Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

Theoria

Vol. 50, No. 2, Issue 102 (December 2003)

Articles

• History Amongst the Chairs at the Collège de France
  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

  The important paper that Pierre Bourdieu has submitted to us is extremely interesting.1 Indeed, while I hope that this paper will not create a precedent, the traditional method by which one or more of us introduce one or other candidate for a Chair, followed by an election in favour of a known colleague and/or a recognised personality, seems to me to be far from optimal. Nonetheless, Pierre Bourdieu, as a sociologist, having taken the effort to examine the field of the historian, and this effort having been extremely enriching for me, I can only be struck tautologically by the quality of his contribution: I wish to respond and to discuss it in detail, and follow our colleague's and my own train of thought with regard to the introduction of candidates. Perhaps tomorrow at the Collège we shall have, not only, as in this case, history seen by a sociologist, but nuclear physics seen by a biologist or mathematics examined from the Chair of one of our colleagues in medicine. Let there be no doubt that then we would also have, as is the case here, something very exciting for us all. Even so, I must repeat that this method is not the one that I prefer for allocating Chairs and choosing new colleagues.

• Needs, States, and Markets: Democratic Sovereignty Against Imperialism
  Lawrence Hamilton

  One of the more intractable questions in the history of political thought is still around today: how can humans collectively control and enhance the development and satisfaction of their needs? This is a question about the nature of contemporary needs, about which and whose needs are developed and satisfied, and about the extant evaluative control over the generation of needs. That is, it is a question about the mechanisms and institutions that constitute and legitimize the generation, interpretation and satisfaction of needs, in particular, states and markets. And it is also a question about the possibilities and means of transforming these mechanisms and institutions. In this paper, I suggest conceptual means of thinking about the different parts of the question and their relation to democratic sovereignty. The suggestions are based on an account of human need that overcomes the current framework of rights and (utilitarian) preferences tempered by paternalist attention to state-defined human needs.

• Promises Unspoken: A Wittgensteinian Response to the Very Idea of a Social Contract
  Anthony Holiday

  Arguing in the spirit of these emergent realities, I shall contend that the very idea of a social contract is without foundation in the natural and normative regularities governing our lives and languages; that this idea is the product of a conflation of figurative with descriptive discourse and that it belongs to a layer of technico-theoretical language which has lost its anchorage in our natural, everyday forms of expression. However, I shall counterbalance this complaint by suggesting that the contractarian conceit does harbour the germs of a crucial insight that comes into its own in the work of the later Wittgenstein. The elucidation in question is to the effect that there is indeed a form of agreement between language-using social beings, which resembles a social contract, inasmuch as it is an agreement upon which all but the most primitive of interpersonal exchanges depend, but which is radically distinct from all and any real or imagined kinds of social consensus in being pre-conventional and, thus, pre-consensual. If this is right, then as far as the project of making sense of our political arrangements goes, nothing is lost by ditching the image of an overarching social contract, except to the scientistic enterprise of constructing a general theory of politics, law and the state.

• Religion and Community: Adam Smith on the Virtues of Liberty
  Charles L. Griswold, Jr

  I propose to examine, in the present paper, Adam Smith's arguments for liberal political arrangements with respect to religion in particular. I begin with Smith's critique in the Wealth of Nations of state-supported religious monopolies, and his suggestions about political structures that encourage honest piety and honest politics. I shall then turn (in section II) to the moral psychology of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) in order to examine Smith's analysis of religious sentiments and of their roots in moral psychology. I take it that, for Smith, questions of institutional structure, virtue, and moral psychology are closely connected. Finally, I shall conclude (in section III) with brief reflections on the question of whether Smith's 'liberal' stance effectively commits him to holding that the state is to remain 'neutral' among competing views of the good life and, if so, whether this is because there is no way to adjudicate such views, there being no knowable standard of the 'good person'. While the bulk of the paper is thus an exegesis of Smith, my hope is that these reflections will suggest that Smith has an important contribution to make to current debate about liberalism. Some of what follows has a distinctly empirical cast. This is a reflection not only of Smith's approach to the issues, but of the fact that the issues in this branch of social or political philosophy do in fact make important empirical commitments. Theorists since Plato have been making those commitments all along.

• When Time is Money: Contested Rationalities of Time in the Theory and Practice of Work
  Barbara Adam

  In this paper, therefore, I will neither engage in surveying or evaluating this extensive literature on time and work nor offer a historical account of the development towards the current relation to time as money.4 Instead, I want to investigate a number of interdependent issues and relationships: first, I consider the assumptions and presuppositions associated with the relation to time as money and its connection to the valorisation of speed in work and production processes. Second, I examine the link between the commodification of time and new working conditions associated with time-based rationalisation, intensification, compression and flexibilisation. Third, I explore its connection to the restless, sleepless, non-stop work patterns associated with globalised work time, information and trade, that is, work in the competitive world of unbounded time and space. Fourth, I trace the implications of the economic approach to time in spheres of work that are not easily commodified on the one hand and those whose time is not remunerated on the other. Fifth, I bring to the fore contested rationalities of time, taken-for-granted incongruities and mis-matches between different time priorities and time-based competition to open up a critical conceptual space for alternative praxis. Finally, I establish connections between these contested temporal rationalities.

• Review Article: Human Rights as Imperialism
  Roger Deacon

  Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, by Michael Ignatieff. Edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann, with comments by K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur and Diane F. Orentlicher, and a response by Ignatieff. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2001. ISBN: 0691114749.

  During the second half of the 20 th century, a quiet revolution took place in international relations. This revolution had little to do with politics between states - which for most of that time remained locked in a chilly bi-polar embrace - but a lot to do with politics within states; it had equally little to do with the admission of new states into the international system, even though during this time more states than ever before became independent. Instead, it was a human rights revolution, a slow and gradual but ever more extensive and influen-tial movement to protect human beings (but especially individuals and minority groups) from themselves (but especially other groups and states).

• 'Condemned to Meaning': A Critical Review of Recent Work on Charles Taylor
  Deane-Peter Baker

  Charles Taylor, by Ruth Abbey. Teddington, UK: Acumen, 2000. ISBN: 0691057141.
  Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, by Nicholas H. Smith. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. ISBN: 0742521273.
  Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity, by Mark Redhead. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. ISBN: 0745645767.

  There can be no doubt that Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has made a major contribution to the development of contemporary philosophy and is one of the most influential and prolific philosophers in the English-speaking world today. Perhaps the most striking feature of his work is its breadth, both in terms of the topics addressed and per-spectives employed. Taylor's work ranges from reflections on artificial intelligence to analyses of contemporary multicultural societies, touching on (among others) questions of epistemology, ethics, identity, and metaphysics along the way. He is rare in his ability to bring his deep knowledge of history, ancient culture and religious thought to bear in his philosophical investigations.