“A General Principle of Democracy”

2018 ◽  
pp. 44-73
Author(s):  
Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Colonial Violence

“Terror,” like “security,” is a keyword of contemporary political and economic order. This chapter denaturalizes the term’s latter-day resonance via an examination of its longer history within the context of a specifically colonial modernity. The politics of terror, this chapter contends, are expressed in and by three primary modalities. In the first instance, terror—the sublime terror of the state of nature—is a pretext for the imposition of imperial power. In the second instance, terror is a method employed by the imperial security state to guarantee the conditions and outcome of capital accumulation. Finally, terror is a strategy of resistance to colonial violence.

The Terror of Invulnerability

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-82
Author(s):  
Rahul Rao
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Right

THE IDEA OF a world without vulnerability is an oddly terrifying prospect. Perhaps ‘prospect’ isn’t quite the right word because politics in colonial modernity has long taken the form of seeking escape from vulnerability in ways that displace it on to others. We might think of the state of nature as a fabled representation of severe and widespread vulnerability in which, prior to the establishment of a social contract, every individual is vulnerable to attack from every other. The establishment of the state, while theoretically eliminating the vulnerability of individuals ...

Implications

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Widerquist ◽  
Grant S. McCall
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Property ◽  
Government Failure ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Best Response ◽  
Lockean Proviso ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Taking Action ◽  
Disadvantaged People

Earlier chapters of this book found that the Hobbesian hypothesis is false; the Lockean proviso is unfulfilled; contemporary states and property rights systems fail to meet the standard that social contract and natural property rights theories require for their justification. This chapter assesses the implications of those findings for the two theories. Section 1 argues that, whether contractarians accept or reject these findings, they need to clarify their argument to remove equivocation. Section 2 invites efforts to refute this book’s empirical findings. Section 3 discusses a response open only to property rights theorists: concede this book’s empirical findings and blame government failure. Section 4 considers the argument that this book misidentifies the state of nature. Section 5 considers a “bracketing strategy,” which admits that observed stateless societies fit the definition of the state of nature, but argues that they are not the relevant forms of statelessness today. Section 6 discusses the implications of accepting both the truth and relevance of the book’s findings, concluding that the best response is to fulfil the Lockean proviso by taking action to improve the lives of disadvantaged people.

The Power of Public Positions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
Sufficient Condition ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient Condition ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

The Kantian account of political authority holds that the state is a necessary and sufficient condition of our freedom. We cannot be free outside the state, Kantians argue, because any attempt to have the “acquired rights” necessary for our freedom implicates us in objectionable relations of dependence on private judgment. Only in the state can this problem be overcome. But it is not clear how mere institutions could make the necessary difference, and contemporary Kantians have not offered compelling explanations. A detailed analysis is presented of the problems Kantians identify with the state of nature and the objections they face in claiming that the state overcomes them. A response is sketched on behalf of Kantians. The key idea is that under state institutions, a person can make claims of acquired right without presupposing that she is by nature exceptional in her capacity to bind others.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Local Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
First Time

After war, rebuilding the state’s presence—or building it up for the first time—is both a physical and social endeavor requiring new norms of compliance and cooperation. Local authority is deeply contested and the state typically has minimal presence. These conditions are akin to those described in the state of nature. To escape these conditions, Hobbes and Locke argued for the necessity of a sovereign to impose order and impartial justice to form what I call the kernel of the state. Extralegal groups orient societies in that direction by performing a set of visible and hidden functions in contemporary post-conflict environments. But they are not intentionally state-making. Rather, extralegal groups are driven by the need to create a stable trading environment and state-making is a by-product of this imperative. In the contemporary era, the motivation that drives extralegal groups to begin state-making is trade, not war.

Capital Switching and the Role of Ground Rent: 1 Theoretical Problems

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
R J King
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Rent Extraction ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Speculative Investment ◽  
Capital Switching

The flow of both productive and speculative investment into housing relates to the state of capital accumulation in other economic sectors, as hypothesised in the ‘circuits of capital’ argument, but it also relates to the incentive to ‘switch’ investment into and out of housing, and therefore to expectations of ground rent and the (changing) social conditions that enable ground rent extraction. This is the first of three papers in which the relationships involved in these processes are explored. A series of theoretical problems arising from the argument are dealt with, principally relating to its seeming economic determinism and to an inappropriately narrow treatment of crisis and social change. In the subsequent papers, in this journal, these various ideas will be used to reflect on housing market and related social change in Melbourne from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Arrighi’s Theory of systemic cycles of capital accumulation as a mechanism of cyclical development of the Global Economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 966-981
Author(s):  
Sergey Gennadyevich Kapkanshchikov
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Global Analysis ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
World Economic Order

The article uses the methodology of systemic global analysis and the theory of systemic cycles of capital accumulation to argue that we are now at a turning point of the modern era in connection with the unfolding change in the dominant world economic order. Based on the methodological approach, within the framework of which there is a hegemonic country and the rest of the world, the forecast regarding the forthcoming multipolarity of the world economy is rejected. Various stages of capital and financial expansion with their inherent, respectively, dirigistic and liberal models of state regulation of the economy are compared to each other. A chronological overview of the Spanish-Genoese, Dutch, British, American and Asian accumulation cycles is presented. The patterns of their change in the course of the formation of new technological structures are revealed. The place of Russia in the process of natural evolution of world economic structures is also identified. The objective and subjective reasons for the longterm hegemony of the United States, as well as factors of the upcoming completion of the American cycle of capital accumulation in the foreseeable future, are revealed. The author outlines the tactics employed by the American authorities to counteract the objective hegemonic cycles. The reasons for the movement of the center of the world economy to the East Asian region are revealed, with the justification of the need for a natural inclusion of Russia in the functioning of the Asian world economic order.

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