Reviewed Works:
In The Shadow of Dubois:Afro-Modern Political Thought in America by Robert Gooding-Williams;
The Undiscovered Dewey:Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy by Melvin L. Rogers
Review by: Jason Frank
Political Theory
Vol. 40, No. 3 (June 2012), pp. 379-386
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41703030
Page Count: 8
Downloaded via Air to Dbox

King's College London -- What unites these experiences of frustrated freedom? It is certainly not the fact that the protagonists in these examples lack the capacity for rational, intentional control over their actions or face legal impediments to their choices. Krause thus parts ways with a long tradition in western political thought dating back to Locke, Kant and Mill, which locates individual freedom in the rational will and the capacity to exercise intentional choice and control. In fact, the originality of Krause's account is showing how freedom can be undermined despite a generally friendly background of political rights and privileges that guarantee the space for intentional choice. Something subtler is going on, which is why certain dimensions of freedom have been absent from standard accounts of what it means to be free. The quality of our everyday interpersonal exchanges matters quite a lot for individual freedom because these interactions are constitutive of personal agency. Krause argues that a proper understanding of agency is inextricably tied to freedom. Following Bernard Williams, she deploys a two-dimensional conception of agency: agency consists both in deliberation and results. To be an agent is both to plan one's actions and to have a recognizable impact on the world. Agency is thus "the affirmation of one's subjective existence, or personal identity, through concrete action in the world." The efficacy dimension of agency distinguishes it from "mere willing or dreaming." (4) Crucially, however, we are not in complete control of how our actions affect the world. Their effect depends, in significant part, on how others perceive and respond to them.

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates—how do you pronounce that, by the way? Lately, it has become more difficult to see in here. My intellectual wings have been chafing my… She picks up every piece of passive-aggressive discomfort, weaseling self-justification, feeble attempts to reassert cultural and moral authority without appearing to (wouldn't "do" for the Yale professor of humility to be seen to pull rank), and general intellectual, moral and rhetorical disaster in David Brooks' column. He's given his readers an excuse not to take Ta-Nehisi seriously, since Brooks has publicly performed the discomfort of white privilege for them and has shared with them what he's "learned" from Black Lives Matter and Ta-Nehisi's book, which is that he still believes in fairy tales, and so his readers are encouraged to as well.

We distinguish between… property rights, political rights, and civil rights… …Liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two. Democratic transitions are typically the product of a settlement between the elite (who care mostly about property rights) and the majority (who care mostly about political rights). Such settlements rarely produce liberal democracy, as the minority has neither the resources nor the numbers to make a contribution at the bargaining table. We develop a formal model to sharpen the contrast between electoral and liberal democracies…. We discuss… the difference between social mobilizations sparked by industrialization and decolonization. Since the latter revolve around identity cleavages rather than class cleavages, they are less conducive to liberal politics. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Original in The New Humanist June 2011 -- The claim that Christianity provides the bedrock of Western culture might serve the interests of extremists, but it is a betrayal of a far more complex history. In the warped mind of Anders Breivik, his murderous rampages in Oslo and Utoya earlier this year were the first shots in a war in defence of Christian Europe. Not a religious war but a cultural one, to defend what Breivik called Europe's "cultural, social, identity and moral platform". Few but the most psychopathic can have any sympathy for Breivik's homicidal frenzy. Yet the idea that Christianity provides the foundations of Western civilisation, and of its political ideals and ethical values, and that Christian Europe is under threat, from Islam on the one side and "cultural Marxists" on the other, finds a widespread hearing. The erosion of Christianity, in this narrative, will lead inevitably to the erosion of Western civilisation and to the end of modern, liberal democracy. -- useful roundup of the pundits and publishers churning out these claims -- downloaded pdf to Note

Original in Polish -- Translation by Irena Maryniak -- First published in Res Publica Nowa 13 (2011) (Polish version); Eurozine (English version) --;A European patriotism can be generated only through political acts that create a sense of solidarity, says historian Pierre Manent. If invocations of Europe are to be anything but vacuous, Europe needs to be decisive in defining its interests and demarcating its boundaries. -- the interview was stimulated by the large waves of intra-EU migration, e.g. the Poles -- downloaded pdf to Note

Original in Swedish -- Translation by Anna Paterson -- First published in Arena 5/2011 (Swedish version); Eurozine (English version) -- Democracy, humanism and diversity have little to do with a "European inheritance". Yet EU cultural policy instrumentalizes cultural heritage to promote common identity. This narrative bias needs to be challenged, says Erik Hammar. -- EU cultural budgets and priorities being set by right wing pro-EU with focus on "the big 3" of England, France and Germany in languages and efforts to project "soft power" globally -- the purportedly universally shared European heritage and collective identity is "humanism, tolerance and enlightenment"

An historian can define European identity descriptively, as Krzysztof Pomian demonstrates in a tour of European culture since the first millennium before Christ. But the real controversy lies elsewhere, in the political question: what of the European past is worth preserving? (..) What are we ready to abandon, and what are we attached to so strongly that under no circumstances will we allow ourselves be deprived of? To what extent must the future be patterned according to our expectations, rooted in the past, and to what extent are we ready to leave the shaping of it to forces we do not control, and which seem to be causing a growing estrangement from our familiar ideas about how that future should look? These questions, in many different forms, (..) must be addressed not to historians but to politicians, and in the last instance to the European citizenry, which as ultimate decision-maker must provide an answer. European identity is a historical fact. More and more, it is also becoming a political problem. -- Original in Dutch -- First published in L. Ornstein and L. Breemer (eds.), Paleis Europa. Grote denkers over Europa, as "De Europese identiteit : een historisch feit en een politiek problem", De Bezige Bij: Amsterdam 2007, 29-54 (Dutch version); Transit 37 (2009) (German version). -- downloaded pdf to Note

The massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, has revived discussion about the Confederate battle flag and its meaning. Liberals find it easy to condemn it, but…

Has the liberating charge of struggles for recognition dissolved into pure identity politics? Do these have to sidestep inequalities of wealth and power? Not, Nancy Fraser contends, if recognition is understood as a question of social status rather than existential address. -- interesting fit from a social justice angle of key themes taken up by Jacib Levy in his new book -- downloaded pdf to Note

C A new direction in political sociology?

Authors
Abstract

This essay reviews works in (political) sociology that offer alternatives to sociology-as-usual. Sociologists with even fleeting awareness of the recent history of political sociology are surely familiar with the cultural turn, the global turn, and the turn toward complexity; however, another turn seems to be afoot, one toward existential concerns that direct us to recover how people experience ‘the complex contradictions of the social and political world’ (Taylor). Complex experiences often leave behind residues or ‘traces,’ and contributors in a recently edited volume challenge sociologists to unlock the social significance of these traces and find new ways to capture what our methods capture so poorly, namely, popular forgettings, geographies of exclusion, and the slow erasure of deeds, memories, and other subjugated knowledges belonging to individuals who find themselves dismissed, dispelled, or disenfranchised by nation-states. Traces left behind by individuals navigating the complexities of contemporary experiments in human ‘being’ are just the sort of analysis that must, in principle, place the actor at the center of analysis, and, after careful study, we now appreciate that despite the analytical ease of assuming that actors are singular, sociologists should examine actors as plural and unearth their essential multiplicity. *-* 1. Graham Taylor, The New Political Sociology: Power, Ideology and Identity in an Age of Complexity, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2010; viii + 208 pp. *-* 2. Herman Gray, Macarena Gómez-Barris (eds), Toward a Sociology of the Trace, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2010; xvi + 328 pp. *-* 3. Bernard Lahire , The Plural Actor, Polity: Malden, MA, 2011; xx + 280 pp. -- Keywords - Agency, Bourdieu, complexity, political sociology, social theory, trace -- downloaded pdf to Note

There may seem to be something wilfully perverse about the idea that 19thC Britain, or its empire, was ‘less racist’ than the contemporary nation. Nevertheless there is an element of truth to Cannadine’s argument. 19thC thinkers and administrators combined a belief in natural inequality with a belief in the ‘universality’ of the world – the conviction that they lived in ‘one vast interconnected world’, as Cannadine puts it. Today, in the post-Holocaust era, we have by and large rejected ideas of natural inequality – but also ideas of universality. Indeed, in the ‘West and the Rest’ tradition, universalism is itself regarded as a product of racism, a means by which the West has silenced the voices of the Rest. The consequence has been not the embrace of equality, but the reframing of inequality as ‘difference’. We have managed to combine today a formal belief in equality with the practical creation of a more fractious, fragmented, identity-driven world. Against this background, the moral of Cannadine’s story is not so much that an empire built ‘on individual inequality, had ways of dealing with race that contemporary societies, dedicated to collective equality do not’. It is rather that an age that enjoyed a bullish belief in the ‘sameness’ of the word possessed certain resources to cope with problems of difference that we no longer do, despite the fact that race and inequality were much more central aspects of the Victorian world-view. If we truly want to bury Victorian ideas of inequality, then we must repossess their belief in universality.

JORDAN S. DOWNS -- University of California, Riverside -- This article attempts to uncover the political significance of the Old Testament verse Judges 5:23, ‘the curse of Meroz’, during the English Civil War. Historians who have commented on the printed text of Meroz have done so primarily in reference to a single edition of the parliamentarian fast-day preacher Stephen Marshall's 1642 Meroz cursed sermon. Usage of the curse, however, as shown in more than seventy unique sermons, tracts, histories, libels, and songs considered here, demonstrates that the verse was far more widespread and politically significant than has been previously assumed. Analysing Meroz in its political and polemical roles, from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and through the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, sheds new light on the ways in which providentialism functioned during the Civil Wars, and serves, more specifically, to illustrate some of the important means by which ministers and polemicists sought to mobilize citizens and construct party identities. --* I am grateful to Richard Cust, Barbara Donagan, Peter Lake, Isaac Stephens, Stefania Tutino, and the two anonymous reviewers who read and commented on earlier versions of this article. Special thanks are due to Tom Cogswell for his guidance and extensive feedback

The fall of class in nineteenth-century British history has become a familiar tale. Its rise in the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain has been less noted. This essay explores the reasons for this divergence and emphasizes its methodological origins. It highlights the need for a comprehensive history of class society and identity to replace the confused and contradictory picture of particular classes and communities that is currently on offer. To understand better the constitution of class society, it urges historians to talk less of consciousness and more of identity and to recognize that class is an imagined community much like any other. It proceeds to use this understanding of class identity to assess the turn to political language amongst social historians interested in class. The paper offers a sustained examination of the recent work of Joyce and Wahrman in particular and argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of usable political languages and to the particular discursive contexts in which they are employed. It is argued that to acknowledge that class is so constructed is not to deny its existence or its importance and that historians need to look beyond political discourse to explain how class became so central to the self and the social in the nineteenth century. -- extensive references on British social history as well as postmodern historiography debates -- downloaded pdf to Note

This volume engages in a critical discussion of the connection between historically specific categories of identity determined by class, gender, nationality, religion, political factions and age, and the media available at the time, including novels, newspapers, trial reports, images and the theatre. Recognizing the proliferation of identities in the epoch, these essays explore the ways in which different media determined constructions of identity and were in turn shaped by them. *--* Introduction: mediating identities in 18th-century England, Isabel Karremann; *--* Identifying an age-specific English literature for children, Anja Müller; *--* Found and lost in mediation: manly identity in Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Isabel Karremann; *--* Gender identity in sentimental and pornographic fiction: Pamela and Fanny Hill, Franz Meier; *--* Paratexts and the construction of author identities: the preface as threshold and thresholds in the preface, Katharina Rennhak; *--* Owning identity: the 18th-century actress and theatrical property, Felicity Nussbaum; *--* Constructing identity in 18th-century comedy: schools of scandal, observation and performance, Anette Pankratz; *--* Material sites of discourse and the discursive hybridity of identities, Uwe Böker; *--* Constructions of political identity: the example of impeachments, Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos; *--* The public sphere, mass media, fashion and the identity of the individual, Christian Huck; *--* Topography and aesthetics: mapping the British identity in painting, Isabelle Baudino; *--* The panoramic gaze: the control of illusion and the illusion of control, Michael Meyer; *--* Peripatetics of citizenship in the 1790s, Christoph Houswitschka; *--* Critical responses, Rainer Emig, Hans-Peter Wagner and Christoph Heyl - downloaded introduction to Note

Given recent social and political transformations as well as our cultural landscape's dominance by narratives of threat and victimization, it is understandable that fear has occupied an ever-expanding role in our lives. Although these instabilities and insecurities have inspired a resurgence of various explanatory and mollifying fundamentalisms, radical democrats suggest that the conditions of this "postmetaphysical" age might instead facilitate unprecedented commitments to democracy. As such, radical democrats welcome the very conditions of contingency that contemporary citizen-subjects tend to find so frightening. In attacking the drive towards fundamentalism that they identify in various ideologies from Islam through liberalism, radical democrats betray an inattention to the functional consolation they offer. If fundamentalisms are opiates, radical democrats offer a prescription for addiction treatment that few have any interest in taking. -- very interesting bibliography -- downloaded pdf to Note

Reviewed (1) The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory by Amanda Anderson; *--* (2) Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics by Wendy Brown -- downloaded pdf to Note