Critical Historical Studies最新文献

{"title":"For a Fallible and Lovable Marx: Some Thoughts on the Latest Book by Foster and Burkett","authors":"Andreas Malm","doi":"10.1086/693903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693903","url":null,"abstract":"W hen I first read the key works of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett—Marx’s Ecology,Marx and Nature,Marxism and Ecological Economics, and assorted articles—during the unusually hot Swedish summer of 2006, they struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. I had read Marx for more than a decade by then. I had just realized how catastrophic a threat global warming is and how, as the saying now goes, it changes everything. But I was fumbling for links between socialism and ecology, and I had never noticed any particularly environmental messages in the writings of Marx (due partly to flaws in Swedish translations; partly to the general preconception of Marx as a thinker concerned with other matters; and partly also, to be sure, to my own previous indifference). And then here were two scholars who demonstrated how it all fits together. Never missing a good quotation, Burkett and Foster relayed one striking flash of insight after another from Marx—and, not to be forgotten, Engels; integrated them into an overarching framework of ecological Marxism; and explained, with the greatest lucidity and precision, how a tendency to environmental degradation inheres in the accumulation of capital. It was an exhilarating, even liberating experience, because it allowed someone like me to throw myself into the nascent climate movement, organize, study ecology, and sharpen—not blunt—the critique of capitalism. Many other readers of Foster and Burkett have felt the same. Little wonder, then, that two scholars and the school they represent have also come in for a fair amount of criticism. With Marx and the Earth: An Anti-critique, we now have their comprehensive rebuttal and defense of (their own interpretation of) the ecological thought of Marx and Engels. It should be noted already here, however, that the Anti-critique makes no mention of what is undoubtedly the most influential attack on the school: that of Jason W. Moore. In Capitalism and the Web of Life and article piled upon article, he accuses Foster in particular of peddling “Cartesian dualism”","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693903","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47886934","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":"Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India Companies and Slave Plantations","authors":"R. Austen","doi":"10.1086/693900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693900","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Dutch and English East India companies and the mainly British and French Caribbean slave plantations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as institutions embodying features of both “premodern” and “postmodern” economies. Because they endured and produced profits over long periods of time, neither of these institutions can be dismissed as “primitive accumulation.” The East India companies were state-licensed monopolies but also huge, vertically integrated, multinational corporations funded through share sales on the world’s first stock markets. Plantation slavery can be seen as an advanced form of constantly improving agrarian capitalism in which wage labor is replaced by the capital/chattel of purchased human beings. Arguments and evidence for a “patrimonialist” or “hypercapitalist” understanding of both institutions are considered with the conclusion that they are “hybrid,” but less in postcolonialist cultural terms than in the problematic way they fit into the genealogy of modern European capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693900","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43194323","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":"Dialogic Struggle in the Becoming of the Cultural Revolution: Between Elite Conflict and Mass Mobilization","authors":"X. Xu","doi":"10.1086/693922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693922","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the becoming of contentious political events through the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966). The conditional theory of structural causation and the rational choice conception of agency that have complemented each other in current scholarship have left missing links between elite conflict and mass mobilization. Examining the dialogic struggle among various actors involved in the process helps to overcome the teleological explanation of the rise of the Cultural Revolution and brings to light the politics of interpretation in constructing its meaning. The perspective shows ideological contradictions in the status quo ante to be important sources for change in an uncertain and destabilizing situation. The event thus did not result from the realization of actors’ fixed goals but was an emergent process of the disarticulation of structural contradictions, in which actors’ active appropriation and changing deployment of cultural repertoires were critical.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693922","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41563960","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":"Polanyi for the Age of Trump","authors":"Greta R. Krippner","doi":"10.1086/693902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693902","url":null,"abstract":"t is no exaggeration to say that Fred Block andMargaret Somers are almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving interest in Karl Polanyi’s intellectual and political legacy in American sociology. Their contribution has consisted not only in reminding sociologists of the power of Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of market society tomake sense of our troubled times but evenmore importantly in resolvingmany of the difficult theoretical tangles that Polanyi gets himself into in the course of developing this analysis. Now their various essays, written over three decades, have been revised for publication in a single volume, supplemented with several new essays that introduce novel themes and also attempt to apply Polanyi’s conceptual apparatus to current social and political problems. As a compilation of essays, the resulting volume defies easy summary—and I won’t attempt to offer a full treatment of the many important contributions that run through these chapters. An incomplete inventory would include the masterful exegesis of the complex argument of The Great Transformation presented in chapter 2; chapter 5’s valuable reexamination of the Speenhamland period in English social history; and a highly original, Polanyian-inspired consideration of free market ideology as a genre of utopian social theory, which is elaborated in chapter 4 but runs as a theme throughout the book. Alongside these contributions, I want to give special emphasis to two conceptual innovations that underpin Block and Somers’s entire analysis and I think represent their most enduring legacy to Polanyian scholarship: namely, their notion of the “always embedded economy” and the closely related concept of “ideational embeddedness.” But since my role as reviewer is not merely to praise but also to offer a critique, after introducing these concepts, I will take is-","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693902","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47332660","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":"Ontology and Ideology: Günther Anders’s Philosophical and Political Confrontation with Heidegger","authors":"Jason Dawsey","doi":"10.1086/690967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/690967","url":null,"abstract":"This article integrates Günther Anders, a critic of technology and antinuclear militant still not widely known in the Anglophone world, into current critical discussions about Heidegger’s Nazism and his legacy for modern thought. It does so by sketching Anders’s many biographical connections but mainly focuses on his critiques of the political implications of Being and Time and of the later Heidegger. These two critiques I treat as parts of one larger “confrontation” with the reactionary character of Heideggerian philosophy. This article should help clarify Anders’s place in the history of Heideggerianism and also set the stage for a detailed evaluation of Anders’s approach to modern technology.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/690967","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49624564","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":"Finding Value in Empire of Cotton","authors":"Aaron G. Jakes, A. Shokr","doi":"10.1086/691060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/691060","url":null,"abstract":"coercion through “the purportedly impersonal but far from impartial social mechanisms of the market, the law, and the state.” Beckert is certainly not wrong to identify the necessary role of the state in organizing and sustaining successive regimes of accumulation around the world. Nor, of course, is he incorrect to treat the hard-fought abolition of chattel slavery as a transformative achievement in the history of global capitalism. But the characterization of a progressive transition in which the mediating institutions of the market, the law, and the state “replaced” the social and ecological violence of the slave plantation requires its own startling acts of narrative omission. Excepting a couple of brief remarks about “boll weevils” and “soil exhaustion” in the American South, the conversion of ever more farmland to cotton cultivation appears as a rather straightforward matter of applying new scientific techniques to soil. Missing are the swarms of ravenous insects, rising water tables, and terrifying dust storms that farmers everywhere soon recognized as the modern plagues of monocrop agriculture. At intervals throughout his final chapters, Beckert casts the peasant smallholding as a last redoubt of subsistence techniques and localized production lying beyond the grasp of the world market. This may have been so in some cases. But in many others, from the New South to the Nile Delta, the smallholding endured within the empire of cotton in no small degree because the family norm upon which it rested, with its gendered and generational division of labor, proved so amenable to the cultivation of cheap raw cotton. Perhaps most strange of all, the word “race” (used in the relevant sense) does not appear in the second half of the book; “racism” appears exactly once. 25. Ibid., 280. 26. Ibid., 344, 352. 27. Hannah Holleman, “De-naturalizing Ecological Disaster: Colonialism, Racism, and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Journal of Peasant Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1195375. 28. In listing the “factors which have made Egypt the most perfect cotton-country of the world—a cotton-laboratory would be a better term,” Egypt’s foremost botanist of the colonial era laid special emphasis on the importance of the family smallhold. “In the first place,” he explained, “there is an ample supply of hand-labour at a reasonable price; cotton can be grown with the use of horse-hoes and similar appliances, but it cannot be grown to its highest productivity, because the plants cannot then be set closely together, and the best results can only be got by hand-hoeing between closely planted, closely-set rows; further, the harvest of cotton has to be picked from the open fruits by hand, and where labour is scarce and dear this item may cost half as much as the cotton is worth; the small-holding fellah, incredibly industrious in his patient way, and with a numerous progeny, solves both these labour difficulties automatically.” See William Lawre","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/691060","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41494175","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":"“Freedom of the Fassions”: The Politics of the Street in Montreal and the Struggle against the British Fiscal-Military State","authors":"Michael Gauvreau, N. Christie","doi":"10.1086/690969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/690969","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines street protests in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada as a lens through which to study the movement of economic and political liberal ideas around the British Empire. These were not backward-looking evocations of an anticapitalist moral economy but embraced the tenets of the new political economy emerging in Britain. Protestors drew on the work of British political economists, as well as currents of Irish agrarian radicalism, to mobilize a constituency of small merchants and artisans. Using a variety of legal records, the mainstream colonial press, and the satirical Scribbler permits a multilayered analysis of the cultural and political meanings expressed in out-of-door political activity. If, as recent historians have argued, the British empire was imbricated with the development of liberalism, this microstudy illustrates that British colonies were critical sites for the articulation of modern notions of economic and civil rights, including the rights of consumers.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/690969","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46069158","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":"Conflict and Consensus: The Steel Strike of 1959 and the Anatomy of the New Deal Order","authors":"Kristoffer Smemo, S. Sonti, Gabriel Winant","doi":"10.1086/690968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/690968","url":null,"abstract":"This article places the 1959 steel strike—the largest work stoppage in US history—within the trajectory of the New Deal order. We provide a multiscalar account of the strike that stretches from the mills and corporate boardrooms, to Congress and the Oval Office, and back to the homes of steelworkers themselves. The strike crystallized the limits of postwar collective bargaining and Keynesian policy making to manage postwar economic growth. Those limitations allowed steelworkers to lay claim to the New Deal’s promise of industrial citizenship and defend the moral economy of their home life—but only for a brief time. Therefore, unpacking the steel strike along these lines recasts the entire New Deal order as a complex formation composed of multiple layers of social activity, each powered by its own internal dynamics, and each in contradictory relation to the others.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/690968","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46679400","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":"Who Lit This Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy","authors":"Andreas Malm","doi":"10.1086/688347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/688347","url":null,"abstract":"Global warming projects new meaning onto the past two centuries: since the early nineteenth century CO2 emissions have soared, driving humanity into an unprecedented crisis. This article outlines a historical research agenda for the study of the fossil economy as the main driver of this process. It argues for studying history in climate, as distinct from the preoccupation with how climate fluctuations have affected societies in the past. While narratives of “the Anthropocene” point to the human species as the agent of fossil fuel consumption, this article scents a narrower set of suspects. Study of colonial India and other parts of the British Empire demonstrate that imperial agents introduced large-scale extraction and combustion of coal in those areas but found the “natives” ill-disposed to the project. Turning to present-day India, I argue that inequality and capital accumulation should be in focus when studying the historical dynamics of our warming world.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/688347","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60598948","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 Statecraft to Social Science in Early Modern English Political Economy","authors":"A. Sartori","doi":"10.1086/688348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/688348","url":null,"abstract":"With the elaboration of the concept “commercial society,” political economy identified the social as an object of analysis proper to its inquiry. But the development of a discourse of political economy in the seventeenth century centered on the role of extraterritorial, maritime, and interstate commerce in underwriting the funding of state power and in augmenting the collective wealth of the polity. While political economy emerged in response to accelerating processes of early modern commercialization, it was slower than contemporary discourses of natural law and moral skepticism to formulate a conception of “commercial society.” When in the later seventeenth century an inchoate conception of commercial society did emerge in political economy, this was achieved through the internalization of models of maritime commerce as the basis for reimagining domestic society as radically commercial and for understanding this fact as a new, endogenous basis for the expansion of the aggregate wealth of the polity.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/688348","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60598986","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}