The Authoritarian Temptation, and Its Radical Left Expressions

No political regime can be entirely immune from authoritarian temptations. This article focuses on the distinctive sources and dynamics that apply to post-revolutionary regimes. To prevail in bringing about radical and irreversible change they will require an effective security apparatus that overcomes the backlash that will arise from the previous order. These security requirements provide the first source of authoritarian temptation, but there are three more. Once the regime is firmly established the new rulers can choose what restraints on their conduct to accept. It is tempting to dispense with healthy channels of feedback. Moreover, even the most successful of revolutionary regimes polarise opinion between the old order and the new. And when material hardships arise loyalty may be rewarded above market rationality. In conjunction these amount to a serious set of authoritarian temptations. But there are also some countervailing considerations. A durably successful radical regime must counterbalance the requirements for unity and discipline against the need for creativity and adaptability. Initial emancipatory ambitions may be updated and renewed in order to inspire future generations and legitimise the revolutionary process. Such regimes can seesaw between authoritarian and empowering tendencies, rather than relying on repression alone to keep them in existence. Their legitimation strategy will contain three main components: i) reaffirming and updating their emancipatory origins; ii) downplaying/excusing any authoritarian “deviations”; iii) projecting future prospects for inclusionary development.

The Material Constitution in Crisis: Telos, Nomos, and Demos

<Online Only>This chapter explores how the crisis of the material constitution was underpinned by the erosion of democracy, and not only by the dominance of ordoliberalism and neo-liberalism. It discusses how the deepening of the liberal market rationality of integration came to occur in a more disciplinary mode throughout the euro crisis, dismantling domestic social contracts, if ultimately still under the guidance of domestic elites. This was contested by extraordinary popular countermovements, which emerged to break out of the straitjacket of austerity. In particular, the chapter discusses the election to government in Greece of a left-wing party, Syriza, reflecting broader anti-systemic currents across Europe. The chapter concludes by examining how Syriza’s subsequent capitulation symbolized not merely the increasingly powerful external constraints of EU membership, but the homegrown roots of the dominant constitutional imaginary: a fear of popular sovereignty and of radical democracy under the veil of an ideological Europeanism.</Online Only>

A Lacanian understanding of urban development plans under the neoliberal discourse

Urban development and land release policies in the city fringes are criticised because they often fail to achieve their objectives such as providing affordable housing for low to moderate-income groups as well as provision of infrastructure and transportation. From a Marxian point of view, urban development plans fail because of the inherent contradictions of capital, and consequently, maximisation of surplus-value becomes the main objectives of land supply policies. In this paper, I draw on the Lacanian concept of drive and use the homology between Marxian surplus-value and Lacanian surplus-enjoyment to explain how the market rationality of neoliberalism (late-capitalism) deflects the desired objectives of urban development plans (UDPs); that is, the desire to provide affordable housing and urban services and infrastructure instead facilitates speculative activities on land in the suburban areas of a metropolis, such as Perth, Western Australia. In particular, the paper focuses on the neoliberal intuitional and financial dimensions of UDPs. In conclusion, I suggest how planners may deal with the pressure of the lack in the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism in order to avoid the stuckness of the logic of drive materialised in the operation of planning institutions.

Neoliberal discourses in Spanish for business: An ethnographic classroom study

Beginning in the 1970s, education has responded to the rise of neoliberalism across macro-, meso-, and micro-level contexts through shifts in practice and structure. Meanwhile, language learning is often promoted as an instrument in job attainment and transnational business communication. For example, in language education, courses in language for specific purposes, whose ubiquity continues to increase, often reflect the market rationality embedded in contemporary education and support an instrumental orientation to language learning. This ethnographic study investigates the neoliberal discourses taken up by students and the instructor in a university-level Spanish for Business classroom. Drawing on triangulated data from classroom observations, field notes, informal interviews with students and the instructor, and a semi-formal interview with a focal student participant, the findings suggest that competition, compliance, and individualism were among the ideological discourses of the classroom. However, while societal and institutional discourses of neoliberalism were often interpellated, they were also resisted. Implications for praxis are also discussed.

Pluralism in European Private Law

This chapter examines the further contours of an instrumental-normative approach, focusing on how the question ‘who does what, and at what level of regulation’ is answered by existing theories of legal pluralism in European private law. It has been said that most theories of legal pluralism in European private law, even if they proclaim to adopt a strong legal pluralist perspective, still fall back on an ordering of some sort. The chapter tests this assumption by analysing how the market rationality of EU law interacts with the juridical rationality of national private laws in relation to three aspects of lawmaking: actors, norms, and processes. It concludes that many theories of legal pluralism in European private law lean towards an ordering of some kind. Yet, at the same time the chapter reveals several instances in which inroads are made on the ordered conception of legal pluralism, which could provide the premises for the further development of a strong legal pluralist theory for European private law.

Political power and Measure for Measure

This chapter analyses Shakespeare’s consideration of the pulls of seclusion, and of concealment, against the demands of public government and open contestation of the power to rule. Measure for Measure dramatizes the abuse and corruption of authoritarian governing power, in particular in the form of male sexual coercion and exploitation of females. The plot focuses on a ruler’s use of secrecy and surveillance in order to monitor their attempts to counter overly lax law enforcement with authoritarianism. It also puts questions of market rationality, and the imperatives that govern poor people’s attempts to earn livings in constrained urban circumstances in relation to questions of political order, and into relation with the imperatives of theological truth and spiritual virtue. The claims and imperatives of frank public speech, as a method of revealing corruption and pursuing justice, are brought into relationship with the political strategy of trickery.

Exploring Challenges in Space Syntax Theory Building: The Use of Positivist and Hermeneutic Explanatory Models

The planning and building of sustainable cities and communities yields operational theories on urban space. The novelty of this paper is that it discusses and explores the challenges for space syntax theory building within two key research traditions: positivism and hermeneutics. Applying a theory of science perspective, we first discuss the explanatory power of space syntax and its applications. Next, we distinguish between theories that attempt to explain a phenomenon and theories that seek to understand it, based on Von Wright’s modal logics and Bhaskar’s critical realism models. We demonstrate that space syntax research that focuses on spatial configurative changes in built environments, movement and economic activities can explain changes in a built environment in terms of cause and effect (positivism), whereas historical research or research focusing on social rationality, space and crime or cognition seeks to develop an understanding of the inherent cultural meaning of the space under investigation (hermeneutics). Evidently, the effect of human intentions and behaviour on spatial structures depends on the type of rationality underlying these intentions, which is the focus of this study. Positivist explanatory models are appropriate for examining market rationality in cases that entail unambiguous intentionality and that are associated with a high degree of predictability. By contrast, other kinds of reasoning require a hermeneutic understanding.

The act of reading aloud: Animating the neoliberal speaking subject in post-Suharto Indonesia

The global spreading of neoliberalism requires discursive technologies capable of producing forms of subjectivity congruent with the extension of market rationality to all dimensions of social life. Since the millennium, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven implementation of governance reform in Indonesia has entailed the dissemination of electoral mission statements – a discursive genre aimed at consolidating a new morality of accountability, transparency and proactive entrepreneurialism. Drawing on audiovisual data recorded in a peripheral region of Indonesia, this article examines the circulation of this transnational genre and reveals how its uptake has not been fully successful. The analysis shows how, through a series of verbal and non-verbal cues, candidates would signal their disalignment from the genre’s metapragmatic structure. By performing their statements through the affectless prosody of written texts read aloud, candidates evaded the moral and discursive expectations of transparent accountability and neoliberal entrepreneurialism and reasserted the ethos of impersonal acquiescence underlying the local modes of political self-presentation.

Australia’s remote workfare policy: Rhetoric versus reality of ‘community’ empowerment

In 1977, Jones (in Bryson and Mowbray, 1981: 255) described the term ‘community’ as ‘the aerosol word of the 1970s because of the hopeful way it is sprayed over deteriorating institutions.’ They argued that the term is used to give the impression of community ownership over policymaking processes and outputs when the reality can be far different. This article discusses one of Australia’s current workfare programs, the Community Development Programme (CDP), which operates in remote parts of the country as new welfare conditionality architecture for moving (mainly Indigenous) remote unemployed people off welfare and into work. It argues that, despite political rhetoric to the contrary, ‘community’ is marginalised in the program’s design and implementation. Instead, CDP can be best conceptualised as a manifestation of neoliberal paternalism, whereby the governance practices of the state work through community organisations to enforce market principles and ‘train’ unemployed and poor people into pursuing ‘freedom’ within the bounds of market rationality. Through these modes of governing, Indigenous communities are instead strategically disempowered.