Liberal Emphasis Research Articles

Uncovering the uncoverers: identity, performativity and representation in counter-disinformation discourse

ABSTRACT Treating counter-disinformation activities as a discursive practice producing knowledge in specific cultural and historical contexts, this article brings a vital cultural studies perspective to an incipient Critical Disinformation Studies agenda. At the same time, it cautions against inadvertently aligning that agenda with the ‘bad faith’, right-wing populist critique of counter-disinformation practices, acknowledging their genuine potential to enhance democratic culture. It proceeds by interrogating the communicative strategies informing the proliferating Western counter-disinformation initiatives which have mushroomed in response to what is widely perceived to be one of democracy’s most potent threats, and which border on a ‘moral panic’ serving to conceal key ideological tensions. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis methods, a close reading of mission statements and related materials from the websites of four leading counter-disinformation units demonstrates how these texts interweave three functions – identity construction, performativity, and representation – to generate the overarching ‘discursive formation’ or ‘articulation’ constituting counter-disinformation as modern liberal democracy’s core, but also exposing its fault lines. Specifically, it shows that a failure to reconcile competing accounts of truth (as scientific rationality and normative value) indexes deeper contradictions pitting the liberal emphasis on individual freedom and capitalist efficiency against the democratic prioritizing of popular power, dispassionate observation against civic participation, and the promotion of transparency against the creeping power of surveillance. It concludes that the absolutist epistemology – a vestige of disinformation’s Cold War conceptual origins – designed to cover over these paradoxes masks the complex roles played by truth and deception in politics, thereby hindering the emergence of alternative, oppositional forms of knowledge capable of embracing truth in its radical contingency and plurality and facilitating democratic renewal.

The Sidney Sperry/Heber Snell Debates: Critical Biblical Scholarship and Mormon Tradition

The Sidney Sperry/Heber Snell Debates: Critical Biblical Scholarship and Mormon Tradition

The Concrete Conditions of Human Rights: Western and Chinese Approaches

ABSTRACT Based on the principle that universals are valid if they are concrete universals, this article provides a comparison between Western liberal and Chinese Marxist approaches to human rights. It does so in three steps. First is the analysis of the foundations, or roots, of the Western liberal emphasis on an individual’s mastery over a “right” understood in terms of private property, and the Marxist tradition’s emphasis on anti-hegemonic sovereignty in light of anti-colonial struggles for national liberation. Second is the contrast between the development of the Western approach to the core human rights in terms of freedom of expression, movement, and assembly, and the Marxist emphasis on the right to socioeconomic well-being, or common prosperity. Third is the comparison between the fruits of either tradition, one in terms of identity politics, and the other in the emphasis on civil, political, cultural, and environmental rights. The article concludes by asking whether the two approaches are able to come to an understanding of each other, and proposes that such an understanding may need to take place in light of the concept and reality of concrete universals.

Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins

Reviewed by: Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject ed. by Sarah Collins Emma Sutton (bio) Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins; pp. xiii + 254. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $80.00 ebook. From videos of George Floyd's murder to tweets of political leaders wearing or eschewing masks to photographs of statues being tumbled, many of the events for which 2020 will be remembered are impressed on our collective memories through visual images. None of us can doubt visual media's capacity to galvanize shared actions, sentiment, and a sense of community, as well as—all too often—division, intolerance, and hatred. Amid urgent global concerns, music may seem incidental or irrelevant to politics. But from protest songs performed at Black Lives Matter gatherings to online outpourings of anguish about the cancelation of live concerts and risks associated with choral singing, it is clear that music plays a vital part in contemporary ideas about community and the responsibilities of our shared social and individual lives. These examples have their own distinctive contexts, but they also bring into focus how our contemporary assumptions about the value and roles of music are profoundly indebted to Victorian ideas. Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject thus has an acute topical resonance. The eleven essays in Sarah Collins's handsomely produced collection explore the significance of music to Victorian ideas about selfhood (often via self-cultivation) and community. Rightly noting that musical metaphors frequently underpin philosophical and literary liberal writing about "moral sentiment" and "sympathetic social relations," the volume also argues that our own understandings of Victorian liberalism have [End Page 137] overlooked the role of aesthetic experience in it (1). As Collins observes, this may partly be because liberal thinkers from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill were dismissive of music; despite being an accomplished keyboard extemporizer, Mill famously termed musical performance "unproductive labour" (qtd. in Collins 1). But Collins invites us to reconsider the apparent precedence of production and pragmatism over pleasure and beauty in this quotation and in liberal discourse more widely. A running concern of the volume is music's role in the relationship between individualism and control in liberal writing about music and in musical practice, a relationship often organized along class lines. At the heart of the opening section are questions about whom music was for, where and when it was accessed, and what was heard. Erin Johnson-Williams's chapter on music and physical exercise in working-class schools examines musical pedagogy to unpack some of the limitations of liberalism's emphasis on self-development. Describing the mass-choreographed action songs, physical drills, and displays widely used to provide physical education following the 1870 Education Act, she rightly notes their inextricability from militarism and colonialism. She emphasizes, too, the differences between "complex listening" instilled in middle-class children who were taught musical notation and the contrasting emphasis on P. E. for the children taught only drilling and Tonic Sol-fa (19). Such concerns are picked up in a chapter on music education and choral singing in pauper schools, asylums, and prisons. The physical and mental health benefits of music-making were emphasized, as was its potential to support the development of speech, hearing, and literacy. But music's role in reforming initiatives in institutions typically was framed in the language of utility and trod a narrow line between self-development and control: as Rosemary Golding pithily notes, "Conformity was the route to freedom" (66). Simon McVeigh's chapter on the "Sunday music question" further teases out tensions between individualism and state control: the push (inspired by the Great Exhibition) to make music accessible to workers through Sunday performances was closely linked to non-conformism and tolerance of religious observance; later in the century, it became entwined with aestheticism's valorizing of individualism (40). Yet it was also closely linked to the state's role in determining public good given its interdependence with the development of public parks, promoted as ideal venues for performances that promised physical and spiritual health. A greater sense of music's potential to foster dissent is apparent in two...

What Can Faith-Based Forms of Violent Conflict Prevention Teach Us About Liberal Peace?

Faith-based actors are often recognised as contributors to both conflict and peace. However, their work to prevent violent conflict, rather than bring an end to or recover from it, is largely unexplored. This is despite the growth of conflict prevention as a global social norm and field of practice. Based on collaborative research with faith groups and organisations in Nigeria, the Solomon Islands and Zanzibar (Tanzania), this paper examines faith-based forms of violent conflict prevention. It argues that faith-based approaches exist on a spectrum, from instinctive and ad hoc initiatives run by individuals and local places of worship to large-scale, systematised interventions led by global faith-based development organisations. Yet, while faith-based approaches to violent conflict prevention vary in form and function, they are consistent and distinctive in their emphasis on building resilient relationships at the local level, modelling forms of prevention embedded within local culture and that recognise the emotional and spiritual dimensions of transformative change. Faith-based approaches offer insights valuable to the wider conflict prevention field, which is increasingly critiqued for its liberal underpinnings and emphasis on technical and technological solutionism. Lessons emerge for others implementing prevention programmes, who could adapt elements of the unhurried, values-led, relationally sensitive approach demonstrated by some faith-based actors, albeit within their own structural limitations. Policymakers should support such adaptations and expand their view of prevention to explicitly include faith-based forms of activity, as to do otherwise risks missing opportunities and reproducing existing failures.

Lýðræðisleg gildi, samræða og hlutverk menntunar

Ákvæði grunnskólalaga um að búa eigi nemendur undir þátttöku í lýðræðisþjóðfélagi er hér skoðað í ljósi hugmynda Sigrúnar Aðalbjarnardóttur. Skólastarf í anda þessa ákvæðis veltur óhjákvæmilega á því hvaða skilningur er lagður í lýðræði, hvað það þýði að búa og starfa í lýðræðisþjóðfélagi. Kynnt eru til sögunnar þrjú lýðræðisviðhorf sem fela í sér ólíka sýn á borgarana og mismunandi hugmyndir um borgaravitund nemenda sem búa skal undir þátttöku í lýðræðissamfélagi. Því er haldið fram að í menntunarkenningu og menntunarstarfi Sigrúnar sé samræðuhæfni lykilhugtak sem felist einkum í því að fást farsællega við félagslegan ágreining og mynda samstöðu um sameiginleg gildi. Samkvæmt Sigrúnu beinist samræðan síður að því að meta vægi raka og réttmæti gilda, en það krefst ræktunar gagnrýninnar hugsunar og rökræðufærni. Færð eru rök fyrir því að bæði samstaða um lýðræðisleg gildi og gagnrýnin rökræða sé nauðsynleg til að takast á við þær áskoranir sem lýðræðissamfélagið stendur nú frammi fyrir.

Freedom of Association and its Discontents: The Calculus of Consent and the Civil Rights Movement

Does the classical liberal emphasis on freedom of association provide an intellectual cover for bigotry? We formulate this question in economic terms using James Buchanan’s economic approach to ethics, according to which moral values can be understood as preferences about other people’s behaviors. We discuss two possible market failures associated with freedom of association: inter-group externalities and Schelling-type emergent segregation. We show that the classical liberal position about freedom of association, as elaborated in Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent, is fully equipped to deal with the first one, but not with the second. The progressive view that some preferences are so offensive that they should be dismissed rather than engaged or negotiated with can be reframed as an attempt to solve the emergent segregation problem, but it is vulnerable to political economy problems of its own, in particular to an inherent tendency to over-expand the meaning of “bigotry.”

Kant, autonomy and bioethics

Summary The concept of autonomy has played a pivotal role in bioethics discourse since the 1970s. Yet, prior to the emergence of bioethics, autonomy had received scant mention in twentieth-century philosophy and was conspicuous by its absence from discussions of healthcare. The term was not even mentioned in the 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia of philosophy . The emergence of bioethics in the early 1970s coincided with increased attention across the western world to civil and human rights; with the rise of this new discipline the liberal emphasis on individual rights was recast in terms of respect for patient autonomy. Although its legal appeal was based on the ease with which autonomy was operationalized in the doctrine of informed consent, the power of the concept of autonomy lay in what it symbolized: the right of an individual to resist coercion or compulsion in the context of a relationship of power. Most commentators in the field of bioethics are familiar with autonomy as one of the four principles of biomedical ethics laid down by Beauchamp and Childress in their canonical text, The principles of biomedical ethics (1979) . ‘Principlism’ is a mid-level theoretical tool, which has had broad appeal in facilitating analysis of ethical dilemmas in biomedicine, grasped in the abstract as conflicts between two or more of the four principles. Yet the principle of autonomy, which has had such an extraordinary influence in contemporary bioethics bears only, passing resemblance to the concept of autonomy, which emerged in early modern philosophy. Although the bioethical redrawing of autonomy owes a large debt both to the philosophical tradition and to the social upheavals of the twentieth century, the relationship between contemporary interpretations of the concept of autonomy in bioethics and its historical origins is rarely examined. The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution of the concept of autonomy from its emergence in modern moral theory to contemporary debates about its relevance for bioethical analysis. The roots of the principle of autonomy can be traced back to the political theory of ancient Greece. Originally used to describe the capacity of the Greek polis or city-state to govern itself, the concept of autonomy received its first modern expression – and its first application to the individual – in the moral theory of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, autonomy stood for the ideal of free will: a human will be driven to action, not by appetite or desire, but by identification with a ‘higher’ or rational self. At the heart of Kant's ethics is the close association of moral action with human rationality; for Kant, autonomous action – action which is deliberately and self-consciously motivated by moral reasons – is the quintessential expression of human rationality. Although the moral universalism Kant sought to defend is no longer philosophically tenable, his insights about many of the core features of autonomous action remained influential until well into the twentieth century. This paper falls into four parts: in the first section I will explore the contextual factors which influenced the emergence of autonomy as a principle appropriate for bioethical analysis. From there, I will examine the hugely influential definition of autonomy put forward by Beauchamp and Childress in the Principles of biomedical ethics and trace the philosophical foundations of this concept. I will then provide a brief account of the concept of autonomy so central to Kant's moral theory and I will conclude by examining recent accounts of personal autonomy in contemporary philosophy with the aim of arriving at a richer understanding of autonomy, which can perhaps be of greater service to bioethics.

Introducing Joint Capabilities: Findings from a Study of Development in Honduras’ Garifuna Ancestral Villages

This article argues for the family as a unit of analysis within capabilities approaches to human development. Challenging the liberal emphasis on the individual, this article illustrates that individualist approaches to families do not account for the relatively common scenario of families acting as a unit. Building upon Margaret Gilbert’s concept of plural subject agents, the paper suggests a new category of capabilities called joint capabilities that apply to the opportunities afforded to families that function as a unit. In order to build the case for joint capabilities, the author’s experiences and observations of family in the Afro-indigenous Garifuna ancestral villages of Honduras are discussed. More specifically, the capability of rural families to make cassava bread, or ereba in the Garifuna language, is explored. While the Garifuna family is explored as an important unit of analysis for understanding capabilities, the family is also examined as a complex context for exploration of power relations and inequality.

“Half Bacchanalian, Half Devout”: White Intellectuals, Black Folk Culture, and the “Negro Problem”

In the wake of the Civil War, white Americans generated an unprecedented amount of writing about the songs, stories, and “superstitions” of black southerners. This interest was not purely esthetic. In the late nineteenth century, folk culture was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence, discourse on black folklore was entangled with the debate on the social and political place of African Americans. A number of scholars have noted the ways in which white supremacy was bulwarked by the work of folklorists, ethnologists, local color writers, and other intellectuals. The variety and contingency of this discourse on race, however, has sometimes been obscured, giving the impression of a static and monolithic racial ideology. Ideas about black folk culture shifted over time, shaped by a range of racial attitudes encompassing a liberal emphasis on uplift, a conservative commitment to stasis, and a radical insistence on regression. Moreover, the racial politics of intellectuals determined not only the ways in which they represented black folk culture, but also the particular cultural forms about which they wrote. Thus, while the Christian content of the “spirituals” suited the agenda of liberal reformers, the supposedly sinister figure of the conjure doctor complemented radical discourse on dangerous racial degeneration.

Red, Black, and Green

This essay responds to the commentaries on the talks Stephen Healy and I delivered during the 2013 Rethinking Marxism International Conference, as well as to Healy's own talk. Rather than persisting in an understanding of left politics that is little more than a liberal emphasis on individual choice, participation, and pluralization, communists need to think and act in terms of building and exercising political power. Fortunately, we are seeing left political advances as ever more segments come together in a struggle for political power. Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and other efforts indicate that the party remains a viable form for thinking and acting politically. It's time to take up the challenge of actively constructing a political collectivity with the will and mass to fight for an egalitarian world. The party doesn't prefigure this world but shows the gap between the world we have and the world we can desire.

Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada, by Benjamin T. Jones

Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada, by Benjamin T. Jones. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. x, 299 pp. $100.00 Cdn (cloth), $34.95 (paper). There is no such thing as society, Mrs Thatcher famously expostulated with distillation of the essence of the liberal creed, There are individual men and women, and there are families. It is the contention of this work that such liberal emphasis on the individual was much less influential in changing the political culture of the Victorian British world than is commonly believed. Rather, it contends, the creed that did most to shape the reforming energies which brought about responsible government was energized by strain of thought which it characterizes as republicanism. Where liberals focussed on the individual and freedom from interference, was communally-minded and was actuated by fear of domination. Its classical roots are well captured in quotation from Cicero's De re publica: a people is not any group of humans ... but multitude of people who ... agree to serve the common good of the (p. 217)--a very different view of society to the atomistic form of liberalism underlying Thatcher's pronouncement. Civic republicanism, it is argued here on the basis of Canadian and Australian case studies, provided creed which could prompt change without sparking revolution. Importantly for citizens of the British world, it allowed for the retention of the monarchy while at the same time accommodating responsible government at the local level. The great architect of such constitutional dexterity was Lord Durham who proposed forms of colonial government which allowed for multiple centres of power within the British Empire while retaining the monarchy as common core of sentiment and identity. It was formula which, if followed by George III, might have kept Canada's southern neighbour within the British Empire. Hence avoided the disruptive and centrifugal forces of the separatist associated with the American and French Revolution. It meant, however, that the advocates of that communal political ideology which the author terms civic republicanism were cautious about the r-word with all its connotations of regicide in the case of the French and English Revolutions and fratricidal strife in the American. This means that often the presence of has to be inferred by its goals rather than by an explicit appeal to the term itself. The classical origins of mean, too, some difficulties in charting its transmission to the nineteenth century debates on constitutional government. …

How liberalism assimilates minorities. The failure to develop a Welsh national movement in the nineteenth century

In the nineteenth century, Wales contained all the necessary building blocks for the development of a successful ethnolinguistic nationalism on the European pattern. However, no serious nationalist movement emerged, and that nationalism which did develop was civic rather than linguistic in nature. This course of events is explained by the unusual nature of the British state, and the development of ideologies within it. Britain was a liberal state, and Wales was the most liberal part of Britain. The emphasis of liberalism on personal advancement and individual emancipation came at the expense of communitarian loyalties. Inevitably, this undermined the idea of nation as an intellectual concept. Welsh radicals argued in sincerity for social justice, but justice could only be achieved on the basis of a common citizenship, which was shared with all in the British Isles and defined by the English language. Because of the liberal emphasis on shared civic space and cultural universalism, the Welsh attachment to radical politics led to cultural assimilation.

Reform or Revolution: Thoughts on Liberal and Radical Criminologies

THE COURSE TAUGHT JOINTLY BY JONATHAN SIMON AND TONY PLATT AT UC BERKELEY in the Fall of 2012 constitutes a rather exceptional scholarly and pedagogical enterprise. Attractively titled From Community Control to Mass Incarceration, the course soon developed into something closer to a permanent workshop than a simple university class. As news spread that something akin to a rendition of the atmosphere of the defunct Berkeley School of Criminology was being attempted in one of the high-tech classrooms of the just-renovated Boalt Hall School of Law, the audience of the course began to grow and diversify in unforeseen directions. As discussed elsewhere in this issue (Stein, infra), the broad focus of the course could be summarized as an attempt to reconstruct a genealogy of the current US penal crisis through a critical analysis of some of the cultural, political, and discursive struggles that swept the criminological field in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. This period witnessed--in the span of less than 20 years--first the consolidation of the host of rehabilitative ideologies and practices subsumed by David Garland (1985, 244-64) under the category of penal-welfare complex, and then the quick dismissal of that correctional ethos in favor of a punitive turn that throughout the 1980s and 1990s pursued the systematic warehousing of the black and Latino urban poor (Western 2006; Wacquant 2009; Alexander 2010; Rios 2011). Platt and Simon made this journey in the form of multiple intersecting dialogues: between contemporaries and the past, between different generations of scholars, and, most significantly, between liberal and radical (1) perspectives on the history, present, and future of the US penal crisis. It is precisely on the latter side of this dialogue that I would like to focus my comments. In the opening article of this issue of Social Justice, Jonathan Simon {infra) reaches the interesting conclusion that--however distant the positions expressed by the liberal and radical traditions may have appeared against the highly polarized background of the massive social protests and state repression of the time--ultimately the theoretical distance between these streams of thought remained productively small. After all, Simon seems to suggest, both liberal and radical penal agendas were about to be wiped away by the wave of penal populism and post-civil rights revanchism that would flood the country for the next 30 years. In this view, the advent of mass incarceration, essentially a rejection of any criminologically sound approach to the penal question, would seem to operate retrospectively as a sort of great equalizer between liberal and radical criminological traditions. Observed from the rather exceptional viewpoint of 30 years of draconian penal policies and racialized drug wars in which the United States emerged as the world leader in incarceration, the liberal and radical criminological agendas of the 1960s and 1970s do indeed appear much less distant from each other than they were from the penal catastrophe that would soon unfold. It would be difficult to dispute, for example, that the radical agenda of prison abolition appears less distant from the liberal agenda of prison as a last resort than both are from mass incarceration; or that the radical claim to democratic self-defense against police abuse is closer to the liberal critique of police brutality than they are to the paramilitary style of policing of inner cities during the 1980s and 1990s; or that the radical demand for full recognition of the civil, social, and political rights of prisoners appears less distant from the liberal emphasis on rehabilitation and treatment than both are from the systematic use of solitary confinement in contemporary US prisons. Here I would like to revisit some of the debates that emerged in the Berkeley class and suggest that, despite the undeniable elements of proximity between radical and liberal approaches in light of the punitive revolution of the last three decades, significant contrasts remain between the two. …

Cameron and Liberal Conservatism: Attitudes within the Parliamentary Conservative Party and Conservative Ministers

Research Highlights and Abstract This article: Contributes to the development of academic research on the internal dynamics of the Conservative Party under the leadership of David Cameron. Contributes to the development of academic research on the processes of ministerial selection within British Government. Contributes to the development of academic research on cohort effects within parties, and the analysis of comparisons and differences between different parliamentary cohorts. Contributes to the development of academic research on the constraints upon Prime Ministerial power when in coalition. This article identifies the ideological composition of the parliamentary Conservative party (PCP) in order to determine the location and numeric strength of the critics of Cameron. By constructing a data set of attitudes across two ideological divides—the social, sexual and morality divide and the European divide—the article identifies the following. First, despite Cameron's social liberal emphasis both the PCP and his ministerial team is predominantly Thatcherite—i.e. socially conservative. Second, despite numerically having a Eurosceptic PCP and ministerial team, with Europhilia now an inconsequential rump, Cameron faces a minority ‘hard’ Eurosceptic faction of rebels who oppose his ‘soft’ Euroscepticism. Third, the influx of new parliamentarians elected in 2010 may increase social liberal strength, but they are overwhelmingly Eurosceptic, with a significant tranche of hard Eurosceptics amongst them. Finally, through a process of ideological mapping of these two ideological divides the research identifies a core of 50 socially conservative and hard Eurosceptics who are the critics of Cameron.

Temporal Autonomy in a Laboring Society

The aim of this paper is to discuss which stance towards the allocation of labor and leisure would be defensible from the perspective of modern liberal political theory. There is a long tradition in philosophy defending an ideal of leisure, but this tradition has been rightly criticized for being too perfectionist. A liberal perspective seems more attractive in not dictating how much time people spend in labor or leisure, but leaving this choice to individuals. The question is whether this is possible. After scrutinizing the traditional philosophical defense of leisure I focus on Robert Goodin and his collaborators' recent proposal to think about labor and leisure in terms of “temporal autonomy”. I show that their concept is a great improvement over the older philosophical theories, both in its conceptualization of labor and leisure and in its ambition to leave labor/leisure choices to individuals. Nonetheless, it contains an important unresolved ambiguity about whether discretionary time maximization is a desirable end. Since the exercise of one's temporal autonomy can undercut the temporal autonomy of others in society, this leads to a dilemma. This dilemma can be resolved either in a libertarian or in a sufficientarian direction. I provide a cautious defense of the sufficientarian conception of temporal autonomy, because it accounts for the intuition in the older tradition of leisure that it is important not to be overwhelmed by the demands of labor, while also retaining the liberal emphasis on individual choice.

Decentering agency in feminist theory: Recuperating the family as a social project

Synopsis Ethnographic investigations demonstrate that there are many cultures in which women relinquish rights for broader social goods and protections, which are equally acceptable, if not more desirable, to women. These include Western European social democracies, Eastern European post socialist nations, and the East Asian industrialized nations. Exploring these gender politics provides a powerful window into how the liberal emphasis on “choice” captures only one narrow aspect of what is at stake for women in issues such as feminist debates about domesticity and the politics of abortion and family planning. In this article we draw on Japan and Bulgaria as our case studies, and we historicize the brand of social feminism that we are discussing, locating it in the mission to incorporate women into national agendas during the interwar period in many locations throughout the industrialized world as well as in the diverse mandates of early socialist feminism in the United States. We argue that “social feminism” can help sharpen the critiques of liberal feminism mobilized by anthropologists under the banner of “cultural relativism.”

A new law on advance directives in Germany

This article presents the new German law on advance directives from 1 September 2009. The history of the parliamentary process of this law is described, the present regulations are explained,...

JOURNALISM AND MEDIA STUDIES IN LEBANON

This study uses mixed-methods to map out the field of journalism and media studies in Lebanese universities and deploys a Q-technique to capture faculties’ opinions. The Q-analysis of 29 instructors revealed three groups of opinions towards journalism studies: one advocated a professional approach, one preferred a communication arts focus, and one pushed for a theoretical and research-intensive orientation. While the three groups differed on various matters, they all agreed that journalism and media studies in Lebanon urgently needed more qualified faculty, locally oriented research, and relevant academic and technical resources. Student demographic analysis revealed a stable increase in broadcast journalism and public relations (PR) enrolments but a decrease in print journalism; advertising and marketing were the most popular subjects, followed by broadcast journalism and PR; females outnumbered males; and the Lebanese University, the only public university, remained the most prestigious and popular program despite its dire financial situation. The curricula analysis found most programs had either a practical or a liberal-professional orientation, while only one had a liberal emphasis. In addition, most programs required an internship, while only two required a thesis; English and the US academic system dominated; only one program offered online journalism; while none offered media or news literacy.

The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (review)

Reviewed by: The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good Christopher Clark The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. By John Lauritz Larson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. For more than twenty years, social and political historians of the early American republic have employed the term market revolution to describe the rapid economic and social transformations that the United States underwent between the Revolution and the Civil War. Introduced by Sean Wilentz, Charles Sellers, and others, the concept has been challenged by scholars including Daniel Walker Howe and Daniel Feller; indeed, this reviewer has expressed skepticism about it. But a generation of historians now has employed the term constructively as a device with which to think about the dramatic changes of the period, their character and causes. Many of them published their work in the Journal of the Early Republic, of which for ten years John Lauritz Larson was co-editor. Larson, also author of two previous books and many articles on American economic history, has now contributed this volume to the Cambridge University Press "Essential Histories" series, aimed at providing critical introductions to major historical themes. He offers a fine, clear, lively, and thought-provoking overview of his topic that is not only the best now available but likely to survive the test of time. While acknowledging that the concept of a Market Revolution has been subject to warm debate, Larson avoids getting bogged down in the particulars; for readers wishing to delve further he indicates some of the major points of contention and provides a good bibliographical essay. Nevertheless, he offers a clear rationale for employing the term. Over this period, he suggests, market dealings, connections, and dependencies, once associated with mercantile capitalism, spread to shape everyday life for most "ordinary" [End Page 194] Americans. Responsiveness to markets and their demands also promoted the technical, organizational, and social changes that fostered territorial expansion, commercialized agriculture, manufacturing developments, transportation improvements, urbanization, and new methods of finance. By the 1850s, Larson suggests, the elements of U.S. capitalism had largely fallen into place. In broad but precise brushstrokes, Larson delineates the different elements and regional characteristics of these changes, and captures contemporaries' sense of the breathtaking pace at which they seemed to occur. He also notes key interconnections, for instance between commercial growth, the spread of newspapers (carriers inter alia of commercial information), and developments in paper making. Larson demonstrates why economic and development issues were at the heart of U.S. political activity and debate during the period. Unlike some earlier exponents of a Market Revolution thesis, he interprets political conflicts not as between "forward-looking" and "backward-looking" groups, but between exponents of centrally-conceived and guided programs, such as Henry Clay's "American system" of federally-funded internal improvements, and those of "individualism, localism, and libertarianism" (22), who supplied much of the energy behind nineteenth-century developments and helped unleash a "steady privatization of economic life" (23). Among the book's strengths is its introduction to the different traditions in economic theory, from Adam Smith and his critics onwards, that influenced both contemporary political debates and historical interpretations of the Market Revolution and its characteristics. Larson traces in this nineteenth-century transformation not only the economic and social changes and disruptions he outlines, but what his subtitle calls "the eclipse of the common good," the replacement of republican notions of community interest and virtue with a liberal emphasis on individual action and freedoms. He addresses the long-standing debate about the relationship between capitalism and slavery by treating the slave South as a set of "variations" on the general (presumably Northern) pattern. He suggests how conflicts over slavery (resulting ultimately in the Civil War) honed the concept of "freedom" into narrowly drawn definitions of property ownership and wage earning that cohered with the liberal ideology of a market-based political economy. Larson balances a long chapter on the "marvelous improvements" (46) of the antebellum period with another outlining the stories of the many groups—farmers, artisans, factory-operatives, women, Native Americans, African Americans (free and enslaved)—whom these changes challenged, disrupted...