Introduction: the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Britain

1983 ◽  
pp. 222-226
Author(s):  
Michael Dunford ◽  
Diane Perrons
Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.


Author(s):  
Leila El Houssi

This chapter interrogates the confrontation between fascist and antifascist elements within the Italian community in French Tunisia through an analysis of the attitude of the local Italian language press to the ‘Ethiopian Question’. Through the daily newspaper L’Unione and the weekly L’Alba, Italian fascist propaganda focused its efforts on downplaying the impact of the ‘notorious’ Laval–Mussolini agreements of January 1935 and cast the conquest of Ethiopia as a prelude to more important conquests. It was challenged by the antifascist front (anarchists, republicans, communists and Giustizia e Libertà) in Tunisia who, in the pages of the weekly magazine Domani and the clandestine newspaper Il Liberatore, accused the regime of being interested more in the profits of industrial capitalism than in the interests of Italian citizens resident in the country.


Author(s):  
Susan Brophy

Agamben’s complicated engagement with Immanuel Kant celebrates the brilliance of the German idealist’s thought by disclosing its condemnatory weight in Western philosophy. Kant was writing in the midst of burgeoning industrial capitalism, when each new scientific discovery seemed to push back the fog of religion in favour of science and reason; meanwhile Agamben’s work develops in concert with the crises of advanced capitalism and borrows significantly from those philosophers who endured the most demoralising upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever lanugo Kant was eager for us to shed in the name of individual freedom,1 Agamben sees in this crusade for civic maturity a surprising prescience: ‘[I]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the heading of a sublime “moral feeling,” was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (HS 52). To a remarkable extent, Agamben finds that Kant’s transcendental idealist frame of thought lays the philosophical foundation for the state of exception.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Dommann

Der Text geht von der These aus, dass nicht, wie oft behauptet, eine Virtualisierung, sondern eine Vergegenständlichung und Materialisierung den Kapitalismus auszeichnet. Dabei werden Warenlager als materialisierte Form des industriellen Kapitalismus hinsichtlich ihrer epistemischen Produktivkraft untersucht. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Entstehung eines neuen handelswissenschaftlichen und volkswirtschaftlichen Wissenskorpus, das in die Praxis der Warenlagerung interveniert. Nach der Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1920/21 wird die Vorratshaltung in Frage gestellt und es beginnt eine neue Epoche der Warenlagerwissenschaften, deren Folgen auch bei der Formulierung von Konjunkturtheorien thematisiert werden. </br></br>The paper presents the thesis that, in contrast to the conventional claim, capitalism is not characterized by virtualization, but by objectification and materialization. As materialized forms of industrial capitalism, warehouses are investigated with regard to their epistemic productivity. Central for the argument is the emergence of a new body of knowledge concerning commercial and economic sciences, which figures decisively in the practice of warehousing. After the worldwide economic crisis of 1920/21, stockpiling is called into question and a new era of warehouse sciences begins, the consequences of which are also addressed in the formulation of trade cycle theories.


Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.


1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia J. Hilden

Reflecting on the development of industrial capitalism in Europe, Antonio Gramsci wrote:It is worth drawing attention to the way in which industrialists…have been concerned with the sexual affairs of their employees and with their family arrangements in general. One should not be misled…by the ‘puritanical’ appearance assumed by this concern. The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized.


Urban History ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
APOSTOLOS DELIS

ABSTRACT:Port-cities provide excellent examples of the socio-economic transformations that occurred during the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hermoupolis on the island of Syros was a major economic centre in Greece and a hub of international trade during the nineteenth century. However, economic transformations that commenced in the 1860s affected long-established port-based activities such as wooden shipbuilding and its related industries due to the decline of sailing ships and the expansion of factories. This factor led to an increase in tension and antagonism between manufacturers and shipbuilders over the use of land and altered the physical and the socio-economic landscape of the port-city. However, new types of economic activities flourished, like the tramp steamship business and factories, which enabled Hermoupolis to maintain its economic importance until World War II.


1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
John White

Andrew Carnegie, as he never tired of informing his readers and audiences, was an avowed and fervent admirer of the British railway engineer turned evolutionary cosmic philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie frequently addressed Spencer as “ My Dear Master,” entitled one chapter of his Autobiography “ Herbert Spencer and His Disciple,” and liked to say that Spencer had had an even greater influence on him than either Burns or Shakespeare. Certainly in Carnegie, Spencer had one of his warmest American friends and a generous admirer, and the two men remained in close contact from the time of their first meeting sometime during the early 1880s until Spencer's death in 1903. An examination of their friendship yields some valuable insights into the reception of Spencer's ideas by the outstanding — if atypical — spokesman of the American business class during the Gilded Age. It reveals Carnegie's much-vaunted evolutionism to have been instinctive rather than intellectual, derived not from study and uncertainty but from innate optimism and heuristic observation. Again, despite Spencer's promotion by some historians as the patron saint of industrial capitalism, his writings and his relationship with Carnegie indicate that Spencer was highly critical of American competitive mores, monopolistic practices and pervasive materialism.


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