Political Economy and the Science of Economics in Victorian Britain

Author(s):  
Keith Tribe

This chapter looks at the historical understanding of political economy. It also describes the transformation of political economy as a general understanding of wealth and its distribution to a new science of economics. This transition can be linked to the expanding system of public education during the later end of the nineteenth century and the reorganisation of university life around teaching and research in modern subjects. The movement for wider access to higher education was associated with the formation of new university subjects in the humanities. Among these modern subjects, commerce and economics were prominent as new disciplines of study relevant to the modern world.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Bishop

This chapter looks at how suitable the current equality policies of Wales's universities are to compete in the current economic climate and the changes needed to deliver best value to people with disabilities and all other taxpayers. The chapter makes the finding that universities are too bloated, by carrying out functions, which in Wales could be better handled by the public sector that is under direct control of the Welsh Government's education minister. This would involve learning from how the telecoms and energy companies work UK wide, so that HEFCfW becomes an infrastructure provider, Estyn would become responsible for ensuring the equality of access to higher education and ensuring the standards of university education. Universities would thus consist mainly of teaching and research staff, optimising how they use the infrastructure to attract the most students to their degrees, which are homogenised. The chapter makes clear, however, that whilst this policy would likely work in Wales, it would be unlikely to in England, perhaps allowing “clear red water” between governments.


Author(s):  
François Dubet

En este texto se busca establecer parámetros para responder  a la pregunta ¿qué son los estudiantes?, en el contexto de la educación superior en Francia, considerando, en principio, la aparición de dos procesos que dominan la vida universitaria de dicho país desde hace 40 años: la masificación del acceso a los estudios superiores y la diversificación de la oferta universitaria. Se revisan las múltiples variantes que arroja el traslape de estos dos fenómenos partiendo de dos premisas: los estudiantes incluyen, a la vez, a gran parte de la juventud, una juventud definida por condiciones de vida que rebasan a la propia universidad, y también son estudiantes propiamente dichos, definidos por condiciones de estudios particulares. El estudiante no se puede reducir ni a su papel ni a su condición, sino que elabora una experiencia que articula una manera de ser joven y una relación con los estudios.A través del análisis del recorrido que representa la vida estudiantil se intenta comprender, también, por qué el mundo estudiantil, pese a estar débilmente organizado, se constituye como actor colectivo durante algunas movilizaciones masivas y movimientos que plantean frecuentemente a la sociedad francesa el problema del lugar y la función de la enseñanza superior.AbstractThis article attempts to establish parameters in order to answer the question: What are students? within the context of higher education in France , considering, firstly, the appearance of two processes ruling university life in that country for the last 40 years: the mass access to higher education and the diversification of the university offer. This works reviews the multiple variants that these two overlapping phenomena yield, starting from two premises: the students include, at the same time, a great part of today's youth, a youth defined by living conditions that surpass the university itself, and they are also students, defined by conditions of particular studies. The student can not be reduced either to his/her role or to his /her condition, but he/she creates an experience that articulates a way of being young and a relationship with studies.Through the analysis of what student life represents, we also attempt to understand why the student world, in spite of being weakly organized, becomes a collective actor during some mass demonstrations and movements that frequently pose to French society the problem of the place and function of higher education.


1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
James Tunstead Burtchaell

Looking backward from the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England had disappointingly little scholarly achievement of which to boast since the Reformation. Henry Holden, Charles Butler, John Lingard—all were men to be proud of, but Catholics of such intellectual bent were so few. And understandably so. The penal laws had effectively deprived the recusants of any access to higher education, and would perdure until the latter nineteenth century. Squires whose sons were barred for their faith from most schools and from the two universities had to be content to enroll them quietly at one or another of the exile schools across the channel. The Irish immigrants who later came to fill and overspill the churches in the nineteenth century had even less exposure to—and perhaps appetite for—scholarship. And the clergy who shepherded this extraordinary flock of secluded gentry and boisterous working folk pursued a highly sacramental and understandably unsophisticated pastorate. The Church naturally felt itself somewhat put upon, and fell into rather defensive postures. Scholarship would appear as a luxury at best, and at worst as a weapon that the Establishment seemed always more adept and smooth at handling.


Author(s):  
Lindsay Farmer

One of the most important and distinctive themes of Lacey’s recent work has been the analysis of penal practices from the perspective of political economy. However, it is arguably the case that ‘political economy’ is primarily viewed as a dimension of the context in which the criminal law develops rather than as a method of legal analysis. In this chapter I explore the meaning and critical potential of the concept of political economy—how it is used by Lacey, the different traditions that she draws on—and what the perspective and theory of political economy contributes to our understanding of criminal law. I seek to deepen the relevance of political economy to the analysis of criminal responsibility by exploring how the development of the modern conception of English criminal law in the early nineteenth century was itself shaped by contemporary understandings of political economy. Most historical work on the development of the modern criminal law has focused on the impact of utilitarianism to show how changes in penal laws and institutions were linked to new efforts to shape individual conduct in society. However, equally important to the intellectual and political culture of the early nineteenth century were understandings of the new ‘science’ of political economy. This chapter explores the ways in which theories of political economy shaped the modern criminal law in this period and thereby to open up new possibilities for exploring connections between criminal law, criminal responsibility, and political economy—and thus for critical criminal law theory.


1961 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 513-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Semmel

In 1948, in an address before this association, the late J. B. Brebner spoke of laissez-faire as a “myth,” describing it as a battle cry of the middle classes in their struggle with the landed aristocracy, and noting particularly that the philosophic Radicals—the Benthamites—were proponents not of laissez-faire, as they had been represented to be, but of a new bureaucratic collectivism. It is becoming clear that the reputed mid-Victorian policy of “anti-colonialism” is likewise a myth, as two Cambridge dons argued in an article in 1953, for England continued to extend her empire—both “formal” and “informal”—during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Was the policy which led to the extension of the empire in direct contradiction to the ideas of the men who had revealed the absurdities of the “Old Colonial System” in the bright beam of the new science of political economy and had brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and of the Navigation Acts in 1849? Or is the “anti-colonialism” of Radical doctrine also a myth? I hope to show that Benthamite Radicals, far from being ideological opponents of colonialism, as they are usually depicted, were advocates of positive programs of empire, and, grounding their argument upon the new economic science, constructed and maintained a set of doctrines of which the keystone was the necessity of empire to an industrial England.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-59
Author(s):  
Olivia Mason ◽  
Nick Megoran

The increased reliance of universities on a pool of highly skilled but poorly paid casualised academic labour for teaching and research has emerged as a defining feature of higher education provision under neoliberal New Public Management. Based on seventeen visual timeline interviews with academics in the North East of England, this article augments and extends existing studies of precarity through a framing of dehumanisation and humanisation. Specifically, we suggest that casualisation is dehumanising in four ways: it renders individuals invisible; it leaves them vulnerable to exploitation; it denies them academic freedom; and it hampers them in constructing a life narrative projecting into the future. We conclude that casualisation is not simply the product of a reprehensible political economy, but that it is an afront to the very meaning and dignity of being human.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOCELYN PAUL BETTS

Samuel Laing was a key figure in propagating both an academically respectable defense of peasant proprietors and a critique of bureaucratic central government in Victorian Britain, his writings cited and argued with by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Austin (among others). This article corrects misapprehensions that Laing was a libertarian apologist for unfettered commercialism and complacent patriotism. It situates Laing in his argumentative contexts to show him as a critic of conventional political economy who called for a “natural” society of self-governing freeholders like that he observed in Norway, but who gradually became ambivalently caught between a British commercial and aristocratic order and a Continental model of greater property diffusion and strong central government. Laing's story sheds new light on the complex afterlives of republican and civic themes in nineteenth-century Britain, and their interaction with emergent concerns over the dangers to active citizenship of both wage labor in international markets and centralizing bureaucracies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 132-150
Author(s):  
Jason Annetts ◽  
Hazel Work ◽  
Andrea Cameron ◽  
Amy Miller ◽  
Vilja Niitamo ◽  
...  

The paper examines the experience and performance of Abertay Access to Higher Education programme, AHEAD. The research is largely based on a qualitative analysis of two focus groups and nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews with former AHEAD students. A statistical analysis of the performance of all AHEAD students on their chosen undergraduate degrees between 2012-13 and 2016-17 was also conducted. The paper demonstrates that AHEAD is an effective alternative route to higher education and argues that university-based access courses may be better in preparing these students for the culture and rigours of university life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Moeniera Moosa ◽  
Dale Langsford

Prospective students have both expectations and anxieties about what their imminent university experiences might entail. In this study, we compare first-year students' expectations with their experiences of being included and excluded while settling into university life. Our participants in this qualitative phenomenological research study were 322 first-year students. We use insights from social and pedagogic inclusion to critique Tinto's (1983) model of the transition of students from schooling to higher education settings. The findings indicate that participants experienced mastery of knowledge, procedures, and structures of the institution as a point of exclusion almost 8% more than they expected. The participants also experienced personal disposition and relationships to be a point of exclusion 24% less than they expected. We recommend that university orientation programmes place more focus on the academic expectations of university since this was an aspect on which participants did not focus much. In addition, these findings also have implications for how universities conceptualise and implement the move to online learning which is often viewed as the solution to increasing access to higher education.


1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Fernández ◽  
Miguel A. Mateo ◽  
José Muñiz

The conditions are investigated in which Spanish university teachers carry out their teaching and research functions. 655 teachers from the University of Oviedo took part in this study by completing the Academic Setting Evaluation Questionnaire (ASEQ). Of the three dimensions assessed in the ASEQ, Satisfaction received the lowest ratings, Social Climate was rated higher, and Relations with students was rated the highest. These results are similar to those found in two studies carried out in the academic years 1986/87 and 1989/90. Their relevance for higher education is twofold because these data can be used as a complement of those obtained by means of students' opinions, and the crossing of both types of data can facilitate decision making in order to improve the quality of the work (teaching and research) of the university institutions.


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