Liberal Capitalist Societies Research Articles

The Ontario educational association: transnational networks and curriculum reform in the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT Originally founded in 1861 as the Teachers’ Association of Canada West (TACW), the Ontario Educational Association (OEA) was a fixture on the education scene in Ontario for one hundred twenty-five years until its dissolution on November 28, 1985. This article traces the early development and maturation of the OEA to focus on its involvement in curriculum reform undertaken by Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments in the early twentieth century. As a non-state entity, the OEA nevertheless had close ties to and received financial support from the state. It regularly advised the Department of Education on matters related to education and contributed to the building of the educational state. The annual conventions of the OEA attracted transnational participation and provided a space for educationists to exchange knowledge as well as form networks and alliances to advance their interests in education. This article locates the formation of OEA as part of the phenomenon of association that Alexis de Tocqueville identified in nineteenth century America. While mid-nineteenth century Ontario was not America, it was nevertheless a liberal capitalist society and the concept of desiring to act in political self-interest for what was deemed good for education and society underlay the creation of the Association. De Tocqueville’s focus on the importance of political associations was linked to understanding the capacity of liberal democracies to govern in the nineteenth century. This approach makes possible to understand the OEA as a site where processes of building and governing the educational state were enacted through association.

Fiction Cares: J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

Abstract J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man considers “care” in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies, including the ostensibly frivolous care of and care for literature. In contrast to grander affects and occupations, care often seems to be “just care,” as if it fails to live up to certain criteria of reality in much the same way that one says something is “just fiction.” If in its literary investigation of such serious issues as disability, aging, and immigration, Slow Man turns into a reflection on the ontology of fiction, this is not mere metafictional frivolity—for care shares the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized by what I propose to call “justness.” In this light, the novel can be read as examining the skepticism and disappointment with which, on account of this justness, earnest pleas for an ethics of care, or apologies for fiction, are met. The advocacy of care, as of fiction, requires not only good will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.”

Periphery and centre in comparative perspective: Opportunities for accounting praxis

• Why the critical in critical accounting matters. • Expanding what we mean by ‘critical’ so we learn from the periphery. • What can critical accounting learn from ‘the culture wars’? • Critical Accounting and interdisciplinary teaching and learning. In their paper On the Centrality of Peripheral Research and the Dangers of Tight Boundary Objects, the authors call for a more ambitious accounting research programme. However, their call whilst is difficult is also perhaps hard to pin down. The article needs to be disseminated and debated, because it crystalizes for accounting research a fundamental moral position in knowledge production within a liberal capitalist society. As such. Different perspectives and indeed voices should be included and a certain egalitarianism sponsored. In a liberal capitalist society this is a good in itself (Rawls, 2009; Appiah, 2017). Surely many would argue this is the role indeed the essence of the University? We readily take up the paper’s invitation and are gratified by the professionalism and commitment of the authors. Accounting scholarship , like all parts of liberal capitalist society, requires constant vigilance and reform to approximate these liberal ideas of voice, inclusion, and equal participation. However, the paper is not merely for a liberal position ought to be. Rather the authors also insist that including voices from the periphery will lead to better scholarship. In other words, they argue that peripheral research possesses an intrinsic characteristic that can alter and improve accounting research. In this reply, we will set aside what makes it hard to resist – its appeal to a level playing field, fairness, inclusion, voice – and try to isolate this stronger claim if not for the superiority of peripheral scholarship, then at least for its salutary effects on central scholarship.

Ownership's Shadow

Abstract This article theorizes contemporary authoritarian mobilization and its continuities with liberal modernity. It draws on the genealogy of modern property to systematically integrate two registers that often compete in explanations of authoritarianism: materialist analyses of the political economy, and accounts of racism and sexism. Following intersectional feminist and race scholarship, it argues that liberal capitalist societies rely on inbuilt entitlements to group-based oppression, and that these oppressive relations historically took on a form analogous to property. This analogy is not accidental. Propertized oppression supplements the promise of self-ownership that liberalism rests upon; and it compensates parts of the population for the material dispossession on which capitalism thrives. At the present historical conjuncture of formal legal equality and neoliberal material dispossession, the logic of property is replicated in a new key. Neoauthoritarianism seeks to protect embodied entitlements to appropriate for select groups, and to designate others as disposable.

On the political aspects of Agnes Heller’s ethical thinking

Abstract The author describes Heller’s concept of ethics as a “quasi-sphere” intersecting with various fields relating to human relationships. Special attention is paid to the axiological aspects of her concept of ethics and the relationship between virtues and responsibility. The author also seeks to show how Heller integrated a traditional philosophical question—the relationship between “is” and “ought to be”—into her concept of “radical philosophy” at an earlier stage in the development of her philosophy. She initially considered the relationship between “is” and “ought to be” to be contrasting. Later, when she had come to accept the political model of liberal capitalist society, the ideal of all-compassing equality became the ideal of “equality of opportunities”. The author interprets this shift as one in which the relationship becomes continual. He is also critical of Heller’s underestimation of the effect the “social a priori” has on the possibilities of human life.

Social Cohesion and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Britain: Impossible Mission!

In contemporary multicultural Britain, the concept of social cohesion has been a pressing priority for not only politicians and sociologists but also for the various British ethnic minorities. Race riots like those of 2001 in Northern Britain and the events of 7/7 in London (2005) put into question the allegiances of different British ethnic populations. They equally shed light on the real or perceived lack of social and cultural communication between the established British host population and the British ethnic and immigrant communities. Hence, social cohesion came to the fore as the new jargon of governance in contemporary Britain. This article analyzes on the concept of social cohesion and its applicability within an officially declared multicultural community like that of Great Britain. The concept will be reviewed, defined and approached from different liberal political perspectives while paying special attention to the British context. Bhikhu Parekh’s conception of the different theoretical approaches to the issue of social cohesion that are pertinent to liberal capitalist societies in general and the British context, in particular, is investigated. The aim of this study is to highlight the complexity of the normative accounts of the political scientists regarding the challenges that face multicultural Britain in coming to terms with its endeavor of creating “unity within diversity”. The 2002 White Paper and security speech of David Cameron (2011) political discourses are analyzed and evaluated to decipher how they understood national identity in relation to cultural diversity and social cohesion.

Social Cohesion and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Britain: Impossible Mission!

In contemporary multicultural Britain, the concept of social cohesion has been a pressing priority for not only politicians and sociologists but also for the various British ethnic minorities. Race riots like those of 2001 in Northern Britain and the events of 7/7 in London (2005) put into question the allegiances of different British ethnic populations. They equally shed light on the real or perceived lack of social and cultural communication between the established British host population and the British ethnic and immigrant communities. Hence, social cohesion came to the fore as the new jargon of governance in contemporary Britain.This article analyzes on the concept of social cohesion and its applicability within an officially declared multicultural community like that of Great Britain. The concept will be reviewed, defined and approached from different liberal political perspectives (Robert Dahl’s pluralist approach and Arend Lijphart’s consociationalism to the more recent Will Kymlicka’s group-differentiated citizenship) while paying special attention to the British context. Bhikhu Parekh’s conception of the different theoretical approaches to the issue of social cohesion that are pertinent to liberal capitalist societies in general and the British context, in particular, is investigated. The aim of this study is to highlight the complexity of the normative accounts of the political scientists regarding the challenges that face multicultural Britain in coming to terms with its endeavour of creating “unity within diversity”. The 2002 White Paper and security speech of David Cameron (2011) political discourses are analyzed and evaluated to decipher how they understood national identity in relation to cultural diversity and social cohesion. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3376484

Precarisation and care-citizenship

ABSTRACT The distinction between labour and care is constitutive for liberal-capitalist societies in Europe. The hierarchization of refugees and the correspondingly disparate allocation of political and social rights, which have become increasingly apparent as societal structurings since 2015, are entangled with this constitutive distinction. Such trends are genealogically tied to a basic pillar of Western European societies: the idea of the autonomous individual and the related concept of free labour. These notions rely on deeply racialized, gendered, and heterosexualized entanglements, by which they ward off, devalue, domesticate, and feminise needs for protection and care. This is a logic forms the background of the politico-economic crisis we are facing today, and as such it must be the point of departure for thinking about current forms of precarization. In multi-dimensional ways, the regime of precarization constitutes how labour, autonomy, and care are entangled in contemporary capitalism and their function within governmentality. Subjectivation has become valorizable, allowing autonomy to turn into an instrument of government. Thus, the challenge today is to invent how might we imagine a way of living together that is based on commonly shared precariousness, on care rights, and on care-citizenship?

Planning in the face of immovable subjects: a dialogue about resistance to development forces

Urban development can often seem an irresistible force. The imperatives of development are deeply inscribed in the DNA of liberal capitalist societies. As well as realising profit-making opportunit...

Sex under socialism: From emancipation of women to normalized families in Czechoslovakia

Sexuality in communist Czechoslovakia was to a large extent informed by an expert discourse of sexology. Analyzing sexual advice books published by sexologists for the general public in the 1950s and 1970s, I show that sexual discourses were formed in a reversed order of liberalization vs. conservatism as compared to the West. While writing on sex in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s stressed gender equality and emancipation of women, the texts published in the 1970s insisted on the necessity of gender hierarchy for a successful marriage and defended privatized families isolated from larger society. I link these shifts to the changing character of the regime which moved from accentuating public, work and equality in the 1950s to emphasizing private, family and authority in the 1970s. In my analysis, I use the concepts of psy-ences ( Rose, 1992 , 1996 ) and intimacy at the intersection of the public/private divide ( Berlant and Warner, 1998 ), while also accounting for their blind spots. Where Rose insists that psy-ences have operated exclusively in modern liberal capitalist societies, I argue that a psy-ence of sexology also co-constituted social life under state socialism. My article analyzes Czechoslovak sexual and gender trajectories and accounts for differences from and convergences with 20th-century western histories of sexuality. I critically examine Czechoslovak sexological discourses in their changing historical settings to show that there was not one ‘communist period,’ even in one country. Rather, there existed varying modes of framing sexuality at different times.

Silêncios permissivos: os cadernos especiais da Folha de S. Paulo e Jornal do Brasil no 10º ano do regime militar

From the understanding of silence as the subject of an ideological connection process and realizing the layout / morphological suppression of journalistic material as part of macropropositional layer of discourse, there is the thesis of the silences or analytical redirects of the newspapers Folha de S. Paulo and Jornal do Brasil in the issues of 10h years of military regime, on March 31, 1974, express the identification of the subject of study, in case the media, with the edification project of an ideal political-economic regime, which would be provided by the liberal capitalist society, being acceptable, therefore, spend including by government / military dictatorships to achieve the ultimate goal.

‘The disease of the interregnum’: irony and climate change

As concerns over climate change grow there has been some debate as to whether, despite being increasingly ecologically aware, liberal-capitalist societies are conceptually equipped to deal with the current ecological situation. Moreover, it has been suggested that ecocriticism itself is underpinned by a methodological liberalism which can make it blind to certain problems and contradictions within its own methods and focuses. Taking these issues as its starting point, this essay reads a variety of texts, particularly the work of Derek Mahon, to explore how irony can function as a tool for exposing contradictions within environmentalist thought and practice. However, it also suggests that the kind of ironic disposition we find in contemporary writing about ecology sometimes risks morphing into a morbid cynicism.

The Straight Line: Sexuality, Futurity, and the Politics of Austerity

After all is said and done, the prospects and of heterosexual culture still represent the optimism optimism, hope which people apparently have already pledged consent. Berlant and Warner HOW ARE THE POLITICS OF AUSTERITY related particular structures of feeling that are future-oriented and which assume certain measures of progress can function as markers of success and happiness under neoliberalism? How are these measures related temporal modes of belonging that are generational and heteronormative? And how might these modes of belonging demonstrate the cruel optimism, as Lauren Berlant puts it, with which we attach ourselves of future happiness via institutions and practices that diminish us? Berlant claims, a relation of cruel optimism exists when you desire is actually an obstacle your flourishing (1). It might involve food, or kind of love; it might be fantasy of the good life, or political project. It might rest on simpler, too, like new habit that induce in you an improved way of being (1). Our relationships these objects might not even feel like optimism, but according Berlant all attachments are optimistic in that they move us out of ourselves, offering a cluster of promises about what we imagine is possible in the world (23). Our relationships these objects become cruel when the object/scene that ignites the sense of possibility is the very thing that makes it impossible attain the expansive transformation which we are striving (2). For instance, we might hold on fantasy of the good life, or the life of upward mobility, job security, and political and social equality, despite overwhelming evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on provide opportunities individuals make their lives add up something (Berlant 2). We might do this even if it threatens our well being, because do so gives us sense of what it means look forward living in the world. The politics of austerity operate through similar affective structure. Like cruel optimism, austerity is future-oriented and relies on an attachment scene impossible attain. Austerity also relies on similar temporal structure. In focusing on saving the good life, if not oneself at least one's children, austerity requires psychic investment in particular narrative of progress. I want suggest that this narrative follows sequence of events--birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction, death--that is heteronormative. As Sara Ahmed explains, for life count as good life, it must return the debt of life by taking on the direction promised as social good, which means imagining one's futurity in terms of reaching certain points along life course (554). Such points accumulate, creating the impression of straight line. To follow such line might be way become straight, by not deviating at any point (554). To stay on this straight line is also inhabit kind of straight time, what Judith Halberstam describes as reproductive, biological, and generational. As Halberstam outlines, in straight time values, wealth, goods, and morals are imagined be passed through family ties from generation the next, so that the family is tied both to the historical past of the nation and to the future of both familial and national stability (5). Queer time, on the other hand, is non-normative, what Halberstam describes as those forms of belonging that emerge once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance (6)--the very keywords of austerity. I therefore want suggest that the politics of austerity rely on temporality that is generational and straight in the way that Ahmed and Halberstam outline and cruel in the manner that Berlant describes. …

Popular Protest in Portugal: The Douro Region in First Half of Nineteenth Century

In the 19th century in the Douro region (where port wine was produced) there were still social protest which were considered to be pre-modern, that is, they had typical features of the protests that occurred before the 18th century, such as banditry or millenary movements. These movements didn’t have any organized structures such as political parties or trade unions and took place spontaneously and sporadically, having emerged as a reaction to the changes introduced by the new liberal politics and capitalist society. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p91

Resisting Institutional Barriers to Prisoner Reintegration into the Mainstream Workforce

In liberal market capitalist societies, a wasteland confronts individuals released from prison, induced by influences that coalesce to create an institution that is an all but insurmountable barrier to their reintegration into the mainstream labour market. This situation has attracted little attention from diversity management scholars and in this paper we address this omission by engaging in theory building that surfaces and analyses the cultural, normative and regulative elements of this institution. We argue the prisoner re-entry problem in liberal market capitalist societies requires that policy makers, practitioners and diversity theorists apply themselves to a highly unusual task: fabricating a body of theory and practice that informs the development of strategies to support employers in liberal market economies to engage in ‘institutional avoidance’, even when this may draw unfavourable attention to the firm, and be ill-received by employees who do not have a criminal record.

OVERTIME IN CHINA: LAW, PRACTICE AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

In most liberal capitalist societies, the working class is generally protected by laws regulating an 8-hour working day and a 5 day work week. But in China today, such rules are a luxury most laborers do not enjoy. This paper explores overtime working conditions that the Chinese working class currently suffers, especially migrant workers who have flowed from bankrupted rural villages into urban centers by the hundreds of millions. They supply the "surplus" labor force demanded by the booming manufacturing industry as China has quickly become the world´s leading producer of industrial goods. This paper not only documents this tragic situation but tries to answer the question: how could this seemingly pre-modern capitalist phenomenon have occurred in an ostensibily socialist country like China?

The University's Uncommon Community

In the UK, as elsewhere in the world, the global financial crisis has focused attention on the cost of public services and the need to reduce expenditure, not least in respect of higher education. This, however, raises a set of prior questions: What kind of society do we want? What is important to democratic society? What kind of higher education is desirable? The article takes Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of what he calls liberal capitalist society as a starting point for considering questions concerning the kind of higher education that would be valuable and relevant to a healthy democratic society. His thesis is outlined and the implications of this for the university set out. The article examines MacIntyre's notion of community, which he elaborates in relation to medieval religious worldviews, and argues that whilst his conceptualisation is more intellectually and educationally coherent than some others, it is ultimately too restrictive. The article argues instead for a recognition, within education, of what is uncommon. This may open greater possibilities for keeping alive the serious questions that we must constantly attend to, beyond and within our communities, secular or religious.

The contradictions of Nussbaum's liberalism

The paper argues that there is a fundamental tension in the work of Martha Nussbaum between its implicit materialist foundations in what John McMurtry calls life-value, and her political liberalism. The genuinely universal values of life-requirement satisfaction and human capability development that form the core of Nussbaum's ethics cannot be fully and coherently realized, I will argue, within the framework of liberal-capitalist society, whose surface problems she criticizes but whose depth social dynamics and normative justifications her work leaves intact. The problems particular to Nussbaum's position are of general importance in so far as they expose the structural limitations of liberalism as a critical social theory.

The Media and the Public Sphere in Contemporary China

This paper examines how market-oriented reforms to media are changing the public sphere in contemporary China with particular concern for how the commercialization of media may impact the prospects for democracy. While the authors find “public sphere” a problematic concept, they nonetheless find it useful for both normative and empirical analysis, particularly when that analysis is sensitive to China's specific historical and institutional context. The study shows that the commercialization of media in China as elsewhere has created a seemingly apolitical consumption-oriented discourse. However, the authors argue that in contrast to liberal capitalist societies, where commercial culture tends to devalue the existing democracy, in China commercial culture replaces a Leninist public sphere in which individuals were compelled to participate in a relatively monolithic official discourse. While the party-state continues to closely supervise the public sphere, the introduction of markets, the relative diversification of media producers, and the increasing volume of media introduce a degree of dynamism and unpredictability. Seeing important change but recognizing limits, the authors label the new public sphere “pluralistic.” Even while the party-state maintains its restrictive management, the commercialized public sphere nonetheless allows citizens more choices than they used to have. The authors conclude that this “pluralistic” public sphere by no means guarantees a transformation to democracy, but it does at least marginally improve the prospects for democratic change.

Confronting a World without Justice: Brian Barry’s Why Social Justice Matters

Brian Barry presents his latest book Why Social Justice Matters as a move away from political philosophy. He makes a detailed case for policies that would, by imposing controls on currently unfettered market capitalism, promote a return to post‐war social democracy. But his argument is both more philosophically developed and more politically radical than he suggests. Indeed the egalitarian and environmentally friendly measures Barry proposes press beyond the limits of any conceivable capitalism. In the process he paints a morally and existentially powerful portrait of the deep ways in which inequality penetrates the very grain of contemporary liberal capitalist societies.