Speculative Enterprise Research Articles

Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763 by Mattie Burkert (review)

Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763 by Mattie Burkert (review)

Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763 By Mattie Burkert. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021; pp. ix + 284, 7 illustrations. $95.00 cloth, $39.50 paper, $29.50 e-book.

Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763 By Mattie Burkert. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021; pp. ix + 284, 7 illustrations. $29.50 e-book.

Burkert, Mattie. Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London: 1688–1763

Burkert, Mattie. <i>Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London: 1688–1763</i>

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

Twenty-one lessons learnt

A number of years ago, my practice Sergison Bates was invited to take part in a competition for a housing project in north London. At some point in the competitive interview, I stated that every project we undertake is unique in the set of interests it investigates, and could be understood as a form of research. I still believe that this is true, although I would be cautious about making the same comment again in such circumstances. We did not win the competition and found out later that a number of members of the members of the jury took issue with my statement. They misconstrued it, thinking that what we had in mind was some form of speculative enterprise with implicit risks and an uncertain outcome, which they would be funding. I now understand the difficulty the client had. Naturally, they wanted to be assured that we had the experience and competence to deliver a building that would serve their needs and be fit for purpose.When we set up in practice – at about the same time as arq was launched – Stephen Bates and I had learnt some things about building from working for a number of established architects in practice. When we formally founded our own practice, we accepted a future of uncertainty, although this was countered by great optimism on our part. Looking back, it is clear that a series of events that were wholly out of our control have shaped the practice we now have. Many of the projects we worked on in the early years took on issues for the first time, and this partly explains why it feels that we undertook more research then than we do now. I do, however, believe that we are constantly building upon a set of shared interests, and while the knowledge we have acquired through building is cumulative, our restless curiosity to explore new themes and ideas remains unchanged.

On Mills' ‘Jung's Metaphysics’

Despite his patient attempt to reconstruct Jung's metaphysics, Jon Mills fails to show that Jung was a metaphysician or even a philosopher of science and perhaps even a scientist. Mills seems to equate metaphysics with the postulation of immaterial entities – notably, archetypes. But on the one hand metaphysics can be materialist as well as dualist. On the other hand it is a speculative enterprise. A metaphysician would not simply announce the existence of immateriality but would seek to prove that immateriality fits the nature of reality as already known. Jung's metaphysics, which for him means sheer pronouncements, constitutes neither psychologism nor idealism, as Mills seems to agree. But Jung is not a Kantian, either. Jung should be treated as a great psychologist, but not as a thinker.

Oriental by Design: Ottoman Jews, Imperial Style, and the Performance of Heritage

WHEN, IN THE EARLY 1890S, OTTOMAN JEWS began to appear in Chicago in anticipation of the 1893 World’s Fair, many American observers were perplexed at first. In one author’s words, the “looks and garb” of these foreign visitors to the Windy City led him “to believe them Mohammedan.”1 Others decided that they were Turks, such as the editors of The Chicago Times Portfolio of the Midway Types, who labeled Robert Levy—an Ottoman Jewish merchant who managed the empire’s exhibit at the fair and who was photographed wearing the attire of an Ottoman Muslim religious scholar—a “typical Turk,” or “Rosa”—a Jewish woman from Ottoman Salonica—a “Turkish dancer.” (See Figures 1–2.) Fairgoers’ disorientation was not helped by the fact that these Eastern Jews used the newly constructed mosque built on the Midway—where Muslim employees of the Ottoman exhibit regularly prayed—as the site of their Yom Kippur services.2 Once they discovered that the people dressed as Muslims or Turks were Jews, however, certain visitors expressed their disappointment. One chronicler of the fair explained that visitors in the know had begun to grumble that the “Turkish village” erected on the Midway Plaisance did not really “represent Turkey,” and that it was “purely a speculative enterprise of some Oriental Jews.”3 Equally vexing for those who sought an unadulterated glimpse of Eastern life in Chicago, many of the performers in the Midway’s Turkish Village were caught changing into Western-style suits and dresses between their Oriental acts. During the same period, Sultan Abdulhamid II and various Ottoman officials

National Citizens, Global Economies: Sarah Gertrude Millin and the Professionalization of Envy

This article examines the South African novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin’s writings on economics. Though Millin has most commonly been treated as a theorist of race and miscegenation, her novels and nonfiction writings demonstrate an equally strong interest in how global economic institutions affect South African life. Eatough proposes that Millin’s fascination with such diverse economic practices as currency speculation, actuarial accounting, and stock broking stems from the way in which these practices dramatize a seemingly insuperable tension between Anglo professionalism and South African nationalism. As the article shows, Millin’s efforts to overcome Anglo-Afrikaner rivalry and fashion a unified white nationalism entailed a radical rethinking of what global professional networks were in their innermost essence. Central to this nationalist project, Eatough argues, was Millin’s tendency to regard such networks less as rooted national institutions than as distant speculative devices capable of inflating the value of South African nationality. Over the course of the article, Eatough investigates how Millin uses this definition to finesse complaints by (primarily Afrikaner) nationalists against British control of the professions by suggesting that such articulations of envy drive speculative enterprise—and, thus, provide a means for transforming national abjection into national value.

Is There a Place for Philosophy in the Social Sciences?

The article deals with the problem of relationship between social sciences and philosophy. In contemporary social sciences this relationship is denied by not ascribing to philosophy the status of autonomous discipline, which could be considered as being separate from social sciences and yet fruitfully collaborate with them. The positivist tradition of the social sciences denies the importance philosophy, considering it as a merely speculative enterprise, which is not worthy of attention of social scientists oriented towards the increase of empirically verified scientific knowledge. On the other hand, the interpretive tradition of the social sciences tends to incorporate philosophy into social sciences as an integral part of social theory. However, claims the author, the divide into two traditions itself shows the importance of philosophy, since both of these traditions already depend on the philosophical presuppositions of their exponents. The article argues that philosophy of social sciences should be considered as a separate and autonomous discipline, because of the objects it studies and the methods it uses, which differ from those of social sciences. However philosophy can (and actually does) fruitfully collaborate with social sciences by formulating their methodological basis.

Response to Nell Irvin Painter

NELL IRVIN PAINTER'S INVESTMENT OF TIME AND INTEREST redeems my speculations and places me in her debt. Specie and Species grew from a study of counterfeiting and racial passing, and, since the parallel discussion of money and citizenship that characterized Reconstruction offered an especially clear example of the shared language of money and race, most of my essay focuses on the 1 870s. We agree that slavery, the commodification of racial difference, must be central to any future ventures in this line. Slaves, Painter points out, simultaneously as an embodied currency and a labor force. As workers and as the basis of the economy in which they toiled, slaves circulated like legal tender. Fetishized as commodities, they embodied their owners' social prestige. The point is well taken; slaves occupied a unique and crucial role in antebellum political economy, and American historians cannot be reminded of this often enough. Acknowledging slavery's centrality, I would argue that slaves circulated not like legal tender but like specie. Legal tender, deriving its value from law, pointed away from essentialism and toward the social and associative construction of meaning and value. But when they served as collateral for loans and embodiments of their owners' prestige, slaves served the same function as gold: their existence as valuable commodities anchored speculative enterprise, and their commodity value depended on fantasies of racial essentialism. On page 388, I suggest that the apparently chaotic antebellum financial system might only have been feasible in a society containing racial slavery. Would Painter agree that this might be true in the South-that racial slavery anchored speculative enterprise and that slaves helped stabilize a volatile, highly mobile, and economically expansionist society both socially and economically? This suggestion locates slavery at the core of American political economy and reconnects it to debates about money and banking. In his famous message vetoing the Second United States Bank's recharter, Andrew Jackson linked a specie economy to a law meritocracy. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government, he insisted, because equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. Some citizens enjoy natural and just advantages, which a good government should do no more than help reveal. The bank and its paper money,

The U. S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation

O N August 10, 1945, the Japanese government finally announced its willingness to surrender on the sole condition that the imperial institution not be prejudiced. In roundabout ways, the American government met the request, one which virtually everyone had anticipated and which many in Washington had long been prepared to make. Still, for both governments these gestures represented an abandonment of intransigent postures adopted in wartime propaganda. The postwar world might have been very different if the timing had been other than what it was. If the surrender had occurred later, the Russian military position in China, Korea, and Japan would have been much stronger. Conversely, if Tokyo and Washington had reached an agreement earlier, the atomic bomb would not have been used, Russia would not have entered the war in the Pacific, the Yalta agreement on the Far East would have remained a dead letter, and the American military position in Europe would have been much stronger. The many possibilities revealed by an awareness of this contingency and the importance of timing have stimulated an enormous amount of speculation by historians and the public at large. Two broad trends can be recognized in this speculative enterprise. At the height of the Cold War many Americans felt that the bomb alone had ended the war, that Soviet entry in the Far East should not have been encouraged, and that Russia had reaped the Yalta rewards without any sacrifice. Presumably communist sympathizers within the state department had duped the government into prolonging the war to make Soviet entry possible. Historians have recently turned this interpretation on its head. Agreeing that the war had been unnecessarily prolonged, they contend that the purpose was to terrorize the Soviets by demonstrating

On Early Greek Astronomy

In a somewhat polemical article on ‘Solstices, Equinoxes, and the Presocratics’ D. R. Dicks has recently challenged the usual view that the Presocratics in general, and the Milesians in particular, made significant contributions to the development of scientific astronomy in Greece. According to Dicks, mathematical astronomy begins with the work of Meton and Euctemon about 430 B.C. What passes for astronomy in the earlier period ‘was still in the pre-scientific stage’ of ‘rough-and-ready observations, unsystematically recorded and imperfectly understood, of practical men’ whose chief concern was to fix the seasons for ploughing, seed-time, sailing voyages and religious festivals. Ionian speculation, says Dicks, took very little note of such observation: ‘some of its wilder flights of fancy might have been avoided, if it had taken more’. In this account of the rise of Greek astronomy, the natural philosophers have no part to play. Their theories represent a speculative enterprise without a scientific future, a philosophic sideline with no impact on the development of observational science from Hesiod to Meton or the development of mathematical astronomy from Meton to Ptolemy.I believe that such a dichotomy between early philosophy and early science in Greece is misguided in principle, and that it seriously distorts our picture of the initial phases of each discipline. It also imposes a considerable strain upon our credulity. Take the case of Anaxagoras who, according to Plato and Theophrastus, had given a causal explanation of eclipses of the moon a generation before Meton.

The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly that Missed

Attempts to monopolize the automobile industry began early in its history but were never successful because the industry possessed characteristics which made monopolization exceptionally difficult. The first of these efforts provides an illuminating example of business failure resulting from avoidable errors of judgment. The Electric Vehicle Company began its operations on the assumption that the electric automobile was going to be the dominant type; when this became demonstrably a bad guess, the company tried to compensate by using the Selden patent to collect royalties from the manufacturers of gasoline automobiles. This scheme likewise misfired, and the company collapsed into bankruptcy. The scheme also brought disaster to the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, which abandoned a very promising position of leadership in the automobile field in order to participate in a highly speculative enterprise.