scholarly journals MONEY AS FRAME

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (60) ◽  
pp. 158-174
Author(s):  
Nicholas Huber

This essay responds to “Money as Art: The Form, the Material, and Capital” by the Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas with refer-ence to the triple manifestation of crisis in the United States dur-ing the spring months of 2020. By triangulating the role of money in the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing mass unemployment, and the historical nationwide revolt in response to the police mur-der of George Floyd predicated on a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, Nicholas Huber makes a three-part claim. First, that acceptance of the Marxist theory of fetishism forecloses the possibility of conceiv-ing of capitalist money as art in the sense developed by Lapavitsas, insofar as the latter tends toward transhistorical concepts of both art and money. Following from this, any aesthetic function of mon-ey in the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from its total social function; that is, capitalist money is at once an economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic mediation unlike any other. Finally, Huber draws on Louis Marin’s typology of the frame in correspond-ence with Erik Olin Wright’s integrated class analytic framework to argue that the question of whether money is art or not leads us to a dead end. Huber suggests that a crisis such as the one unfolding in 2020 raises instead the more challenging question of what social system must come into being, such that a theory of capitalist money as art becomes intelligible.

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-145
Author(s):  
Ethan B. Kapstein

This article sheds light on the role of foreign direct investment as an instrument for economic development and, in turn, for the advancement of U.S. foreign policy goals during the Cold War. From the earliest days of the Cold War, and especially after the U.S.-Soviet competition for influence in the developing world began in the 1950s, the United States sought to promote private enterprise on behalf of U.S. goals. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. officials believed that foreign investment would suffice to fuel international development, obviating the need for official development assistance. These hopes, however, were largely disappointed. On the one hand, U.S.-based multinational companies preferred to invest in the industrial world; on the other hand, some Third World governments were uninterested in promoting private enterprise rather than state-led development. In part because foreign investment did not meet expectations, the U.S. government ended up elaborating an official foreign aid program instead.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Weimer

Reality is complex, and often does not lend itself to generalization or simplifying explanations. Yet at the same time, explaining reality often requires the shaping of notions and concepts of it through generalization and the reduction of complexity. This tension between complexity and particularity on the one hand and generalization and the search for abstracting explanatory patterns on the other is beautifully illustrated by two recently released publications on precaution and risk regulation in the United States and Europe, namely “The Politics of Precaution” by David Vogel1 and “The Reality of Precaution” edited by Jonathan Wiener, Michael Rogers, James Hammitt, and Peter Sand.Both books together can be seen as the latest significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of the precautionary principle in risk regulation in a comparative EU-US perspective. Both contributions are significant in that they consolidate the trend towards an empirically informed analysis of the actual practice of the application of precaution in risk regulation.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika V. Ossipova

For several centuries the overall trend in the world development has been along the way paved by Western civilization. Hence, the predominant flow has been based on borrowed Western cultural features. The issue of cultural interaction among nations with different culture types became fairly topical in contemporary society. Humankind now faces the legacy of moral decline of the past century and is trying to find a way out of its ideological dead end through other cultures and civilizations. In addition, the globalization processes that developed towards the end of the last century have also embraced the nations' cultural ties, turning the cross-cultural communication into an integral part of humankind's existence. The unique role of Russia in Northeastern Asia calls for an answer to the following question: Is there any cultural interaction between the Russian Far East, on the one hand, and the East Asian nations, on the other? And if so, what are its manifestations and how big are they?


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (16) ◽  
pp. e2008814118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youpei Yan ◽  
Amyn A. Malik ◽  
Jude Bayham ◽  
Eli P. Fenichel ◽  
Chandra Couzens ◽  
...  

Staying home and avoiding unnecessary contact is an important part of the effort to contain COVID-19 and limit deaths. Every state in the United States enacted policies to encourage distancing and some mandated staying home. Understanding how these policies interact with individuals’ voluntary responses to the COVID-19 epidemic is a critical initial step in understanding the role of these nonpharmaceutical interventions in transmission dynamics and assessing policy impacts. We use variation in policy responses along with smart device data that measures the amount of time Americans stayed home to disentangle the extent that observed shifts in staying home behavior are induced by policy. We find evidence that stay-at-home orders and voluntary response to locally reported COVID-19 cases and deaths led to behavioral change. For the median county, which implemented a stay-at-home order with about two cases, we find that the response to stay-at-home orders increased time at home as if the county had experienced 29 additional local cases. However, the relative effect of stay-at-home orders was much greater in select counties. On the one hand, the mandate can be viewed as displacing a voluntary response to this rise in cases. On the other hand, policy accelerated the response, which likely helped reduce spread in the early phase of the pandemic. It is important to be able to attribute the relative role of self-interested behavior or policy mandates to understand the limits and opportunities for relying on voluntary behavior as opposed to imposing stay-at-home orders.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

However proud Africans must be to have a person of African descent in the White House, they should have no illusions as to how much President Barack Hussein Obama can do for Africa. Africans must put their own house in order for purposes of dealing successfully with the major challenges facing the continent, the most important of which is that of democratic and developmental governance. Obama's priorities are not necessarily those of Africans. They have to do with the role of the United States as a superpower in a global system in which the American military and business corporations play a hegemonic role. In this context, Africa is relevant to American and Obama's global priorities when its resources are needed to strengthen this role, on the one hand, or its humanitarian crises are likely to affect them in an adverse manner, on the other.What are these global priorities, and how are they likely to affect Africa during Obama's tenure? Following is a brief examination of four major priorities. The first is limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. Operating on the premise that nuclear weapons should be limited to the few countries now possessing them (U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan), the U.S. government has led an international campaign against the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology by other countries, particularly those deemed hostile to Western interests, such as Iran and North Korea. Since South Africa destroyed the nuclear arsenal of the former apartheid state and Libya gave up its nuclear ambitions, the only relevant issue with respect to Africa's role in the spread of nuclear weapons is the question of who has access to Africa's abundant supply of uranium. Denying access to African uranium to “rogue states” and terrorist organizations is an important foreign policy objective of any American government, including the Obama administration.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Owens

Hannah Arendt’s monumental study The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, is a founding text in postcolonial studies, locating the seeds of European fascism in the racism of imperial expansion. However, Arendt also harboured deep racial prejudices, especially when writing about people of African descent, which affected core themes in her political thought. The existing secondary literature has diagnosed but not adequately explained Arendt’s failures in this regard. This article shows that Arendt’s anti-black racism is rooted in her consistent refusal to analyse the colonial and imperial origins of racial conflict in the United States given the unique role of the American republic in her vision for a new post-totalitarian politics. In making this argument, the article also contributes to the vexed question of how international theorists should approach important ‘canonical’ thinkers whose writings have been exposed as racist, including methodological strategies for approaching such a body of work, and engages in a form of self-critique for marginalising this problem in earlier writing on Arendt.


Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
Justyna Fruzińska

My paper investigates 19th-century travel writing by British women visiting America: texts by such authors as Frances Trollope, Isabella Bird, or Frances Kemble. I analyze to what extent these travelers’ gender influences their view of race. On the one hand, as Tim Youngs stresses, there seems to be very little difference between male and female travel writing in the 19th century, as women, in order to be accepted by their audience, needed to mimic men’s style (135). On the other hand, women writers occasionally mention their gender, as for example Trollope, who explains that she is not competent enough to speak on political matters, which is why she wishes to limit herself only to domestic issues. This provision, however, may be seen as a mere performance of a conventional obligation, since it does not prevent Trollope from expressing her opinions on American democracy. Moreover, Jenny Sharpe shows how Victorian Englishwomen are trapped between a social role of superiority and inferiority, possessing “a dominant position of race and a subordinate one of gender” (11). This makes the female authors believe that as women they owe to the oppressed people more sympathy than their male compatriots. My paper discusses female writing about the United States in order to see how these writers navigate their position of superiority/inferiority.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
H. Obeid ◽  
F Hillani, ◽  
R. Fakih ◽  
K. Mozannar

In recent years artificial intelligence has entered a new era, which gives rise to many hopes for powerful states such as the United States and China. In this paper, we analyze the importance and role of artificial intelligence in technological development in each of the two countries on the one hand, and its influence on China-American relations in terms of technological and geopolitical conflict. To get the right results, we rely on a literature review of dozens of articles published on the phenomenon in order to compare the power of artificial intelligence between the United States and China where we found that the US still has technological strength, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, but we can say that a large force is beginning pose a threat for it which is China that has great technological capabilities so, we can say that the United States should work more in this field. Also, we found that artificial intelligence has a primary goal in both countries, it helps China to achieve its ambitions to be the leader of the world, and this intelligence, on the other hand, provides protection and security to the United States. This paper is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the importance of artificial intelligence in achieving China’s ambitions, the second section explains the role of artificial intelligence in the US protection service, and the third section describes the technological and geopolitical conflict resulting from the competition in artificial intelligence between these two countries. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, United States, China, Conflict, leader.


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