Loyal Agents Research Articles

Loyal agent or shirking partner: understanding the policy goals of national ministers in the Council of the European Union

ABSTRACT Research on representation within the European Union (EU) often assumes that partisan policy preferences are mediated primarily through the European Parliament, while the European Council and Council of the EU (Council) represent national interests. This assumption obfuscates the potential for divergent policy preferences within Council delegations, the majority of which are coalitions comprised of ideologically diverse parties. Such divergent preferences within national governments provide an incentive for coalition partners to pursue policy outcomes at the EU level that diverge from those of their coalition. This research assesses the existence of such policy shirking by members of the Council utilizing the DEU III dataset, party manifestos, and a new dataset on the partisan characteristics of individual Council members. This analysis provides insights into the factors that affect variations between national positions (as measured by the DEU III) and coalition member preferences (as reflected in party manifestos).

MAKING THE PAST SERVE THE PRESENT: HISTORICAL REVISIONISM IN CHINA’S ONE BELT ONE ROAD PROPAGANDA

ABSTRACT Propaganda is an illuminating and under-studied entry point for assessing the One Belt One Road initiative (OBOR). This essay discusses the ideological and historical claims embedded in three categories of OBOR propaganda: documentary films for domestic audiences, national history textbooks, and short films for English-speaking audiences. Chinese-language propaganda reframe the historical Silk Road as a deliberate, visionary achievement of renowned emperor Han Wudi (r. 141-87 B.C.). The historical narratives work systematically to legitimate Xi's international ambitions by juxtaposing his contributions with those of Han Wudi, including by adjusting factual claims about the ancient Silk Road to make the parallel more obvious. OBOR is thereby cast as a neo-tributary system, in which partner countries enjoy favourable access to China's market and technology-and acknowledge China's preeminent status in return. The historical adventurers Zhang Qian and Zheng He are recast as loyal agents of the emperor in expanding the geographic scope of this system. English-language OBOR propaganda feature a completely different and far more benign narrative about OBOR's historical legacy and contemporary China's ideological motivations. The “Belt and Road Bedtime Stories” cast China as a peace-loving power that respects difference and seeks to protect the existing international order by promoting globalization and free trade. In light of the first two categories of propaganda, I argue that this third narrative is unpersuasive.

British Project in Palestine: Colonial “National Home”

Mandatory Palestine proved to be a unique example of an attempt to create a “national home” within the framework of the colonial system. The present article aims to analyse the combination of the national and the colonial in the implementation of the “home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, as well as the role of cultural-religious narratives in the mindset of both the British administrators and the Zionist settlers. The research is based on British official documents and archive materials, as well as on the memoirs of Jewish settlers in Eretz Yisrael, some of which are introduced into the Russian academic circulation for the first time. Many British politicians viewed the return of the Jews to their historical homeland as a specific noble mission, which fit both into the framework of “Christian Zionism” and the notion of the civilizing nature of imperial colonialism. Palestine, along with its religious and cultural significance, was at the same time playing a thoroughly practical strategic role, and in that sense served as a highly convenient “foothold”. The British politicians and administrators perceived the Zionists as loyal agents of European colonial influence in the Middle East region. Based on the conducted research, the author reached the following conclusions. Even before ethnic confrontation in mandate Palestine intensified, some representatives of the British Empire anticipated that the Jews would not be a loyal minority, always ready to act in the Empire’s interests to the full extent. The main finding of the research is that despite the superficial similarity between the outlooks of the European Zionists and the official representatives of the British Empire, their perceptions of Palestine and their aims and purposes there were fundamentally different. On the one hand, the notions of the leaders of the Zionist movement about Eretz Yisrael were indeed in many respects close to the positions of British politicians and administrators. Jewish nationalism emerged under the influence of European ideas and concepts, and even orientalism influenced it to a certain degree. On the other hand, the Zionists perceived the Europeans as situational allies, therefore their interests coincided only in the short-term perspective. The idea of the national revival of the people of Israel in its historical homeland played a key role for them. This laid the foundation of the new Jewish identity, which also included multiple elements of religious traditions and legal bases of Judaism.

Choosing the agent's group identity in a trust game with delegated decision making

AbstractMembers of a given social group often favor members of their own group identity over people with different group identities. We construct a trust game in which the principal delegates the decision about an investment into a receiver to an agent who either favors the principal's or the receiver's group identity. When choosing the agent's group identity the principal faces a trade‐off between a loyal agent and an agent who might increase the receiver's willingness to cooperate. We solve for the principal's decision in a subgame‐perfect nash equilibrium for the two scenarios of a risk‐neutral and risk‐averse agent, respectively.

Secure consensus control for multiagent systems with attacks and communication delays

This paper addresses the consensus problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems suffering from attacks and communication delays. The network studied in this paper consists of two types of agents, namely, loyal agents and attack agents. The loyal agents update their states based on delayed state information exchanged with their neighbors. Meanwhile, the attack agents can strategically send messages with wrong values, or collude with other attack agents to disrupt the correct operation of the system. We design a novel delay robust secure consensus U+0028 DRSC U+0029 algorithm according to the neighboring nodes U+02BC delayed information. Convergence analysis of the system under the protocol designed is provided by using Lyapunov-Krasovskii stability theory and Barbalat-like argument approach. Finally, an example and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Power Structure and Media Autonomy in China: The Case of Southern Weekend

ABSTRACTHow do Chinese media derive the autonomy to practice relatively freely, and how are they deprived of it? By analyzing the case of Southern Weekend, this study proposes one crucial factor—the central–local power structure within the Party’s censorship system to explain the dramatic changes of media autonomy in China. It argues that the divergence between the local authority and the central propagandists in dealing with the local media has guaranteed the autonomy of local media practitioners. The autonomy becomes eroded later when the central authority rationalizes the nomenklatura system of the regulatory bodies. By nurturing loyal agents at the local level, the central authority successfully eases the tension within the central–local power structure and strengthens its control over the regionally-based media outlets.

Professionalism, Agency, and Market Failures

ABSTRACT:According to themarket failures approachto business ethics, beyond-compliance duties can be derived by employing the same rationale and arguments that justify state regulation of economic conduct. Very roughly, the idea is that managers have a duty to behave as if they were complying with an ideal regulatory regime ensuring Pareto-optimal market outcomes. Proponents of the approach argue that managers have aprofessional dutynot to undermine the institutional setting that defines their role, namely the competitive market. This answer is inadequate, however, for it is the hierarchical firm, rather than the competitive market, that defines the role of corporate managers and shapes their professional obligations. Thus, if the obligations that the market failures approach generates are to apply to managers, they must do so in an indirect way. I suggest that the obligations the market failures approach generates directly apply to shareholders. Managers, in turn, inherit these obligations as part of their duties as loyal agents.

The Anglo-American Connection: Examining the Intersection of Nationality with Class, Gender, and Race in the James Bond Films

James Bond/007 is a popular cultural icon of British identity. Working as a secret agent for the British organization MI6, Bond travels the world on missions and acts in the best interest of his country to safeguard its geopolitical interests.1 While he can and does harbor doubts about these missions, he is nonetheless depicted as a loyal agent serving Queen and Country, as Domino Derval remarks in Thunderhall (Terence Young 1965). Although Bond operates as a solo agent and is not assigned a regular 00 partner, he often works opportunistically with those he encounters in the field, and more routinely with other non-British agents, collaborating frequently with American allies. These relationships, both opportunistic and planned, are crucial to mission success and have been seen by many scholars and fans as indicative of the changing contours of the post-1945 geopolitical world, and the Anglo-American relationship.In the Eon/United Artists Bond films, these American characters usually work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and represent American geopolitical interests, such as furthering regional hegemony in strategic spaces such as the Arctic, the Caribbean, East Asia, and even outer space. According to the historian Jeremy Black and author of the Politics of James Bond, support for the United States [was] central to British policy during the cold war [and] is important to Bond's in the films (Black 94). The depiction of Bond working with American allies not only helps to connect the common geopolitical interests of Britain with America vis-a-vis the challenges posed by China, Russia, and nonstate entities such as SPECTRE, but it also serves as a way to attract American filmgoers to the films (Bennett and Woollacott 29). Even the choice to cast Sean Connery over David Niven for the role of Bond in Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) was judged a commercial necessity. Producer Albert R. Broccoli felt that Niven was too English for the part and envisioned for Bond a more midAtlantic image with a tougher persona that would appeal to both British and American audiences.2 Not only did the films rely on the United States as a primary market, but the films themselves were strongly shaped by American creative personnel like Broccoli and screenwriter Richard Maibaum. Without United Artists underwriting the earliest Bond films, the franchise would never have developed in the manner that it did.3This article considers the representation and geopolitical significance of Bond's American allies to better understand how Anglo-American geopolitical interests are refracted across the different eras of the franchise. The intersection of nationality with class, gender, and race shapes the reading of American characters and informs the nature of their relationships with Bond. A number of recurring characters and character types appear across the franchise including Felix Leiter, a variety of American Bond Girls, and a handful of minor figures like J.W. Pepper and Jack Wade. But those intersections, however important, are not sufficient in their own right. Bond's repeated demonstration of what he can do, touch, and feel also matters to the relationship. His ability to connect is what makes the relationship special with his American allies-he can push the button at the right moment, seduce a key informant, and sense danger that others cannot. So while Bond may be the junior partner operating in a Cold War geopolitical climate dominated by the United States, it is his personal intuition, touch, and movement that allows him to connect with people, objects and sites/spaces, and thus emerge as a dominant/superior figure.The Connery Era ( 1962-67, 1971): Establishing the AngloAmerican ConnectionThe Anglo-American connection was established in the Connery era through the pairing of Bond with a male CIA operative. Felix Leiter is the best-known American ally of Bond and a close friend who appears in ten films across the franchise. …

Consensus of discrete-time multi-agent systems with adversaries and time delays

This paper studies the resilient asymptotic consensus problem for discrete-time multi-agent systems in the presence of adversaries and transmission delays. The network is assumed to have loyal agents and adversarial agents, and each loyal agent in the network has no knowledge of the network topology other than an upper bound on the number of adversarial agents in its neighborhood. For the considered networked system, only locally delayed information is available for each loyal agent, and also the information flow is directed and a control protocol using only local information is designed to guarantee the realization of consensus with respect to communication graph, which satisfies a featured network robustness. Numerical examples are finally given to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoretical results.

‘Fathers’ and ‘Sons’: Inscribing Self and Empire at Vijayanagara, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

This article examines nᾱyaka political subjectivity and culture in the making of Vijayanagara Empire. It argues that ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ relationships of family produce nᾱyaka kingship in Vijayanagara Empire (1350–1650 AD). In the inscriptions, the nᾱyaka repeatedly projected a genealogical proximity to the emperor and other nᾱyaka. They described themselves as loyal servants, fictive (or political) sons, and agents and bearers of the burden of the kingdom. Nᾱyaka discourses of loyalty, service and filiality are expressive of the political relationships and also constitutive of empire. Conceptually, this project offers a way out of the primarily structuralist and functionalist explanations of nᾱyaka identity and politics. It does not simply view the inscriptions as documents or as records of a social and political reality; instead, following both philological and post-foundational approaches, it looks at the inscriptions as a series of testimonials in a political field which inscribe the nᾱyaka self and state simultaneously.

Contracts Meet Henry Ford

Legal scholars and legal educators view contracts as a welfare-maximizing (or optimal risk-allocating) device for two or more parties. Because we cling to this principal-driven paradigm, we think of lawyers only as the proverbial “transaction cost engineers,” the loyal agents of parties to a transaction. And whenever we observe contracts that appear to be suboptimal, we blame agency costs. We instead should apply the literature on organizational economics to understand the production of contracts by the modern law firm. This literature better illustrates how law firms organize, why they produce the products they do, and why those products sometimes exhibit strangely inefficient features. These inefficiencies are not the consequence of agency costs or a lack of attorneys’ fidelity to their clients; they instead illustrate the limits — and, indirectly, the strengths — of large organizations. Indeed, observing that legal products do not perfectly match contemporary needs might be no less provocative than observing that Detroit is long overdue to produce high-mileage cars.

Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: A Field-Based Quasi-Experiment

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the firm's proactive management of consumer-to-consumer communication. We are particularly interested in understanding how, if at all, the firm should go about effecting meaningful word-of-mouth. To tackle this problem, we implemented a large-scale field-based quasi experiment in which a national firm created word of mouth through two (non-randomized) populations: loyal customers and non-loyal customers. We break our theoretical problem into two subproblems. First, we ask, What kind of WOM drives sales? Motivated by previous research, we hypothesize that the WOM that is most effective at driving sales occurs between acquaintances (not friends) and is created by non-loyal customers, not loyals. We find support for this. This result is also noteworthy as it demonstrates the potential usefulness of exogenously created WOM. Then, we ask, Which agents are most effective at creating this kind of WOM? In particular, we are interested in evaluating the effectiveness of the commonly-used opinion leader designation. While we find that for the agents that were very loyal to the product, opinion leadership was associated with the creation of more WOM, this was not the case for less loyal agents. This finding may present a challenge for a firm attempting to design a WOM campaign. In a final exploratory analysis, we suggest a measure of one's social network intensity as a predictor of effectiveness of non-loyals as potential buzz agents.

Organizations as Internal Capital Markets: The Legal Boundaries of Firms, Collateral, and Trusts in Commercial and Charitable Enterprises

IN TROD UCTION ........ ..... ......... 1103....... o 3 I. SWITCHING OPTIONS, INFORMATION ASYMMETRIES, AND AGENCY PROBLEM S I110o9 II. ORGANIZATIONAL BOUNDARIES OF INTERNAL CAPITAL MARKETS 1119

A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law

Contemporary corporate scholarship generally assumes that the central economic problem addressed by corporation law is getting managers and directors to act as loyal agents for shareholders. We take issue with this approach and argue that the unique rules governing publicly-held corporations are instead designed primarily to address a different problem - the problem - that arises when a number of individuals must invest firm-specific resources to produce a nonseparable output. In such situations team members may find it difficult or impossible to draft explicit contracts distributing the output of their joint efforts, and, as an alternative, might prefer to give up control over their enterprise to an independent third party charged with representing the team's interests and allocating rewards among team members. Thus we argue that the essential economic function of the public corporation is not to address principal-agent problems, but to provide a vehicle through which shareholders, creditors, executives, rank-and-file employees, and other potential corporate who may invest firm-specific resources can, for their own benefit, jointly relinquish control over those resources to a board of directors. This alternative to the principal-agent approach offers to explain a variety of pivotal doctrines in corporate law that have proven difficult to explain using agency theory, including: the requirement that a public corporation be managed by a board of directors rather than by shareholders directly; the meaning and function of a corporation's legal personality and the rules of derivative suit procedure; the substantive structure of directors' fiduciary duties, including the application of the business judgment rule in the takeover context; and the highly-limited nature of shareholders' voting rights. The team production model also carries important normative implications for and popular debates over corporate governance, because it suggests that maximizing shareholder wealth should not be the principal goal of corporate law. Rather, directors of public corporations should seek to maximize the joint welfare of all the firm's stakeholders - including shareholders, managers, employees, and possibly other groups such as creditors or the local community - who contribute firm-specific resources to corporate production.

Cleansing the modern heart

J ohn Selden, a seventeenth-century English jurist and scholar, warned: "The reason of a thing Is not to be inquired after, till you are sure the thing itself be so. We commonly are at, what's the reason for it? before we are sure of the thing" (cited in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 435). We know what physics is: the study of matter and energy. What biology is: the study of living things. But what is psychoanalysis? Who speaks for psychoanalysis? We are familiar with Freud's many contradictory teachings and the diverse practices he engaged in, calling them all "psychoanalysis." We know that the term is used to refer to a method of diagnosing and treating mental illnesses, detecting mental illness in famous dead persons and in characters invented by poets and writers, explaining and influencing human behavior, and interpreting the "meaning" of works of art. Here are two current examples of what persons officially authorized to speak for psychoanalysis say about it. In an essay titled, "Will the real psychoanalyst please stand up?" Richard Fox, president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2001, declares: "Psychoanalysis today is a far cry from what it was thirty to forty years ago .... We lobby in Washington .... We work with other groups such as the ACLU to further our goals" (The American Psychoanalyst, 2001, p. 27). Are these activities we ought to applaud? At present, the ACLU is engaged in formulating commitment laws, the better to justify incarcerating innocent Americans accused of mental illness. During World War II, it was engaged in supporting and justifying the incarceration of innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry (see Charles L. Markmann, 1965, and Thomas Szasz, The Therapeutic State, 1984, pp. 58-66). The American Psychoanalytic Association, Fox proudly reports, no longer bars psychologists from membership: "We have extended our membership .... We have shed our medical orthodoxy and have become more egalitarian." This is not good enough. For its past policies, the American Psychoanalytic Association owes a collective apology to psychologists and homosexuals as well. It would be a mistake to conclude that psychoanalysts have finally acknowledged that they do not treat diseases, because problems in living are not diseases and because listening-and-talking is not a medical procedure. On the contrary, analysts join psychiatrists in expanding the concepts of disease and t r e a t m e n t , assert tha t "psychotherapy changes the brain," and then use that claim to prove that they treat brain diseases. According to Glenn Gabbard, M.D. , professor o f p sych i a t ry and director, Baylor Psychiatry Clinic and editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, "behavior therapy and drug therapy [ate] affecting the same brain areas and in the same manner . . . . Psychotherapy seems capable of favorably influencing the minds and bodies of persons with bodily diseases and perhaps is even capable o f c o u n t e r i n g those diseases .... l i t is important] to get scientific results that lend credibility to psychotherapy as a real treatment" (cited in Joan Arehart-Treichel, "Evidence is in: Psychotherapy changes the brain," Psychiatric News 2001, 36 (July 6), p. 33). Why is it important to claim that conversation with a psychoanalyst changes the client 's--but presumably not the analyst's--brain? In order to qualify as loyal agents of the therapeutic state and be paid by the state for one's services to it.

The Political Economy of a Soviet Military R&D Failure: Steam Power for Aviation, 1932 to 1939

The behavior of principals and agents in the interwar Soviet economy can be studied through the failed attempt to develop a new aviation-engine technology based on the steam turbine. Some possible approaches to the evaluation of R&D failure are outlined. Soviet R&D agents competed for funding within a command system. Principals funded ventures in a context of biased information and adverse selection. In the presence of sunk costs budget constraints on individual projects were often loose, but were tightened periodically. There is evidence of rent seeking, but not that rents were distributed deliberately as political gifts to loyal agents.

Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution by Anna s> Geifman (review)

REVIEWS 56I similar theme, is a reflection of how much ground needs to be made up by Czechs and Germans in workingthrough their troubled history, not only on an inter-state level but among historians themselves. A recent invitation to present the workat the Czech Embassyin Berlincan thereforebe takenas an encouragingsign. The crucialtestof the project'svalue willbe how the second part covering I939-45 will manage to combine the Nazi occupation of Bohemia-Moraviaand the 'wild expulsions'of Sudeten Germans in the postliberationperiod in one volume, while simultaneouslyavoiding relativization or simply cataloguing a long list of atrocitiesagainst the Germans. Were it to fall into that trap then the project will not so much representa 'trialogue'as an all too familiar Sudeten German monologue which academics stopped listeningto long ago. StAntony's College MATTHEW FRANK University ofOxford Geifman, Anna. Entangled in Terror. TheAzefAffairandtheRussianRevolution. Scholarly Resources, Wilmington, DE, 2000. X+ 247 PP. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography.Index. fI 6.95 (paperback). THEunmaskingof Evno Azef as a police agent in I908 was a scandalwithout equal in late tsarist Russia. Azef was no ordinary revolutionary turned informer, but a founder member of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, a member of its Central Committee and the leading light of the most feared terroristorganization in Russia, the SR Combat Organization. The Combat Organization'stwo most spectacularsuccesseswere widely credited to Azef's masterlyleadership.The revelationthat all along he had been workingforthe police was a shattering blow to the morale of the PSR and especially the Combat Organization. Nor did the government escape the fall-out of Azef's exposure, appearingto be implicatedin a whole range of terroristactivities. Explanations of Azef's behaviour at the time and since have traditionally stressedhis venality, his absence of scrupleand his complete lack of principle. Anna Geifman, in this stimulating and provocative book offers a different interpretationof Azef's motivation and of his career as a police agent. Using the insightsof historywith psychology, Geifman arguesthatit was not venality or some other banal human weakness that drove Azef, but fear. Azef's fear was rooted in his childhood experiences of poverty and progroms. These created within Azef an irrational,devouringfear that could be managed only by turning it into a reality hence his career as a double agent. By placing himself at the heart of the most violent organization in Russia and systematicallybetraying that organization, Azef externalized his fear which then helped him to control it. The second part of Geifman'sbook is her insistence that Azef was not and had never been a double agent, but from the time he went on the police payroll until his exposure, he was a loyal agent of the police and did all in his power to thwartthe operationsof the Combat Organization. The spectacular successes of the organization came in spite of Azef's attempts to warn the police. To protecthimselfhe had to be circumspectin the informationhe gave 562 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 the police, hoping that they would have sufficientwit to piece together an accurate assessment of the Combat Organization's operations from the sometimes oblique hints that he gave. When they failed to do this the result could be catastrophic,but thiswas due to the failingsof the police ratherthan Azef's betrayal. Assessing these two central claims is not easy, particularly the first one. Clearly,psychology has much to offerin attemptingto understandindividual motivation and Geifman usesit skilfullyand oftenpersuasively.Her argument that fearis a primalhuman motivation and has been much underestimatedby historians as a basic motivator of human behaviour seems valid to me. The problem comes when this insight is applied to an individual such as Azef. As Geifman herself admits, much of what she says is speculative particularly regardingAzef's criticalchildhood years.Although the starkdetailsof his life are known, there is little to give light and shade to them. Azef wrote no memoirs and many of the descriptionsof his childhood were written afterhis exposure and were invariablycoloured by his career. He could well have had thismonstrousfearinside him, forcinghim to externalizeit in orderto control it, but without detailed clinical notes, it seems very difficultto prove one way or the other. The second argument is more amenable to critical judgement. The voluminous recordsof Azef's activitiesin the...

Dictator, loyal, and opportunistic agents: The Soviet archives on creating the Soviet economic system *

Studies of the mature Soviet economy focus on the structuralweaknesses of rent seeking and corruption. Such an economy ispresumed to perform better in its adolescent phase under astrong stationary-bandit dictator, dedicated to growth andable to control rent-seekers. We use the recently openedSoviet state and party archives to show the process that beganin the 1930s of transforming the inner circle of the Sovietstationary bandit into a rent-seeking bureaucracy lackinglong-term goals.

Shareholder Interests, Human Capital Investment and Corporate Governance

Corporations simultaneously claim that human capital is increasingly important to their success - People are our most important asset - and that their executives are the loyal agents of shareholders - Our primary goal is the maximization of shareholder value. This paper studies the relationship between these two claims in a context of incomplete contracting. We show that the strict pursuit of shareholder interests may require ceding a role in corporate governance to employees in order to motivate their investing in firm-specific human capital. We consider three versions of such involvement: profit-sharing (applicable when profits are contractible), ex post bargaining effectuated by giving workers representation on the board, and comitting to respect the human capitalists' interests. Ceding a role to workers becomes more attractive as their investments increase in importance. This result bears on the on-going debate about reforming European and Japanese governance systems in the direction of the American system, reducing employees' influence. In this context, we present a model on the optimal choice of governance systems based on ideas suggested by Bengt Holmstrom. The model allows firms to respond to changes in the environment by changing strategy, which benefits shareholders but hurts workers. The workers can accept the change, quit, or use open conflict (strikes) to try to limit the change in strategy. The firm can reduce the likelihood of conflict by granting workers a say in strategy selection. The model predicts that there will be two regimes: one with shareholders in complete control and with strikes from dissatisfied workers, and the other with workers having a sufficient role in governance to ensure labor peace. Comparative statics analyses of the model suggest that differing historical conditions in the US and Europe made the selection of different regimes appropriate. The increasing pace of globalization and technological change, however, does favor shareholder dominance. On the other hand, increasing the importance of human capital favors granting a role in governance to workers, which is then associated with larger investment in specific capital and with inertia in firms' strategic choices.

The situated critic or the loyal critic? Rorty and Walzer on social criticism

This article addresses the question whether the model of social criticism as 'connected' or 'loyal' which is advanced by Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer offers an adequate picture of social criticism. Two claims are made. First, it is suggested that loyalty is an internally conflicted concept, with three components: a recognition of situatedness in a particu lar relationship; an affirmation of that relationship by the loyal agent; a set of values or local principles. Where the third component is prominent, loyalty is more reflective and distanced; where the second component predominates, loyalty slips into unreflective commitment. Second, it is argued that Rorty and Walzer conflate the social critic's recognition of his or her situatedness in contexts of power with the affirmation of that situ atedness. It is concluded that the model of loyal social criticism is mislead mg, and that the practice of the critic must be tempered by the operation of the sense of injustice.