Fty Years Research Articles

Finding our inner scientist

Popper had a fateful meeting with the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Cambridge Philosophy Club. In a talk to the Club, with Wittgenstein in the audience, Popper described several “philosophical problems”– important, dif1⁄2cult questions that he thought would one day be answered. Here Popper was issuing a direct challenge to Wittgenstein, who had argued that philosophy could only analyze linguistic puzzles–not solve any real problems. The visit has become most famous for the subsequent controversy among eyewitnesses over whether or not Wittgenstein’s response to this challenge was to angrily brandish a 1⁄2replace poker at Popper. But there is a more interesting aspect to the story. One of the problems Popper described was the problem of causal induction: How is it possible for us to correctly infer the causal structure of the world from our limited and fragmentary experience? Popper claimed that this problem would one day be solved, and he turned out to be right. Surprisingly, at least part of the solution to the problem comes from a source about as far removed from the chilly Cambridge seminar room of 1⁄2fty years ago as possible–it comes from babies and young children. The past thirty years have been a golden age for the study of cognitive development. We’ve learned more about what babies and young children know, and when they know it, than we did in the preceding two thousand years. And this new science has completely overturned traditional ideas about what children are like. The conventional wisdom, from Locke to Freud and Piaget, had been that babies and young children are irrational, egocentric, pre-causal, and solipsistic, governed by sensation rather than reason, and impulse rather than intention. In contrast, the last thirty years of research have taught us that even the youngest infants–literally newborns –already know a great deal about a wide range of subjects. Moreover, we have been able to chart consistent changes

The Attacks of September 11 in Three Temporalities

The attacks of September 11 are explored from the perspective of three temporalities—that of US hegemony (roughly the last 50 years), that of the history of modernity (roughly the last three hundred and ?fty years) and that of the ‘clash’ between Western and non–Western civilizations (roughly the last one thousand years). The attacks are symptomatic of the emergence of regional, networked actors that the US is not well prepared to address and which disrupt the national–developmental world order organized under US hegemony. By demonstrating one of the unintended consequences of modernity—the democratization of means of destruction—the attacks mark another nail in the co?n of the idea that progress can be attained through technological breakthroughs and the rational organization of the world (which we call hegemonic rationalistic modernity). The attempt to galvanize the Islamic community through an assault on its perceived rivals parallels the strategy of the Christian crusades 1000 years ago. The attacks mark a moment in the declining ability of the West to control the non–Western world. In conclusion, world order is likely to be reconstructed only if there is a move beyond US hegemony, rationalistic modernity, and the presumption of Western supremacy that characterize the contemporary world.

International Inequality in the Age of Globalization: Japanese Economic Ascent and the Restructuring of the Capitalist World-Economy

This paper shows how Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state constructed a development model based on the steel industry as a generative sector that drove Japan’s economic ascent in the world-historical context of U.S. hegemony. We make three arguments in this paper. First, there is a new model of capital accumulation that does create new forms of social inequality by redistributing costs and bene?ts in very di?erent ways than earlier models. Second, Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state created this new model of capital accumulation and social inequality via mechanisms including joint ventures, long term contracts, and other forms of international trade and investment, not U.S.-based transnational corporations, as is usually assumed. Third, world-systems theory reconstructed through the lens of the new historical materialism explains this restructuring of the capitalist world-economy as the outcome of Japan’s economic ascent over the last ?fty years. Further, we argue that this new model of capital accumulation has had similar impacts on redistributing the costs and bene?ts of development between core and peripheral regions of the capitalist world-economy in a wide range of global industries. These strategies created a tightly linked set of technological and organizational innovations to overcome the natural and social obstacles to Japanese development, dramatically increase Japan’s international economic competitiveness by lowering production costs in all sectors of the economy, turn Japan into the world’s largest exporter of manufactured products, restructure a range of global industries, and recreate the world-system hierarchy in support of Japanese development. In particular, organizational inno-vations in the use of long term contracts and joint ventures in raw materials industries to foster global excess capacity and lower rents to resource extracting ?rms and states reallocated the costs of providing the material building blocks of Japanese development to the states and ?rms of its new raw materials periphery. This competitive advantage drove Japanese capital accumulation and economic ascent, and simultaneously drove underdevelopment in Japan’s periphery. These Japanese innovations became key elements of globalization as U.S. and European transnational corporations and states sought to compete with Japan. Joint ventures, long-term contracts, and other forms of inter?rm cooperation have replaced vertically integrated foreign direct investment, the earlier U.S. model of capital accumulation and international economic linkage, as the model for global industries.

Deepening Our Commitment, Hitting the Streets: A Call to Action

The Ž ftieth anniversary of the Society for the Study of Social Problems provides us with an opportunity to reect upon, celebrate, and deepen our commitment to the ideals of the organization. For Ž fty years, the SSSP has brought together academics, practitioners, and activists committed to humanistic ideals in order to encourage both scholarship and action in pursuit of a just society. Our mission is to encourage the critical examination of social problems, their causes, and their solutions and to help solve those problems. Our membership brochure invites people to “get active in the pursuit of social justice,” while our description of the organization claims that the “SSSP works to solve [social] problems and to develop informed social policy” (SSSP 2000). The point of this organization is not simply to understand our social world, but to improve it. Many of us as scholars have taken the Žrst task to heart, but not the second. The Ž ftieth anniversary of the SSSP provides us with an occasion to reect upon our own individual and collective practices and to further strengthen our commitment to social change. This is no easy task. As Alvin Gouldner suggests,