This Is Not a Game

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-82
Author(s):  
Daniel Renfrew

This chapter argues that lead poisoning acted as a metonym of a general social imaginary of crisis associated with the collapse of the neoliberal model while also being rooted in the legacies of the mid-twentieth-century Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period. The chapter counters Uruguay’s modern foundational myths of “exceptionalism” with social imaginaries anchored in the militant working-class history of La Teja. The chapter critically examines these foundational myths in relation to the all-encompassing socioeconomic crisis that began in 2002, arguing that activists interpreted the lead-poisoning epidemic within the working-class counter-narrative of Uruguayan national identity and history, politics and society, and in dialogue with a counter-imaginary of crisis linked to the material and symbolic fallout of the neoliberal order.

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1056-1057
Author(s):  
Ronald Beiner

Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 215The originality of Charles Taylor's thought can be seen in the fact that it is not easy to “place” his work over the last fifteen years in the categories of standard academic disciplines. It is not really political philosophy. It is not really sociology (though it perhaps leans more towards sociology than towards political philosophy). It is something else. But what? Cultural history and the history of philosophy clearly provide the materials for Taylor's enterprise, but whatever it is, it aims for something intellectually more ambitious than mere intellectual or cultural history. The term “social imaginary” in fact captures quite well this “unplaceability” of his work between philosophy and sociology.


1981 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Melvyn Dubofsky ◽  
David Brody ◽  
David Montgomery

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1449 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hilliard

This book reconsiders the workings of literacy and law in everyday life in early twentieth-century Britain. It does so through an analysis of an extraordinary criminal case from the 1920s—a poison-pen mystery that led to a miscarriage of justice and four criminal trials. The case, which unfolded in the coastal Sussex town of Littlehampton, proved as difficult to the police and the lawyers involved as any capital crime. Yet the offence in question was not murder, but libel, a crime involving words. So when a leading Metropolitan Police detective was tasked with solving the case, he questioned the residents of Littlehampton about their neighbours’ vocabularies, how often they wrote letters, what their handwriting was like, whether they swore. He assembled an ethnographic archive of working-class literacy. This book uses the materials generated by the investigation and the legal proceedings to examine, first, the variety of language used in working-class communities, and, second, the ways working-class people engaged with the legal system and vice versa. The four trials illustrate questions of access to justice; the relationship between respectability and credibility as a witness; and the largely forgotten history of criminal libel in modern times.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Jakub Štofaník

The article focuses on the role of religion among working-class inhabitants of two industrial towns in the Czech lands, Ostrava and Kladno, during the first half of twentieth century. It analyses the enormous conversion movement, the position of new actors of religious life, and the religious behavior of workers. Looking at the history of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the study understands religion as one of the constituent factors of society and its historic change. Traditional, new, and nonconformist religious actors appear as active agents in the private and public life of industrial towns. They mobilized workers, young people, and women, and they produced the major arena in which social, cultural, and church history come together.


Author(s):  
Gregory Wood

This introductory chapter explores the intertwined histories of smoking and the working class, pointing out the ubiquity of smoking in twentieth-century workplaces despite its marginalized presence in histories of labor. Moreover, the chapter shows that, as cigarette smoking and subsequent nicotine addiction became significant components of many working-class lives in the twentieth century, smokers in a multitude of workplaces shaped, established, and defended the work cultures that sustained their need to use nicotine regularly during the workday. These developments at times accommodated or challenged employers' rules that limited or even banned working-class smoking practices outright. Worker demands for the right to smoke, and their abilities to cultivate spaces and times (sometimes clandestinely) for smoking, underpinned a new dimension of shop floor politics in the cigarette century.


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