{"title":"Past-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of High Fascism: Toward an Architecture of Italian Difference, 1936–1942","authors":"Gregory Milano","doi":"10.1086/724271","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724271","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses the category of difference—a critical tool used by post-structuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial theorists—to interrogate Italian Fascist architecture of the late interwar period. I show how architecture for the 1942 Rome World’s Fair created an identitarian aesthetic that hybridized rectilinear facades of modernism with arches and columns of Roman antiquity. I argue this aesthetic represented Fascism’s resistance to the universalizing impulse of modern industrial society, which Fascists identified with modernist architecture. To counter, planners rendered “irreducible” cultural difference as Fascism’s standpoint of resistance to capitalism’s abstract and universal materializations. By designating the aesthetic “past-modernist,” this work underscores Fascism’s claim to simultaneously return to “ethno-cultural origins” and transcend modernism. Past-modernism, though, anticipates postmodernism. The conclusion considers past-modernism alongside recent theories that posit “cultural antecedents” as resistance to capitalism, arguing that Fascism’s claim of difference shows the limits of identitarian movements to realize freedom from domination.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"43 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47615342","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":"Individualism in America: Alexis de Tocqueville Discovers a New World of Liberal Politics","authors":"Michael Zakim","doi":"10.1086/724270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724270","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the radical, if not subversive, nature of individualism, as originally expounded by Alexis de Tocqueville in the second volume of Democracy in America in 1840, arguably the most important study of liberal political theory written to this day. Tocqueville drew on the neologism individualism to explain the implausible emergence of democracy as a viable form of government. “Individualism in America” addresses the restless result while exploring additional developments central to the making of a new world of liberal politics, including the rise of a cult of the new (or what contemporaries began to call progress), the plasticity of a social order resting on personal ambition, the transfer of power from formal ruling institutions to what Tocqueville referred to as cultural mores, and the search for sources of common sense in a civilization organized around the first person singular.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"73 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44242762","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":"From Inclusive Informality to Alienating Inclusion: The Rise of Mexico’s Debtfare Society on the Urban Fringes of Guadalajara","authors":"Inés Escobar González","doi":"10.1086/721835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721835","url":null,"abstract":"This article ethnographically traces the social transformation brought about by Mexico’s 2001 housing reform to argue that financial inclusion restructured Mexican society and conditioned a shift away from a social order of inclusive informality to one defined by alienating inclusion. Financial inclusion upended the social arrangements that underpinned Mexico’s old urban periphery, which exhibited high levels of social cohesion and strong horizontal relations based on reciprocity and trust. As the reform unleashed mortgage finance to erect vast, peripheral housing complexes and make formal homeowners out of Mexico’s urban poor, the households inhabiting these new urban worlds came to experiment with, and ultimately depend on, consumer credit finance to sustain themselves. The “debtfare” society that matured with the financial inclusion of Mexico’s urban poor is now marked by atomization, social isolation, and uncertainty as the beneficiaries of Mexico’s housing reform adapt and respond to their incorporation into global financial flows.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"161 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49091435","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":"On the Centrality of the Subject: French Marxism and the Sève-Althusser Correspondence","authors":"J. Collins","doi":"10.1086/721834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721834","url":null,"abstract":"By the 1960s Louis Althusser and Lucien Sève were two leading philosophers in the French Communist Party. Their aim was to build a stronger theoretical foundation for the party by returning to the letter of Marx’s texts and purging French Marxism of its idealist tendencies. They soon came to disagree, however, over basic issues—of dialectics, structure, crisis—and especially over questions of subjectivity and humanism. Whereas Althusser hoped to “decenter” the subject and break with all notions of humanism, Sève believed that Marxism was constituted as a “theory of personality,” a new kind of humanism that provided insight into the psychological structures of capitalism. Using their recently published correspondence as a frame, this article examines how Althusser and Sève generated distinct models for understanding the role of the individual in society and helped shape the French Communist Party’s theory and strategy in the 1960s and 1970s.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"259 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42032215","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":"Across the Cordon of the Color Bar: Japan and Korea as Subjects in the Capitalist World of Exhibitions","authors":"J. Jeon","doi":"10.1086/721841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721841","url":null,"abstract":"Analyzing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expositions and their “human zoos” as instances of racialist subsumption of the colonies, I argue that they gave rise to a new form of objectification and subjectivity that cannot be subsumed into colonial or anticolonial dichotomies. In particular, I focus on the case of Japan and Korea as two countries whose fate diverged on the fair site and compare Japanese and American use of the fair as a means of claiming higher status in the racialized global hierarchy. Their convergence upon the so-called civilizing mission presaged the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905) and facilitated Japan’s colonization of Korea in 1910. At the same time, however, Korean voices from inside the Japanese exhibition give a glimpse of new modern subjectivities that were forged in the furnace of colonial commodification.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"221 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42479234","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":"Class Power in Hard Times: Excavating Nicos Poulantzas’s Theory of the Capitalist State through the History of the 2007–2008 Crisis","authors":"Matthew Soener","doi":"10.1086/721840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721840","url":null,"abstract":"After the 2007–8 financial crisis, the fortunes of the American financial class remained surprisingly secure. This owed to the state’s extraordinary set of bailout measures. How do we theoretically make sense of the state’s class bias? Most prevailing state theories are agnostic to class. This is a sharp departure from their neo-Marxist predecessors, particularly Nicos Poulantzas, who argued that capitalist states support the dominant class faction. To recenter the politics of class, I discuss Poulantzas’s ideas in the context of the 2007–8 crisis in the United States. Arguing against criticisms that he was functionalist and ahistorical, I show how he theorized moments of historical change. To demonstrate the utility of his ideas in recent history, I apply them to the history of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s when dominant form of capital shifted from big industry to finance. I then discuss some ways that state responses to financial crises effectively safeguarded this class. This article casts a new theoretical light on the history of the 2007–8 crisis and seeks to revive an interest in a radical theory of the capitalist state.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"195 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45564753","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":"Revolution and Extinction: The Chrono-Economics of Capitalism","authors":"Trevor A. Jackson","doi":"10.1086/721836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721836","url":null,"abstract":"There is an increasing sense that capitalism may have broken time itself and now is rushing human society toward a catastrophic extinction event. But despite a substantial body of literature on capitalist temporalities and another on the ruptures in historicity that attended the French Revolution, there has not yet been an exploration of the fact that the two intersect in the figure of Georges Cuvier. He and his followers formed a school of “catastrophists,” who raised questions about the finitude of time and of the natural world. Their ideas were ultimately defeated, relegating catastrophism to the category of pseudoscience until it returned under a variety of different scientific, philosophical, and political guises in the 1980s. Since capital is predicated on future returns, capitalism on continual growth, and continual growth on unlimited natural resources, the lost “chrono-economics” of finitude and catastrophe offers a repressed alternative to the intellectual preconditions for industrial capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"283 - 306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46453607","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":"Modern Dramas: Transcendence and Immanence in Power in Modernity","authors":"Tad Skotnicki","doi":"10.1086/721833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721833","url":null,"abstract":"I n one of her many efforts to think about the modern, Hannah Arendt turned to a parable of Franz Kafka ’ s. It begins, “ He has two antagonists: the fi rst presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the fi rst supports him in his fi ght with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way, the second supports him in his fi ght with the fi rst, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. ” 1 She presents this as “ the only exact description ” of an essentially modern predicament: fi nding oneself in a world with “ no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change. ” 2 In Kafka ’ s parable the protagonist is literally caught between past and future. Such a world, as Arendt said elsewhere, requires “ thinking without a banister. ” 3 This thinking without a banister, without a sense of where one is going or where one has come from, is not reserved for political theorists or philosophers. It concerns all of us who have happened to live through or in the wake of countlessrevolutions and upheavals since at leastthe eighteenth century — from the social and political to the scienti fi c and technological. Like Arendt, Isaac Reed puzzles over the hazards and hopes that attend such dys-phoria. These aren ’ t mere abstractions but rather genuine crises that we experience in our often ordinary, sometimes extraordinary lives. It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that Power in Modernity , Reed ’ s vertiginously thoughtful project to reformulate the modern, begins with not one but two parables from Kafka. 4 The fi rst, “ Before","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"307 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60727722","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":"Reading Gigs Dialectically","authors":"H. Berg","doi":"10.1086/719123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719123","url":null,"abstract":"With gig-based sex work as its analytical lens, this article argues that narratives about the crisis of gigification miss workers’ exits from non-gig employment. It advocates taking gig workers seriously when they say they prefer gigified hustling to clocking in for a middling wage. Gig work’s autonomy, limited as it is, can make the workday materially better. And the platform is not necessarily more powerful, or better able to forge false consciousness, than the cubicle farm or the assembly line. Grounded in sex workers’ critical engagements with the gig economy, the article finds workers armed with sharp class analyses who use gig economies to wrest control over their conditions of work. Their efforts produce uneven ends, but the tactics they deploy and the politics that inform them invite a rethinking of gigification and its stakes for twenty-first-century anti-capitalist struggle.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"35 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45762152","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}