scholarly journals Liberalism, commodification, and justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-82
Author(s):  
Vida Panitch

Anti-commodification theorists condemn liberal political philosophers for not being able to justify restricting a market transaction on the basis of what is sold, but only on the basis of how it is sold. The anti-commodification theorist is correct that if this were all the liberal had to say in the face of noxious markets, it would be inadequate: even if everyone has equal bargaining power and no one is misled, there are some goods that should not go to the highest bidder. In this paper, I respond to the anti-commodification critique of liberalism by arguing that the political liberal has the wherewithal to account not only for the conditions under which goods should not be sold, but also for what kinds of goods should not be for sale in a market economy. The political liberal can appeal to a principle of equal basic rights, and to one of sufficiency in basic needs and the social bases of self-respect, I argue, to account for what’s problematic about markets in civic goods, necessary goods, and physical goods including body parts and intimate services.

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Marmot ◽  
Ruth Bell

From the start, the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health built its case for taking action on the social determinants of health, unashamedly, on principles of social justice. Quite simply, the Commission stated that health inequities in the sense of avoidable and preventable differences in health between countries, and between groups within countries according to income, occupation, education, ethnicity or between men and women, are unjust. Taking this position has brought praise and blame: praise for the Commission’s boldness in putting fairness on the global health agenda1 in the face of the dominant global model of economic growth as an end in itself, and blame for the Commission’s unworldliness in apparently not recognising that economic arguments push the political agenda.


1970 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Taha

The discussion of the four categories of ending and closure in modern Arabic literature in terms of openness and closedness clearly indicates the interrelations between the ending and the model of the textual reality, and the interrelations between this model and the extra-literary reality. It seems that when the historical, and especially the political and the social reality slaps writers across the face and stands before them in all its might and immediacy, they do not remain indifferent and write a literature with optimistic, promising, and closed endings; and vice versa: a text with a model of reality which does not relate to a well defined piece of history ends with a more open type of ending and becomes a closure in the reader.


2018 ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Mona Chettri

‘Rowdies or rowdy’ refers to a person who fits somewhere between a gangster and a goon, not a criminal per se but prone to crime and violence, usually at the behest of political leaders. ‘Rowdies’ are the face of political movements, an integral and ubiquitous feature of Darjeeling politics. Their centrality to popular movements indicates a form of hill politics that challenges accepted notions of political participation, democracy, and mobilization. The essay engages in an assessment of the political culture of Darjeeling through the perspective of the ‘rowdies’ who are a product of the social, political, and material circumstances of postcolonial Darjeeling. It examines the vital role that ‘rowdies’ play in shaping the political terrain of the region and how their lives provide a context through which to understand contemporary state and society in Darjeeling.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-83
Author(s):  
Mudjahirin Thohir

to be able to live normally, human being struggle to fulfill their basic needs. The human basic  needs are: biological, social, and integrative. Biological needs include: food, clothing, and shelter. Social needs include:  interact, cooperate, compete, and social order. Integrative needs include the need for: freedom in justice in accordance with the agreed common reference. So that regularity of life is realized, then guidelines are needes that are concidered true and good.  There are five types of guidelines as a reference, namely:  constitutive faith, cognitive, evaluative, ethical, and  expressive. This is a reference as the ideal culture of society.  Although there are such guidelines, but in real  practice (real clture) violations often occur, including because of individual or group interest. As in ilustraton, it can be seen in the world of football, the concept of fairplay is manifested in the form of inappropriate actions. Not  to mention in the political and economic world. From this angle the concepts of fairness and justice are always warmly studied.  This paper discusses about it from the social sciences perspective, especially anthropology. Keywords: Basic need; guideline; ideal culture; real culture; fairplay. Intisari Untuk dapat hidup secara normal, manusia berjuang untuk memenuhi kebutuhan dasarnya. Kebutuhan-kebutuhan dasar itu ialah kebutuhan biologis, sosial, dan integratif. Kebutuhan biologis meliputi pangan, sandang, dan papan. Kebutuhan sosial meliputi kebutuhan berinteraksi, bekerjasama, dan bersaing. Kebutuhan integratif meliputi nilai-nilai, agar kegiatan bekerja sama maupun bersaing didasari oleh koridor nilai-nilai dan norma hukum yang adil.  Untuk dapat memenuhi kebutuhan dasar tersebut, secara ideal (ideal culture) masyarakat manusia memerlukan pedoman yang dianggap benar dan baik. bermuara kepada lima acuan, yaitu: konstitutif, kognitif, evaluatif, etik, dan ekspresif. Meskipun sudah ada pedoman, tetapi dalam kebudayaan riil (real culture) yakni dalam tataran praktik kehidupan, pedoman-pedoman tadi sering dilanggarnya. Dari sinilah nilai dan norma-norma hukum, hampir selalu menjadi ajang perdebatan, sebagaimana ilustrasi konsep fair play dalam pertandingan sepakbola.  Tulisan ini mendiskusikan mengenai persoalan adil dan keadilan sosial ditinjau dari perspektif antropologis. Kata kunci: Kebutuhan dasar; acuan; budaya ideal; budaya riil; fairplay.


Africa ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole Bjørn Rekdal

This article focuses on the symbolic qualities of sorghum beer and milk among the Iraqw of northern Tanzania. The author illustrates how the villagers in a southern Mbulu village handle and make use of these two products, and seeks to illuminate the manner in which they both become associated with qualities that are perceived as positive and desirable. With the spread of the market economy, and of money as a medium of exchange, the symbolic content of sorghum beer and milk has come under considerable pressure. As products in demand, they may today circulate in impersonal relations which lack the social and religious qualities that they traditionally communicated. The monetisation of sorghum beer and milk has not, however, caused a breakdown in established practices, or in the structures of meaning in which such practices are embedded. The article illuminates some of the processes which seem to be of importance in explaining this remarkable cultural continuity in the face of fairly radical social change. The examples of sorghum beer and milk seem to reflect and highlight more general dynamics of change and continuity among the Iraqw, and it is suggested that they may help to shed light on certain seemingly paradoxical ways in which the Iraqw have been conceived by outsiders and by members of neighbouring ethnic groups.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 628-645
Author(s):  
Hafizullah Emadi

Hindus and Sikhs, longtime minority religious communities in Afghanistan, have played a major role in the social, cultural, and economic development of the country. Their history in Afghanistan has not been faithfully documented nor relayed beyond the country's borders by their resident educated strata or religious leaders, rendering them virtually invisible and voiceless within and outside of their country borders. The situation of Hindu and Sikh women in Afghanistan is significantly more marginalized socially and politically. Gender equality and women's rights were central to the teachings of Guru Nanak, but gradually became irrelevant to the daily lives of his followers in Afghanistan. Hindu and Sikh women have sustained their hope for change and seized any opportunity presented to play a role in the process. Active participants in the social, cultural, and religious life of their respective communities as well as in Afghanistan's government, their contributions to social changes and the political process have gone mostly unnoticed and undocumented as their rights, equality, and standing in the domestic and public arena in Afghanistan continue to erode in the face of continuous discrimination and harassment.


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan

AbstractThis paper concerns the question of whether the political liberties tend to be valuable to the people who hold them. (In contrast, we might ask whether the liberties are valuable in the aggregate or are owed to people as a matter of justice, regardless of their value.) Philosophers have argued that the political liberties are needed or at least useful to lead a full, human life, to have one's social status and the social bases of self-respect secured, to make the government responsive to one's interests and generate preferred political outcomes, to participate in the process of social construction so that one can feel at home in the social world, to live autonomously as a member of society, to achieve education and enlightenment and take a broad view of the world and of others' interests, and to express oneself and one's attitudes about the political process and current states of affairs. I argue that for most people, the political liberties are not valuable for these reasons.


2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK A. RUSSELL

Hamburg's Bismarck memorial, unveiled in 1906, is considered to be one of the greatest expressions of Imperial Germany's Bismarck cult and an important development in the history of German memorial art. This article looks beyond these contextual categories to focus on the political and cultural exigencies specific to Hamburg which gave birth to the memorial. It suggests it was born of the desire of Hamburg's patrician classes to defend their political privileges in the face of dramatic social change and attendant demands for political reform. To those who presided over its construction, it was also a means of asserting Hamburg's cultural aspirations and of shrugging off a reputation as a city hostile to the arts. The article examines some of the memorial designs submitted to a competition as a means of illustrating the functions it was intended to fulfil, but argues that it failed to fulfil both. Meeting widespread disapproval among the working classes, the memorial could not stay their increasing support for the Social Democrats. Although widely admired, the monument did not stimulate further significant patronage of the arts in Hamburg.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 721-738 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gábor Scheiring ◽  
Kristóf Szombati

This article presents and empirically substantiates a theoretical account explaining the making and stabilisation of illiberal hegemony in Hungary. It combines a Polanyian institutionalist framework with a neo-Gramscian analysis of right-wing hegemonic strategy and a relational class analysis inspired by the political economy tradition in anthropology. The article identifies the social actors behind the illiberal transformation, showing how ‘neoliberal disembedding’ fuelled the rightward shift of constituencies who had erstwhile been brought into the fold of liberal hegemony: blue-collar workers, post-peasants and sections of domestic capital. Finally, the article describes the emergence of a new regime of accumulation and Fidesz’s strategy of ‘authoritarian re-embedding’, which relies on ‘institutional authoritarianism’ and ‘authoritarian populism’. This two-pronged approach has so far allowed the ruling party to stabilise illiberal hegemony, even in the face of reforms that have generated discontents and exacerbated social inequality.


Inner Asia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Ellis

This paper attempts to rethink the relationship between the practice of shamanism and the political-economic ‘context’ it is held to emerge from in contemporary Mongolia. In the face of an extraordinary ‘revival’ in shamanism, anthropologists have sought explanations for the phenomenon that centre around a concern with how to locate it in relation to the social, economic and political structures alongside which it manifests. Authors tend to produce accounts that either reduce shamanism to an expression of more fundamental material realities, or explore the cosmo-ontological parameters of the practice itself, in turn masking its articulation with other processes in the social field. This point will be illustrated with reference to a novel ethnography of the making of the shamanic gown in Ulaanbaatar. Yet more than this, it will be suggested that a more sustained reflection upon the nature of the shamanic gown, and consideration of new information regarding the processes that contribute to its creation, might provide the means to theorise in a rather different fashion. The shamanic gown and the people and things mobilised in its emergence do not simply collect social and theoretical contexts, but rather flow outward. As such, while being both intimately reactiveandirreducible to the adjacent realities, Mongolian shamanism also engages in themakingof these very structures. Shamanism and the making of shamanic gowns do not simply emerge from, or deny, contexts; they assemble them.


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