scholarly journals Elias, ultra-realism and double-binds: Violence in the streets and the state

2020 ◽  
pp. 147737082097788
Author(s):  
Matt Clement ◽  
Stephen Mennell
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
The State ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Double Binds ◽  
Sociology Of Deviance ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Post War

‘Ultra-realism’ has become an influential current in criminology, especially in the study of violence and explanations of trends in violent crime. Ultra-realist writers frequently make use of Norbert Elias’s theory of civilizing processes, while also often expressing reservations about his ideas. In this article, we argue that ultra-realists tend to make only partial and inaccurate use of Elias’s very extensive writings. Although he himself did not write very much about crime – and indeed was less concerned with violence per se than with the roots of aggressive impulses and their control – we place him in the context of the post-war sociology of deviance. We argue in particular that it is far from true that he was blind to political economy, since the state-formation processes are central to his theory. We relate our argument to double-bind processes, violent subcultures, moral panics, populism and recent political developments in Britain.

Women in Transition

2017 ◽  
pp. 1501-1517
Author(s):  
Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

The chapter describes institutional and gender relations in the society and the economy, the influence of institutions and the state that may lead to the institutional change, which is understood as an adaptation of habits of thought to changing circumstances. The situation of women in Poland has been chosen to illustrate this phenomenon. Poland, as a country, has gone through major social, political and economic transformations in the last 25 years, and they have had important impacts on people's lives. The analysis of the impact of major transformations in Poland's post-war political economy enables the distinguishing factors (policies, institutions) that guarantee certain continuity in a society, and the ones that lead to institutional changes. Knowledge about the mechanisms of institutional change in the context of gender relations is helpful in designing policies aiming at promoting gender equality in societies as well as economies.

Women in Transition

2015 ◽  
pp. 212-229
Author(s):  
Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

The chapter describes institutional and gender relations in the society and the economy, the influence of institutions and the state that may lead to the institutional change, which is understood as an adaptation of habits of thought to changing circumstances. The situation of women in Poland has been chosen to illustrate this phenomenon. Poland, as a country, has gone through major social, political and economic transformations in the last 25 years, and they have had important impacts on people's lives. The analysis of the impact of major transformations in Poland's post-war political economy enables the distinguishing factors (policies, institutions) that guarantee certain continuity in a society, and the ones that lead to institutional changes. Knowledge about the mechanisms of institutional change in the context of gender relations is helpful in designing policies aiming at promoting gender equality in societies as well as economies.

Party and Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Organizational Development ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The State ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Post War ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes

The book integrates philosophical, historical, and empirical analyses in order to highlight the profound roots of the limited legitimation of parties in contemporary society. Political parties’ long attempts to gain legitimacy are analysed from a philosophical–historical perspective pinpointing crucial passages in their theoretical and empirical acceptance. The book illustrates the process through which parties first emerged and then achieved full legitimacy in the early twentieth century. It shows how, paradoxically, their role became absolute in the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period when the party became hyper-powerful. In the post-war period, parties shifted from a golden age of positive reception and organizational development towards a more difficult relationship with society as it moved into post-industrialism. Parties were unable to master societal change and favoured the state to recover resources they were no longer able to extract from their constituencies. Parties have become richer and more powerful, but they have ‘paid’ for their pervasive presence in society and the state with a declining legitimacy. The party today is caught in a dramatic contradiction. It has become a sort of Leviathan with clay feet: very powerful thanks to the resources it gets from the state and to its control of societal and state spheres due to an extension of clientelistic and patronage practices; but very weak in terms of legitimacy and confidence in the eyes of the mass public. However, it is argued that there is still no alternative to the party, and some hypotheses to enhance party democracy are advanced.

The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Topher L. McDougal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The State ◽  
Hierarchical Networks ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Economic Relationship ◽  
Relationship Of

In some cases of insurgency, the combat frontier is contested and erratic, as rebels target cities as their economic prey. In other cases, it is tidy and stable, seemingly representing an equilibrium in which cities are effectively protected from violent non-state actors. What factors account for these differences in the interface urban-based states and rural-based challengers? To explore this question, this book examines two regions representing two dramatically different outcomes. In West Africa (Liberia and Sierra Leone), capital cities became economic targets for rebels, who posed dire threats to the survival of the state. In Maoist India, despite an insurgent ideology aiming to overthrow the state via a strategy of progressive city capture, the combat frontier effectively firewalls cities from Maoist violence. This book argues that trade networks underpinning the economic relationship between rural and urban areas—termed “interstitial economies”—may differ dramatically in their impact on (and response to) the combat frontier. It explains rebel predatory tendencies toward cities as a function of transport networks allowing monopoly profits to be made by urban-based traders. It explains combat frontier delineation as a function of the social structure of the trade networks: hierarchical networks permit elite–elite bargains that cohere the frontier. These factors represent what might be termed respectively the “hardware” and “software” of the rural–urban economic relationship. Of interest to any student of political economy and violence, this book presents new arguments and insights about the relationships between violence and the economy, predation and production, core and periphery.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
International Monetary System ◽  
The State ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....

State Sponsored Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asha Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
British Council ◽  
Material Condition ◽  
State Involvement ◽  
Satanic Verses ◽  
Original Analysis ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
Post War ◽  
Archival Work

Debates about the value of the ‘literary’ rarely register the expressive acts of state subsidy, sponsorship, and cultural policy that have shaped post-war Britain. In State Sponsored Literature, Asha Rogers argues that the modern state was a major material condition of literature, even as its efforts were relative, partial, and prone to disruption. Drawing from neglected and occasionally unexpected archives, she shows how the state became an integral and conflicted custodian of literary freedom in the postcolonial world as beliefs about literature’s ‘public’ were radically challenged by the unrivalled migration to Britain at the end of Empire. State Sponsored Literature retells the story of literature’s place in modern Britain through original analysis of the institutional forces behind canon-formation and contestation, from the literature programmes of the British Council and Arts Council to the UK’s fraught relations with UNESCO, from GCSE literature anthologies to the origins of The Satanic Verses in migrant Camden. The state did not shape literary production in a vacuum, Rogers argues, rather its policies, practices, and priorities were inexorably shaped in turn. Demonstrating how archival work can potentially transform our understanding of literature and its reading publics, this book challenges how we think about literature’s value by asking what state involvement has meant for writers, readers, institutions, and the ideal of autonomy itself.

The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article

1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Newly Industrialized Countries ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Balance Of Forces ◽  
The Third World

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.

The Saint with Indra's Sword: Khruubaa Srivichai and Buddhist Millenarianism in Northern Thailand

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
The State ◽  
Capital City ◽  
The Political ◽  
Northern Thailand ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
Modern Context ◽  
A Charge ◽  
Social Causes

AbstractDespite a growing literature revealing the presence of millenarian movements in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist societies, scholars have been remarkably reluctant to consider the role of messianic beliefs in Buddhist societies. Khruubaa Srivichai (1878–1938) is the most famous monk of northern Thailand and is widely revered as atonbun, or saint. Althoughtonbunhas been depoliticized in the modern context, the term also refers to a savior who is an incarnation of the coming Maitreya Buddha. In 1920 Srivichai was sent under arrest to the capital city of Bangkok to face eight charges. This essay focuses on the charge that he claimed to possess the god Indra's sword. Although this charge has been widely ignored, it was in fact a charge of treason. In this essay, I argue that the treason charge should be understood within the context of Buddhist millenarianism. I note the saint/savior tropes in Srivichai's mytho-biography, describe the prevalence of millenarianism in the region, and detail the political economy of the decade of the 1910s prior to Srivichai's detention. I present evidence to show that the decade was characterized by famine, dislocation, disease, and other disasters of both natural and social causes. Such hardships would have been consistent with apocalyptic omens in the Buddhist repertoire portending the advent of Maitreya. Understanding Srivichai in this millenarian context helps to explain both the hopes of the populace and the fears of the state during that tumultuous decade.

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