Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: on Piketty’s Capital and Ideology

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
Martin O’Neill

Abstract Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology constitutes a landmark achievement in furthering our understanding of the history of inequality, and presents valuable proposals for constructing a future economic system that would allow us to transcend and move beyond contemporary forms of capitalism. This article discusses Piketty’s conceptions of ideology, property, and ‘inequality regimes’, and analyses his approach to social justice and its relation to the work of John Rawls. I examine how Piketty’s proposals for ‘participatory socialism’ would function not only to redistribute income and wealth, but also to disperse economic power within society, and I discuss the complementary roles of redistribution and predistribution in his proposals, and Piketty’s place in a tradition of egalitarian political economy associated with James Meade and Anthony Atkinson. Having elaborated on Piketty’s account of the relationship between economic policy and ideational change, and his important idea of the ‘desacralization’ of private property, I develop ‘seven theses’ on his proposals for participatory socialism, examining areas in which his approach could be enhanced or extended, so as to create a viable twenty-first century version of democratic socialism.

Author(s):  
Roger T. Ames

Perhaps the most important international relationship in the twenty-first century is that between America and China. Given the often delicate and sometimes underproductive history of the relationship between America and China broadly, this chapter argues that American pragmatism might serve as a vocabulary to promote a positive dialogue between these cultures at a moment in history when such a conversation is imperative. These commonalities provide a language introducing Confucian philosophy to the Western academy and also an external perspective from which to examine the presuppositions of our own worldview and common sense. The chapter compares the central Confucian notion of relationally constituted persons (ren 仁)— or human “becomings”—with Dewey’s technical term, “individuality.” It explores the centrality of moral imagination in Confucian role ethics and in Deweyan ethics and also concludes that these two traditions share the idea of a human-centered religiousness.


1987 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibyl Schwarzenbach

A careful, theoretical clarification of gender roles has only recently begun in social and political philosophy. It is the aim of the following piece to reveal that an analysis of women’s traditional position - her distinctive activities, labor and surrounding sense of ‘mine’ - can not only make valuable contributions towards clarifying traditional property disputes, but may even provide elements for a new conception of ownership. By way of illustration, the article focusses on the influential work of John Rawls and argues that - when Rawls’s own analysis and principles of justice are supplemented by an account of what is here called ‘reproductive labor’ - his theory in fact tends to a form of democratic socialism. Stated somewhat differently, my aim is to shift the terms of the property debate as posed by Rawls fromwithinhis own position. I hope to show that the real ownership question which now emerges is no longerwhether‘justice as fairness’ countenances a private property or socialist form of democracy, but what preciseformsuch a socialism should take.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Martin Shaw

This chapter examines the functioning of the feminist NGO Associated Women of Zimbabwe (AWZ) to highlight varieties of feminism and the influence of a political and economic crisis on a feminist organization in Zimbabwe at the turn of the twenty-first century. After providing a brief history of AWZ, the chapter considers its experiences to demonstrate how women consciously organize to fight sexism in Zimbabwean society. It then explores AWZ's role in the political process as it advocated for women and promoted women's civil rights in the context of increasing political competition, electoral violence, and a declining economy. It also discusses cosmopolitan feminism in Zimbabwe and the relationship between AWZ and the state—especially in relation to the politics of inclusion, state-sponsored violence, and economic decline; explains how an organization that once stood against government lost its edge, even as government became more oppressive; and analyzes the fiction of Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. The chapter concludes by showing what happens to an NGO dependent on international donors when the money stream begins to dry up.


2021 ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Agnes Arnold-Forster

This chapter concludes that cancer’s incurability was not just an obstacle to overthrow, but a galvanizing and intellectually provocative idea that shifted medicine, health care, and professional identity in profound and lasting ways. It enabled the construction of professional credentials and community values; turned hospitals into places for treating ‘terminal’ illness; made possible the invention of new forms and rationales of intervention; and brought into being certain modes of investigating the disease such as mapping, the microscope, and discourses of progress and decline. I also suggest that it is almost impossible to research and write a history of cancer without reflecting on its contemporary life. This chapter explores the relationship between cancer then and now and reappraises the twenty-first-century disease.


1938 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-141
Author(s):  
R. E. M. Wheeler

The excavation of Verulamium in the years 1930–4 originated in a coincidence of archaeological need and local opportunity. The former, at this late date, needs no elaboration; the latter, it may be recalled, lay in the acquisition, by the Borough of St. Albans, of the southern half of the walled site, now known to have taken shape in the second century A.D. A central area within the new Corporation property accordingly remained for three years the main focus of the excavations, supplemented by an intensive examination of the town-defences, including two wall-towers and three gateways, of which two lay on property retained by Lord Verulam.Archaeologically, the problem confronting the excavators was twofold: to establish (for the first time) the outlines of the economic history of a major Romano-British town deep-set in the 'lowland zone'; and to determine the relationship, topographically and culturally, of the successive Belgic and Roman settlements. It was a familiar fact that Verulamium had held an important royal mint at the beginning of the first century A.D., and, whether the term municipium applied by Tacitus to the town in A.D. 61 be taken at face-value or no, the chance of observing the growth of a first-class Roman city out of a first-class pre-Roman one was unsurpassed on any other site. It was, therefore, essential that the exploration of a part of the Roman city should be accompanied by a systematic search for its predecessor.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
Resha T. Swanson

Post-Reconstruction Black Codes implemented throughout the South stunted the economic mobility of Black workers and replicated the free labor system of slavery (Nittle, 2021). While these laws were abandoned or outlawed over time (Nittle, 2021; PBS, 2017), the use of contemporary preemption in Southern states acts as a de facto continuation of Black Codes by barring legislation, often from progressive cities and municipalities, that seeks to strengthen rights and protections for Black workers throughout the region. In order to properly understand the unique racial, political, and economic entanglement between twenty-first century preemption and the oppression of Black workers, one must first explore the origins of preemption and the history of Black worker oppression in the South. This examination provides the backdrop for modern attempts to suppress Black workers in states like Alabama and Tennessee. A closer look at the deep political divisions between Southern legislatures and urban municipalities in their states offer arguments, though unfounded and insufficient, in favor of preemption, and outline the challenges worker advocates face when addressing the problem. Despite its challenges, it is critical for organizers to continue fighting preemption using creative strategies and to reaffirm the rights and advancement of Black workers.  


2020 ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Simon Peng-Keller ◽  
David Neuhold

Abstract The first chapter of this edited volume traces the history of documenting spiritual care. By referring to ancient and early modern practices, the relationship between spiritual (self-) care and various forms of documentation is outlined. The focus lies on developments in the twentieth and the twenty-first century, although the question of what constitutes an adequate practice of documenting healthcare chaplaincy is as old as the profession itself. The pioneers of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) – Richard Cabot, Anton Boisen, Russell L. Dicks, and others – developed distinctive forms of recording for different purposes. For example, procedures of documentation that are prepared for and helpful to the pastors themselves as “self-criticism,” “self-improvement,” or even “self-revelation” have been distinguished from documentation practices that are intra- or interprofessional. Regarding more recent developments in documentation, the introduction of electronic patient records (EMRs) was critical. We present a case study from Kenya to show how the issues discussed here are encountered in a non-Euro-American context.


This book offers an account on the last eight decades of British and Irish prose fiction. It begins during the Second World War, when novel production fell by more than a third, and ends at a time when new technologies have made possible the publication of an unprecedented number of fiction titles and have changed completely the relationship between authors, publishers, the novel, and the reader. The chapters look at the impact of global warfare on the novel from the Second World War to the Cold War to the twenty-first century; the reflexive continuities of late modernism; the influence of film and television on the novel form; mobile and fluid connections between sexuality, gender, and different periods of women’s writing; a broad range of migrant and ethnic fictions; and the continuities and discontinuities of prose fiction in different regional, national, class, and global contexts. Across the volume there is a blurring of the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction, as the literary thinking of the period is traced in the spy novel, the children’s novel, the historical novel, the serial novel, shorter fiction, the science fiction novel, and the comic novel. The final chapters of the volume explore the relationship of twenty-first century fiction to post-war culture, and show how this new fiction both emerges from the history of the novel, and prefigures the novel to come.


Author(s):  
Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen

This chapter offers a history of Dutch translations of Paradise Lost, from the early eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. The focus is on the question of how Dutch translators have grappled with two issues: the epic’s verse form, especially its lack of rhyme and syntactic idiosyncrasies; and its politico-religious dimension, its complex view of the relationship between earthly and divine authority, as well as its anti-predestinarian stance. The history of Paradise Lost in Dutch, which starts with the translation of Van Zanten in 1728, is characterized by an unresolved formal struggle with Milton’s blank verse, embraced unreservedly only in the early twentieth century, with translator Gutteling. Before 1900, the politico-religious dimension of Paradise Lost was at the fore for translators, yet this aspect of the poem has receded in prominence, with translators after 1900 presenting the poem instead as a timeless and self-contained work of literary genius.


Author(s):  
Peter Boxall ◽  
Bryan Cheyette

This chapter addresses the future of the novel. It also reflects on the possibility and nature of historical change. The push and pull between the novel as an expressive symptom of an ailing culture, and the novel as the engine for the production of new cultural possibilities, runs through the long history of novelists’ reflections on the future of the novel. From our perspective in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the perception of a watershed triggered by 1973, and a new understanding of the relationship between style, fiction, and knowledge, seems remarkably prescient. Moreover, the new generation of novelists that have emerged since the turn of the century have collectively registered the re-emergence of a kind of historical vitality in the culture.


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