Vision Of Capitalism Research Articles

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Apocalyptic Vistas in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

This essay proposes to read Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis as an allegorical treatment of turn-of-the-century concerns about the crisis of representation of capitalism. Cosmopolis read in this way becomes a tale of capitalist and narrative apocalypse which stages the confrontation of opposing forces of “the future” and “the past,” or the utopian desire inscribed in the capitalist vision of time and the carnivalesque practice of subjects under capitalism. The use of allegorical form and the mocking framework of Bakhtinian carnival allows for Cosmopolis to be read not as high satire but popular comedy. I argue that by implicating the writer as a character in this apocalyptic allegory, DeLillo prevents the glorification of the writer to the position of an authoritative voice in history, leaving the final judgment of the capitalist myths to the reader.

The Pre-Raphaelite city and the trap of modernity

The poetic and pictorial works of the “Pre-Raphaelite galaxy”, as one might call the group formed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their artistic kindred, exhibit an ambiguous relationship to Victorian modernity and 19th-century technical and political “progress”, especially British urbanisation. As urban-living people, the Pre-Raphaelites were always in direct contact with the modern city and its evolutions, and if the urban context is not their one major topic, the paintings and poems that come to grasp with it from the late 1840s onward are the strongest proponents of what could be called an alter-modern philosophy: the acceptance of some aspects of modern society, combined with the rejection of its dehumanizing and alienating excesses, to form a via media, an alternative to untamed Progress and unchecked urbanisation. The return to Nature they advocate is not just a nostalgic look backwards, but a real way of life based on simplicity, common decency, and the equality of all mankind – a vision which comes to life in the 1880s in William Morris’s socialist pamphlets and proposals for a new city. We shall base our demonstration on a set of four poems: Christina Rossetti’s “The Dead City” (1840) and “Goblin Market” (1862), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny” (1848-1869), and William Bell Scott’s “Maryanne” (1854), and compare them with D. G. Rossetti’s painting The Gate of Memory (1857-1864) and some of William Morris’s essays. This corpus constitutes an ensemble of works answering one another, and openly attacking the alienating artificiality of the modern world and its consequences.This paper will successively focus on three aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite relationship to the modern city. The first aspect is its representation: the city is a fatal beauty which seduces and corrupts, winds its network around the characters, and whose façades hide only death. This criticism opens the way to an attack against urban modernity, characterised by unnatural excess and human alienation. Beings are reified and despised, used and abused, and finally lost in a haze that separates them from any source of meaning – all this the fruit of a capitalist vision of the world. After this criticism comes a proposal: a return to what is the essential part of humanity. The definition of this “human essence” may vary depending on the author, but always centres on intimate knowledge of oneself, God, or others. The modern city is not absolute evil: even its corruption is a thing of beauty. But it is only a half-drawn canvas that the Pre-Raphaelite project tries to achieve, by opening the way for humanity to realize its full potential.

Dialectical libertarianism: the unintended consequences of both ethics and incentives underlie mutual prosperity

In Bourgeois equality, Deidre Nansen McCloskey argues, as advertised in the book's subtitle, that Ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world (2016). This ambitious historical project takes its position in opposition to the political left and right. McCloskey understands the left to reflect the opinion that accumulated capital enriched the class by exploiting the working class who will only be included in the capitalist vision of perpetual accumulation as a result of state mandated redistribution. She understands the right to be the contemporary neo-institutionalists who argue that economic growth will be achieved with the appropriate incentives to reward rational action. McCloskey's argument is primarily historical. It spans the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, focusing on the European invention of capitalism and what she argues are the attendant virtues of prudence, temperance, and justice (p. 189). The strength of the project is its re-visitation of the ideals and development of classical liberalism. Its weakness is McCloskey's failure to engage with or recognize that markets and rationality are historically contextualized cultural forms. Hence latter day late-twentieth century political economy represents a different set of challenges to an advocate of bourgeois liberalism than did early modern nobility. The preeminence of rational choice social science threatens the bourgeois that McCloskey seeks to defend as the basis for a prosperous capitalist global order and it provides the most compelling contemporary rationale for markets and politics.In view of the current preeminence of neo-institutionalism and game theory, I find Bourgeois equality particularly illuminating for reminding readers of the theoretical principles characterizing modern liberal market theory such as those evident in Adam Smith's Theory of modern sentiments (1982 [1759]). Thus, in focusing critical attention on contemporary neo-institutionalism, McCloskey provides the means to clarify the distance between contemporary markets and their classical liberal predecessors. One reward for achieving this understanding is to grasp the significant differences between contemporary market ideology and that of early liberalism. Another is to fruitfully pose the question of whether McCloskey is correct: perhaps, beyond incentives, the motivating ideas and animating virtues of agents are directly correlated to whether a market society generates inclusive prosperity?In this review, I quickly rehearse McCloskey's historical argument that modern capitalism is best understood as a period of 'Great Enrichment'. i discuss her core thesis that ideals concerning human dignity are fundamental to inclusive economic growth. After this I address McCloskey's particular intervention in rejecting what she takes to be the left's assertion that redistribution is essential (e.g., Thomas Piketty), and the right's focus on institutional structures to facilitate economic growth and inclusive prosperity (e.g., Douglass C. North). I make the following points. First, I agree that McCloskey is correct in arguing that the neoliberal institutionalists concentrate on incentives to the exclusion of ethical reasons for action. Second, I suggest that the neoliberal institutionalists are more accurately viewed as extending from the right to the left sides of the political spectrum. Finally, I investigate whether perhaps the position McCloskey develops may best be characterized as 'dialectical libertarianism' because both ethical ideals and prudential incentives are fundamental to inclusive free market prosperity. Thus, I invite McCloskey to consider whether on the one hand theorists from both the left and right could endorse ideals alongside with prudential incentives. On the other hand, I ask McCloskey to take a position on whether ideals should be accompanied with a commitment to a minimal safety net, to ensure the inclusion of the least well-off in the opportunities for development. …

Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capitalist Vision by Brett Sheehan

Reviewed by: Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capitalist Vision by Brett Sheehan Georgia A. Mickey Sheehan, Brett. Industrial Eden: A Chinese Capitalist Vision. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 344 pp. $34.95 (cloth). Industrial Eden tells a complex story of two men, father and son, who built business enterprises in northeastern China during the first half of the twentieth century. The father, Song Chuandian (宋傳典 1872?–1929), came from a poor peasant family that converted to Christianity. British Baptist missionaries in this part of northern China belonged to “the social gospel movement,” which—along with religious conversion—aimed to better the lives of destitute people through developmental projects such as schools and small businesses. They justified their motives for emphasizing economic development by conceiving a causal link between Christianity and prosperity. As a student in their missionary school, Song Chuandian came into contact with this “developmental gospel.” After he graduated, the missionaries gave him work in one of their handicraft projects: a small lacemaking business. Chuandian gathered a few investors, and together they founded the Dechang Lace Company (德昌花邊莊). It remained a small and cash-poor operation until the mid-1910s, when they added hairnets for export to the product line. The hairnet business earned Chuandian a fortune. After Chuandian’s death, his eldest son, Song Feiqing (宋奜卿 1899–1955) turned the family business into a modern industrial enterprise specializing in spinning yarn. During the 1940s, he expanded into other commodities, including gunnysacks. One of the book’s many strengths is that it is the first to analyze Chinese people’s lives across the dislocations of the five authoritarian regimes in power in North China from the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912 through Chinese Communist Party rule. This time span gives Brett Sheehan the opportunity to explore the commonalities shared by authoritarian regimes and—more importantly—the contradictions arising from immediate circumstances. These five regimes each aimed to build state-run economies. Sheehan complicates the division between authoritarian and developmental states by showing that, in the midst of the extortion and confiscation that private companies like Feiqing’s Dongya Corporation (東亞毛呢纺織股份有限公司) endured, there were also times when these regimes needed to promote developmental objectives, bringing cooperation between the authoritarian state and private business. Central to Sheehan’s analysis is Song Feiqing’s business philosophy. Song—as well as other Chinese businessmen in the 1920s and 1930s—conceived of industrialization as a modern and scientific project that had the potential to socially, culturally, and politically redeem the Chinese nation. In other words, industrializing China was not just about making money. Entrepreneurs like Feiqing were patriots. Theirs was a utopian vision of change derived from origins that scholars do not usually see as complementary. For Feiqing, there was Christian redemption from Baptist missionaries; the paternalism, loyalty, and self-cultivation of Confucian teachings; and the Western and scientific mandate of the May Fourth movement. These influences came together in Song Feiqing’s vision of a scientific, hygienic modernity practiced at his factory in Tianjin. In his utopian vision, shareholders, employees, and the nation were enriched and prospered along with the business. Sheehan’s title, Industrial Eden, captures this complex convergence of ideas and influences. [End Page 106] Evidence from Sheehan’s rich and widely varied sources puts to rest historiographical arguments over whether Chinese entrepreneurs in the twentieth century profited from reliance on Chinese cultural values or exposure to Western business practices. Song Feiqing and his father did not use any “single, culturally determined set of Chinese business practices” (4). They were pragmatists. They accepted the arbitrary and extortionate nature of their political environments. They formed their business strategies and met challenges by using what they saw as the most effective means at hand. Sheehan shows how the term “capitalism” could have multiple meanings as a result of the hybrid practices that men like Song Chuandian and his son used to build their business empires. One of the ironies that Industrial Eden documents is that it was often the instability of China’s political environment that brought success to the Song family. Father and son were astute and clever, and they found spaces within authoritarian, but often disorganized, regimes where they could run their businesses...

The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa: decolonization, the free flow of information, and the media business, 1960–1980

AbstractThis article examines the news business in Africa during decolonization. While UNESCO stimulated enormous discussion about creating independent ‘third world’ alternatives for news exchange, African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania sought to secure informational sovereignty by placing international news agencies within their control. Reuters and other international news agencies, in turn, adapted to decolonization by reinventing themselves as companies working to assist new nation-states. In the subsequent contest over news distribution, the Cold War, and inter-agency competition, Africa became a battleground for disputes between Reuters’ capitalist vision of news as a commercial product and UNESCO's political conception of news. Ironically, decolonization enabled Reuters to gain greater control over information supply across Africa, because African leaders viewed the capitalist model of news as better suited to their diplomatic goals and political views.

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson Jared Hardesty (bio) River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 526. $35.00 cloth) Walter Johnson’s latest book examines the American conquest and development of the lower Mississippi Valley from the early nineteenth century until the Civil War. Tracking the development of a fully capitalist slave society or, as he explains it, the transformation of the region from a Jeffersonian “empire of liberty” into the “Cotton Kingdom,” Johnson finally lays to rest old debates, most famously those articulated by the late Eugene Genovese, about the economic development of the South. Yet, the capitalist vision of the South was much different from that of the North. Global in scope, this economic system was not only shaped by its dependence on slave labor and slaveholding but also on cotton monoculture and its accompanying ecological effects, the Liverpool cloth market, and specialized industrial technology (cotton gins and steamboats). Rationalized economically, the economy of the lower Mississippi Valley employed high-speed and high-pressure steamboats prone to accident and explosion, commodified human beings, transforming enslaved African Americans into “hands” that, dependent upon age and sex, [End Page 602] consumed a certain amount of food and picked a certain amount of cotton in a given time, and it attempted to expand the Cotton Kingdom abroad in order to create new markets and conquer new lands to replicate the transformation of the lower Mississippi Valley. In many ways, Johnson tells the story of a supposed course of history gone horribly awry. After the removal of Native Americans from the region, officials had hoped that the Deep South would be settled by free white yeoman, whose prodigious and fecundate offspring would spread across the American continent. Instead, settlers used slave labor—many of the enslaved being purchased and brought from the Upper South—to transform the landscape into one of unfreedom, market production, and human misery known as the Cotton Kingdom. Drawing upon published accounts of gamblers, speculators, planters, runaway and escaped slaves, and travellers, Johnson is able to construct his narrative convincingly and powerfully. He then uses the intellectual endeavors—books, pamphlets, trade and farm magazines, and legislation—of southern political and economic leaders to demonstrate their vision of the future—the “Dark Dream.” Unlike previous historians, Johnson moves events usually treated as peripheral to the sectional conflict between North and South, such as filibustering or the campaign to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, to the center of the story. In fact, Johnson contends that we have to move beyond national, teleological models like “North/South” or “free/slave” to truly understand the global vision of the antebellum South. Coinciding with this argument, the author argues that we have to accept the southern economy as fully capitalist. The lack of “modern” infrastructure such as railroads had more to do with the interests of steamboat owners (the industrial technology of the Mississippi) and New Orleans merchants than some systematic backwardness. Likewise, paternalism towards slaves was not due to precapitalist aristocratic pretensions, but an acknowledgement that masters owned not only the slaves but also their reproductive capacities. Benevolence towards the enslaved meant more offspring, an important form of [End Page 603] liquid capital for the master class. Quite simply, River of Dark Dreams is an incredible tour-de-force that will reshape the way historians think about slavery and capitalism in the antebellum South. There are two criticisms, however. First, the ecological transformations wrought by the rise of the Cotton Kingdom could have been examined in a more systematic way, perhaps dedicating a whole chapter to the subject. Secondly, Johnson did not take the argument far enough in places, especially in regard to the coming of the Civil War. Johnson suggests that nothing short of a unique capitalist system arose concurrently with the free-labor industrial economy of the North. If we take Johnson’s argument to its logical conclusion, the Civil War was not between a semifeudal South and a capitalist North and not only about slavery, but it was a struggle between two competing views of...

Worldview Islam dan Kapitalisme Barat

In the era when the idea of similarity, equality and pluralism are disseminated in diversified area, one might face difficulty to distinguish one civilization from the other.Now capitalism is the most dominant system of economic in the world and even developed into a civilization that has a worldveiw. Capitalism also used to be claimed and accepted as universal system that could be applied to the whole world. In response to this state of mind, it is imperative that capitalism be studied and identified from its very basic concept, i.e worldview perspective, and then compared it with Islam. This paper is a preliminary attempt to identify capitalist worldview and prove that it differs fundamentally from the worldview of Islam. The capitalist vision on religion, world, life style, justice, freedom of thought, wealth, economic activities which are influenced by Western worldview is diametrically different from Islamic worldview. Based on this study it must be very clear that Muslim intellectual who intend to borrow certain concept of capitalism for the development of Islamic economic should realize there are fundamental principles of capitalism that are irreconciliable with that of Islamic economic.

Embeddedness and beyond. Conference on the state of economic sociology

Do Sociological Theories Meet Economic Realities?– went the provocative subtitle of the most recent international economic sociology conference ´Embeddedness and Beyon ´, held in Moscow, October 2012. Indeed, approaches towards dealing with the current economic turbulence show how different narratives can sometimes coexist in contested spaces without speaking to each other, as was the case of the Occupy Movement. Here, with their post capitalist vision, participants pitched their tents in front of the very symbol of capitalism: the London Stock Exchange. At the conference, Sandy Ross from the London School of Economics suggested that, as with the Occupy Movement, speaking at cross-purposes should be avoided in science as well. To better capture reality scholars should breach boundaries within economic sociology and between disciplines. To this end the conference was a success, as scholars with various academic backgrounds and inspiration ranging in fields from sociology to cognitive science, economic history and complex system research to science and technology studies gathered from around the world with their palette of research techniques, from ethnographic research to the state-of-the-art mathematicised (network) analytics.

“Killing Time,” or Mrs. Braby’s Peppermints: The Double Economy of the Family Herald and the Family Herald Supplements

The article is a case study centring on the mass-market fiction weekly the Family Herald and its Supplements. It argues that affect and its possibilities for political and economic critique are often ignored as "supplements" in the study of periodicals. After a methodological introduction, the piece suggests that the Family Herald Supplement may have resulted from the intervention of an advertising agent keen to address new markets. Counter to this capitalist vision, the piece then explores the only sustained discussion of the periodical's use by readers. It circulates there in a feminine gift economy as a resource of hope.

Capitalism and the Tax System: A Search for Social Justice

America is a country founded on ideas. The Enlightenment was one set of ideas that attended our birth and one Enlightenment belief as strong today as during the revolution is our faith in capitalism and the protection of private property. Yet, the United States tax system manages to violate fundamental capitalist principles as outlined in the extensive writings of Adam Smith - the father of capitalism. Comparing Smith's vision to the current United States tax system reveals many important inconsistencies, particularly the current penchant for simultaneously taxing wages while exempting (or delaying) taxes on wealth and wealth appreciation. The article proposes more closely aligning the U.S. tax system with Smith's capitalist vision by introducing a combined wealth and consumption tax each with significant exemption amounts. The expected result of a combined wealth and consumption tax system is the release of a considerable portion of the population from tax liability. Less expected rewards of a tax system that more closely resembles Smith's capitalist ideal include: (a) support for a living wage; (b) class based affirmative action; and, (c) reparations for slavery.

The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere. Edited by Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 362. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $50.00 paper.

Reviewed by: The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere Lincoln Cushing The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere. Edited by Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 362. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $50.00 paper. The premise of this anthology is an important one in the confluence of time, geography, and topic. The 1930s, like "the '60s," is shorthand for a significant period in history that does not truly fit neatly into an even-numbered decade. What is meant by "the 1930s" covers the late 1920s right up to the U.S. involvement in the Second World War, a very radicalized period struggling with the Great Depression, capitalist recovery, and communist responses. This book also inclusively embraces the whole Hemisphere, packing into one volume a range of essays on artists and movements in Argentina, Canada, Cuba, and Mexico as well as the United States. The book's title reflects its goal of dissecting interpretations and implications of "social realism," an imprecise term never used by the artists at the time (the phrase "people's art" edged out "revolutionary art" after the Popular Front shift in 1935) but which has now come to define an entire relationship between art and politics. [End Page 457] The Introduction presents a good overview of the political and cultural movements during this period, including the often-contradictory relationships between nations, artists, and communist formations. The 14 eclectic essays focus on a single topic—an artist, movement, or subject. All reveal fascinating facts and analyses that incrementally add to a better understanding of this period. Alejandro Andreus documents how Argentine artist Antonio Berni based his paintings on photographs he took of the unemployed, Mary K. Coffey explores how Mexican muralists shifted from using classical European sources to integrating indigenous cultural imagery in their work, and Marlene Park offers insight into the politics of a pair of competing anti-lynching art exhibitions held in New York City. The strongest essays go further, raising challenging questions about deeper issues such as nationalism, the orthodoxy of representational art, the importance of federal funding for the arts, and the relationships between artists and Party organizations. Andrew Hemingway posits that the various U.S. communist cultural movements of that period fell apart because of how the CPUSA imploded in response to repression, Jonathan Weinberg suggests that the hyper-masculine representations in 1930s artwork were a response to the insecurity felt from massive unemployment and women entering the workforce, and Anthony W. Lee makes the case that Diego Rivera's Detroit murals perpetuated a "leftist fantasy of the American worker" (p. 202) and "call forth a capitalist vision of harmony on the assembly line even as [they try] to articulate a socialist vision" (p. 208). One quality of this book is that many of these essays are about failures, not successes. It is easy to glorify and romanticize art making during the pre-McCarthy golden years of militant unionism and social upheaval, but this book takes a hard look at the contradictions and limitations of this period. People of color were stereotyped and used to political advantage, women artists had a hard time getting recognition, and the Left spent much of its time fighting itself. Some things never change, but this book gives us tools to avoid the mistakes of the past. Some peculiar and significant flaws mar this otherwise illuminating work. There are no author biographies, and almost all the images lack documentary photographer credits. The reproductions are often inadequate; important images are referred to but not displayed, the lack of color reproduction eviscerates much of their impact, and many of the mural photos—admittedly a difficult documentation challenge—lack sharpness and contrast. Finally, the emphasis on muralists and painters perpetuates the marginalization of the important role of posters and prints during this period. Lincoln Cushing University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California Copyright © 2007 Academy of American Franciscan History

Asian Mail-Order Brides, the Threat of Global Capitalism, and the Rescue of the U.S. Nation-State

AMERICUS MITCHELL'S PROVOCATIVE ANALOGY reveals a great deal about the status of U.S. and Asian women in the global capitalist era. In three brief sentences, he succeeds in drawing on the backlash in the 1980s and 1990s against U.S. women who work outside the home, as well as on fears of Asia as an economic threat. Speaking specifically about the virtues of Asian mail-order brides, he also confirms the global capitalist vision of Asian women as automatons. Mitchell's comments suggest that a variety of competing systems are at work here: as white U.S. women con tinue to value themselves more highly, by putting themselves on a pedestal and by entering the workforce in greater numbers, U.S. men must necessarily move outside the nation's borders to locate new domes tic and sexual partners. International trade thus becomes intimately

Pornography in small places and other spaces

This article investigates pornographic web-based media at a time when commercial pornography has flooded the Internet and pockets of sex activism are budding alongside the porn boom. Pornography moving freely across borders is foremost a capitalist vision, but the web’s sexual potency is equally defined by web users and artists who visit and maintain peer-to-peer networks for producing and sharing sexually explicit materials. Revisiting Foucault’s notion of space as ‘heterotopia’, networked sexual communication and pornography are shown to permeate physical places and other spaces. Web users cultivate attachments to everyday places and spaces other than the ones they routinely inhabit. Networked sexual agency materializes desire far beyond the confines of community rituals and commodity industries. Besides the fact that porn industries expand their markets and diversify products, sex communities emerge alongside these markets and play a vital role in negotiating sexuality. The article shows how the Internets decentralized mechanisms of power and communication, including debating societies and playgrounds, have entered the realm of online porn and sexuality. Developing a theoretical notion of space as other spaces, the article unfolds the sexual web as exuberant, dispersed in bodies and cultures, yet forcefully regulated by global corporations and nation-state governments.

The New South Creed and the Limits of Radicalism: Augusta, Georgia, before the 1890s

IDEA OF A NEW SOUTH WAS PERHAPS THE PREEMINENT INTELLECTUAL innovation of the post-Civil War era. The eastern states of the former Confederacy, and particularly Georgia, were home to numerous apostles of this vision, none more vociferous and aggressive than Henry Grady of Atlanta. From his post as editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Grady popularized the idea of a New South--one that welcomed investment and encouraged business enterprise--as the harbinger of industrial development and commercial wealth. Grady claimed that new manufacturing and increased exploitation of the region's abundant natural resources would bring prosperity to all southerners, black and white. Moreover, as historian Paul Gaston has noted, this New posited a connection between farming and industrial growth. Creation of smaller, diversified farms to replace the antebellum pattern of large cotton plantations central to this vision. A renovated agricultural system to be infused with the values of business enterprise instead of the plantation ideals that supposedly characterized the slave South. Pursuing new market crops and keeping the profits at home would generate the investment capital necessary for southerners to build manufacturing enterprises comparable to those of the industrial North. Here a grand design for implementing a new era of prosperity in the defeated South, one freed from the dead hand of plantation agriculture and slavery.(1) Tragically, the dream of a New stillborn. Rather than the actual harbinger of prosperity, the New quickly became the credo of an oppressive ruling elite that content to exploit the impoverished southern masses. Rejecting the new creed as little more than empty rhetoric, large numbers of rural southerners embraced an apparent ideological alternative beginning in the late 1880s, first under the banner of the Farmers' Alliance and later under that of the People' s Party. Uniting middling-to-poor farmers and the dispossessed, these rebels coupled deep hostility toward the laissez-faire capitalist vision of New partisans with sensitivity toward the economic struggles of southerners, both white and black, in pursuit of a more humane society. Reflecting the cultural traditions and interests of the dominant rural South, the insurgents seemed poised to sweep the Redeemer politicians aligned with the Democratic Party from power during the early 1890s. In response, however, Democrats shamelessly employed fraud, violence, and intimidation to crush the potent agrarian coalition. By the turn of the century, the Democratic Party ruled a Solid South noted for poverty, vicious exploitation, and racial oppression.(2) The idea of an increasingly prosperous New became the intellectual dogma of triumphant Democrats across the for generations. It bears remembering, however, that this vision originated as a revolutionary alternative to the ideology of the plantation South. As Paul Gaston reminded us over a generation ago in his classic analysis of the New creed, the ideal of a New served a vital enabling function for those living in the postwar era. It delineated a path that led from the devastation of war to a prosperous future. This vision a complex intellectual constellation of assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, values, ideas, perceptions, judgments, ideals, and prejudices enabling individuals to understand the world around them and their place in it. Accurate or not, it sufficiently coherent and comprehensive to allow men and women to understand intuitively the workings of society. Moreover, the New vision an inclusive one, promising greater prosperity and freedom for all southerners, black and white, rich and poor. Like other successful ideologies, it sufficiently vague and ambiguous to appeal to large numbers of people with diverse interests. Indeed, the allure of a New so powerful among those of the postwar generation that, by the late 1880s, it was on the verge of achieving the hegemony once enjoyed by the creed of the Old South. …

CYBER-UTOPIA AND THE MYTH OF PARADISE: USING JACQUES ELLUL'S WORK ON PROPAGANDA TO ANALYSE INFORMATION SOCIETY RHETORIC

Whereas Jacques Ellul's work on the role of myth in propaganda about the technological society has been largely overlooked, it presents an effective means to analyse the ways in which the information society is symbolically constructed. The French thinker'sexamination of mid-twentieth-century propaganda has much relevance in studying current rhetoric about the 'information revolution', 'global information infrastructure' and 'knowledge-based society'. Not only did he prove prophetic in his description of the increasing intensification of technique in various aspects of life, but also his work offers significant insight into the ways the integrally capitalist vision of 'global information society' is being publicized around the world. The promotion of new media on a transnational scale by government, industry and media can be usefully studied within a myth-based framework. Unlike other writers on myth and communication Ellul underlined the religious roots of myth, therefore drawing attention to the ancient origins of contemporary notions. He suggested that ideology in itself was not able to mobilize individuals, but was dependent on the psychological/spiritual force of myth to move people to action. Propagandists use networks of various myths, which operate interactively with each other to reinforce prevailing ideologies. This article uses a set of technological myths identified by Ellul (science, history, nation, work, happiness, youth and the hero) to show how they can be used in developing a framework to analyse and challenge current propaganda about information society. Such applications of the French sociologist's work on myth, propaganda and technological society will encourage the broadening of scholarly activity beyond the strictly positivist confines of dominant social science.

The Three Faces of Privatisation

Starting from the premise that social policies represent solutions to socially constructed problems (Edelman 1987), this article presents an adaptation of Lukes's (1974) theory of power to consider three interpretations of privatisation as illustrated in Britain and the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s. Privatisation is most frequently presented in political and academic discourse as essentially a matter of contracting out public services or functions and selling off state assets. This `first face' of privatisation coincides with a naive pluralist approach to power and a liberal capitalist vision of society. While this view has some justification within a very narrow frame of reference, a `second face' of privatisation is necessary to bring attention to crucially related aspects of exercises of power, such as corruption, homelessness and social inequality, which may be products of contracting out and sell-offs. Additionally, a second face view of privatisation highlights the privatising effects of certain policies which are ignored, obscured or hidden by the first face view. An analysis of public sector expenditure cuts as a process of privatisation is crucial in this regard. Finally, a `third face' of privatisation, as a hegemonic project, is raised. Here, privatisation is viewed as having a cultural and political mission, aiming to alter consciousness and effect changes in power relationships. The hegemonic capacity of privatisation is considered through an examination of ideological constructions such as the binary divide between private and public spheres and a sociobiological rationale for policy.

Kellogg's Six-Hour Day: A Capitalist Vision of Liberation through Managed Work Reduction

Historians have recently tried to explain why the century-long work-reduction movement ended in the 1940s. A history of Kellogg's Six-Hour day program reveals that the loss of business and management support contributed to this demise. Mainstream corporations such as Kellogg's once thought that managed work reduction would save capitalism, and they developed a capitalist vision of freedom from work remarkably similar to recent socialist writings. But Kellogg's management reversed course and ultimately opposed the Six-Hour day. Instead they developed more conventional corporate views: that industrial progress is defined by more work for more people, that increasing the number of jobs is a primary economic goal (but not the responsibility of the individual firm), and that work can be perfected to become the most satisfying part of life.