Shock Therapy: Atlas Shrugged, Urban Renewal, and the Making of the Entrepreneurial Subject

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 84-103
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Shock Therapy ◽  
White Flight ◽  
Urban Decay ◽  
The Future ◽  
Policy Shocks ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Post War ◽  
Subject Making

Naomi Klein opens The Shock Doctrine by comparing the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds” with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could return society to “pure capitalism.” Klein’s book raises the question, why did shock become the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological modernization? This chapter suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock’s emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the post-war period. Reading Atlas Shrugged in relation to the debates surrounding the future of America’s cities at a time when the often-opposing forces of urban sprawl, suburbanization, urban decay, and urban renewal were making that future increasingly uncertain, this chapter argues that Atlas Shrugged simultaneously acts as an origin story for the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject and reveals the racialized and revanchist urban processes that helped create and shape these seemingly objective economic narratives and subjectivities.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willeke Sandler
Keyword(s):  
The Future ◽  
Specific Association ◽  
Nature Preservation ◽  
Post War

This short epilogue takes the story of the leading colonialists into the post-1945 period and assesses the historiographical narrative of post-war colonial amnesia. This amnesia did not begin in 1945, however, but in the 1930s and 1940s through the work of colonialists. In their efforts to situate overseas colonialism within the needs of the present and of value for the future, colonialists had created an overly positive narrative that emphasized an inherent German aptitude for administering Africa. After the war, these ideals could find expression through development or nature preservation, even though (or perhaps because) they no longer bore a specific association with Germany’s past of formal colonialism.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

scholarly journals Disruption, destruction and the creation of ‘the inner cities’: the impact of urban renewal on industry, 1945–1980

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALISTAIR KEFFORD
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Industrial Activities ◽  
Inner Cities ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACT:This article examines the impact of post-war urban renewal on industry and economic activity in Manchester and Leeds. It demonstrates that local redevelopment plans contained important economic underpinnings which have been largely overlooked in the literature, and particularly highlights expansive plans for industrial reorganization and relocation. The article also shows that, in practice, urban renewal had a destabilizing and destructive impact on established industrial activities and exacerbated the inner-city problems of unemployment and disinvestment which preoccupied policy-makers by the 1970s. The article argues that post-war planning practices need to be integrated into wider histories of deindustrialization in British cities.

The Image of the Future in the Situation of the Decline of Culture: Contemporary Russia from the Perspective of O. Spengle

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 323-334
Author(s):  
Inga V. Zheltikova
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Conservative Values ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Images Of The Future

The concept of O. Spengler suggests that the history of any culture goes through certain stages of development, the last of which is civilization. During this period creative activity in culture is replaced by mechanical imitation and lost connection with the culture formed by the «pra-phenomenon». The author correlates Spengler’s postulates with the processes of actual social reality and comes to the conclusion that contemporary Russia is going through the stage of civilization. The article raises the question of how the future is seen in this situation. The author uses the term “image of the future”, introduced by F. Polak to understand the disinterest of modern post-war Europe in its future. Thus, the lack of interest in the future can be recognized as another characteristic of the state of civilization. The existence in contemporary Russia of distinct images of the future is an open question. Using the methods of content analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that in Russian contemporary society there exists a retrospective image of the future, focused on conservative values, hierarchy of society and its closed nature to the world. Thus, it is concluded that it is wrong to talk about complete absence of images of the future in contemporary Russia. But the nature and content of these images demonstrate the low level of interest in the future, which also indicates the transition of Russian culture to civilization.

THE HISTORICAL MANUSCRIPTS COMMISSION AT 150

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Arike Oke
Keyword(s):  
Keynote Lecture ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
Archival Practice ◽  
Historical Manuscripts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Post War

The 150th anniversary of the Historical Manuscripts Commission invites the opportunity for reflection on how the commission characterises and influences the development of the archives profession. This article considers archival practice as linked to the mood and character of a nation, in this case Britain. It uses the historiography of post-war identity building to begin to investigate and critique the British archives sector, and asks questions about the future of archives and archivists. The article is adapted from a keynote lecture at the HMC150 commemoration, 14 October 2019.

Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Great Migration to White Flight

Novel Shocks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Flight ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Post War

Shortly after Ralph Ellison’s protagonist arrives in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a man wearing Charlie Chaplin pants, “pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper,” and singing a blues song that reminds the protagonist of home. Often read as a carrier of blues and vernacular traditions within the novel, Wheatstraw is also a literal carrier of building plans, all of which point to the ascendancy of Robert Moses and his New York City Slum Clearance Committee under the aegis of the Federal Housing Act of 1949. This chapter reads Ellison in relation to this emergent regime of post-war planning to suggest we think about Invisible Man not as a novel about a Jim Crow system passing into history, but about the tensions between the emergent racial regime of racial liberalism and white flight out of which neoliberalism would emerge.

A Multicultural, Multiethnic, and Multiconfessional Bosnia and Herzegovina: Myth and Reality

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Yugoslav Wars ◽  
Post War

In early 1992, the “three m's” (tri m), which denoted a multicultural, multiethnic, and multiconfessional Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), became the rallying cry against the forces of disintegration, or more accurately, of partition. These identifying characteristics or national ideals could not avert catastrophe. Indeed, BiH's liminal position at the crossroads of cultures, religions, and history rendered it the most vulnerable of republics in the Yugoslav wars of succession. However “three m” Bosnia and Herzegovina was in 1992, it was less so by 1995. Yet, despite the bloodshed, forced expulsions, migrations, and the inevitable rise in nationalism, citizens of BiH have no choice, in the aftermath, but to examine what their country was before the war and the potential for a new “multi-multi” Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such an investigation must begin with the past, as a Sarajevan colleague implied when I asked her how she envisioned the future in Bosnia. She replied that Bosnians could hardly conceive a future when in 1998 they still had no idea what had happened, and why. This work addresses the reality behind the epithets that gained currency during and after the war, of a “three-m,” “multi-multi,” and multi-kulti (multicultural) Bosnia and Herzegovina. Within the framework of a particular understanding of multiculturalism, it will suggest why, despite its multiethnic and multiconfessional reality, BiH proved in many instances vulnerable to nationalistic rhetoric. This analysis proceeds from the conviction that multiculturalism must be both studied and encouraged in the international community's efforts to support the growth of democratic institutions and practices in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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