Liberal Scholars Research Articles

Decolonisation is not even a footnote: On the dominant ideologies and smokescreens in South African higher education

The turn to democracy in South Africa brought hope for a higher education sector that would play a key role in tackling racial inequalities and injustices. However, transformation promises ended up being largely smokescreens for maintaining entrenched racist and capitalist logics rooted in colonialism and apartheid. Instead of focusing on epistemic decolonisation, universities became commodified and commercialised neoliberal enterprises focused on the maintenance of Eurocentric epistemic hegemony. In this conceptual article framed within the decolonial theoretical framework, we critically interrogate how two dominant ideologies – the Rainbow Nation and neoliberalism – have sidelined fundamental transformation and epistemic decolonisation in South Africa. Focusing on the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Strategic Plan 2020–2025, we illustrate that decolonisation is not government’s priority and that neoliberal visions continue to dominate strategic planning for higher education. We argue that the lack of political will and policy alignment from the government will contribute to the further entrenchment of coloniality, Eurocentricity and neoliberal logics at universities. We conclude with the call for critical engagement with the history of universities and their role in propagating and supporting colonialism and apartheid and argue that progressive scholars and students must continue to organise within South Africa and beyond and work on the radical dismantling of the Eurocentric and neoliberal universities.Contribution: While other scholars have engaged separately with neoliberalism and the Rainbow Nation and their impact on higher education in South Africa, in this article, we bring these two ideologies together to show how they have combined to prevent decolonisation of higher education.

«Our immutable symbol “Tsar and freedom”»: Old Believers in the First Russian Revolution

The article is devoted to the political views of the Old Believers of various consents during the First Russian Revolution. The source base of the study was made up of materials from Old Believer congresses, councils and meetings of 1905-1907, as well as Old Believer periodicals. The analysis showed that the clergy showed the greatest conservatism among the Old Believers, the scholars (were more liberal than others, the Old Believer peasants turned out to be even more radical, demanding the forced confiscation of part of the landowner lands. Old Believer entrepreneurs mainly focused on the Octobrists. But, despite criticism of the "police-bureaucratic regime," all strata and groups of Old Believers adhered to monarchical views. Even liberal scholars, hoping for the Duma, retained faith in the king. At the same time, all consents and social strata condemned violence and rejected cooperation with both the "red" and "black" parties. In general, the political position of the Old Believers at that time was expressed in the slogan: "Long live the tsar! Long live freedom!"

Constitutional Reform and the Problem of Distributive Justice

While Americans celebrate the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they are not nearly as enthusiastic about the prospect of another constitutional convention through the Article V process. The stakes would be high, including the possibility of rewriting the entire document. At present, calls for a new convention come much more from conservatives than progressives. Afraid of the risks, many progressives oppose such a convention, with the notable exception of Sanford Levinson, who for decades has railed against its antidemocratic features and adverse political effects. What is absent from the recent scholarship about a convention is a serious discussion about distributive justice. As an alternative to the dominant progressive approach underscoring democratic reform, my focus will be on how to protect the most vulnerable persons from financial insecurity through the constitutionalization of positive economic rights. This article also explains why progressive scholars must appreciate the deliberative and civic educational potential of a convention. For the time being, another convention is highly unlikely to result in meaningful constitutional reform. However, this situation could be a blessing in disguise. A new convention could spark a national conversation about distributive justice and what could be done to reduce economic inequality and alleviate poverty.

Public History and Emancipatory Politics in Transition: From the Anti-Apartheid Struggle to Democracy in South Africa

Abstract The expansion of public history in the context of the ‘decolonial turn’ has generated conversations about the potential productive and mutually constitutive relations between the two. While recognizing that there is no predetermined connection between public history and emancipatory politics, this paper focuses on the strand in public history associated with movements of anti-colonization and decolonialization. In particular contexts, the ideas and practices of public history can present as acts of resistance, of which there are numerous examples. The focus here is on South Africa where the emergence of people’s history (an early instantiation of public history) was closely associated with the anti-apartheid struggle, itself a late instance of decolonization. People’s history proliferated during the 1980s and was both separately and co-produced by progressive scholars at some universities and activists in the internal liberation movements. The paper examines the evolution of the articulation of public history and emancipatory politics, from the anti-apartheid struggle to the democratic era, with particular reference to universities. Whereas the latter were important sites for the expansion of public history until the early 2000s, the adoption by university managements of corporatist models has reinforced hierarchical relations between institutions of higher learning and outside publics, thus narrowing the scope for the practice of a public history that seeks to maintain and grow its connection to emancipatory politics and movements.

Errand Runners of Digital Platform Capitalism: The Errand Economy as a Contribution to the Discussion on the Gig Economy

This article describes a new concept called the errand economy. It examines the dark side of the platform economy and the gig economy and makes a valuable contribution to the field. The concepts, especially for liberal scholars, hide the negative impact of platform capitalism on production relationships and the working class by emphasising digital technologies and piecework. The errand economy, however, especially highlights the degradation of labour, regardless of its qualifications, alongside processes such as flexibilisation, precarisation, and informalisation. That is because, under the conditions of the errand economy, platforms treat all types of work as cheap, worthless and degraded errands. The main mission of the platform economy is to end employment by using the discourse of flexibility and entrepreneurship and to transform all employees into errand workers by classifying them as self-employed. For this reason, the article proposes to use the concept of the errand economy together with the platform economy, which refers to digital infrastructures, and the gig economy, which emphasises the piecework.

Afterword

The afterword draws out the political stakes of the recent expansion of critical infrastructure studies. Describing the articles’ interventions, it explains how nineteenth-century studies is well positioned to engage infrastructure to perform vital progressive scholarship. 

Hegel's Defence of Constitutional Monarchy

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel defends the constitutional monarchy as a key element of political sovereignty. Most commentators, however, argue that a rational government requires that the decision power of the monarchy be very limited. Accordingly, scholars such as M.O. Hardimon, Klaus Vieweg, Z.A. Pelczynski and Thom Brooks ignore that, for Hegel, the decision power of the monarchy is crucial to overcome the limits of liberal conceptions of political sovereignty. These liberal scholars, it seems to me, are influenced by Montesquieu’s conception of the division of powers. Yet Hegel rightly argues that while Montesquieu takes the right direction in conceiving the state as an organic unity, he failed to properly formulate the relation between the political constitution and the division of powers. Thus, Hegel claims that liberal political theories fail to secure political sovereignty, since they consider political constitution to be logically prior and legally superior to political powers. By contrast, Hegel argues that only the constitutional monarchy that functions as a higher unity of the executive and the legislative power can secure a genuine political sovereignty.

Conversational Silencing of Racism in Psychological Science: Toward Decolonization in Practice

This article addresses a paradox between self-perceptions of psychology as a liberal, progressive, antiracist discipline and profession and the persistent criticisms of racism and calls for decolonization. It builds on the criticisms of epistemic exclusion and White centering, arguing that White supremacy is maintained by “conversational silencing” in which the focus on doing good psychology systematically draws attention away from the realities of racism and the operation of power. The process is illustrated by investigations of disciplinary discourse around non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic psychology and on stereotyping, racism, and prejudice reduction, which constitute the vanguard of liberal scholarship in the discipline. This progressive scholarship nurtures “White ignorance,” an absence of belief about systemic racism that psychology plays a part in upholding.

Corporate Efforts to Adopt and Distort the Social Determinants of Health Framework.

Over the past two centuries, progressive scholars have highlighted the health-harming effects of oppressive living and working conditions. Early studies delineated the roots of inequities in these social determinants of health in capitalist exploitation. Analyses in the 1970s and 1980s that adopted the social determinants of health framework emphasized the deleterious effects of poverty but rarely explored its origins in capitalist exploitation. Recently, major U.S. corporations have adopted and distorted the social determinants of health framework, implementing trivial interventions that serve as rhetorical cover for their myriad health-harming behaviors, and the Trump administration cited social determinants to justify imposing work requirements for persons seeking health insurance through Medicaid. Progressives should raise the alarm against the use of social determinants of health rhetoric to bolster corporate power and undermine health.

De Novo Evaluation of Gender Dysphoria Misconceptions and Islamic Religious Perplexity: Is there any Chance of Reconciliation?

Gender dysphoria [GD] or a sex and gender discord that leads to enormous psychological suffering in some variants of transgender people is a highly complex and debatable subject. Muslim culture, religious and ethical values pose more challenges to the acceptance of GD than the Western system. The purpose of this narrative review is to present and discuss GD misconceptions and contrasting Islamic views with a fresh perspective and a rational approach in light of current advancements in this field. Since there are no directives in the Holy Quran and Hadith on matters of GD, Muslims have been polarized regarding GD. The so-called “liberal scholars” corroborate the scientific fact and view GD patients as a medical condition, which necessitates contemporary therapeutic interventions. Conversely, the so-called “conservative approaches” regard GD a delusional thinking probably arising from a mental illness, or a spiritual immorality, which necessitates psychotherapy or zealous religious guidance. Due to the religious tensions, generalized unawareness, and scarcity of the quality multifaceted research, there is widespread misconceptions and hostility toward transgender people in Islamic culture. The critical appraisal of the Islamic debate on GD proves that despite its ambiguity and intricacies, GD remains a stark reality and merits resolution. Though conflicted on GD, Islamic jurists concur that Islamic laws founded on core principles of love, and respect for all dictate rational reasoning, and enlightened approach on obscure matters. Young Muslims can help reconcile GD conflict in Islamic societies by initiating intra-faith dialogues and engaging their religious scholars in clinical and patient-centered research to broaden their perspective. Collaborative efforts can prompt conservative Islamic scholars to re-negotiate their antagonistic stance on GD or SRT. Islamic leaders can also influence local governments and policy makers to develop policies to improve the welfare of long-ignored transgender people that deserve attention, empathy, and treatment on moral and religious grounds.

The Historical Origins of the Horizontal Effect Problem in the United States and Japan: How the Reach of Constitutional Rights into the Private Sphere Became a Problem

Abstract This Article examines the historical origins of the horizontal effect problem in the United States and Japan. In the United States, from the founding era to the nineteenth century, jurists considered common law rights and constitutional rights had the same scope. Lawyers in the nineteenth century considered that the Due Process Clauses protected common law rights, which originally developed in private litigations. For example, private parties as well as the government shall not infringe on liberty of contract. However, this circumstance changed after the constitutional revolution in 1937. The concept of constitutional rights, distinct from common law rights, has gradually developed since then. The problem of horizontality appears because of the historical fact that constitutional rights and common law rights diverged at that time. In 1946, the framers and lawyers in Japan had the idea that the Constitution applied to private spheres. They expected the government to enforce the Constitution in all legal areas, including private relations. This is because just after World War II, Japan experienced various liberal and progressive social reforms. However, Japanese politics ultimately became conservative. The conservative Liberal Democratic Party had constantly ruled the government. Japanese liberal scholars could no longer expect the government to impose liberal ideologies upon society and they needed an intellectual weapon to combat the government. Japanese lawyers have rebuilt a constitutional theory that constitutional rights are a bulwark of individual liberties against the government, and that the rights only apply to governmental actions. From the time that constitutional theory emerged on, Japanese jurists have had to tackle the horizontality problem.

Specters of Bloom

Specters of Bloom Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) It's not like Ji-Yoon Kim was pining her entire career to be a department chair—and then finally became one. Rather, like many who end up as chairs, when the department calls your number to serve, you oblige. Ready or not, it often appears to be an offer too good to refuse. The Chair (2021) is a Netflix series that follows the fictive life of a newly appointed English department chair of Pembroke College. Professor Kim is played by Sandra Oh, who is well known for her roles as Cristina Yang on the medical drama series Grey's Anatomy and as Eve Polastri in the spy thriller series Killing Eve. Here she is cast as the first Asian American woman chair of her Ivy League English department. Given Oh's star power, it is a role with the potential to inspire many. At the beginning of the series, she gives a rousing speech in defense of the humanities to her colleagues at her first departmental meeting as chair. Her speech includes the second line from Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000). "Information is endlessly available to us," writes Bloom; "where shall wisdom be found?" However, by the sixth and final episode of the first season, her actions as chair have played out some of the consequences of the search for wisdom in the information age. The faculty are again meeting with her as chair, but by this time the bloom has fallen off the rose of her new administrative role—and she is given a vote of no confidence by her colleagues. Worse yet, the seeds of her undoing are for the most part not sown by others. Rather, they are the outcomes of her decisions as chair. Chief among them is her decision to appoint as chair of the departmental promotion and tenure committee of her African American colleague, Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah), a senior colleague in her field whose vision of it is totally different from Professor McKay's. While McKay represents the new socially and politically progressive vision of the humanities, Elliot Rentz's (Bob Balaban) vision is more like that of Bloom than Toni Morrison. Bloom, who fought hard in the PC wars of the 1990s against a socially and politically progressive vision of the humanities, described Morrison as "a self-proclaimed African American Marxist and feminist" in whose work [End Page 22] he "hear[s] a totalizing ideology." Yet for Bloom, "to read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all." This is a position with which Professor Rentz would wholeheartedly agree. He is presented in The Chair as a scholar who has not changed his view of Melville one iota in the last thirty years. Professor McKay, however, represents a vision of the humanities that is the polar opposite of both Rentz and Bloom. Unlike Rentz, not only is she presented in the series as more than willing to discuss Melville's rumored domestic abuse with her students at Pembroke, she utilizes a progressive pedagogy that allows her students to express their views on the author however they see fit, including through rap. The result is that while McKay's class enrollments in American literature are busting through the ceiling, Rentz's have tanked. In terms of their approach to teaching and scholarship, Rentz is portrayed as the image of literary studies past, whereas McKay is its future. Still, the new chair quickly comes to realize that appointing Rentz to oversee McKay's tenure committee is tantamount to denying McKay tenure. Why? Because Rentz, like Bloom, is never going to assent to McKay's approach to literature. While putting Rentz in charge of McKay's tenure case initially made sense to Kim, particularly as she quotes Bloom not Morrison to her colleagues at that first meeting, afterward she realizes that placing Rentz in this role is to ask for the same response that Bloom would have to McKay's approach to Melville, namely, to reject it as a form of socially and politically progressive scholarship that has no place in the study of literature—and is not...

In the shadow of settlement – the Israeli Progressive Scholars’ critical analyses of the decision-making policies of the Israeli Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice

This article, drawing heavily on Kretzmer’s and Ronen’s newly edited and expanded book, analyses the approaches of the Israeli Supreme Court (SC) to petitions relating to the occupied Palestinian territories. Its purpose is to examine how the SC’s judicial policies can be considered to cohere with the demands of international humanitarian law (IHL) of occupation and those of international human rights law (IHRL). After dwelling on some interpretive issues relating to Article 43 of the Hague Regulations, this article classifies three salient patterns of the SC’s judicial policies: (1) the SC’s approach of applying very controversial interpretations in some areas; (2) its judicial policy based on the mixture of restrictive interpretations and some liberal tendencies in other areas; and (3) its willingness to develop in yet other areas some pioneeringly progressive jurisprudence, which can provide lessons even for the monitoring bodies of IHRL. This article shows that as with Kretzmer and Ronen, the SC’s controversially deferential stance tends to be discernible whenever issues touch on the right-wing Israeli government’s policies of settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories and on the rights of Israeli settlers in those territories. These issues provide the invisible barriers to any progressive potentials of the SC’s judicial policies.

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

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

“Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution” or, What about Institutional Change?

Progressive scholars can easily point out that present neoliberal policies fail to achieve the goals they claim to pursue (output and financial stability) and determine unacceptable income and wealth inequality as well as social debasement. They find it more difficult to conceive of an alternative. What is at issue is not just the identification of some set of technically viable policy measures. Policy determines institutional changes that involve not only the economy but society as a whole. An alternative to Neoliberalism must, therefore, deal not only with its strictly economic implications but with the societal changes that the latter determined. A standard approach in this respect is to focus on interdisciplinarity. While it allows to take account of changes that lie beyond the economy, this approach implicitly assumes that the structure of society—thus the disciplinary boundaries that relate to it—is given. A more interesting approach that draws on the institutionalist tradition, is an open-systems one, which allows for overall—rather than merely additive—change.

Nathaniel Solon Finney

Nathaniel Solon Finney, 54, died Oct. 8, 2021, in San Diego. “Nat and I traveled many a road together, be it conference gigs in Russia, Thailand, and Ethiopia or career moves from San Diego to Zurich to Tianjin, China. We regularly attended Gordon Research meetings together and worked closely to advance the Laboratory for Process Chemistry in Switzerland. We shared a commitment to living in the moment without regret and with confidence that we were at worst creating great stories for future reflection. We believed in the principles of lifelong experiential learning and the power of liberal scholarship to foster innovative thinking. His life spectrum manifested an incandescent illumination.”—Jay Siegel, friend and colleague Most recent title: Professor, Tianjin University Education: BS, chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988; PhD, chemistry, California Institute of Technology, 1993 Survivors: Mother, Rebecca; sister, Dorothea To recognize your late loved one or colleague, submit obituary

Peace and the rule of law: A brief theoretical overview

Having in mind that peace is a basic, universal social and legal value and a substantial prerequisite for realising all other values, the author observes the complex relationship between peace and the rule of law. In that relationship of mutual dependence, one of the disputable matters could be the fact that the issue resembles a chicken-and-egg dilemma: which of the two values is the preceding factor, which one is older, which one should be considered the cause and which one the consequence? Is peace a necessary environment for the rule of law establishing, or the rule of law is a necessary prerequisite for peace? The answer to this question depends primarily on how the rule of law is perceived. Following the prevalent view that the rule of law is a formal/material concept, which implies that it has both institutional and value aspects, the author takes a standpoint that the value-openness of the rule of law concept should be regarded as its advantage rather than a weakness. The author criticises the one-sided perception of the rule of law based exclusively on the ideology and values of liberalism and the tendency among western countries to present that vision of the rule of law as the only one that can ensure peace. According to the position of liberal scholars, without 'liberal peace', war and disorder would govern. However, the reality proves that imposition and export of a liberal version of the rule of law and the tendency to establish universal 'liberal peace' could also feed wars and conflicts. Correlation between peace and the rule of law is required but is not necessary (if one perceives the rule of law in its 'thinnest' form - the existence of an order). However, without peace, it is impossible to establish any kind of value-based 'thick' rule of law. On the other hand, no one-sided value-burdened vision of the rule of law is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of peace and order. The author believes that if there is a wish to take a step in the direction of 'perpetual peace' in Kant's sense, the necessary presumption is tolerance and open-mindedness toward different ideological (value) models of the rule of law.

“Comfort Women” Memorials at the Crossroads of Ultranationalist, Feminist, and Decolonial Critiques: Triangulating Japan, South Korea, and the United States

This article examines the ongoing debate over “comfort women” memorials, especially one statue known as the Statue of Peace. Whereas Japanese ultranationalists and their foreign collaborators attack “comfort women” memorials for tarnishing Japan’s reputation and spreading historical falsities, progressive scholars sympathetic to “comfort women” victims criticize these memorials for reinforcing female chastity and anti-Japanese nationalism. Examining these varying responses to “comfort women” memorials across the Pacific, this article analyzes how Japanese ultranationalism, anti-Japanese Korean nationalism, US imperialism, and transnational feminism collide in the representation of “comfort women.” By pointing out the significance and limitations of “comfort women” memorials, this article concludes with a discussion of how socially engaged memorials can serve as critical sites for building transnational feminist coalitions in shared struggle against both wartime violence and postwar amnesia.

Roland Betancourt - Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages

Roland Betancourt's Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender & Race in the Middle Ages provides a creative and often provocative account of Byzantine history, fully informed by recent trends in progressive scholarship, twinning critical race theory and historical scholarship. Through this lens, the book examines a wide range of evidence from visual and material culture (included in black-and-white plates) to literary sources. Betancourt is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of California, Irvine. Art history has usually been the subdiscipline of Byzantine Studies most quickly influenced by wider scholarly trends and Irvine is known for being home to cutting-edge social theorists across several traditions. Byzantine Intersectionality opens by recounting a seventh-century Palestinian version of the Life of Mary of Egypt.1 This narrative features Mary encountering a monk (Zosimas) and confessing to him that she had led a sexually-sinful life, including forcing herself on unwilling men. As penance she...

Predilection or Prediction? Country Selection for the President's Daily Intelligence Brief, 1961–1977

Abstract A study of the daily briefings of US presidents by the intelligence community offers a useful test of whether governments can surmount intragovernmental influences in the acquisition and processing of information. A finding that the briefs somehow anticipate events would suggest that governments—their leaders and organizations—rise above political incentives and institutional practices to approach the rationality that realist and liberal scholars attribute to states. This study, thus, examines which countries appear in (the now declassified) daily intelligence briefs of the 1961–(January)1977 period, covering the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford years. It not only finds evidence that the selection of countries for the briefs favors countries referenced in prior briefs (per the foreign-policy literature) but also finds significant evidence that the appearance of countries, in the briefs, anticipates their increased activity in the period to follow (per a rational model).