Age Of Crisis Research Articles

Gaia in turmoil: climate change, biodepletion, and Earth ethics in an age of crisis

Gaian theory, which holds that Earth's physical and biological processes are inextricably bound to form a self-regulating system, is more relevant than ever in light of increasing concerns about global climate change. The Gaian paradigm of Earth as a living system, first articulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, has inspired a burgeoning body of researchers working across disciplines that range from physics and biology to philosophy and politics. Gaia in Turmoil reflects this disciplinary richness and intellectual diversity, with contributions (including essays by both Lovelock and Margulis) that approach the topic from a wide variety of perspectives, discussing not only Gaian science but also global environmental problems and Gaian ethics and education. Contributors focus first on the science of Gaia, considering such topics as the workings of the biosphere, the planet's water supply, and evolution; then discuss Gaian perspectives on global environmental change, including biodiversity destruction and global warming; and finally explore the influence of Gaia on environmental policy, ethics, politics, technology, economics, and education. Gaia in Turmoil breaks new ground by focusing on global ecological problems from the perspectives of Gaian science and knowledge, focusing especially on the challenges of climate change and biodiversity destruction. Contributors: David Abram, Donald Aitken, Connie Barlow, J. Baird Callicott, Bruce Clarke, Eileen Crist, Tim Foresman, Stephan Harding, Barbara Harwood, Tim Lenton, Eugene Linden, Karen Litfin, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Bill McKibben, Martin Ogle, H. Bruce Rinker, Mitchell Thomashow, Tyler Volk, Hywel Williams

The Resistable Rise and Predictable Fall of the U.S. Supermax

In a recent article entitled The Penal State in an Age of Crisis (Monthly Review, June 2009), Hannah Holleman, Robert W. McChesney, John Bellamy Foster, and R. Jamil Jonna sought to account for surprising stability of civilian government spending (non-defense government consumption and investment) as a percentage of GDP during a period, roughly 1970 to present, when power of capital over labor increased, inequality grew, and cuts in government programs for poor and working class continued more or less without abatement. One solution to paradox, authors persuasively argued, was growth in spending for the penal state, a political regime marked by mass incarceration of poor and vulnerable who posed risks to stability of prevailing economic and social order.This article can also be found at Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at Monthly Review website.

The Penal State in an Age of Crisis

As a rule, crime and social protest rise in periods of economic crisis in capitalist society. During times of economic and social instability, the well-to-do become increasingly fearful of the general population, more disposed to adopt harsh measures to safeguard their positions at the apex of the social pyramid. The slowdown in the economic growth rate of U.S. capitalism beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s—converging with the emergence of radical social protest around the same period—was accompanied by a rapid rise in public safety spending as a share of civilian government expenditures. So significant was this shift that we can speak of a crowding out of welfare state spending (health, education, social services) by penal state spending (law enforcement, courts, and prisons) in the United States during the last third of a century.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

D.H.Lawrence’s View of Sensibility-oriented Education: the Age of Crisis and the Restoration of Vital Self

D.H.Lawrence’s View of Sensibility-oriented Education: the Age of Crisis and the Restoration of Vital Self

Franciscan Advice to the Papacy in the Middle Ages

AbstractThe famous image of Francis of Assisi holding up the falling Church has come to symbolise the nature of the relationship between the Franciscans and the papacy in the thirteenth century. Deliberately manufactured by Franciscan propagandists at a time when they were becoming indispensable in almost every area of Christian activity, it represented a complex set of ideas about medieval spirituality, power and responsibility. This article investigates the ideals, concerns and ambitions of the order through examination of a number of occasions on which prominent Franciscans offered criticism and advice to the papal curia. In the process, light is shed on the anxieties of Christendom in an age of crisis.

Writing to Exist: Humanity and Survival in Two fin de siècle Novels in French (Harpman, Darrieussecq)

Writing to Exist: Humanity and Survival in Two fin de siècle Novels in French (Harpman, Darrieussecq) Lorie Sauble-Otto THE LAST HALF OF THE 1990's saw a new generation of writing by women in French.1 Two texts from the mid 1990's merit particular attention, both for what these texts are as well as for what they are not. These are not feminist manifestos. These are not feminist utopias, nor are they exactly feminist dystopias. These novels are not what science fiction scholar Justine Larbalestier calls "battle-of-fhe-sexes texts."2 (Although these works cannot be categorized unequivocally as feminist science fiction, many of the social and political themes that run through that genre are evident in these two novels.) These novels are, however, creative speculative snapshots of women in oppressive futuristic, post-apocalyptic environments, striving to find meaning for their existence in these far from ideal circumstances and conditions. They are, similar to feminist science fiction of the 1970's and 1980's, what Anne Cranny-Francis has described as a "literary response" to an "age of crisis."3 Whereas the 1970's and 1980's saw a dialogue of feminist science fiction that concentrated on a separatist utopia or dystopia according to gender, the 1990's and the millennium provided a backdrop for the exploration of the post-feminist, post-modern female protagonist striving for her survival and her identity.4 The earlier of the two texts examined in this article, Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (Prix de Mediéis 1996), is by Belgian-born author and practicing psychoanalyst Jacqueline Harpman.5 Although this and most of Harpman's nine other novels to date lend themselves to psychoanalytical interpretation, this article will concentrate on the role of subjectivity and writing in the construction of the self and of existence. Harpman's novel is a firstperson narrative that documents the life of a nameless young woman who grows from childhood to adulthood in a cage with thirty-nine other women where they are constantly and rigidly kept under a form of surveillance that recalls the Foucauldian panopticon.6 Within this system of power and surveillance , the women inhabiting the cage discipline themselves in order to avoid punishment. Foucault's theory of discipline, or "the panoptic machine," is a salient image of power and of surveillance techniques that can be helpful in understanding the particular kind of control that is exerted over the women in Vol. XLV, No. 1 59 L'Esprit Créateur Harpman's futuristic tale. With no clear memory of the catastrophic events that preceded their captivity, the women live in a state of loss, grief, isolation and ignorance for nearly a decade until the day when suddenly and without explanation the guards are called away by sirens. Leaving the key to the cage in the lock, the guards thus enable the women to escape into an unknown and desolate landscape to wander in biblical fashion for the rest of their lives. The second novel treated in this analysis is the better-known Truismes published in 1996 by French-born normalienne and one-time professor of literature Marie Darrieussecq. Truismes is Darrieussecq's first and to date most recognized novel within a growing œuvre.7 Like Harpman's, Darrieussecq's text is written in the first person, and it documents the often humorous metamorphosis of a nameless Parisian woman into a sow. The post-apocalyptic Paris and its inhabitants portrayed by Darrieussecq have become sensually extravagant to the extreme. Marina Warner in her analysis of Truismes characterizes Darrieussecq's novel as a "fable of moral and political degradation ."8 Darrieussecq's young female narrator takes a job in the pleasure industry , specifically, in a perfume shop, that is actually a sort of brothel, and her work involves what is effectively prostitution. In Truismes the social status of women in general is made quite clear simply by the kind of work that is available to them: "Ils m'ont dit que les seuls métiers publics accessibles aux femmes désormais c'était assistante privée ou accompagnatrice de travels."9 The narrator's continued and at times aggravated mutation, perhaps...

Normal Discipline in the Age of Crisis

As a byproduct of the asserted imperative to control flows of unauthorized information, purveyors of intellectual goods are moving to build into delivery systems for digital information a range of capabilities that insert both surveillance and enforcement functions into private spaces and embed these functions within communications networks, protocols, and devices. This essay offers a framework for theorizing this process that is informed substantially by the work of Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens. The extension of intellectual property enforcement into private spaces and throughout communications networks can be understood as a species of disciplinary regime similar to those that Foucault sought to understand, but it is not exactly like any of those studied by Foucault. Instead, it represents a new, hybrid type, which locates the justification for its pervasive reach in a permanent state of crisis. Although the success of this hybrid disciplinary project is not yet assured, the model of social change elaborated by Giddens suggests that its odds of success are by no means remote. Power to implement this discipline in the marketplace for digital content arises from a confluence of private and public interests and is amplified by the dynamics of technical standards processes. The emergent model of crisis discipline has profound implications for both the production of behavior and the production of information spaces, and raises pressing questions about the future of the networked information society.

Lessons of the early Cold War for understanding WMD proliferation today

Consideration of employing military options against rogue proliferators is, in many respects, a throwback to the period of the early Cold War. Preventive and preemptive war options have once again become a regular part of strategic discourse. This article explores similarities between the early Cold War and the present era, focusing on how the process of proliferation creates acute fears about shifting balances of power and the risks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) conflict. Drawing on recently published US and Russian sources, which have enabled a vastly improved empirical understanding of this period over the last decade, the article illustrates how the instability of the ‘age of crises’ derived in large part from three rational pathways to global war. It is argued that these three pathways are also present in the contemporary strategic environment. Also, various stabilizing elements that existed during the early Cold War are not likely to function in present circumstances. The article concludes that instability may be an inherent feature of radically asymmetric WMD rivalry.

Book Review: Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

Book Review: Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

Book Review: Lockdown America - Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

Book Review: Lockdown America - Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture: Essays by Charles Muscatine (review)

230 Reviews Muscatine, Charles, Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture: Essays by Charle Muscatine, Columbia, The University of South Carolina Press, 1999; cloth; pp. ix, 252; R.R.P. US$39.95; ISBN 1570032491. Muscatine's title suggests a project, whereas his book is simply a collectio essays, many published long since and all familiar to most medievalist readers. It does declare the principal interests of a most distinguished academic career. In thefirst,famous essay, Muscatine tackles the 'Style of the M a n and Style of the Work'; its position here seems to extend an invitation to respond in kind. '[Chaucer's] tales were long in the writing,' w e are reminded, 'but nothing suggests that their styles are in any way related to their chronology'. The same might be said of Muscatine; the earliest piece, on the 'emergence of psychological allegory', published 50 years ago, possesses in full the poise we appreciate in the last, published just three years ago, on fabliaux and courtly culture. Muscatine constantly remarks on Chaucer's 'protean' genius; most satisfying for him, however, is the text that holds idealism and realism in tension, juxtaposing instances, or mixing them so that no fixed commitment is made to one centre of meaning: 'The comedy and the tolerant irony, the relativism, the necessity to perceive: these are the answers implied by his mixed style.' W h e n Chaucer matters this way so long, it is hard not to conclude that the poet's defining virtues are also those that Muscatine would like to be judged by. Tolerant irony, comic sense, civility, relativism. Muscatine seeks to comprehend texts in their entirety, even as he responds to particular moments with acumen and appreciation. And he never raises his voice, never shouts. The virtue of such a critical personality is obvious; analysis may be grounded in great learning, but authority is never used oppressively, so we never lose our pleasure in tracking this critical intelligence. In this he owes much to Erich Auerbach; in this, he himself was important for m y generation, because of the critical ambition he inspired this way. Criticism, he proved, did not need to be the cabalistic activity that D. W. Robertson demanded, nor need it depend on the kind of inert learning that reduces a text to representation of antecedents. Perhaps through this book he may have similar value for another generation. Sadly, I doubt it. Central to this collection is the group of linked essays first published in 1972 as Poetry in an Age of Crisis. Even then, before time had got round to rubbing off its sharp corners, it seemed 'disappointing' to its reviewers in Year's Work in English Studies, 'rather easy-going'. I remember Reviews 231 finding it stimulating, mostly because it insistently made a case for taking the poet's negotiations with stylistic traditions and conventions as a second story, registering engagements with a pressing social world. To m y way of thinking, the most striking work done by medievalists in the last 20 years has been driven by the need to make sense of this world-affiliated text. Muscatine anticipated, but never really took that step, perhaps. For him it is an 'Age of Crisis', and he does describe its aspects, but the description is broad, 'easy-going', maybe even second-hand. Ifwe think ofthe demanding, often graceless but provocative work of scholars like Knight, Paterson, Aers, Strohm, Delaney, Wallace, Staley and Dinshaw, it seems fair to say that, for all their insight, love of the text and integrity, these essays are indeed 'disappointing', even disengaged. Stephen Justice's work on the texts that surround the Peasants' Rebellion registers crisis to a degree Muscatine never approaches. This is the more disappointing since, in offering an idea of criticism that acknowledges the world, Muscatine aimed to win the interest of a new generation of students whose acquiescence in the game of scholarship could not be taken for granted. In his presidential address to the Chaucer Society in 1980, published as '"What amounteth al this wit?" Chaucer and Scholarship', he noted that medieval studies had lost its privileged constituency ('Mostly male'); indeed it was losing students absolutely. H e...

Capitalism and Crisis: Creating a Jailhouse Nation

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in The Age of Crisis by Christian ParentiThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Identity of the Chinese in Australian History

Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

危機の時代に求められている知性

危機の時代に求められている知性

The Regions and the New Europe: Patterns in Core and Periphery Development

Introduction: The Regions and the New Europe, Martin Rhodes Part I The Transnational Scene: European Integration and Regional Responses, Professor Paul C. Cheshire European Cities Towards 2000 Entrepreneurialism, Competition and Social Exclusion, Michael Parkinson Regional Lobbying in the New Europe Sonia Mazey European Cities Towards 2000 - Entrepreneurialism, Competition and Social Exclusion, Michael Parkinson Regional Lobbying in the New Europe, Sonia Mazey. Part II Regional Strategies in Core and Periphery Regions. Regulating Regional Economies - Wales and Baden-Wurttemberg in Transition, Philip Cooke Economic Development Strategies in Emilia-Romagna, Shari Garmise Rhone-Alpes - a Dynamic Region in an Age of Crisis, Mick Dunford Ireland - Region and State in the European Union, Rory O'Donnell Scotland and the SDA, Chris Moore The Fragmented Region - Business, The State and Economic Development in North West England, Adam Tickell Regional Development and Employment in Europe's Southern and Western Peripheries, Martin Rhodes Conclusions - The Viability of Regional Strategies, Martin Rhodes.

The 'Primitive,' the 'Real,' and the 'World System': Knowledge Producion in Comtemporary Anthropology

That we are living in an age of crisis is taken for granted. Far more difficult to comprehend is how the crisis manifests itself across the disciplines. Anthropology has been particularly hard hit by the epochal and cataclysmic events of the late twentieth century. With the accelerating expansion of the capitalist world system into the remotest corners of the globe, Anthropology has had to witness its traditional objects of study, the so-called primitive peoples, disappearing with the speed of light. One after another, the world's tribal and peasant societies have been 'pacified,' settled, and put to work in the fields and sweatshops of the New World Order. As a result the question of what constitutes knowledge of the 'Other' and how it is produced has become particularly troubling for anthropologlsts.

Church and Realm 1272–1461. Conflict and collaboration in an age of crises. By Peter Heath. (Fontana History of England.) Pp. 432. London: Fontana Press, 1988. £5.95. 0 00 686055 9

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Delinquency and Justice: An Age of Crisis

Delinquency and Justice: An Age of Crisis

Boxes, Bubbles, and Lessons from Business: The Role of the Supervisor in an Age of Crisis

Boxes, Bubbles, and Lessons from Business: The Role of the Supervisor in an Age of Crisis

The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750

The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750