Inspiracje aksjologii Elzenberga. Monadologia bez Boga

The absence of references to Leibniz in almost all of Henryk Elzenberg’s writings is surprising, since his first strictly philosophical book was a treatise on Leibniz’s metaphysics. Referring to Elzenberg’s remarks on the sources of his own thinking and its dependence on others, I will aim at finding Leibnizian traces in Elzenberg’s philosophy. By signalling various clues related to Elzenberg’s and Leibniz’s way of philosophizing and community of beliefs, I will try to show that, although at first not obvious, the deepest trace of Leibniz and the work on his metaphysics can be found within Elzenberg’s axiology. I will try to show that Elzenberg’s understanding of perfect value (resp. hypervalue) has its structural roots in Leibniz’s understanding of the monad (resp. requisite).

From Precariousness to Prudence: Eco-Cosmopolitanism as the Fabric for Weaving the Post-COVID World

In a crucial juncture when the whole world has been shattered by the reign of a tiny virus invading the apparently invincible empire of human ‘civilization’, the plaguing pandemic has brought to the fore fundamentally interconnected nature of our collective existence and consequently our shared vulnerability. COVID-19 as essentially a zoonotic disease accentuates the anthropogenic hazards inflicted on the ecosystem resulting in spilling over of such pathogens from animals to humans. It also nudges us to reflect on our fundamentally interconnected existence which we have long remained oblivious about. The prevailing obliviousness seems to have emanated from willful ignorance or selfdeceptive knowledge rooted in over-arching dictates of anthropocentrism; however on the structural front, the roots can be traced back to the capitalistic system perpetuating the ‘homo economicus’ aspirations so as to mark the unflinching triumph of the ‘Capitalocene’. While pushing and pulling ourselves to adapt to the ‘new normal’, it becomes an imperative to go beyond the myopic vision of restricting ourselves to shortterm mitigation measures like border-closure or vaccination; instead time is ripe for taking a critical and broad-based stance on the structural roots of the current pandemic such that restructuration of post-COVID world helps shoving aside such calamitous disaster in days to come. It is in this regard, a radical take on ‘cosmopolitanism’ seems the need of the hour to fill the lacunae in the existing mode of perusing interconnectedness that operates only on the surface level in the name of ‘globalization’ and overlooks the fundamental rubric of ecological integrity. While shedding some light on the nexus that this pandemic shares with the evils of capitalistic enterprise and neoliberal culture of globalized consumerism, this paper, within its limited scope, will make an attempt to find an antidote to the current crisis through endorsing an ‘eco-cosmopolitan’ worldview wherein the rationalized ‘instrumentalization’ of environment and wild animals gets overridden by an eco-centric perspective on our fundamentally interconnected existence.

Carnival and Politics

The purpose of this article is to widen the ways in which Carnival’s political dimensions have ordinarily been discussed. What happens politically at Carnival should be placed in the social and cultural contexts in which a performance occurs, rather than being discussed only in terms of the performance’s publicized representations. This contextual mix should in turn be understood first as composed of competing and cooperating communities, but then also as having far-reaching and lengthily enduring structural roots. The author illustrates these propositions chiefly by means of an overview of Rome’s long Carnival history. There is space only to consider in detail two key sets of Roman Carnival sources, a verbal document written in the 1140s and two engravings made in the 1550s. The analysis of their social and cultural contexts leads to two other documentary groups, one stemming from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Nuremberg and the other from the 1570s and 1580 in Romans, France. The long-term, structural thread knitting these disparate Carnival times and places together is the figure of the bear and his humanoid cousin the wildman.

Framing the Mother Tac: The Racialised, Sexualised and Gendered Politics of Modern Slavery in Australia

Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and individual offenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking; interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit; and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and offender, as well as definitions of slavery, are racialised, gendered, and sexualised and rely on the victims’ subjective accounts of bounded exploitation. By documenting these and other limitations involved in a criminal justice approach, the authors reveal its shortfalls. For instance, while harsh sentences are meant as a deterrence to others, the complex and structural roots of migrant labour exploitation remain unaffected. This research finds that improved legal migration pathways, the decriminalisation of the sex industry, and improved access to information and support for migrant sex workers are key to reducing heavier forms of labour exploitation, including human trafficking, in the Australian sex industry.

Voter Behavior in Latin America

Voter choices in Latin America have structural roots that are similar to what is observed in other regions, but these structures are weaker and more fluid than in more established democracies. In particular, while cleavages emerge in the average Latin American country and voters’ choices vary across demographic traits, issues, ideologies, and partisanship, these cleavages are weaker than in Western Europe and the United States. These cleavages are particularly weak in countries where parties do not take ideologically distinct positions from each other and instead emphasize clientelism, which suggests that the overall weakness of these cleavages in the hemisphere reflects the weak commitment of political parties to programmatic competition. Elections in Latin America are strongly shaped by government performance, especially economic trends, but these forms of accountability are weakened in countries where the party system makes it hard to identify the degree to which any specific party is able to dominate the policy process or where identifying a credible alternative to the incumbent is difficult. Thus, while voters are trying to use elections to hold politicians accountable and to ensure that their policy preferences are represented, the weaknesses of Latin America’s party systems often make this difficult.

Theories on Peacebuilding and Social Change

When pursuing social change, questions about what should be the first priority have been a long-standing matter of philosophical interest and debate. What is more important? Is it efforts that expand individual and personal capacities? Or, is it efforts seeking to redress systems and structures? Do we start with the world out there— focusing on the distribution of power and resources within and between societies—or the world within—aiming to develop awareness, growth, and commitment to change on a personal level? While various approaches to peacebuilding and social justice can be located along the full range of this spectrum, conversations about how to approach these endeavors in a complimentary, integrated way are fairly new. Consequently, tensions do exist around how to set priorities. For instance, those committed to promoting attitude change must contend increasingly with critical perspectives which prioritize and address the structural roots of social conflict. On the other hand, those that pursue strictly the structural roots at the heart of a conflict situation—often the tactics and goals of critical social movements—are at risk of polarizing and enflaming conflict in ways that do not easily lead to constructive resolution. In other words, the bridge building skills of the peacemaker are key to conflict transformation work. At the same time, bridge building skills devoid of a critical social justice perspective are arguably shallow at best.