VICTORIAN POLITICS AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 883-902 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL BENTLEY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Critical Scrutiny

This article subjects a variety of works on nineteenth-century politics to critical analysis, focusing on recent work in biography, popular politics, and on those works that have shown an interest in post-structuralist approaches. Mostly it examines texts produced between 1993 and about 1997 with a view to sensing an historiographical mood. Although the argument urges an open-minded reception to the linguistic turn in historical work, it brings the work of some of its adherents – perhaps especially James Vernon – under critical scrutiny and concludes that a price has been paid for the attempt at constructing a ‘cultural politics’. In particular the article expresses alarm at the apparent incoherence and sub-literacy of some post-structural statements.

Automatic Subjects

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Floyd
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Expansion ◽  
Autonomist Marxism ◽  
Fictitious Capital ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
The One ◽  
Reproductive Processes

Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism.

Marx, Central Planning, and Utopian Socialism

1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Scott Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Central Planning ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Utopian Socialism

Marx believed that what most clearly distinguished him and Engels from the nineteenth-century French socialists was that their version (or vision) of socialism was “scientific” while the latters' was Utopian. What he intended by this contrast is roughly the following: French socialists such as Proudhon and Fourier constructed elaborate visions of a future socialist society without an adequate understanding of existing capitalist society. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism was not an idea or an ideal to be realized, but a natural outgrowth of the existing capitalist order. Marx's historical materialism is a systematic attempt to discover the laws governing the inner dynamics of capitalism and class societies generally. Although this theory issues in a prediction of the ultimate triumph of socialism, it is a commonplace that Marx had little to say about the details of post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, some of its features can be discerned from his critical analysis of capitalism and what its replacement entails.

Decolonization as Existential Paradox

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-121
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Human Being

This article offers a critical analysis of Euromodernity through an engagement with the Africana existentialism of Lewis R. Gordon. Drawing on Gordon’s recent work Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) as well as Frantz Fanon, the author argues for the need to decolonize modernity by decoupling Europe and reason, freedom, knowledge, and power. Understanding what it means to be a human being involves an ongoing commitment understanding its relationship to the larger structures of reality, including social reality.

Conclusion: Democracy and Terror

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
High Politics

This chapter discusses how the very particular setting in which the emergence of the sans-culottes in their now familiar guise occurred goes some way towards explaining why the mixture of descriptive and causal claims built into the old master concepts of class or sovereignty of French Revolutionary historiography have never been able to provide much of an explanation of either its content or course, at least without the more complicated assumptions supplied by an assortment of nineteenth-century philosophies of history. Reconstructing that setting, on the other hand, does go some way towards explaining what led to the fusion between high politics and popular politics that occurred in France in the winter of 1791–2.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Nick Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Subsequent Growth ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
The Uk

In common with its companion volume - Soldiers as Workers – Class, employment, conflict and the nineteenth century military (2016), this study argues that class is the primary means of understanding the topic. Focusing on rank and file soldiers it concludes that they were not a separate caste. Instead, soldiering was often just a phase in civilian working lives. The nineteenth century was overshadowed by the mass mobilisation required for the generation-long French Wars and concurrent Industrial Revolution, with emerging working-class popular politics. The chapter reviews developing working class literacy and subsequent growth of rank and file memoirs, which are an important source for this study. The chapter stresses the importance of the new barrack system in the UK and the growth of British Empire, both of which had profound consequences for British society.

Officers’ commitment to the anti-slavery cause

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-96
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Press ◽  
Naval Officers

The chapter examines how naval officers engaged with the cornerstones of the British abolitionist agenda: religion, humanitarianism, morality and concepts of national identity. As most nineteenth-century naval officers came from the middle or upper-middle classes, they were exposed to a culture of anti-slavery sentiment in popular politics, literature and the press. These ideas had a significant impact on how they conceived the nature of their duty as naval personnel and their identity as Britons. Many testimonies of naval suppression offer emotion, insight and conviction regarding the anti-slavery cause, often driven by religious belief, and particularly the rise of evangelicalism in the navy. Yet there was no obligation for naval officers serving on the West Africa squadron to be committed abolitionists. Others held more ambiguous views, particularly as attitudes regarding slavery and race evolved and hardened as the century progressed.

Popular Politics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Chase
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium

Though part of what might be termed historians’ ‘mental furniture’, popular politics is an elastic term that evades close definition. This chapter suggests some defining principles and characteristics of popular political activity. It then takes a broadly chronological form and identifies in the first half of the nineteenth century a diminishing resort to violence and the growing importance of memory and commemoration (notably in Scotland and Wales, less so in England). It goes on to examine the content of popular liberalism and the apparent ‘taming’ of popular politics in the twentieth century. It ends by suggesting that the forms popular politics had increasingly taken by the turn of the millennium seem to indicate a revival of older modes of contesting power.

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