor is the encompassing form of social mediation that dominates and informs the unequal and alienating social relations of capitalist society. Its abstract economizing logic has not only powered the contradictory dynamics of modern society but shaped its modes of thought, its conceptions of worth, and the textures of its social life. In Moishe’s striking metaphor, capitalism has put modern society on a temporal treadmill. Capitalism is engaged in an endless pursuit of value, the highly abstract form of wealth unique to it, which is derived solely from the exploitation of commodified labor. This pursuit requires capitalists to constantly invest inmore efficient means of production to stay abreast of their competitors, which means that labor— the unique source of value under capitalism—is progressively replaced by advanced machinery. This in turn progressively reduces the value yield of investments. Capitalism, returning to the treadmill metaphor, must run ever faster simply to remain in place. Thus, in capitalist societies, the output of material wealth grows, but labor becomes increasingly superfluous and the abundance of material wealth fails to improve general well-being. This interpretation of capitalism seems to describe aptly the dynamics of the increasingly unequal world that capitalism has wrought in the past several decades. But Moishe’s reinterpretation of Marx has implications beyond this stark description of capitalism’s material life. The shift from questions of property relations and class to questions about the abstraction of social life enriches Marxism’s implications for the analysis of cultural matters. Moishe’s reading of Marx has undoubtedly been influenced by his embrace of the cultural revolt that was so prominent during his and my youth and early adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s. Moishe’s thought has a definite resonance with the concerns of Herbert Marcuse’s cultural critique of capitalism and the desire for a cultural liberation from capitalism’s deadening clutches—a theme that was pervasive in the 1960s revolts. Moishe’s analysis of capitalism, with its focus on advancing abstraction and its contradictory effects, sheds a revealing light on modern history. The advances of mathematical and scientific thinking ever since the late sixteenth century, the rise of literacy and scholarly production, the growing sophistication of technology, the increasing freedom from determination by birth and tradition—all of these can be seen as consequences and instances of capitalism’s abstracting force. But capitalism’s abstract dynamic also has negative consequences—the repeated undermining of what passes for truth, the constant decay or obsolescence of skills and competences, the sense that one is constantly subject to forces beyond one’s control, the Remembering Moishe Postone | 163 disorientation and personal alienation that accompanies constant change. For better and for worse, in Marx and Engels’s splendid phrase from the Communist
{"title":"Remembering Moishe Postone","authors":"W. Sewell","doi":"10.1086/699682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699682","url":null,"abstract":"labor is the encompassing form of social mediation that dominates and informs the unequal and alienating social relations of capitalist society. Its abstract economizing logic has not only powered the contradictory dynamics of modern society but shaped its modes of thought, its conceptions of worth, and the textures of its social life. In Moishe’s striking metaphor, capitalism has put modern society on a temporal treadmill. Capitalism is engaged in an endless pursuit of value, the highly abstract form of wealth unique to it, which is derived solely from the exploitation of commodified labor. This pursuit requires capitalists to constantly invest inmore efficient means of production to stay abreast of their competitors, which means that labor— the unique source of value under capitalism—is progressively replaced by advanced machinery. This in turn progressively reduces the value yield of investments. Capitalism, returning to the treadmill metaphor, must run ever faster simply to remain in place. Thus, in capitalist societies, the output of material wealth grows, but labor becomes increasingly superfluous and the abundance of material wealth fails to improve general well-being. This interpretation of capitalism seems to describe aptly the dynamics of the increasingly unequal world that capitalism has wrought in the past several decades. But Moishe’s reinterpretation of Marx has implications beyond this stark description of capitalism’s material life. The shift from questions of property relations and class to questions about the abstraction of social life enriches Marxism’s implications for the analysis of cultural matters. Moishe’s reading of Marx has undoubtedly been influenced by his embrace of the cultural revolt that was so prominent during his and my youth and early adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s. Moishe’s thought has a definite resonance with the concerns of Herbert Marcuse’s cultural critique of capitalism and the desire for a cultural liberation from capitalism’s deadening clutches—a theme that was pervasive in the 1960s revolts. Moishe’s analysis of capitalism, with its focus on advancing abstraction and its contradictory effects, sheds a revealing light on modern history. The advances of mathematical and scientific thinking ever since the late sixteenth century, the rise of literacy and scholarly production, the growing sophistication of technology, the increasing freedom from determination by birth and tradition—all of these can be seen as consequences and instances of capitalism’s abstracting force. But capitalism’s abstract dynamic also has negative consequences—the repeated undermining of what passes for truth, the constant decay or obsolescence of skills and competences, the sense that one is constantly subject to forces beyond one’s control, the Remembering Moishe Postone | 163 disorientation and personal alienation that accompanies constant change. For better and for worse, in Marx and Engels’s splendid phrase from the Communist","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699682","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42966193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ndoubtedly, one of the most important post-Freudian psychoanalytic developments was Melanie Klein’s theorization in the 1940s of the two “positions,” her term for the stages of psychosexual development through which the “normal” infant passes. The first, which Klein termed the “paranoid-schizoid position,” is active from the beginning months of life and is characterized essentially by the splitting of things in the infant’s environment into good and bad parts: in Klein’s paradigmatic example, the mother’s breast “is split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast.” The world for the paranoid-schizoid is essentially one divided between ideal, flawless, good things and evil, persecutory, bad things. It is only in the second position, the “depressive” position, that this split world gives way to one with more gray areas, where the distinction between good and bad is less pronounced, and where “objects” (the psychoanalyst’s unfortunate term for other people) can be perceived as whole. Freed from schizoid projection, the object comes to be regarded in a new, disabused light: neither purely good nor purely evil but rather a complex and inevitably frustrating combination of both. The depressive position thus signals the developing subject’s attainment of a new stage of psychic maturity, one marked by the novel capacity to tolerate moral ambiguity and the ambivalence it gives rise to. An analogy might be drawn here between the Kleinian theory of the two positions and the difficult maturation that
{"title":"A Whole Climate of Critique: Psychoanalytic Politics between Vitality and Obsolescence","authors":"P. Henry, Benjamin Y. Fong","doi":"10.1086/697030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/697030","url":null,"abstract":"ndoubtedly, one of the most important post-Freudian psychoanalytic developments was Melanie Klein’s theorization in the 1940s of the two “positions,” her term for the stages of psychosexual development through which the “normal” infant passes. The first, which Klein termed the “paranoid-schizoid position,” is active from the beginning months of life and is characterized essentially by the splitting of things in the infant’s environment into good and bad parts: in Klein’s paradigmatic example, the mother’s breast “is split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast.” The world for the paranoid-schizoid is essentially one divided between ideal, flawless, good things and evil, persecutory, bad things. It is only in the second position, the “depressive” position, that this split world gives way to one with more gray areas, where the distinction between good and bad is less pronounced, and where “objects” (the psychoanalyst’s unfortunate term for other people) can be perceived as whole. Freed from schizoid projection, the object comes to be regarded in a new, disabused light: neither purely good nor purely evil but rather a complex and inevitably frustrating combination of both. The depressive position thus signals the developing subject’s attainment of a new stage of psychic maturity, one marked by the novel capacity to tolerate moral ambiguity and the ambivalence it gives rise to. An analogy might be drawn here between the Kleinian theory of the two positions and the difficult maturation that","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/697030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47123998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The term “longevity risk” exemplifies how finance capital makes people’s investments against themselves appear both self-serving and collectively enriching by assimilating the insurance risk pool with the financial investment. I develop this argument by drawing on Frank Knight and Georg Lukács, whose contrasting commentaries on the early stages of finance capitalism disturb some of the taken-for-granted aspects of their present articulation. People place their unspent earnings in risk pooling systems as a precautionary measure. My goal is to make explicit that their resources are reinvested and managed not to allay and exploit risks to their lives but rather to allay and exploit the risk of their lives, insofar as these lives do not serve accumulation.
{"title":"Longevity Risk: A Report on the Banality of Finance Capital","authors":"Hadas Weiss","doi":"10.1086/697029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/697029","url":null,"abstract":"The term “longevity risk” exemplifies how finance capital makes people’s investments against themselves appear both self-serving and collectively enriching by assimilating the insurance risk pool with the financial investment. I develop this argument by drawing on Frank Knight and Georg Lukács, whose contrasting commentaries on the early stages of finance capitalism disturb some of the taken-for-granted aspects of their present articulation. People place their unspent earnings in risk pooling systems as a precautionary measure. My goal is to make explicit that their resources are reinvested and managed not to allay and exploit risks to their lives but rather to allay and exploit the risk of their lives, insofar as these lives do not serve accumulation.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/697029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49029761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tradition is a paradoxical concept that, on the one hand, defines a set of practices as external or resistant to the dynamics of global modern society but, on the other hand, makes sense of these practices in references to modernity itself. Colonial scholarship has struggled with this paradox, taking the appearance of tradition as situated outside modernity at face value. By historicizing the logical form of the concept of tradition, this article offers a critique of its use in colonial scholarship. Examining the Oblate missionization of British Columbia in the nineteenth century as a case study, this article tracks how the logical form of tradition was articulated with the development of capital, how it defined Oblate ideology, how it was adopted by various Indigenous communities to make sense of their own social transformation in relation to broader global transformations, and ultimately how it was adopted as a critical analytic by colonial scholars.
{"title":"The Arrival of Tradition: The Influence of the Tradition Concept on Missionary-Indigenous Interactions in the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest Coast","authors":"Haeden E. Stewart","doi":"10.1086/697033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/697033","url":null,"abstract":"Tradition is a paradoxical concept that, on the one hand, defines a set of practices as external or resistant to the dynamics of global modern society but, on the other hand, makes sense of these practices in references to modernity itself. Colonial scholarship has struggled with this paradox, taking the appearance of tradition as situated outside modernity at face value. By historicizing the logical form of the concept of tradition, this article offers a critique of its use in colonial scholarship. Examining the Oblate missionization of British Columbia in the nineteenth century as a case study, this article tracks how the logical form of tradition was articulated with the development of capital, how it defined Oblate ideology, how it was adopted by various Indigenous communities to make sense of their own social transformation in relation to broader global transformations, and ultimately how it was adopted as a critical analytic by colonial scholars.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/697033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44377886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Agrarian social conflict played a major role in shaping Irish economic development from the 1760s to the 1930s. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bands of peasants known as “whiteboys” defended customary rights to land with intimidation and violence. This article analyzes a collection of 135 so-called threatening letters from rural parts of the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. In the letters are found traces of the cultural practices through which peasants resisting primitive accumulation sustained their sense of collective efficacy. These traces have two main forms: expressions of pan-regional collective identity and appropriations from ruling-class status/power displays. A sense of agency was central to the exercise of actual agency—an agency that retarded processes of primitive accumulation and contributed to a situation whereby the spread of the British model of capitalist agriculture was confined and peasant production survived into the twentieth century.
{"title":"Letters of Blood and Fire: Primitive Accumulation, Peasant Resistance, and the Making of Agency in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland","authors":"T. M. Dunne","doi":"10.1086/697031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/697031","url":null,"abstract":"Agrarian social conflict played a major role in shaping Irish economic development from the 1760s to the 1930s. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bands of peasants known as “whiteboys” defended customary rights to land with intimidation and violence. This article analyzes a collection of 135 so-called threatening letters from rural parts of the eastern province of Leinster in the year 1832. In the letters are found traces of the cultural practices through which peasants resisting primitive accumulation sustained their sense of collective efficacy. These traces have two main forms: expressions of pan-regional collective identity and appropriations from ruling-class status/power displays. A sense of agency was central to the exercise of actual agency—an agency that retarded processes of primitive accumulation and contributed to a situation whereby the spread of the British model of capitalist agriculture was confined and peasant production survived into the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/697031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42517111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article traces the concept of reciprocity from its emergence in French philosophy during the Enlightenment to its recent growth in the humanities and social sciences. After charting the term’s accelerated use in French and English in the modern period, the article shows how its meaning has continually wavered between exchange equivalence (barter) and generosity and obligation (the gift, the Golden Rule). During the Enlightenment, these meanings converged in efforts to naturalize commerce and justify liberal economic reforms. A free-market society, it was argued, would be fair and bountiful. Upon the failure of such reforms in the early French Revolution, reciprocity and its new synonym “fraternity” became detached from economic liberalism. As capitalism became increasingly associated with wealth inequality in the nineteenth century, reciprocity became the watchword of capitalism’s critics, who tried to conceptualize social bonds in terms other than those offered by Homo economicus.
{"title":"Capitalism’s Alter Ego: The Birth of Reciprocity in Eighteenth-Century France","authors":"Charles Walton","doi":"10.1086/697032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/697032","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the concept of reciprocity from its emergence in French philosophy during the Enlightenment to its recent growth in the humanities and social sciences. After charting the term’s accelerated use in French and English in the modern period, the article shows how its meaning has continually wavered between exchange equivalence (barter) and generosity and obligation (the gift, the Golden Rule). During the Enlightenment, these meanings converged in efforts to naturalize commerce and justify liberal economic reforms. A free-market society, it was argued, would be fair and bountiful. Upon the failure of such reforms in the early French Revolution, reciprocity and its new synonym “fraternity” became detached from economic liberalism. As capitalism became increasingly associated with wealth inequality in the nineteenth century, reciprocity became the watchword of capitalism’s critics, who tried to conceptualize social bonds in terms other than those offered by Homo economicus.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/697032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44948718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Capitalism’s Futures Past: Expectations in History and Theory","authors":"Francesco Boldizzoni","doi":"10.1086/693901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693901","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693901","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41464982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Walter Benjamin used the archetypes of the Prostitute, the Dandy, and the Gambler to understand the human-commodity relation. Here I push Benjamin’s allegories by examining the actual lived lives of prostitutes, dandies, and gamblers in New Orleans, circa 1820–1920. There have always been actors who played the game with more of a double consciousness than a false consciousness. And they were able to do so because they grasped the romantic and irrational potential of transactions that articulated with sexual desire, emotional comfort, and aspirational fantasies. They were also masters of disguise and commodity props. Fancy prostitutes and dandies performed a kind of drag of consumer respectability, while the professional gambler threatened to reveal the act of faith that all money transactions depend upon. Viewed from the consumption end of the market spectrum, the commodity becomes a fetish through the considerable agency of the seller-seducer.
{"title":"The Prostitute and the Dandy; or, The Romantic Complications of Capitalism as Viewed from New Orleans","authors":"S. Dawdy","doi":"10.1086/694032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/694032","url":null,"abstract":"Walter Benjamin used the archetypes of the Prostitute, the Dandy, and the Gambler to understand the human-commodity relation. Here I push Benjamin’s allegories by examining the actual lived lives of prostitutes, dandies, and gamblers in New Orleans, circa 1820–1920. There have always been actors who played the game with more of a double consciousness than a false consciousness. And they were able to do so because they grasped the romantic and irrational potential of transactions that articulated with sexual desire, emotional comfort, and aspirational fantasies. They were also masters of disguise and commodity props. Fancy prostitutes and dandies performed a kind of drag of consumer respectability, while the professional gambler threatened to reveal the act of faith that all money transactions depend upon. Viewed from the consumption end of the market spectrum, the commodity becomes a fetish through the considerable agency of the seller-seducer.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/694032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41555825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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