scholarly journals Dancing and Calculating: Culturally sustainable development and globalization in light of two paradigms of socio-cultural evolution

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (70) ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Vjeran Katunarić
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Conceptual Foundation ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Developmental Policies ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract Globalization challenges the usefulness of different paradigms of socio-cultural evolution and opens the possibility for their hybridization. In this paper, two paradigms of evolution, the transformational (Spencerian) and the variational / selectionist (Darwinian), as discerned by Fracchia and Lewontin (1999), are examined along with their social theoretical counterparts. Most social theories of development are connected to different evolutionary paradigms in different historical contexts. The transformational paradigm prevailed until the end of the Cold War (e.g. theories of modernization), and the selectionist paradigm, in various theoretical forms, thereafter (e.g. Huntington, Eisenstadt). Most developmental policies today prefer the selectionist paradigm in terms of the neoliberal free market. The transformational paradigm in development policies was predominant in the era of the welfare state in the West, and its counterpart in the era of the statism of the East. Sustainable development in a socio-cultural sense is the youngest and the least consistent policy concept, and it is not founded on the evolution paradigms. The concept was launched by the UN as an attempt at mediating, mostly on the grounds of ecological alarms, between the free-market and statist policies. The author considers the hybridization of these two paradigms to be a proper conceptual foundation of sustainable development. On this premise, he expounds the concept of a culturally oriented sustainable development, arguing that hybrids of developmental policies are more suitable for a decent survival of most countries.

Cold-War Commons: Tragedy, Critique, and the Future of the Illiberal Problem Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-488
Author(s):  
Monica Eppinger
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Problem Space ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Property Regimes

Abstract Major twentieth-century social theories like socialism and liberalism depended on property as an explanatory principle, prefiguring a geopolitical rivalry grounded in differing property regimes. This article examines the Cold War as an under-analyzed context for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” In Soviet practice, collectivization was meant to provide the material basis for cultivating particular forms of sociability and an antidote to the ills of private property. Outsiders came to conceptualize it as tragic in both economic and political dimensions. Understanding the commons as a site of tragedy informed Western “answers” to the “problem” of Soviet collective ownership when the Cold War ended. Privatization became a mechanism for defusing old tragedies, central to a post-Cold War project of advancing “market democracy.” Meanwhile, the notion of an “illiberal commons” stands ready for redeployment in future situations conceived as tragically problematic.

‘Communism Is a Religion That Is Inspired, Directed and Motivated by the Devil Himself’: Billy Graham’s Apologetics and the Cold War West

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Uta Andrea Balbier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
End Times ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

Anti-Communism constituted a core feature of Billy Graham’s preaching in the 1950s. In Graham’s sermons Communism did not just stand for the anti-religious thread of an atheistic ideology, as it was traditionally used in Protestant Fundamentalist circles, but also for its opposition to American freedom and Free Market Capitalism. This article argues that the term Communism took on significantly new meaning in the evangelical milieu after the Second World War, indicating the new evangelicals’ ambition to restore, defend, and strengthen Christianity by linking it into the discourse on American Cold War patriotism. This article will contrast the anti-Communist rhetoric of Billy Graham and other leading evangelical figures of the 1950s, such as Harold Ockenga, with the anti-Communist rhetoric used by early Fundamentalists in the 1910s and 1920s. Back then, Communism was predominantly interpreted as a genuine threat to Christianity. The term also made appearances in eschatological interpretations regarding the imminent end-times. The more secular interpretation of Communism as a political and economic counter-offer by evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham will be discussed as an important indicator of the politicization and implied secularization of the evangelical milieu after the Second World War.

Negotiations and Social Democracy in South Africa

1990 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Southall
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Free Market ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
New Right ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
New Situation

Whilst the so-called ‘new right’ shrilly proclaims victory for capitalism and liberal democracy in the cold war, quieter voices see in the death agonies of European Stalinism the seeds of socialism more as it was meant to be. I refer not any triumphal Trotskyist depiction of the popular overthrow of bureaucratised ruling classes, but rather to wide-spread searchings throughout Eastern Europe for ‘a third – and better – way’. From this perspective, however much the electoral thaw may give rise to stridently anti-communist, anti-central planning, pro free-market parties, the dynamics of the new situation will virtually require pursuit of a mixed economy featuring selective state intervention.

scholarly journals Welfare Mentality as a Challenge to European Sustainable Development. What Role for Youth Inclusion and Institutions?

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 3549
Author(s):  
Andreea-Oana Iacobuță ◽  
Mihaela Ifrim
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
Employment Education ◽  
Main Determinants ◽  
Redistribution Function ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Welfare State

This paper takes a free-market approach to the idea of welfare. That is, the analysis does not reject the role of the welfare state to fight against poverty and inequality but underlines the perils of the welfare mentality’s proliferation. Sustainable development requires more individual responsibility and less dependence on the state and its redistribution function. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims at showing that welfare mentality imposes challenges on sustainable development. The second aim is to identify the factors associated with welfare mentality. We use data from several international databases and apply correlation, principal components, and multiple regression analyses on a sample of 28 European countries. The results of our study show that welfare mentality negatively influences sustainable development by being positively correlated with the risk of poverty and the percentage of young people not in employment, education, or training (NEET). At the same time, countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Luxembourg, widely acknowledged as welfare policy heavens, register low values in terms of preference for redistribution. The main determinants of welfare mentality are found to be a high level of NEET and a low level of economic freedom. This result points to the role of youth inclusion and free-market institutions in diminishing people’s welfare expectations and encouraging them to take better control of their own lives to reach prosperity and not depending on state support.

“Your Grandchildren Will Grow Up Under Communism!”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria M. Grieve
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Democratic Capitalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
Advertising Council ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Market Capitalism

A potent weapon in the Cold War, advertising relied on the notion of childhood innocence to promote Cold War containment at home and to advance a crucial pillar of US Cold War ideology abroad—the superiority of free market capitalism over communism. This chapter analyzes how images of children and ideas about childhood informed several major Advertising Council public service campaigns as well as consumer advertising during the 1950s. The distinction between domestic advertising and foreign propaganda during the Cold War was often a fine one, as both routinely used images of children to represent the nation to Americans and to potential allies around the world. In the hands of government propagandists and corporate advertisers, children simultaneously functioned as symbols of the happiness and security that could be achieved through a commitment to democratic capitalism and as symbols illustrating the nation’s vulnerability to the spread of Soviet communism.

Market Triumphalism and the Wishful Liberals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter focuses on the triumphalism of the free market that emerged in the decade that followed the end of the Cold War. The idea that capitalist markets are essential to, or even define, the democratic idea has always been present in the West, but the idea achieved a near hegemonic power after the fall of the Berlin Wall. New Dealers and old-fashioned populists once held that laissez-faire capitalism presented the gravest danger to freedom, democracy, equality, and the material well-being of most citizens. But Americans were now told to believe that democracy and the free market are identical. And in a maddening piece of ideological larceny, market triumphalists invoked that ultimate sanction—once the principal asset of the left—the stamp of historic inevitability.

The Uses of the Foreign Student

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret O’Mara
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Foreign Students ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
International Educational Exchange ◽  
The Cold War

The rise of the global university is often associated with the concomitant wave of late twentieth-century neoliberalism and privatization and correlated with universities embracing “corporate” models of governance. However, it is a phenomenon with roots in the earliest years of the Cold War that emerged out of a set of institutions and policies with diplomatic rather than explicitly economic aims. Notable among these were the programs aimed at bringing foreign students and scholars to the United States and exporting American-style educational experiences abroad. While only a fraction of these foreign visitors had the US government as their primary financial sponsor, they as a class became the object onto which political values of a particular era were projected, from the postwar internationalism of the Truman years to the Great Society liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson to the free market ethos of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The decentralized and privatized means by which policy makers administered these measures obscured the degree to which they influenced the shape of the higher education system and their wider impacts on the American economy and society. This article explores international educational exchange as a critical element of American universities’ evolving public identity during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods and as an example of the governmental use of the university as an agent of state power and as a tool of political ideology.

“Business Responsibilities in a Divided World”: The Cold War Roots of the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bert Spector
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Social Responsibility ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Harvard Business Review ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Good Society ◽  
Social Good ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Corporate Social

Both business executives and management scholars have, in recent years, focused a great deal of attention on the theme of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Calls for business leaders to expend resources on behalf of “social good” tend to downplay, if not ignore, what is fundamentally an ideological question: just what is a “good” society and who defines “goodness”? The ideological underpinnings of social responsibility and its relationship to the “good” society can be explored through an historical perspective. The roots of the CSR movement trace back to the early years of the Cold War. Led by Donald K David, Dean of the Harvard Business School and supported by other academics and executives given voice on the pages of the Harvard Business Review, advocates urged expanded business social responsibility as a means of aligning business interests with the defense of free-market capitalism against what was depicted as the clear-and-present danger of Soviet Communism. Today's enthusiastic calls for business to “do well by doing good” could benefit from a similar critical analysis not just of the goals of CSR but also the ideological assumptions, often unacknowledged, that underlie those goals.

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