Individual Traditions Research Articles

Economic Effects Of The Philosophical Concept Of Community

Introductory textbooks in the History of Economic Thought in use at colleges and universities devote little space to Scholasticism and its influence. Even those that do not start straight with the Physiocrats, Thomas Aquinas appears stuck between Ancient Greek Philosophers and Thomas Mun. Scholasticism with “medieval” economic thought characterized as primitive and focused on “obsolete” issues like usury and just price. Sometimes it is even categorized among the schools that promote State intervention1. This was not the opinion of F.A. Hayek, who appreciated some Scholastic authors as part of the individualistic tradition of Western civilization rooted on the legacy of Ancient Greeks and Romans like Pericles, Thucydides, Cicero and Tacitus2. In his famous Road to Serfdom (1944) F.A. Hayek assumed that Western Civilization had abandoned the right road and the individualistic tradition by the last quarter of the XIX Century. The abandoned road that Hayek refers to is that grounded on Greek, Roman and Medieval tradition and later paved by the ideas of authors like Cobden, Bright, De Tocqueville, Lord Acton, Adam Smith, Hume, Locke or Milton3. Hilaire Belloc4 located the abandonment of the liberal tradition around the same historical time. He would have agreed with most of the names in Hayek´s list, especially Cobden and Bright, but would have added those of radicals like Fox and Cobbett. Regarding more far away sources of Western thought, he would have included Aristotle, Aquinas and the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez.Some of the authors mentioned above represent different traditions in the political philosophy. These traditions could be referred as the “old” and the “new”, following Leo Strauss in the idea of Machiavelli as the turning point. This essay approaches the influence of the political philosophy in the changes referred by Hayek and Belloc by examining the differences between the old and the new concept of community.

Embracing the collective through medical education.

The journal Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory and Practice has, under Geoff Norman’s leadership, promoted a collaborative approach to investigating educationally-savvy and innovative health care practices, where academic medical educators can work closely with healthcare practitioners to improve patient care and safety. But in medical practice in particular this networked approach is often compromised by a lingering, historically conditioned pattern of heroic individualism (under the banner ‘self help’). In an era promising patient-centredness and inter-professional practices, we must ask: ‘when will medicine, and its informing agent medical education, embrace democratic habits and collectivism?’ The symptom of lingering heroic individualism is particularly prominent in North American medical education. This is echoed in widespread resistance to a government-controlled public health, where the USA remains the only advanced economy that fails to provide universal health care. I track a resistance to collectivist medical-educational reform historically from a mid-nineteenth century nexus of influential thinkers who came, some unwittingly, to shape North American medical education within a Protestant-Capitalist individualist tradition. This tradition still lingers, where some doctors recall a fictional ‘golden age’ of medical practice and education, actually long since eclipsed by fluid inter-professional health care team practices. I cast this tension between conservative traditions of individualism and progressive collectivism as a political issue.

Virginia Governor’s “Executive Order 51”: How Control, Consent and Care Collide in Emergency Laws

A close reading of two interrelated Executive Orders issued by the Governor of the U.S. State of Virginia exposes modern Law’s twofold paradoxes. While the first stems from perennial judicial-political disjunctive opposition between responsibility for self-preservation and collective wellbeing, the second paradox comes into view with the rise, in eighteenth-century North America, of homo oeconomicus who, newly endowed with rights has the (additional) right not to obey government orders. The entanglement of the two, enfolded in decisive contradiction accompanying the formation of Virginia together with the U.S., defines the fault line in all emergency regulation designed to protect populations in a pandemic that threaten lives and livelihoods. Framed by theoretical borrowings from late Foucault (on governmentality) that encompasses various strategic techniques for making society function equitable, and from Balibar’s discussions on “the individualist tradition,” I argue with Menke’s Critique of Rights that the Virginia Emergency Orders expose the historical precariousness of the (neo)liberal subject of interest, reiterating what Schmitt saw as Hobbes’ central political concern, namely that without “the mutual relation between Protection and Obedience” anarchy would threaten the order forged by contract.

Close to Home, One at a Time, Not in My Backyard: Individualism and the Mantras of Depoliticization in US Reform Discourses

The U.S. has a vibrant history of civic activism fueled by a strong individualistic tradition. But while stimulating critical views of the status quo, the individualist mindset has simultaneously acted as a brake on the democratic imagination by promoting the cultural narrative according to which meaningful social change can ultimately only occur by transforming one’s own private environment. This tendency finds expression in popular reform slogans, also including modern cyber-activism which – despite its global reach – shows a disposition to get absorbed in insular pet projects. It also plays a vital, jet largely unacknowledged role in America’s struggle with gun violence.

Place as Refuge: Exploring the Poetical Legacy of Matsuo Bashō

By drawing on phenomenological notions, this paper offers a “middle way” reading of Bashō’s travelogues that accentuates their religious, rather than merely aesthetical purpose, which is to transmit the Buddha Dharma. Two distinctive poetic traditions of Bashō interpretation exist: the Zen-inflected, monologic, and individualist tradition and the intertextual or dialogical interpretation . One way to reconcile these two strains in Bashō’s poetics is to see his haikai through the lens of mind-to-mind transmission of light. This “middle way” interpretation traces a double movement of phenomenological reduction through two travelogues: first, by showing how home departure entails freeing the mind of fixity and, second, by suggesting that mind-to-mind transmission removes the ambition to find refuge in peak experiences, just as it resists being reduced to parodic subversion of reigning cultural values. In the Buddhist lineage, the heart of transmission rests neither upon conservation nor upon rejection of poetic essences but, rather, lies in transforming haikai into medicine, which is efficacious for the process of awakening.

The topic of subjectivity in psychology: Contradictions, paths and new alternatives

AbstractThis paper draws a picture of how topics related to subjectivity have appeared in different psychological theories, such as psychoanalysis, Gestalt and post‐structuralist approaches, discussing in depth a specific proposition from a cultural‐historical standpoint. I argue that, in most of these theories, subjectivity has been used to refer to specific processes and phenomena without advancing a more general theory about it. The way in which subjectivity was treated within the Cartesian/Enlightenment tradition, taken together with the individualistic tradition of psychology, led critical psychological theories to reject the concept. In this way, such critical theories have omitted the heuristic value of subjectivity to study processes that can neither be exhausted by language, nor by discourse. A new proposal of subjectivity is highlighted, based on the cultural‐historical tradition in psychology. From this perspective, subjectivity is defined by units of emotions and symbolical processes generated throughout human experience. On the basis of such definition, I discuss how institutionalized orders can be subverted by subjective productions that represent new social pathways. Far from being a remnant of Modernity, in this way subjectivity is defined as a human production, capable of transcending the apparent objective limits of human existence.

A Psicologia Brasileira e os Povos Indígenas: Atualização do Estado da Arte

Resumo De acordo com o último censo do IBGE (2010a), 0,4% da população brasileira é composta por indígenas, população que vem aumentando nos últimos anos e cresceu 39% em relação ao censo de 2000, embora ainda continue sendo uma população invisibilizada e só recentemente tenha começado a ser estudada pela Psicologia. Como marcos da recente aproximação da Psicologia com a temática indígena, destacamos: o relatório do seminário “Subjetividade e Povos Indígenas” (2004) e o livro “Psicologia e Povo Indígenas” (2010). O objetivo deste estudo é atualizar o estado da arte sobre os povos indígenas na Psicologia no Brasil, considerando duas bases de dados o PePSIC e a SciELO. Utilizando como palavras-chave “indígena” ou “índio” em toda coleção na primeira base e somente nas revistas de Psicologia na segunda, encontramos um total de 25 artigos, os quais foram lidos na íntegra e agrupados de acordo com os temas estudados. Concluímos que os artigos encontrados se caracterizam, por um lado, pela interdisciplinaridade, e por outro, pela falta de um referencial teórico bem-definido específico da área da Psicologia. Entendemos que a complexidade da temática demanda um olhar interdisciplinar, no entanto, a escassez de referências específicas da Psicologia nos indica que ainda temos muito a avançar, possivelmente pela aproximação recente da Psicologia com o estudo da temática e também pela própria constituição da Psicologia enquanto ciência pautada principalmente por tradições individualistas, que destoam das tradições indígenas que se baseiam principalmente no coletivismo.

La comunidad de los ausentes

The modern individualistic and liberal tradition results in the structural incapacity to support any conception of community which cannot go further than economy based on interests. In any case it will produce just clean conscience. In contrary to this is the Nietzschean tradition, taken over by Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Esposito or Nancy, modified by Benjamin and Arendt, which permits to suggest what is called the community of the absent ones, around concepts like absenteeism, literature, time, love, and death.

Ingegneria sociale e salute razziale. Le teorie eugenetiche della Progressive Era statunitense

The success of eugenics in the Usa, a nation that prides itself on its tradition ofindividualism and personal freedom, requires an adequate explanation. The aim ofthis article is to show how eugenic theories that flourishedin the late nineteenth andearly twentieth century derived from the technocratic political culture of theProgressive Era. Eugenics, in other words, was part of the projects of socialengineering and social planning that many American progressives consideredessential for the management and betterment of modern industrial society. In thisperspective, leading progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as a genuine branch ofsocial science and eugenic policies as an indispensable tool in the quest for socialcontrol.

What does it mean to teach thinking in China? Challenging and developing notions of ‘Confucian education’

The Confucian tradition of education is frequently referred to in ways that make it seem antithetical to the aim of teaching thinking. ‘Confucian education’, as depicted in the literature, implies rote learning in large classrooms where students learn not to question authority. However, in what is referred to in the literature as the ‘paradox of Chinese education’, it seems that what appears to many western observers to be rote learning often leads to depth understanding. In this paper we use critical literature review and some analysis of empirical data to argue that this paradox might be an effect of the continuance in Chinese education of a distinctively Confucian approach to teaching thinking. Confucius, we argue, taught thinking in the form of inner dialogue between multiple voices in the context of relationships and responsibilities. Having made the scholarly and theoretical case for this form of teaching thinking, we then offer illustrations of it, taken from recent classroom research in China. We conclude that the Confucian approach to teaching thinking that we uncover still survives and is a significant part of the Confucian heritage. It may have been overlooked in the past simply because it does not fit easily with more demonstrative and individualistic traditions of teaching thinking familiar in the West. Our aim is to correct a common misinterpretation of Confucian education and so perhaps to open the way to developing a more truly Confucian approach to education that is appropriate for the needs of the 21st Century.

Awakening to race: individualism and social consciousness in America

The election of America's first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness - consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner's new individualism becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.

“THIS IS THE TIME. AND THIS IS THE RECORD OF THE TIME”

THIS IS THE TIME. AND THIS IS THE RECORD OF TIMEToday’s extensive use of databases for storing identifying biometric and genetic information raises several questions on the relations between bodies, tech nology, information, power, human rights and personal integrity. While an individualistic understanding of the human being is inadequate as a way of approaching this complex of problems, we are also confronted with the challenge not to dissolve the subject, thus overlooking the fragility of our condition and the ways in which our bodies are being encroached. The present article attempts to meet this double challenge.Starting with the short story Fantomina: or Love in a Maze, written by Eliza Haywood during the early 18th century, and with a discussion on some relations between fiction, power and surveillance, the article investigates contemporary ways in which bodies are being inscribed in laws and captured in the trap of scription when used as proofs of identity. The article analyzes questions of identification in their historical complexity, as well as the patterns that are played out by powers of recording, operating with some continuity over the past centuries.It is also suggested that so-called bodily freedoms and rights, as well as integrity, could gain in critical significance by considering the “betweenness” – the inter-est of Hannah Arendt – and the ways in which our existence presupposes the other (understood as both the world and the others conditioning us). Opposing the individualistic tradition, the law understood as a boundary does not, thus, enclose independent individuals in sovereign possession of themselves beyond time and space; instead, the boundary gains its significance in relation to an opaque who in continuous becoming.

Framing Disability: Comparing Individualist and Collectivist Societies

AbstractIn this paper I use international differences in disability rates as a window to address the question how national culture influences a nation’s understanding and practice of disability. I apply the well-established distinction between individualistic and collectivistic cultures to explore the relationship between culture and disability rates. I argue and find support for the hypothesis that individualistic cultures exhibit higher rates of disability. In the second part I add cultural and institutional detail to the account. While individualistic and collectivist cultures both value assistance to the disabled, only the Western individualist tradition produces a rights-based approach to disability.

Sociologiens nutidige krise: Hvordan undgår vi falsk pluralisme?

The present crisis in sociology: a way beyond spurious pluralism? At the end of the 20th century the state of sociology gives cause for serious con¬cern. The main reasons for this concern can be stated in three features of contem¬porary sociology: First, there is a manifest lack of integration of research and theory. This is a long-standing difficulty, but what makes it worse today than pre¬viously is, that it is now less often seen as a serious problem. Second, there is an evident collective failure among sociolo¬gists to decide just what kind of discip¬line sociology is or ought to be. For some sociology should aim to be a social scien¬ce and to have therefore well-defined links with other social sciences, such as economics and political science, and al¬so human sciences. For others such aspi¬rations represent an outmoded ”posi¬tivsm”. If sociology is to be thought of as a social science at all then it must be one of a distinctive kind; and the crucial inter¬disciplinary links should be with cer¬tains kinds of philosophy and with cul¬tural studies. Third and finally, there is disagreement about how the disagree¬ments on the nature of sociology should itself be viewed. Despite the state of intellectual disar¬ray today´s sociology has some signifi¬cant achievements which can be charac¬terised as success stories and two are mentioned in the article. The first suc¬cess story is about the quantitative soci¬al research: more specifically, research that involves both data collection and da¬ta analysis that are based on statistical methods and on the theory of probability. Through statistical modelling know¬ledge about important social regularities has been established and these social re¬gularities are of major theoretical signi¬ficance. The modelling has typically ena¬bled sociologists to separate out more clearly than before what are the probabi¬litic regularities inherent in complex da¬ta-sets. The second success story of sociology is that of the theory of social action. Today, if we want to have an effective kind of sociological theory then it will be a theory of social action of some kind or other. Two developments lead to this conclu¬sion. The first is the evident collapse of functionalist theory over the last two to three decades. For functionalism to have explanatory power it is necessary that the systems which are taken as the units of analysis should exists in a selective environment; i. e. there must be the possi¬bility that the systems will in some sense fail to survive. Then it becomes possible to explain their constituent feature by re¬ference to their ”survival value”. This ap¬proach underlines the need for sociologi¬cal explannation to have a ”micro-foun¬dation”: i.e. to comprise not only ”macro¬-to-micro” link but a ”micro-to-macro” link as well. We need to return to the in¬dividualistic tradition in sociology. The second argument goes as following: Wi¬thin the individualistic tradition, theory based on the concept of action has in fact shown much greater promise than the main alternative has: i. e. theory based on the concept of behaviour. The attempts to revitalise the individualistic tradition via the theory of social action has proved rewarding and it seems to be around rational action theory that we may best try to build up a more general theory of social action. Through the statistical modelling ba¬sed on data collection and the theory of probability on the one hand and through developing a theory of rational social ac¬tion within the individualistic tradition on the other hand we might be able to overcome the present difficulties of socio¬logy as a science.

Identity, Trust and Altruism: Sociological Clues to Economics Development

Much of economics is built on the assumption of individuals being driven by nothing but self-interest; and economic development is viewed as an outcome of the free play of such individuals. On the few occasions that economic recognizes the role of trust, integrity, in-group cooperation and altrusim, the tendency is to build up these from the axiom of individually selfish behavior. The aim of this paper is to break away from this individualist tradition and to treat as a primitive that individuals have hard-wired in them the 'cooperative spirit', which allows them often to work in the collective interest, even when that may not be in their self-interest. The main objective of the paper is to trace the consequences of this primitive. By using the basic structure of a Prisoner's Dilemma game and building into it assumptions of other-regardingness, the paper demonstrates how our selfish rationality interacts with out innate sense of cooperation. The model is used to outline circumstances under which cooperation will occur and circumstances where it will break down. The paper also studies how sub-groups of a society can form cooperative blocks, whether to simply do better for themselves or exploit others.

Representations sociales et triangulation: une application en psychologie sociale de la sante

La relation du contexte social et de la santé représente un enjeu de recherche important pour les développements actuels en psychologie sociale de la santé. L'approche des représentations sociales offre un cadre d'analyse de la pensée sociale profane concernant la maladie, en rupture avec la tradition cognitiviste et individualiste dominante dans les analyses psychosociales des risques sanitaires. Sur le plan théorico-méthodologique, cette approche permet une étude contextualisée des processus sociocognitifs qui interviennent dans la construction des risques, en opérationnalisant la double nature, produit/processus, de la représentation. Dans cette perspective, la triangulation en tant que stratégie de recherche inductive constitue une démarche privilégiée. Nous présentons une application de cette stratégie à travers une recherche sur les représentations des relations sexuelles et des risques liés au sida chez de jeunes adultes en France et en Grèce. Nous discutons la pertinence de la triangulation pour les approches "multi-niveaux" de la construction des risquesl.

Predicting Recidivism in a Communitarian Society: China

Research on the prediction of recidivism has largely been an enterprise of Western criminology. Therefore, the identification and selection of predictors has tended to follow the individualistic traditions of the West. Important advances in models and methods have not been extended to non-Western societies such as China. This article explores the implications of communitarian features of Chinese urban communities for prediction of recidivism. The article applies the perspective of social capital to the specification of predictors. Available community social-capital measures are included in the prediction model to capture the effects of communitarian cultural features. The results indicate that social capital variables generally have significant effects.

Book Review: An Introduction to the Sociology of Health and Illness

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS Kevin White London: Sage, 2002, x + 196 pp., $55.95 (paperback). This book's strength comes from Kevin White's keen interest in the history of medicine and philosophy of science. White insists that trends in medical knowledge and practice are shaped as much by political, economic and socio-cultural forces as by objective discoveries of the biological and clinical epidemiological sciences; the corollary of which is, as Ray Fitzpatrick says on the back cover, 'health and illness are products not just of our biology but of the society in which we are born'. Of eight main chapters, three use history as their organizing principle, three introduce Marx, Parsons and Foucault, and two focus on gender and ethnicity. 'The Social Construction of Medical Knowledge' (Chapter 2), combines ideas from B.S. Turner, Fleck, Foucault and Kuhn. Readers of White's earlier work, especially his tour de force--the 1991 overview of 'The Sociology of Health and Illness' in Current Sociology--will be familiar with the essential arguments; and pleased to see fresh examples from medical history and today's health issues. In Chapter 3 White shows how the sociology of health has evolved out of a sociology sympathetic to medicine into a sociology highly critical of medicine. He gives arresting examples of the medicalization of deviance--stories of 'drapetomania' from 19th-century America, of pathological gambling and alcoholism in the 20th century, through to the medicalization of everything, even old age. 'Postmodernity, Epidemiology and Neo-Liberalism' (Chapter 4) begins with a typology contrasting industrial and postmodern societies and the changing forms of the state, inequality, economy, politics and policy. The early social epidemiologists of industrial Britain blended statistical data with richly qualitative insights to explain the links between workers' exploitation, poverty and disease; but clinical epidemiology developed into an increasingly individualistic tradition aligned with neo-liberal ideas of consumer capitalism and the winding back of the welfare state. White argues that the current preoccupation with building 'social capital' is as much conservative reaction to the stresses of postmodern life as it is a deflection from its material inequalities. It's tempting to describe Chapters 5, 6 and 7 as standard treatments of Marx, Parsons and Foucault in relation to health, medicine and the body. It's true that their central concepts and their applicability to the field of health are substantial and persuasive. In the main these chapters are intellectually rigorous, and in places strikingly profound; yet there are obscure statements, repetition of theory and complex, contradictory argumentation. …

The guided mind: a sociogenetic approach to personality

How is something as broad and complex as a personality organized? What makes up a satisfactory theory of personality? In this book, Jaan Valsiner argues for a theoretical integration of two longstanding approaches: the individualistic tradition of personalistic psychology, typified by the work of William Stern and Gordon Allport, and the semiotic tradition of cultural-historical psychology, typified by the work of L.S. Vygotsky. The two are brought together in Valsiner's theory, which highlights the sign-constructing and sign-using nature of all distinctively human psychological processes. Arguing that the individualistic and the cultural traditions differ largely in emphasis, Valsiner unites them by focusing on the intricate relations between personality and its social context, and their interplay in personality development. The semiotic devices internalized from the social environment shape an individual's development, and the flow of thinking, feeling, and acting. Valsiner uses this theoretical approach to illuminate two remarkable, and remarkably different, phenomena: letters from the mother of Allport's college roommate, a key empirical case in Allport's theory, and the ritual movements of a Hindu temple dancer. Valsiner shows how both exemplify basic human tendencies for the cultural construction of life courses. The book shows the fundamental unities in the vastly diverse phenomenon of human personality.

O problema do cociente partidário na teoria e na prática brasileiras do mandato representativo

The electoral system affects in advance and decisively the nature of representative mandates and the legitimacy of legislative decisions. Majoritarian systems decrease the density of the representative mandate and, when districts are numerically small in terms of both representatives and constituency, such systems tend to curtail the independence of elected officeholders, whose actions can be monitored by the dominant local groups. On the other hand, proportional systems that operate with numerically large districts maximize the density of representative mandates and, at the same time, ensure the elected officeholder the independent responsibility that characterizes the modern representative mandate. There are, however, three varieties of proportional systems (flexible list, open list, and no list) where the vote cast for candidates from different parties or inter-party electoral coalitions eliminate the party quota and jeopardize party identity both inside and outside the legislative realm. In the Brazilian case, this mechanism follows and reinforces the individualistic and atomistic tradition of the political elites