Strong Language: Mathew Carey, Sensibility, and the American State, 1819–1835

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-142
Author(s):  
DREW E. VANDECREEK

AbstractMathew Carey promoted the high tariff as a political expression of humane sentiments that relieved American workers of the misery caused by low wages and unemployment. This made him an early example of a state-builder working outside the state itself, building ideological frames and using emotional appeals to promote the expansion of state capacity. Although other aspects of his protectionism appealed to the republican tradition, Carey meshed his sentimental appeal with the liberalism. Later reformers integrated sensibility with liberalism by reference to the rights of vulnerable parties, but Carey added an appeal to an enlightened self-interest that allowed American manufacturers to profit while protecting workers. Although he became a well-known advocate for the organized provision of social welfare, his continued opposition to the widespread distribution of outdoor relief also suggests that he viewed the policy as a circumscribed federal social-welfare measure providing work rather than direct aid.

Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury

This chapter offers an alternative view of the incidence and duration of insurgencies in the postcolonial world. Insurgencies and civil wars are seen as the primary symptom of state weakness, the inability of the central government to monopolize violence. Challenging extant explanations that identify poverty and low state capacity as the cause of insurgencies, the chapter shows that colonial insurgencies, also occurring in the context of poverty and state weakness, were shorter and ended in regime victories, while contemporary insurgencies are longer and states are less successful at subduing them. The reason for this is the development of exclusive identities—based on ethnicity, religion, tribe—in the colonial period. These identities serve as bases for mobilization to challenge state power and demand services from the state. Either way, such mobilization means that popular demands for services exceed the willingness to disarm and/or pay taxes, that is, to supply the state.


Author(s):  
Alexander Tabachnik ◽  
Benjamin Miller

This chapter explains the process of peaceful change in Central and Eastern Europe following the demise of the Soviet system. It also explains the failure of peaceful change in the Balkans and some post-Soviet countries, such as the Ukrainian conflict in 2014. The chapter accounts for the conditions for peaceful change and for the variation between peaceful and violent change by the state-to-nation theory. The two independent variables suggested by the theory are the level of state capacity and congruence—namely the compatibility between state borders and the national identities of the countries at stake. Moreover, according to the theory, great-power engagement serves as an intervening variable and in some conditions, as explained in the chapter, may help with peaceful change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Elene Lam ◽  
Elena Shih ◽  
Katherine Chin ◽  
Kate Zen

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.


1977 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Moore

Late Victorian and Edwardian social reform has been studied in recent years in order to clarify that important transitional era when new state resources were being called upon to help redress the most glaring abuses which comprised the condition-of-England question. Most of these studies have emphasized the politics of social policy and have also subsumed the tangled and competitive world of philanthropy. But philanthropists were prominent in the politics and practice of social welfare. In his study of Edwardian social policy, Bentley Gilbert distinguishes three organizations as characteristic of “scientific social reform”: settlements (inspired by Canon Samuel Barnett), the Fabians, and the Charity Organization Society. His analysis of each concluded that “professionally-minded social work,” as represented by the C.O.S., least typified the transition from old to new attitudes about social policy. David Owen's examination of English philanthropy supports Gilbert's conclusions concerning the C.O.S., and less detailed surveys of social policy also cite that agency as representative of a philosophic individualism which rejected the policies necessary for reform. All agree that the charitable community called attention to many defects in the British social system, but they leave readers with the impression that it generally opposed state sponsored remedies for those ills.It is the concern of this essay to show that the “professionally-minded” world of Edwardian philanthropy was, like the state, developing new agencies and reorganizing its resources to help meet the massive and diverse welfare needs of the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Whitney K. Taylor

When do individuals choose to advance legal claims to social welfare goods? To explore this question, I turn to the case of South Africa, where, despite the adoption of a "transformative" constitution in 1996, access to social welfare goods remains sorely lacking. Drawing on an original 551-person survey, I examine patterns of legal claims-making, focusing on beliefs individuals hold about the law, rights, and the state, and how those beliefs relate to decisions about whether and how to make claims. I find striking differences between the factors that influence when people say they should file a legal claim and when they actually do so. The way that individuals interpret their own material conditions and neighborhood context are important, yet under-acknowledged, factors for explaining claims-making.


2011 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 887-914 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK DINCECCO ◽  
GIOVANNI FEDERICO ◽  
ANDREA VINDIGNI

We examine the relationships between warfare, taxation, and political change in the context of the political unification of the Italian peninsula. Using a comprehensive new database, we argue that external and internal threat environments had significant implications for the demand for military strength, which in turn had important ramifications for fiscal policy and the likelihood of constitutional reform and related improvements in the provision of nonmilitary public services. Our analytic narrative complements recent theoretical and econometric works about state capacity. By emphasizing public finances, we also uncover novel insights about the forces underlying state formation in Italy.“The budget is the skeleton of the state, stripped of any misleading ideologies.”Sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid, 19261


Author(s):  
Sumit Ganguly ◽  
William R. Thompson

This concluding chapter focuses on India's state-capacity problems and prospects. Its population may become the world's largest, its economy is becoming one of the world's largest, and its military power will probably move along at least a similar upward trajectory. Yet just about everything concerning India is characterized by developmental handicaps of one sort or another. Too many people are poor, infrastructure is lacking, and demands on the state for action to remedy these problems are multiplying. The Indian state, on the other hand, is characterized by a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. It scores high on its democratic attributes but much less so on its overall effectiveness. It has been and continues to be plagued by peripheral insurgencies and separatist movements. Moreover, its extraction capacity has improved but still has a long way to go, given the tasks the state needs to undertake.


Author(s):  
Sumit Ganguly ◽  
William R. Thompson

This chapter examines violence monopoly. Violence monopoly refers to whether the state is capable of establishing an order in which its claim to be the ultimate and principal employer of coercion goes largely unchallenged. The more often states are challenged, and the more intense the nature of the challengers, the less likely the state is to survive as the central institution of a political system. A poor showing in the violence monopoly category is one of the Indian state's greatest vulnerabilities in terms of state capacity. It will need to be improved upon simply to maintain order. Yet it is doubtful that the Indian state will improve in this area rapidly.


Author(s):  
E. A. Brendeleva

The article talks about the key national indicators characterizing economic development, as well as the problems associated with the aims set in the framework of these indicators. The paper also looks at the possible changes in the existing system to asses the state of national economies and social welfare, as well as in the way institutional characteristics of a particular country are considered in this system, with the final aim of deciding on the states’ long term development strategy.


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