The terms, concepts, and categories used in international studies derive from an assortment of academic disciplines.  In order to reflect these multituple perspectives, the definitions for this glossary have been drawn from three sources.  Terms marked #1 are taken from Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, editors, Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1999).  Terms marked #2 from Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).  Terms marked #3 from Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper, The Social Science Encyclopedia, (London: Routledge, 1996).  In some cases, definitions have been shortened, spelling has been Americanized, and citations omitted.  You may wish to consult these reference works for additional sources.
 
 

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agriculture

1. A fundamental form of culture (as its name suggests), and as such as key site at which humanity confronts and transforms nature to its own ends. Agriculture is therefore relevant as the subject-matter of much high and popular culture (from Virgil’s Georgics of the first century BC, through Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, to that quintessentially English (radio) soap opera, The Archers (‘an everyday story of country folk’). Yet also, it continues to be a boundary where the inter-relationship of culture and nature is negotiated, as is indicated, for example, by contemporary concerns about the genetic manipulation of crops and farm animals. Such concerns may conceal the fact that existing agricultural products are themselves already the outcome of centuries of cultural manipulation.

1. Concept in sociology and political philosophy indicating the legitimate use of power. An agent thus submits willingly to, or is obedient to, the commands of another agent if that agent is perceived to be in authority. Obedience to authority is not induced through coercion and threat of violence. In social theory, the analysis of authority is first developed by Weber. He focuses on the question of why certain agents have authority. He offers three ideal types in explanation. Authority may be legal-rational, in which case authority is bestowed upon rules or laws typically through some regular and public process of law formation or a demonstration of the necessity and efficiency of the rules (as in the case of bureaucracies). Traditional authority again follows more or less well defined rules, but such rules are grounded in traditional practices, customs, and cosmologies, rather than in recent, public processes of formation. Charismatic authority rests, not in rules, but in the personality (and sanctity or heroism) of a particular leader, and thus in that person’s teaching and example.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In political philosophy, the question of authority may be seen to receive a crucial modern formulation in the work of Hobbes. Hobbes effectively addresses the question of the need for authority (contingently in the face of the social disorder of civil war), and the grounds upon which individuals should submit to it. In Weberian terms, Hobbes’s account is a legal-rational one. It is, for Hobbes, rational to form a free social contract with a sovereign, providing that the sovereign maintains the social order and delivers peace. This approach is developed in the liberal tradition. A state is perceived to have authority in so far as its rules and laws would be acceptable to all rational citizens, independently of any particular interests they may wish to pursue. John Rawls’s thought experiment of an ‘original position,’ in which potential citizens plan a society in ignorance of their own talents and interests, is the most sophisticated contemporary version of such social contract accounts. In contrast, communitarian political philosophy suggest the primacy of traditional authority. In contradistinction to liberalism, agents are understood as already embedded in a particular community and culture. The agent’s judgement of authority will thus depend upon values taken-for-granted in their community.

Political ‘realists,’ such as Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca reject the distinction between authority and power, arguing that all submission and obedience is ultimately imposed upon the mass of social members. The distinction between authority and power is questioned more subtly by certain accounts of ideology. Within Marxism particularly, the possibility that agents may be coerced, not merely by the use of threat of physical violence, but also by the control that a dominant group or class can exercise over ideas (for example, through control over education, mass media and religion) is broached. A state may have authority in the eyes of its citizens, only because those citizens are denied the relevant cultural resources and information necessary to recognize that it is not acting in their best interests. The increasing difficulty states find in maintaining authority has been analyzed by Habermas within the theory of a legitimation crisis.

1. Metaphorical term used in art theory and political Philosophy. The French ‘avant-garde,’ or English ‘vanguard’ literally refers to the foremost part of an army. Metaphorically, since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been taken to refer to the political or cultural leadership by an elite. Implicit in this idea are assumptions of political and cultural progress, which the avant-garde pursues. The mass of society will be more or less indifferent to, or ignorant of, their interest in this progress, and will resist or be hostile to the avant-garde. As a key aspect of cultural modernism, the avant-garde typically expresses itself through obscure and innovative techniques, deliberately resisting easy assimilation into popular or mass culture. In political theory, the avant-garde is seen as a necessary intellectual elite, leading a mass that remains afflicted by ideology and thus by a false consciousness that blinds it to its own best interests. With the increasing questioning of modernism, and indeed of Marxism, the validity of the avant-garde has itself come into question.

binary opposition

1. Concept in structuralism, rooted in Saussaure’s linguistics but also Radcliffe-Brown’s cultural anthropology, serving to explain the generation of meaning in one term or sign by reference to another mutually exclusive term. The two terms may be seen to describe a complete system, by reference to two basic states in which the elements in that system can exist (e.g. culture/nature; dark/light; male/female; birth/death). One side of the binary opposition can be meaningful only in relation to the other side. Each side has the meaning of not being its opposite. A term may therefore appear in more than one binary opposition, with its meaning being modified accordingly. (Thus, death may be understood as an event as ‘not birth’; or as a state as ‘not life’.) Binary oppositions structure perception and interpretation of the natural and social world.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In any system of signs, certain binary oppositions may be seen to stand in determinate relationships to each other. One binary opposition may be open to transformation into another, therefore enriching the meaning of all the terms concerned. Thus, for example, in western cultures, the opposition between birth and death may be transformed into an opposition between white and black (for example manifest in white christening robes and black hearses). Put differently, white is to black, as birth is to death. In addition, the binary opposition may contain an implicit evaluation, so that, for example, birth and white are associated with good, death and black with bad. The analysis of such series of oppositions provides a crucial insight into the working of ideology. Consider, for example, the following series: male/female; public/private; culture/nature; reason/emotion. Ideology may therefore work precisely to the degree that such series of binary oppositions are taken for granted, appearing to reflect rather than to structure the world. The critique of ideology entails the explication of a series of binary oppositions as a culturally specific interpretation, selection and privileging of elements from the ambient world.

A further implication of the theorization of binary opposition focuses upon the status of ambiguous categories. Anything that shares characteristics of both sides of the opposition is suspect or otherwise problematic. Anthropologists have therefore suggested that the importance given to human hair or nail clippings in magic and folk law rests in their ambiguous status. They are at once part of the body, but have no feeling and are easily cut from the body without pain or damage. Similarly, rites de passage mark ambiguous stages in human’s development between childhood and adulthood. Magic, ceremony, and the sacred are thus seen to be concerned with ambiguous categories.

1. Bourgeois is a very difficult word to use in English; first, because although quite widely used it is still evidently a French word, the earlier Anglicization to burgess, from oF burgeis and mE burgeis, burges, borges - inhabitant of a borough, having remained fixed in its original limited meaning; secondly, because it is especially associated with Marxist argument, which can attract hostility or dismissal (and it is relevant here that in this context bourgeois cannot be properly translated by the more familiar English adjective middle-class); thirdly, because it has been extended, especially in English in the last twenty years, partly from this Marxist sense but mainly from much earlier French senses, to a general and often vague term of social contempt. To understand this range it is necessary to follow the development of the word in French, and to note a particular difficulty in the translation, into both French and English, of the German bügerlich.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Under the feudal regime in France bourgeois was a juridicial category in society, defined by such conditions as length of residence. The essential definition was that of the solid citizen whose mode of life was at once stable and solvent. The earliest adverse meanings come from a higher social order: an aristocratic contempt for the mediocrity of the bourgeois which extended, especially in the 18^th century, into a philosophical and intellectual contempt for the limited if stable life and ideas of this ‘middle’ class (there was a comparable English 17^th-century and 18^th-century use of citizen and it abbreviation cit).There was a steady association of bourgeois with trade, but to succeed as a bourgeois, and to live bourgeoisement, was typically to retire and live on invested income. A bourgeois house was one in which no trade or profession (lawyers and doctors were later excepted) could be carried on.

The steady growth in size and importance of this bourgeois class in the centuries of expanding trade had major consequences in political thought, which in turn had complicating effects on the word. A new concept of society was expressed and translated into English, especially in the 18^th century, as civil society, but the equivalents for this adjective were and in some cases still are the French bourgeois and the German bügerlich. In later English usage these came to be translated as bourgeois in the more specific 19^th-century sense, often leading to confusion.

Before the specific Marxist sense, bourgeois became a term of contempt, but also of respect from below. The migrant laborer or soldier saw the established bourgeois as his opposite; workers saw the capitalized bourgeois as an employer. The social dimension of the later use was thus fully established by the late 18^th century, although the essentially different aristocratic or philosophical contempt was still an active sense.

The definition of bourgeois society was a central concept in Marx, yet especially in some of his early work the term is ambiguous, since in relation to Hegel for whom civil (bügerlich) society was an important term to be distinguished from state. Marx used, and in the end amalgamated, the earlier and later meanings. Marx’s new sense of bourgeois society followed earlier historical usage, from established and solvent burgesses to a growing class of traders, entrepreneurs and employers. His attack on what he called bourgeois political theory (the theory of civil society) was based on what he saw as its falsely universal concepts and institutions, which were in fact the concepts and institutions of a specifically bourgeois society: that is, a society in which the bourgeoisie (the class name was now much more significant) had become or was becoming dominant. Different stages of bourgeois society led to different stages of the capitalist mode of economic production, or, as it was later more strictly put, different stages of the capitalist mode of production led to different stages of bourgeois society and hence bourgeois thought, bourgeois feeling, bourgeois ideology, bourgeois art. In Marx’s sense the word has passed into universal usage. But it is often difficult to separate it, in some respects, from the residual aristocratic and philosophical contempt, and from a later form especially common among unestablished artists, writers and thinkers, who might not and often do not share Marx’s central definition, but who might sustain the older sense of hostility towards the (mediocre) established and respectable.

The complexity of the word is then evident. There is a problem even in the strict Marxist usage, in that the same word, bourgeois, is used to describe historically distinct periods and phases of social and cultural development. In some contexts, especially, this is bound to be confusing: the bourgeois ideology of settled independent citizens is clearly not the same as the bourgeois ideology of the highly mobile agents of a para-national corporation. The distinction of petit-bourgeois is an attempt to preserve some of the earlier historical characteristics, but is also used for a specific category within a more complex and mobile society. There are also problems in the relation between bourgeois and capitalist, which are often used indistinguishably but which in Marx are primarily distinguished as social and economic terms. There is a specific difficulty in the description of non-urban capitalists (e.g. agrarian capitalist employers) as bourgeois, with its residual urban sense, though the social relations they institute are clearly bourgeois in the developed 19^th century sense. There is also difficulty in the relation between descriptions of bourgeois society and the bourgeois or bourgeoisie as a class. A class is dominant, but there can be difficulties of usage, associated with some of the most intense controversies of analysis, when the same word is used for a whole society in which one class is dominant (but in which, necessarily, there are other classes) and for a specific class within that whole society. The difficulty is especially noticeable in uses of bourgeois as an adjective describing some practice which is not itself defined by the manifest social and economic content of bourgeois.

It is thus not surprising that there is resistance to the use of the word in English, but it has also to be said that for its precise uses in Marxist and other historical and political argument there is no real English alternative. The translation middle-class serves most of the pre-19^th century meanings, in pointing to the same kinds of people, and their ways of life and opinions, as were then indicated by bourgeois, and had been indicated by citizen and cit and civil; general uses of citizen and cit were common until the late 18^th century but less common after the emergence of middle-class in the late 18^th century. But middle-class, though a modern term, is based on an older threefold division of society - upper, middle and lower - which has most significance in feudal and immediately post-feudal society and which, in the sense of the later uses, would have little or no relevance as a description of a developed or fully formed bourgeois society. A ruling class, which is the socialist sense of bourgeois in the context of historical description of a developed capitalist society, is not easily or clearly represented by the essentially different middle class. For this reason, especially in this context and in spite of the difficulties, bourgeois will continue to have to be used.

1. Much used, but often poorly understood term, referring to the dominant class in capitalist society. In Marxist theory, it is most strictly employed in opposition to ‘proletariat,’ where it refers to the owners of productive capital (and thus to mercantile, industrial, and financial entrepreneurs). What distinguishes the bourgeoisie is that they have no need to sell their labor in order to survive. While such a bold contrast might be effective in the analysis of early capitalism, its fails to grasp the role and status of the administrative and managerial classes that have emerged with the development of high and late capitalism. Thus, ‘bourgeoisie’ is frequently used to refer to the ‘middle classes’ of contemporary capitalism. While such classes may still need to sell their labor (as does the working-class), their higher financial reward, and higher status, entails that the continuation of capitalism is as much in their interests as in the interests of any class of owners. The role that the middle-classes have in shaping culture, has led to the frequent use of the adjective ‘bourgeois’ as a derogatory term.

1. A the term is understood in contemporary sociology, bureaucracy is that form of administration in which decision-making power is invested in offices, rather than in identifiable individuals. While bureaucracies have existed in pre-industrial societies (including feudal China), it is the fundamental role that bureaucracy plays in the organization and control of 20th century capitalism that has received the greatest theoretical and empirical study.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The classic source for the theory of bureaucracy is Max Weber, published in the 1920s. Weber proposed a six part model (or ideal type) of bureaucracy, that served to specify its distinctive characteristics (even if these characteristics need not all be present in any particular empirical example of a bureaucracy). Weber’s characteristics are as follows: a high degree of specialization, with complex tasks broken down and clearly allocated to separate offices; a hierarchy, with chains of authority and responsibility clearly defined; activity is governed by a consistent system of abstract rules; officials work impersonally, without emotional or personal attachment either to colleagues or clients; personnel are recruited and promoted on the grounds of technical knowledge, ability and expertise; the official’s activities as an official are wholly separate from his or her private activities (so that a professional position cannot be used for personal advantage). For Weber, this structure is the most efficient (and therefore most instrumentally rational) way in which to organize the complex activities of modern industrial society. As such, bureaucracy is an unavoidable feature of advanced society, not merely in industry, but in almost every area of social life. Mommsen has thus written of the total bureaucratization of life. Weber himself predicted, not just the growing influence of bureaucracy in capitalism, but also a convergence between capitalist and Soviet communist societies, in terms of the dominant role played by bureaucracy in both.

While bureaucracy is technically efficient, for Weber, it also has undesirable consequences for democracy. Precisely because nearly all social activities must proceed through stages that are pre-determined by bureaucracies, and given that those bureaucratic structures are themselves inflexible and possibly unresponsive to change, innovative activity, or activity that does not make sense within the narrow parameters of the bureaucracy, is inhibited. Further, technical expertise is concentrated within the democratically unaccountable offices of the bureaucracy, so that bureaucratic decisions and procedures are not easily challenged. Bureaucracy thereby becomes a ‘steel-hard cage’ that encloses us all.

Marxism has perhaps contributed little to the theory of bureaucracy. Bureaucracies were less extensive when Marx and Engels were writing, and they may be seen to be generally antipathetic to bureaucracy. The classic Marxist writings notably underestimate the significance that administrative structures have in capitalism (and thus have little to say on the significance of the managerial classes). The Marxists who have had most to say about bureaucracy tend to be those who seek to fuse Marxist and Weberian theories. In History and Class Consciousness, the Hungarian Marxist Lukács began to use Weberian accounts of bureaucracy and rationalization to extend Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism into an account of the reification of the social totality (and thus to explain the distinctive ideological forms of contemporary capitalism, in so far as society confronts the individual as an autonomous, quasi-natural object, rather than as a product of human agency and choice). This in turn influenced the Frankfurt School, and especially T.W. Adorno, in developing a characterization of late capitalism as a totally administered society.
 
 

2. Bureaucracy appears in English from the middle of the 19^th century. Carlyle in Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) wrote of the ‘Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy,"’ and Mill in 1848 wrote of the inexpediency of concentrating all the power of organized action ‘in a dominant bureaucracy.’ In 1818, using an earlier form, Lady Morgan had written of the ‘Bureaucratie or office tyranny, by which Ireland had been so long governed.’ The word was taken from bureaucratie, French, bureau – writing-desk and then office. The original meaning of bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The English use of bureau as office dates from the early 18^th century; it became more common in American use, especially with reference to foreign branches, the French influence being predominant. The increasing scale of commercial organization, with a corresponding increase in government intervention and legal controls, and with the increasing importance of organized and professional central government, produced the political facts to which the new term pointed. But there was then considerable variation in their evaluation. In English and North American usage the foreign term, bureaucracy, was used to indicate the rigidity or excessive power of public administration, while such terms as public service or civil service were used to indicate impartiality and selfless professionalism. In German Bureaukratie often had the more favorable meaning, as in Schmoller (‘the only neutral element,’ apart from the monarchy, ‘in the class war,’) and was given a further sense of legally established rationality by Weber. The variation of terms can still confuse the variations of evaluation, and indeed the distinctions between often diverse political systems which ‘a body of public servants,’ or a bureaucracy can serve. Beyond this, however, there has been a more general use of bureaucracy to indicate, unfavorably, not merely the class of officials but certain types of centralized social order, of a modern organized kind, as distinct not only from older aristocratic societies but from popular democracy. This has been important in socialist thought, where the concept of the ‘public interest’ is especially exposed to the variation between ‘public service’ and ‘bureaucracy.’

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In more local ways, bureaucracy is used to refer to the complicated formalities of official procedures, what the Daily News in 1871 described as ‘the Ministry…with all its routines of tape, wax, seals, and bureauism.’ There is again an area of uncertainty between two kinds of reference, as can be seen by the coinage of more neutral phrases such as ‘business methods’ and ‘office organization’ for commercial use, bureaucracy being often reserved for similar or identical procedures in government.

capital

1. Concept from economics, referring most obviously and intuitively to the machines, plant and buildings used in the industrial manufacturing process. More technically, capital is one of four factors of production. A factor of production is a resource that is valued, not for its own sake, but for its function in the production of other goods or services that are of intrinsic value. The other factors of production are land (including all natural resources prior to their extraction, the land surface, sea and space), labor (being the ability of human beings to engage in productive work), and entrepreneurship (being the ability to organize together the other three factors in the production process). Capital is any resource or item used in the production process that has already been subjected to some form of productive labor.

1. A form of social and economic organization, typified by the predominant role played by capital in the economic production process, and by the existence of extensive markets by which the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services (including labor)is organized. The development of capitalism may most readily be linked to industrialization, and thus has its purest manifestation in 19^th-cenutry Britain and USA. However, a more limited form of (mercantile) capitalism, characterized by limited markets in commodities, and thus by the existence of a small capitalist class of merchants, but without the industrial production or free labor markets, existed in medieval Europe.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Different theories of capitalism exist, especially within social theory, providing different explanatory models of the origin of capitalism and of it predominant features. In Marxism, capitalism is theorized in terms of the organization of production and the resultant relationship between economic classes. The emergence of capitalism is thus explained in terms of the development of industrial technology (or the forces of production). A capitalist society is structured through the antagonism of two dominant classes: the bourgeoisie which owns and controls the means of production, and the proletariat that owns only its ability to work (and therefore survives by selling its labor power). At the surface, there appears to be a fair and free exchange of commodities, including labor power, through market mechanism. In Marx’s analysis, beneath this surface lies a systematic exploitation of the proletariat, in so far as the price of labor set on the free market is less than the values of the labor’s product. The bourgeoisie are therefore seen to appropriate surplus value akin to the discrepancy between the costs of producing a commodity and the total revenue received from its sale. While Max Weber’s analysis of capitalism shares much in common with Marx’s, Weber places greater emphasis on the surface organization of capitalism, and thus on capitalism as a system of exchange and consumption. The link between capitalism and rationalization is central to this account. For Weber, a precondition of capitalist development is the development of a double entry book-keeping (and thus the possibility of rational control and prediction of the capitalist’s resources).

At the beginning of the 20^th century, European and American capitalism developed in a number of key areas. Weber’s analysis of rationality responded to the increasing bureaucracy of capitalism, as more complex production required ever more sophisticated forms of administration and control. This in turn leads to the rise of a white-collar middle class that is distinct in its interests and allegiances from either the working class proletariat or the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, banks and other financial organizations became more significant, as day-to-day control of production was increasingly separated from ownership. A distinctive form of finance capital was identified, for example, by the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding around 1910. Linked to this development is both the increasing concentration of capital, so that production is controlled by fewer, larger, corporations (leading to monopoly capitalism), and the expansion of capitalism into colonial markets. Increasing state intervention, not merely in the regulation of capitalist production, but also in the ownership of the means of production, leads to a further deviation from the ‘pure’ model of free-market capitalism. A period of organized capitalism thus begins to emerge after the First World War, and continues, with the increasing multi-national consumption an production bases of major corporations, under the rise of welfare state capitalism and Keynesian economic policies, at least into the 1970s. All these developments may be seen to obscure the basic lines of class conflict identified by Marx. The proletariat is increasingly differentiated within itself, and through greater job security and real income, is more integrated into the capitalist system. The economic crises predicted by Marx are at worst managed and at best avoided by interventionist governments.

Recent developments, in technology, with the decline of traditional manufacturing industries and the rise of communications or knowledge based industries; in consumerism, with increasingly affluent working and middle classes; and in the political shifts of the 1980s away from state intervention, demand new theories of the organization of contemporary societies. Thus theories of late capitalism, post-industrial society, and various accounts of postmodernism suggest a more or less radical break from capitalist modes of organization.
 
 

2. Capitalism as a word describing a particular economic system began to appear in English from the early 19^th century, and almost simultaneously in French and German. Capitalist as a noun is a little older; Arthur Young used it, in his journal Travels in France (1792), but relatively loosely: ‘moneyed men, or capitalists.’ Coleridge used it in the developed sense – ‘capitalists…having labour at demand’ – in Tabletalk (1823). Thomas Hodgskin, in Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825)wrote: ‘all the capitalists of Europe, with all their circulating capital, cannot of themselves supply a single week’s food and clothing,’ and again: ‘betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them and appropriates to himself the produce of both.’ This is clearly a description of the economic system.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The economic sense of capital had been present in English from the 17^th century and in a fully developed form from the 18^th century. Chambers Cyclopedia (1727-51)has ‘power given by Parliament to the South-Sea company to increase their capital’ and definition of ‘circulating capital’ is in Adam Smith (1776). The word has acquired this specialized meaning from its general sense of ‘head’ or ‘chief’: capital, French, capitalis, Latin, caput, Latin – head. There were many derived specialist meanings; the economic meaning developed from a shortening of the phrase ‘capital stock’ – a material holding or monetary fund. In classical economics the functions of capital, and of various kinds of capital, were described and defined.

Capitalism represents a development of meaning in that it has been increasingly used to indicate a particular and historical economic system rather than any economic system as such. Capital and at first capitalist were technical terms in any economic system. The later (early 19^th century) uses of capitalist moved towards specific functions in a particular stage of historical development; it is this use that crystallized in capitalism. There was a sense of the capitalist as the useless but controlling intermediary between producers, or as the employer of labor, or, finally, as the owner of the means of production. This involved, eventually, and especially in Marx, a distinction of capital as a formal economic category from capitalism as a particular form of centralized ownership of the means of production, carrying with it the system of wage-labor. Capitalism in this sense is a product of a developing bourgeois society; there are early kinds of capitalist production but capitalism as a system – what Marx call ‘the capitalist era’ – dates only from the 16^th century and did not reach the stage of industrial capitalism until the late 18^th and early 19^th century.

There has been immense controversy about the details of this description, and of course about the merits and working of the system itself, but from the early 20^th century, in most languages, capitalism has had this sense of a distinct economic system, which can be contrasted with other systems. As a term capitalism does not seem to be earlier than the 1880s, when it began to be used in German socialist writing and was extended to other non-socialist writing. Its first English and French uses seem to date only from the first years of the 20^th century. In the middle of the 20^th century, in reaction against socialist argument, the words capitalism and capitalist have often been deliberately replaced by defenders of the system by such phrases as ‘private enterprise’ and ‘free enterprise.’

These terms, recalling some of the conditions of early capitalism, are applied without apparent hesitation to very large or para-national ‘public’ corporations, or to an economic system controlled by them. At other times, however, capitalism is defended under its own now common name. There has also developed a use of post-capitalist and post-capitalism, to describe modifications of the system such as the supposed transfer of control from shareholders to professional management, or the coexistence of certain nationalized or ‘state-owned’ industries. The plausibility of these descriptions depends on the definition of capitalism which they are selected to modify. Though they evidently modify certain kinds of capitalism, in relation to its central sense they are marginal. A new phrase, state-capitalism, has been widely used in the middle of the 20^th century, with precedents from the early 20^th century, to describe forms of state ownership in which the original conditions of the definition – centralized ownership of the means of production, leading to a system of wage-labor – have not really changed. It is also necessary to note an extension of the adjective capitalist to describe the whole society, or features of the society, in which a capitalist economic system predominates. There is considerable overlap and occasional confusion here between capitalist and bourgeois. In strict Marxist usage capitalist is description of the mode of production and bourgeois a description of a type of society. It is in controversy about the relations between a mode of production and a type of society that the conditions for overlap of meaning occur.

3. The term capitalism relates to a particular system of socioeconomic organization (generally contrasted with feudalism and socialism), the nature of which is more often defined implicitly than explicitly. In common with other value-loaded concepts of political controversy, its definition - whether implicit or explicit - shows a chameleon-like tendency to vary with the ideological bias of the user. Even when treated as a historical category and precisely defined for the purpose of objective analysis, the definition adopted is often associated with a distinctive view of the temporal sequence and character of historical development. Thus historians such as Sombart (1915), Weber (1930[1922]) and Tawney (1926), who were concerned to relate changes in economic organization to shifts in religious and ethical attitudes, found the essence of capitalism in the acquisitive spirit of profit-making enterprise and focused on developments occurring in the 16th , 17th and early 18th centuries. Probably a majority of historians have seen capitalism as reaching its fullest development in the course of the Industrial Revolution and have treated the earlier period as part of a long transition between feudalism and capitalism. Marxist historians have identified a series of stages in the evolution of capitalism - for example, merchant capitalism, agrarian capitalism, industrial capitalism and state capitalism - and much of the debate on origins and progress has hinged on differing views of the significance, timing and characteristics of each stage. Thus Wallerstein (1979), who adopts a world-economy perspective, locates its origins in the agrarian capitalism that characterized Europe of the 16th , 17th and 18th centuries; while Tribe (1981), who also takes agrarian capitalism as the original mode of capitalist production, sees the essence of capitalism in a national economy where production is separated from consumption and is coordinated according to the profitability of enterprises operating in competition with each other.

Whatever the historical or polemical objective of writers, however, their definition is likely to be strongly influenced by Karl Marx (1867-94), who was the first to attempt a systematic analysis of the 'economic law of motion' of capitalist society and from whom most of the subsequent controversy on the nature and role of capitalism has stemmed. For Marx, capitalism was a 'mode of production' in which there are basically two classes of producers: the capitalists, who own the means of production (capital or land), make the strategic day-to-day economic decisions on technology, output and marketing, and appropriate the profits of production and distribution; and the laborers, who own no property but are free to dispose of their labor for wages on terms which depend on the numbers seeking work and the demand for their services. This was essentially the definition adopted, for example, by non-Marxist economic historians such as Lipson and Cunningham and by Marxists such as Dobb (1946).

Given this perspective, it is primarily the emergence of a dominant class of entrepreneurs supplying the capital necessary to activate a substantial body of workers which marks the birth of capitalism. In England, and even more emphatically in Holland, it can be dated from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Holland's supremacy in international trade, associated with its urgent need to import grain and timber (and hence to export manufactures) enabled Amsterdam to corner the Baltic trade and to displace Venice as the commercial and financial center of Europe. The capital thus amassed was available to fund the famous chartered companies (Dutch East India Company 1602, West India Company 1621) as well as companies to reclaim land and exploit the area's most important source of industrial energy - peat. It also provided the circulating capital for merchants engaged in the putting-out system whereby they supplied raw materials to domestic handicrafts workers and marketed the product. Specialization within agriculture drew the rural areas still further into the money economy, and the urban areas supplied a wide range of industrial exports to pay for essential raw material imports.

Dutch capitalists flourished the more because they were subject to a Republican administration which was sympathetic to their free market, individualist values. In England, where similar economic developments, were in progress in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the rising class of capitalists was inhibited by a paternalistic monarchical government bent on regulating their activities for its own fiscal purposes and power objectives and in terms of a different Set of social values. The Tudor system of state control included checking enclosures, controlling food supplies, regulating wages and manipulating (he currency. The early Stuarts went further in selling industrial monopolies and concessions to favored entrepreneurs and exclusive corporations and infuriated the majority whose interests were thus damaged. The English capitalists carried their fight against monopolies to the Cromwellian Revolution. When the monarchy was restored in the 1660s, the climate of opinion had been molded by religious, political and scientific revolution into an environment which favored the advancement of capitalism and laid the foundations for its next significant phase - the Industrial Revolution.

Orthodox economic theorists eschew the concept of capitalism: it is too broad for their purposes in that it takes into account the social relations of production. Modern economic historians adhering to an orthodox framework of economic theory also tend to avoid the term. They do, however, recognize a significant aspect of capitalism by emphasizing the rational, profit- maximizing, double bookkeeping characteristics of capitalist enterprise, and in the post-Second World War debates on economic development from a backward starting-point, there has been a tendency to regard the emergence of this 'capitalist spirit' as an essential prerequisite to the process of sustained economic growth in non-socialist countries.

The modern debate on capitalism in contemporary advanced economies has revolved around its being a~ alternative to socialism. Marxist economists follow Marx in seeing capitalism as a mode of production whose internal contradictions determine that it will eventually be replaced by socialism. In the aftermath of the Second World War, when the governments of most developed countries took full employment and faster economic growth as explicit objectives of national economic policy, there was a marked propensity for the governments of capitalist economies to intervene actively and extensively in the process Of production. At that stage the interesting issues for most Western economists seemed to be the changing balance of private and public economic power (see Shonfield 1965), and the extent to which it was either desirable or inevitable for the increasingly ‘mixed’ capitalist economies to converge towards socialism. In the late 1960s and 1970s, when the unprecedented post-war boom in world economic activity came to an end, Marxist economists were able to point confidently to the ‘crisis of capitalism' for which they found evidence in rising unemployment and inflation in capitalist countries; but non-Marxist economists had lost their earlier consensus. The economic debate on capitalism is now taking place in a political context which is relatively hostile to state intervention; and those economists who believe that the 'spirit of capitalism,’ or free enterprise, is the key to sustained technological progress and that it is weakened by socialist economic policies, seem to carry more conviction than they did in the 1950s and 1960s.

     3. The two concepts center and periphery form part of an attempt to explain the processes through which capitalism is able to affect the economic and political structure of underdeveloped or developing societies. Drawing on the Marxist tradition, this view assumes that in the central capitalist countries there is a high organic composition of capital, and wage levels approximate the cost of reproducing labor. By contrast, in the peripheral countries, there is a low organic composition of capital, and wages are likely to be low, hardly meeting the cost of reproducing labor. This happens because in peripheral area reproduction of labor is often dependent on some degree of non-capitalist production, and the wages paid to workers are subsidized by subsistence production. In some cases, such as with plantation workers, smallholder plots may contribute as much as the actual money wage paid, or in mining, the migrant male wage laborer may receive a wage which supports him but not his family, who depend on subsistence production elsewhere. In the center, wages are determined largely by market processes, whereas at the periphery non-market forces, such as political repression or traditional relations of super- and subordination (as between patrons and clients), are important in determining the wage rate.

The use of the concepts center and periphery implies the world-system as the unit of analysis, and ‘underdevelopment’ as an instituted process rather than a mere descriptive term. Underdevelopment is the result of contradictions within capitalist production relations at the center. It is the outcome of attempts to solve these problems and is a necessary part of the reproduction of capitalism on a world scale.

Attempts to analyze the processes of surplus extraction, together with the claim that the world economy had become capitalist, gave rise to two major interrelated debates. One concerned the precise definition of capitalism and whether it is to be satisfactorily characterized by a specific system of production or an exchange of relations. The other tried to identify links between center and periphery, and thus the nature of the system, in terms of the relations and articulations between different modes of production. In trying to clarify these theoretical issues together with their political implications, the use of the terms center and periphery was elaborated and empirically researched. This gave rise to various forms of world-system theory, represented in the writing of Wallerstein (1974), Frank (1978) and Amin (1976); it also revived interest in theories of national and global economic cycles, for example in the work of Mandel (1980). In addition, in attempting to explain the position of such countries as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, the concept of the semi-periphery was developed. This concept involves the idea that particular political cultures and the mixed nature of their industrialization places these countries in a buffer position, particularly in their international political stance, between central capitalist countries and those of the true periphery.

3. Only a state, that is, an internationally recognized entity, can grant a person citizenship. One cannot be a citizen of an ethnic group or of a nationality which is not organized as a state. Nor is citizenship confined to democratic states. The distinction between citizens (who belong to a republic) and subjects (who belong to a monarchy) became obsolete when democracy matured in states that retained a monarchical façade. Non-democratic states would not now tolerate the international stigmatization of their population by a refusal to term them ‘citizens.’

Citizenship is a legal status defined by each state. Rights and obligations are nowadays ascribed equally to all citizens, since it has become inexpedient to acknowledge the existence of second-class citizens, whether on the basis of place of birth or residence, gender, beliefs, behavior, race, or caste. ‘Civil’ rights protect their safety and ability to act. Raymond Aron (1974) affirms that ‘modern citizenship is defined by the Rights of Man,’ but ancient politics (e.g. the Roman Empire) emphasized liberties and procedural guarantees on behalf of their recognized members. In addition to these civil rights, other rights, again supposedly modern, are termed social rights or entitlements. These entitle the citizen to some level of well-being and of social (i.e. socially guaranteed and organized) security. It should not be forgotten, however, that ancient states had their own form of entitlements, the panem et circenses of Rome being inconsiderable when compared to the state socialism of some ancient empires in America or Asia. Moreover, civil rights, true prerequisites of democracy, have for centuries been viewed as ‘natural’ possessions of individuals, which had only to be protected from the state (hence their often negative description: ‘Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or of the press’). Social rights, in contrast, are popular aspirations which are not always enforceable, even where they are endorsed by the state, because of socioeconomic or ideological constraints. Westbrook therefore suggests that ‘a civil right is thus defined in spite of ordinary politics, a social right is defined by the grace of ordinary politics.’

The duty of the citizens to obey the laws of the state: ‘subjection to the sovereign is the defining characteristic of citizenship’ . Serving the state, from paying taxes up to risking one’s life in its defense, is part of civic duty. However, most political philosophers have stressed that the state exists to serve the citizens: hence it is necessary for the citizens to assert political control over the state in order to ensure that their civic responsibilities do not become too heavy in proportion to their rights.

It is therefore easy to understand why citizenship, originally merely a classification of membership, has become enmeshed with the three most formidable ideological currents of modern times: nationalism and democracy, which advocate an active, dedicated citizenship, and tend to reject on the one hand the non-patriots and on the other hand the non-democrats; and third, but not least, the ideology of the welfare state, which emphasizes a passive, consumerlike citizenship and which emerges easily with the Hobbesian view if a profitable authority. These three conflicting ideologies are themselves internally divided on such issues as the relevance of ethnicity for the nation, and of majority rule for democracy. In consequence of these ideological conflicts being grafted upon it, the juridical notion of citizenship is sure to remain a matter of urgent public debate for many years to come.

1. Before the work of the philosopher Hegel, the term ‘civil society was roughly equivalent in meaning to the term ‘state.’Hegel, in using this term, was alluding to the social domain of market exchange (the market economy – a notion derived from such texts as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) in which individual civil agents freely engage in the pursuit of financial wealth, and the ownership and exchange of goods. Civil society is contrasted by Hegel with the realm of the family, in which the ties between members are based on mutual affection (the bonds of love). In contrast to the family, civil society is defined as a realm of engagement in which an individual pursues their own private ends, and in doing so encounters others primarily as means for the satisfaction of subjective needs (in other words, the relationship between individuals is an instrumental one). In civil society the individual thereby gains a sense of identity derived from his or her relative independence from others. Yet, in Hegel, this dependence contains within it a shared characteristic, for through the active pursuit of their subjective ends individuals also develop a sense of mutual interdependence. Civil society, therefore, is not for Hegel merely to be understood as the outcome of individuals engaged in the free pursuit of their own desires (a domain purely of the market economy in Adam Smith’s sense), but as bringing with it a sense of shared interests in which individuals recognize both the duty they have to support themselves and their duties toward one another (for instance, within civil society, Hegel argues, individuals can claim certain entitlements such as the right to job security, the right to education and the protection from such social hardships as poverty). Because of this, civil society is characterized by Hegel as constituting a ‘universal family,’ which is composed of groups or ‘corporations’ of individuals who are affiliated by means of a common craft or profession. On Hegel’s account civil society is contrasted with the state, which is ultimately concerned with the ethical good of the whole and takes the principle of the universal family to its logical fruition by functioning as a means of mediating between the competing claims of differing interests (both of individuals and corporations) with the aim of achieving the well-being of the whole of society (in Hegel’s terms, the ethical life’).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The young Karl Marx inherited Hegel’s conception of civil society, and displayed or more or less uncritical attitude toward it. In his later writings, however, Marx came to adopt the view that civil society and the state are intimately connected, contending that the apparent freedom of individual association and pursuits in civil society is in fact a masked manifestation of an underlying structure of state power, the latter being the hands of a wealthy capitalist minority whose aim is the exploitation of the majority in the interests of enhanced profit. On a Marxian view, therefore, the realm of civil society is intimately connected with issues of power and ideology. Some recent commentators tend to adhere to the Hegelian view, namely that civil society is a sphere of individual association which may be contrasted with the domain of state power. The meaning of the term has not, therefore, been exhausted by Marx’s attempted revaluation of it.

3. This is an old concept in social and political thought that has recently been revived, especially in eastern Europe but also in the west. Traditionally, up to the 18^th century, it was a more or less literal translation of the Roman societas civilis and, behind that, the Greek koinónia politiké. It was synonymous, that is, with the state or ‘political society.’ When Locke spoke of ‘civil government,’ or Kant of bürgerliche, or Rousseau of état civil, they all meant simply the state, seen as encompassing - like the Greek polis - the whole realm of the political. Civil society was the arena of the politically active citizen, It also carried the sense of a 'civilized' society, one that ordered its relations according to a system of laws rather than the autocratic whim of a despot.

The connection of citizenship with civil society was never entirely lost. It forms part of the association that lends its appeal to more recent revivals of the concept. But there was a decisive innovation in the second half of the 18th century that broke the historic equation of civil society and the state. British social thought Was especially influential in this. In the writings of John Locke and Tom Paine, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, there was elaborated the idea of a sphere of society distinct from the state and with forms and principles of its own. The growth of the new science of political economy - again largely a British achievement - was particularly important in establishing this distinction. Most of these writers continued to use the term civil society in its classical sense, as in Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767); but what they were in fact doing was making the analytical distinction that was soon to transform the meaning of the concept.

It is to Hegel that we owe the modern meaning of the concept of civil society. In the Philosophy of Right (1821), civil society is the sphere of ethical life interposed between the family and the state. Following the British economists, Hegel sees the content of civil society as largely determined by the free play of economic forces and individual self-seeking. But civil society also includes social and civic institutions that inhibit and regulate economic life, leading by the ineluctable process of education to the rational life of the state. So the particularity of civil society passes over into the universality of the state.

Marx, though acknowledging his debt to Hegel, narrowed the concept of civil society to make it equivalent simply to the autonomous realm of private property and market relations. 'The anatomy of civil society,’ Marx said, 'is to be sought in political economy'. This restriction threatened its usefulness. What need was there for the concept of civil society when the economy or simply 'society' - seen as the effective content of the state and political life generally - supplied its principal terms? In his later writings Marx himself dropped the term, preferring instead the simple dichotomy 'society-state'. Other writers too, and not only those influenced by Marx, found less and less reason to retain the concept of civil society. The 'political society' of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-40) recalled the earlier sense of civil society as education for citizenship; but Tocqueville's example did little to revive the fortunes of what was increasingly regarded as an outmoded term. In the second half of the 19th century 'civil society' fell into disuse.

It was left to Antonio Gramsci, in the writing gathered together as the Prison Notebooks (1929-35), to rescue the concept in the early part of the 20th century. Gramsci, while retaining a basic Marxist, orientation, went back to Hegel to revitalize the concept. Indeed he went further than Hegel in detaching civil society from the economy and allocating it instead to the state. Civil society is that part of the state concerned not with coercion or formal rule but with the manufacture of consent. It is the sphere of 'cultural politics'. The institutions of civil society are the Church, schools, trade unions, and other organizations through which the ruling class exercises hegemony over society. By the same token it is also the arena where that hegemony is challengeable. In the radical decades of the 1960s and 1970s, it was Gramsci's concept of civil society that found favor with those who attempted to oppose the ruling structures of society not by direct political confrontation but by waging a kind of cultural guerrilla warfare. Culture and education were the spheres where hegemony would be contested, and ended.

New life was also breathed into the concept by the swift-moving changes in central and eastern Europe in the late 1970s and 1980s. Dissidents in the region turned to the concept of civil society as a weapon against the all-encompassing claims of the totalitarian state. The example of Solidarity in Poland suggested a model of opposition and regeneration that avoided suicidal confrontation with the state by building up the institutions of civil society as a 'parallel society'. In the wake of the successful revolutions of 1989 throughout the region, the concept of civil society gained immensely in popularity. To many intellectuals it carried the promise of a privileged route to the post- communist, pluralist society, though they were vague about the details. Western intellectuals too were enthused anew with the concept. For them it suggested a new perspective on old questions of democracy and participation, in societies where these practices seemed to have become moribund.

Civil society, it is clear, has renewed its appeal. As in the 18th century, we seem to feel once more the need to define and distinguish a sphere of society that is separate from the state. Citizenship appears to depend for its exercise on active participation in non-state institutions, as the necessary basis for participation in formal political institutions. This was Tocqueville’s point about American democracy; it is a lesson that the rest of the world now seems very anxious to take to heart. The question remains whether ‘civil society’ will simply be a rallying cry and a slogan, or whether it will be given sufficient substance to help in the creation of the concrete institutions needed to realize its goals.

1. Civilization is now generally used to describe an achieved state or condition of social life. Like culture with which is has had a long and still difficult interaction, it referred originally to a process, and in some contexts this sense still survives.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Civilization was preceded in English by civilize, which appeared in the early 17^th century, from civiliser, French – to make a criminal matter into a civil matter, and thence, by extension, to bring within a form of social organization. The root word is civil from civilis, Latin – of or belonging to citizens, from civis, Latin – citizen. Civil was thus used in English from the 14^th century, and by the 16^th century had acquired the extended senses of orderly and educated. Hooker in 1594 wrote of ‘Civil Society’ – a phrase that was to become central in the 17^th and especially 18^th centuries – but the main development towards a description of an ordered society was civility, from civilitas, Latin, - community. Civility was often used in the 17^th and 18^th centuries where we would know expect civilization, and as late as 1772 Boswell, visiting Johnson, 'found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary…He would not admit civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilise, better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility.’ Boswell had correctly identified the main use that was coming through, which emphasized not so much a process as a state of social order and refinement, especially in conscious historical or cultural contrast with barbarism. Civilization appeared in Ash’s dictionary of 1775, to indicate both the state and process. By the late 18^th century and then very markedly in the 19^th century it became common.

In one way the new sense of civilization, from the late 18^th century, is a specific combination of the ideas of a process and an achieved condition. It has behind it the general spirit of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on secular and progressive human self-development. Civilization expressed this sense of historical process, but also celebrated the associated sense of modernity: an achieved condition of refinement and order. In the Romantic reaction against these claims for civilization, alternative words were developed to express other kinds of human development and other criteria for human well-being, notably culture. In the late 18^th century the association of civilization with refinement of manners was normal in both English and French. Burke wrote in Reflections of the French Revolution: ‘our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization.’ Here the terms seems almost synonymous, though we must notes that manners has a wider reference than in ordinary modern usage. From the early 19^th century the development of civilization towards its modern meaning, in which as much emphasis is put on social order and on ordered knowledge (later, science) as on refinement of manners and behavior, is on the whole earlier in French than in English. But there was a decisive moment in English in the 1830s, when Mill, in his essay on Coleridge, wrote:

This is Mill’s range of positive examples of civilization, and it is a fully modern range. He went on to describe negative effects: loss of independence, the creation of artificial wants, monotony, narrow mechanical understanding, inequality and hopeless poverty. The contrast made by Coleridge and others was between civilization and culture or cultivation.

1. Classes may primarily be understood as economic groupings, although the relevant economic factors that serve to identify a class may be disputed. Thus, in the Marxist tradition, classes are defined in terms of the ownership of productive wealth, while other traditions look to differences in income or occupation. Class divisions are typically seen as fundamental to the stratification of society, and as such may be associated with differences in power and culture. Crucially, classes are not typically understood as aggregates of individuals, where class analysis would be concerned with classifying some common attribute shared by these individuals. Rather, classes are understood as social entities that have a reality that is independent of the individuals that make them up. As such, class may be a crucial causal factor in explaining the constitution of the individual human subject.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Marx and Engels’ famous, if slightly glib, comment that all preceding history has been the history of class conflict, expresses much that is fundamental to the Marxist approach to class. The analysis of any given society, at any moment of history, can focus on the latent or explicit conflict that exists between two major classes. The subordinate class will be active economic producers in the society. However, the members of that class will not have control over the production process, and thus will not be able to retain the full value of what they produce, or otherwise determine the allocation and distribution of that product. This is because the dominant class will own and control the society’s stock of economic resources or (means of production), and will thereby control the fate of whatever is produced with these resources. The relationship between the dominant and subordinate classes will therefore be one of exploitation, although the precise nature of the exploitation will depend upon the particular historical stage, or mode of production, in which it occurs. In capitalism, for example, the dominant class is the bourgeoisie, which owns capital, while the subordinate class is the proletariat (the members of which have only their ability to labor, which the must sell in order to survive). Exploitation occurs through the appropriation of surplus-value, which is to say that the proletariat’s reward for selling its labor is worth less than the exchange value of the product when it is sold. While the bourgeoisie and proletariat are recognized as the major historical players within capitalism, Marx recognized that other classes will exist. At any moment in history, these classes can be the remnants of earlier historical stages (so that, for example, a feudal aristocracy survived into capitalism), or may be the early form of a class that will subsequently become significant (such as the mercantile capitalists who existed in late feudalism). Other groups may have ambiguous class positions, such as the small, petit-bourgeois producer (including the shop keeper or independent entrepreneur) in capitalism, who own insufficient productive property to free themselves from the necessity of labor.

Class conflict, within Marxism, is understood in terms of the conflicting interests of classes. It is in the interests of the dominant class for the existing economic relations to continue. It is in the interests of the subordinate classes to see the ending of those relations. Overt class conflict, in the form of revolution, is however inhibited, at least in large part, through ideological mechanisms (such as educational institutions, religion and the mass media) existing in the society. A theory of ideology suggests that the dominant class does not maintain its position purely through the exercise of physical force (or control of the means of violence). Rather, the threat of violence is complemented, and possibly in the short-term rendered redundant, by structures of belief that appear to give legitimacy to the dominance of the ruling class. Thus, under the influence of ideology, the subordinate classes will hold beliefs that are against their own objective long-term interests. The issue of ideology becomes a core issue for cultural studies when more sophisticated theories of ideology (not least those centering around the concept of hegemony) suggest that the subordinate classes simply do not accept, passively, an account of the world that is in the interests of the dominant class, but rather more or less successfully negotiate and resist that account, in the light of their own experience. Culture thereby comes to be seen as fundamentally structured in terms of class inequalities.

While the Marxist tradition tends to explain all social inequalities through reference to economic differences (so that the dominant economic class is also expected to be dominant politically and culturally), in the tradition of sociological analysis that arises from the work of Max Weber, a more layered account of social inequality is favored. Weber complements an economic analysis of class by analyses of differences in power and social status. Weber’s approach to the economic determinants of class is itself more varied than that of Marx. Firstly, Weber does not presuppose that all social differences can be collapsed on to economic differences (noting, for example, that the aristocratic Junta in late 19^th century Germany held political power, in spite of the existence of an economically powerful bourgeoisie). Further, for Weber, at least with respect to contemporary capitalism, an individual’s class position does not depend exclusively upon his or her relationship to the means of production, but is realized through the market. Weber thus talks of market opportunities, such that an individual brings various resources including ownership of stocks of capital, the ability to labor and crucially, high levels of skill, to the labor and capital markets. Different resources will earn different levels and kinds of material and symbolic reward (or life-chances). This allows the Weberian to make differentiations within Marxism’s proletariat class, in order to explain the higher levels of material reward and status accorded to intellectuals and managers or administrators over those of manual workers. This in turn throws light on the ambiguous class position of those groups, in that while they are to be strictly defined as laborers, their short-term or apparent class interests, self-understanding and cultural identity may accord more closely with those of the property-owning bourgeoisie. (Analyses of these groups have been a key part of E.O. Wright’s class theory, for example). In addition, analysis of these differences in the social status, or the prestige and respect, that is associated with different social positions, can lead to an analysis of the distinctive lifestyles that are associated with different classes (so that class is again seen as a cultural, rather than purely economic, phenomenon).

There is a danger that the Weberian approach to class analysis can be reduced to an account of class purely in terms of occupational difference and thus to something akin to the Registrar General’s classification of Socio-Economic Groups (of professional; employers and managers; skilled manual and self-employed non-manual; semi-skilled manual; unskilled manual)found in the UK. Without a rigorous underpinning in class theory, such classifications tend to do little more than label, for administrative purposes, aggregates of diverse individuals, rather than to describe and account for classes as real social entities and to explain the constitutive role that they have in our lives. A further problem with all class analysis, that its reduction to Socio-Economic Groups serves to exemplify, is its failure to take account of the position of women. Precisely because class analysis is conducted predominantly in terms of economic activity, women have either remained invisible or been allocated to the class of their male partner, on the grounds that they were not active wage earners, or if they were wage earners, their wage (and associated economic position) was secondary to that of their partner. Socialist feminists have attempted to analyze the relationship between men and women as itself analogous to a class relationship, by focusing on the male expropriation of female labor (for example in unpaid housework, or in the differential that continues to exist between male and female wages).

3. When most of the world's colonial dependencies attained independence as sovereign nation-states in the middle of the 20^th century, it seemed that an epoch had ended logically as well as historically. Colonies had been particular forms of imperialism, created during the tide of western European expansion into other continents and oceans from, the 16^th century onwards. At high noon - the end of the 19^th century -- almost every society outside Europe had become or had been the colony of a western European state. Colonialism began as a series of crude ventures. Whether by force or by treaty, sovereignty was seized, and exercised by governors responsible to foreign states. If indigenous rulers were retained, they mainly veiled the reality of power. As colonial states became more secure and elaborate, they intruded more pervasively into the daily life of subject populations; popular resentment seemed to foreshadow the gradual transfer of governmental machinery to indigenous nationalist leaders.

The actual outcomes were much less orderly. Dislodged or dislocated by the Second World War, and assailed by the United Nations rhetoric of national self-determination, many colonial states in South and South-east Asia passed without ceremony into the hands of nationalists; several in Africa negotiated independence before they had trained indigenous bureaucracies; others had to mount and endure sustained warfare to reach the same goal; and yet others - usually islands with small populations - chose to remain dependencies, with rights of individual entry into the former metropolitan country. A few fragments were retained by metropolitan powers, either as conveniently remote nuclear testing facilities or as significant entrepôts. Despite this messy variety, most scholars believed that a logical narrative had come to an end: western colonialism, born in the 16th century and maturing until the 20th, had reached its apotheosis in the sovereign states which succeeded them and took their places in the community of nations.

Yet colonialism continues to fascinate social scientists, both applied and theoretical. The successor-states were often bounded by arbitrary frontiers which exacerbated ethnic identities, and were vulnerable to the rivalries of the Cold War. Brave attempts to generate solidarity on the basis of the whole Third World, or even more modest efforts such as African unity, failed to reorient the ex-colonies' long- established links with the former metropolitan powers. Their inherited bureaucracies were better equipped to control than to mobilize the populace, and their formal economics were well designed to export unprocessed commodities. Their scanty education and training institutions could not immediately cope with the rising expectations of burgeoning populations. Independence was expected to liberate national energies in escaping from underdevelopment and backwardness, in pursuit of development and modernization. The United Nations Development Decade focused international attention on these goals, and academic centers of development studies graduated platoons of experts to assist in achieving them by finding technical solutions.

Few ex-colonies responded as planned, to strategies of agricultural intensification and economic diversification. Most of tropical Africa and some other parts of the world have performed so poorly that they have, in effect, retired from the global economy, their peoples committed to environmentally dubious practices in order to survive, their cities swelling and their recurrent budgets dependent upon aid flows. These catastrophes contrast sharply with the performance of the economic tigers of South-cast and East Asia, whose success owes rather little to the advice of development experts. In either case, the imperatives of economic development legitimized authoritarian styles of government, which often adopted and elaborated the colonial structures of control in ways which hardly meet the old criteria of modernization. These disconcerting tendencies add grist to the post-modernist mill and its critique of academic positivism. Stage theories of human progress have suffered especially badly at the hands of post-modern writers. Colonialism was not, after all, an aberration. Some see it as inherent in the western Enlightenment, quoting (for example) John Locke's opinion that 'God gave the world to men in Common, hut since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational'. Edward Said's (1978) seminal Orientalism, and the Subaltern Studies pioneered and elaborated by expatriate South Asian scholars (Guha 1994), insist that colonialism was neither a finite era nor a particular set of governmental mechanisms. The desired achievement of post- colonialism therefore requires a great deal more than the application of technical solutions to discrete problems. Colonial apologetics and the triumphalist narratives of anti-colonial nationalism are portrayed as two sides of the same coin, alternative stage theories of social evolution which distort rather than illuminate past and present human experience. Only their de- construction may exorcise colonialism's diffuse influences in the minds and practices of subalterns and superiors alike.

Just as colonialism has been applied beyond its earlier chronological limits, so it has burst its conventional boundaries in space. Ethnic identities which survived the homogenizing pressures of the modern nation-state have been unleashed by the end of the Cold War. When communities seek shelter from open competition, in solidarities which transcend market relations, ethnic identities are, reasserted and historic charters invoked. Whether the immediate demands are political recognition and decentralized institutions or land rights or other tangible benefits, the specter of ethnic nationalism walks abroad, wearing the bloody robe of colonialism. Curiously, this extension of the term's application severs the ties with capitalism and imperialism, and brings it closer to an earlier usage, whereby the movement of any group of settlers into territory claimed or occupied by others could be described quite interchangeably as colonialism or colonization. See also imperialism.

1. A commodity is an object (or service) that is produced for exchange (or a market) rather than for consumption or use by the producer. ‘Commodity’ is the most basic category in Marx’s economics, for it opens up his analysis of capitalism, and specifically of the part that the commodity and commodity exchange play in the exploitation of the proletariat.

1. ‘Commodity fetishism’ encapsulates much of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economy (which is to say, an economy grounded in the ownership of private property and in the exchange of commodities through markets). Marx argues that in the exchange of commodities, the social relationships between human beings take on the appearance of a relationship between objects. Indeed, this relationship between things takes on a phantasmagorical appearance, such that the things confront us as if they themselves were a strange and obscure crowd of persons. Interpreted slightly differently, properties (such as price) that are ascribed to objects through cultural processes, come to appear as if they were natural or inherent properties of the objects.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Commodity fetishism occurs because, in a capitalist economy, producers only come into contact with each other through the market. As such, they relate to each other, not as substantial, complex and unique human beings, but as producers of commodities, and these commodities are made comparable to (and therefore interchangeable with) any other commodities through the common standard of money. Thus, that which is qualitatively unique and distinctive, both in producers and product, is concealed by transformation into a pure quantity.

The theory of commodity fetishism therefore suggests that capitalism reproduces itself by concealing its essence beneath a deceptive appearance. Just as quality appears as quantity, so objects appear as subjects, and subjects as objects. Things are personified and persons objectified. Ultimately, market exchange becomes the appearance of the real essence of production, so that humans falsely understand themselves as consumers rather than producers. This, in turn, conceals the process of exploitation inherent to capitalism (expropriation of surplus-value).

The theory of commodity fetishism was fundamental to the development of theory of ideology within western Marxism, in the account of the reification offered by Lukács and members of the Frankfurt School.
 

1. Community has been in the language since the 14^th century, from comuneté, old French, communitatem, Latin – community of relations or feelings, from the rootword communis, Latin – COMMON. It became established in English in a range of senses: (i) the commons or common people, as distinguished from those of rank (14^th-17^th century); (ii) a state or organized society, in its later uses relatively small (14^th century-); (iii) the people of a district (18^th century-); (iv) the quality of holding something in common, as in community of interests, community of goods (16^th century-). It will be seen that senses (i) to (iii) indicate actual social groups; senses (iv) and (v) a particular quality of relationship (as in communitas). From the 17^th century there are signs of the distinction which became especially important from the 19^th century, in which community was felt to be more immediate than society, although it must be remembered that society itself had this more immediate sense until the 18^th century, and civil society (see civilization) was, like society and community in these uses, originally an attempt to distinguish the body of direct relationships from the organized establishment of realm or state. From the 19^th century the sense of immediacy or locality was strongly developed in the context of larger and more complex industrial societies. Community was the word normally chosen for experiments in an alternative kind of group-living. It is still so used and has been joined, in a more limited sense, by commune (the French commune – the smallest administrative division – and the German Gemeinde – a civil and ecclesiastical division – had interacted with each other and with community, and also passed into socialist thought (especially commune) and into sociology (especially Gemeinde) to express particular kinds of social relations). The contrast, increasingly expressed in the 19^th century, between the more direct, more total and therefore significant relationships of community and the more formal, more abstract and more instrumental relationships of state, or of society, in its modern sense, was influentially formalized by Tönnies (1887) as a contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and these terms are sometimes used, untranslated, in other languages. A comparable distinction is evident in the mid-20^th –century uses of community. In some uses this has been given a polemical edge, as in community politics, which is distinct not only from national politics but from formal local politics and normally involves various kinds of direct action and direct local organization, ‘working directly with the people,’ as which it is distinct from ‘service to the community,’ which has an older sense of voluntary work supplementary to official provision or paid service.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The complexity of community thus relates to the difficult interaction between the tendencies originally distinguished in the historical development: on the one hand the sense of direct common concern; on the other hand the materialization of various forms of common organization, which may or may not adequately express this. Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavorably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.

1. The notions of ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ are often taken as interchangeable. Consciousness is the awareness by an individual (human or animal) of its environment and, if self-conscious, of its place in and relationship to that environment. Humans, higher primates and certain other creatures, e.g. dolphins, are usually regarded as self-conscious. Some philosophers, e.g. Jonathan Glover, have conjectured that there exists a progressive spectrum of consciousness starting with lower, mere conscious animals and ending with self-conscious human beings.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The stance one adopts regarding the nature of consciousness and on what can possess this property, depends upon one’s view of the nature of the mind. A dualist such as René Descartes would view ‘souls’ (minds) and bodies as two radically different substances. Bodies, according to Descartes, have shape, mass and location both in time and space. Minds, on the other hand, although containing thoughts that have duration, do not share any other properties with bodies. This radical separation of minds and bodies led to the infamous mind/body problem. This is the problem of how two substances, so totally different in their natures, can causally interact, granted that minds do in fact affect bodies and vice versa. Descartes would not agree that animals are conscious since he held only humans have souls.

In modern philosophy of mind the attempt to answer the mind/body problem usually results in the adoption of materialism. Materialists attempt to explain the mind in physical and biological terms. Behaviorists suggest that the mind is nothing more than a series of dispositions to behave in various ways given certain sorts of environmental stimuli. Most behaviorists reject all talk of inner psychological processes. Supporters of the mind-brain identity theory take a reductionist approach, holding that the mind is nothing more than the brain. Functionalists argue that mental phenomena or psychological states can be understood in terms of the causal relationships that exist between causal stimuli, other mental states and the behavior that results. Eliminativists suggest that all our common-sense talk of psychological states, such a beliefs and desires, is wrong. In fact, eliminativists, such as Paul Churchland, hold that science will ultimately generate a much better model that the one we have now for explaining consciousness. This new model will result in a wholly different view of what minds are and how they work.

1. Conservatism is perhaps better described as constituting an attitude toward politics and society rather than a political ideology. Its origins can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which was inspired by the events of the French Revolution into articulating the basic characteristics underlying conservative thinking. As such, modern conservatism may well be said to have drawn its first inspiration from a reaction to the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment, which found (albeit rather distorted) expression in the French Revolution. These reactions are (i) a negative attitude toward social change; (ii) a tenaciously held faith in the moral and political rightness of traditionally held attitudes and beliefs; (iii) a generally bleak and pessimistic view of human nature, i.e. conservatives tend to think that individuals left completely alone to pursue their own goals will generally descend into an at best immoral, and at worst amoral, lifestyle (a view which stands in direct contrast to the more optimistic conception of the individual held by both liberalism and socialism); (iv) the view that society is an interconnected structure of relationships constituting a community.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In the 20^th century there have been a number of significant (or at least well-known) exponents of conservatism. Michael Oakeshott has frequently been cited in this connection, although his political thinking, as well as owing a significant debt to such philosophers as Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and G.W.F. Hegel (the latter two of which display ‘conservative’ tendencies), also has features which might equally be described as having features in common with the thinking of communitarianism and is, in any case, far more complex than such a label might imply. Leo Strauss and, more recently, Roger Scruton, might both be taken as better examples of modern conservative thought.

More recently the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has provided an account of conservatism which links it to the writings of postmodernism (e.g. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard). Postmodern thinking, Habermas argues, in articulating its criticisms of the Enlightenment (i.e. of the Enlightenment faith in reason and science) is in effect the expression of a resurgent conservatism which takes its inspiration from the writings of those ‘darker’ thinkers of the bourgeois tradition, Sade and Nietzche (although it may well be equally germane to connect the thought of a thinker like Lyotard with the liberal tradition, with which his later work shares some common features.

1. In modern English consumer and consumption are the predominant descriptive nouns of all kinds of use of goods and services. The predominance is significant in that it relates to a particular version of economic activity, derived from the character of a particular economic system, as the history of the word shows.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Consume has been in English since the 14^th century, from consumer, French, rootword, consumere, Latin – to take up completely, devour, waste, spend. In almost all its early English uses, consume had an unfavorable sense; it meant to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust. This sense is still present in ‘consumed by fire’ and in the popular description of pulmonary phthisis as consumption. Early uses of consumer, from the 16^th century, had the same general sense of destruction or waste.

It was from the mid-18^th century that consumer began to emerge in a neutral sense in descriptions of bourgeois political economy. In the new predominance of an organized market, the acts of making and using goods and services were newly defined in the increasingly abstract pairings of producer and consumer, production and consumption. Yet the unfavorable connotations of consume persisted, at least until the late 19^th century, and it was really only in the mid-20^th century that the word passed from specialized use in political economy to general and popular use. The relative decline of customer, used from the 15^th century to describe buyer or purchaser is significant here, in that customer had always implied some degree of regular and continuing relationship to a supplier, whereas consumer indicates the more abstract figure in a more abstract market.

The modern development has been primarily American but has spread very quickly. The dominance of the term has been so great that even groups of informed and discriminating purchasers and users have formed Consumers’ Associations. The development relates primarily to the planning and attempted control of markets which is inherent in large-scale industrial capitalist (and state-capitalist) production, where, especially after the depression on the late 19^th century, manufacture was related not only to the supply of known needs (which customer or user would adequately describe) but to the planning of given kinds and quantities of production which required large investment at an early and often predictive stage. The development of modern commercial advertising (persuasion, or penetration of a market) is related to the same stage of capitalism: the creation of needs and wants and or particular ways of satisfying them, as distinct from and in addition to the notification of available supply which had been the main earlier function of advertising (where the kind of persuasion could be seen as puff and puffery). Consumer as a predominant term was the creation of such manufacturers and their agents. It implies, ironically as in the earliest senses, the using-up of what is going to be produced, though once the term was established it was given some appearance of autonomy (as in the curious phrase consumer choice). It is appropriate in terms of the history of the word that criticism of a wasteful and ‘throw-away’ society was expressed, somewhat later, by the description consumer society. Yet the predominance of the capitalist model ensured its widespread and often overwhelming extension to such fields as politics, education and health. In any of these fields, but also in the ordinary field of goods and services, to say user rather than consumer is still to express a relevant distinction.

1. The idea that capitalism had become a 'consumer society' arose, a least in western Europe, in the 1950s, in response to increased affluence and changes in the economic and industrial structure (a move away from traditional heavy industry and towards new technologies and service provision) after the Second World War. This awareness gradually led to an increased interest in consumption as a culturally significant activity. However, important theories of consumption can be found from the late 19^th century onwards.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Social theorists such as Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel were amongst the first to begin to articulate the significance of consumption to urban existence. Veblen's (1953) account of the 'conspicuous consumption' of the new bourgeois leisure class suggested that class identity could rest, not upon occupation, but upon patterns of consumption, that served to construct distinctive lifestyles and express status. Similarly, Simmel's essays, including those on 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' (1950) and on 'Fashion' (1957), analyze the manner in which consumption may be used to cultivate, what for Simmel is a sham individuality. Such sophisticated and indeed blasé, consumption allows the consumer to differentiate him or herself. Fashion is thus seen to work through a curious interplay of conformity and dissension, of familiarity and strangeness, in so far as fashion-conscious consumers at once consolidate their membership of the fashionable as they distinguish themselves from the mass. Fashion, for Simmel, represents an attraction to the exotic, strange and new and yet, thanks to its continual historical change, an opportunity to ridicule the fashions of the past (and thus paradoxically one's own once fashionable self).

Marxists typically demonstrate a similar, or even more pronounced, skepticism as to the value of consumption, not least in so far as Marxist social theory is grounded in the view of human beings as primarily producers. An emphasis on humans as consumers suggests an ideological distraction from the essence of economic and political struggle, or at best a manifestation of the unfulfilling or alienating nature of production within capitalism. Perhaps the most sustained Marxist engagement with consumption came from the Frankfurt School. The account of the culture industry proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) holds that 20th-century capitalism is a distinct mode of production at least in comparison with the high capitalism of Marx's own time. For Marx, 19th -century consumers could freely choose between commodities on the grounds of utility (or use-value) that they would derive from them. A useless commodity would be rejected, and thus the consumer retained some vestige of power with high capitalism. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that in late capitalism, use-value has been brought within the control of the capitalist producers, thanks to the power of advertising and the mass media. The consumers buy, crudely, what capitalism wants them to buy. The model of the culture industry is, however, is more subtle than this. The consumers are not, on Horkheimer and Adorno's account, passive dupes of the capitalist system.

Rather, the most efficient way of surviving and gaining some pleasure within the constraints of a highly bureaucratic and instrumental society, is to accept the goods offered, and that consumption may serve to express a deep awareness of the damage that capitalism is inflicting upon them. Adorno imagines a 'shop girl' who visits the cinema, not because she believes that the fantastic events of the cinema could happen to her, but because only in the cinema can she admit that they will not happen to her. This vignette expresses a side of Frankfurt theory that is often lost to its less sensitive readers.

More recent approaches to consumption recognize the utopian element inherent in shopping. An ideology of shopping may be analyzed, where shopping or consumption are perceived as solutions to the discontents of one's life. In Lacanian terms, shopping promises to make us whole again. Yet, as with Freud's analysis of dreams, the pursuit of consumption may be interpreted as an illusory solution to the real problems of social life. In effect, this returns the analysis to the Frankfurt position. The continual round of consumerism is rejected as a short-term and ultimately illusory solution to one's problems. The task of theory would be to expose the real (social and psychological) problems that cause this discontent in the first place. Jacques Attall (1985) has lamented upon this theme, suggesting that when we purchase music (in the form of records), what we do is exchange our own labor (and thus involvement in the pressures and necessities of working life) for a commodity. But, unlike most other commodities, we carry out this exchange only in the utopian expectation of some day having the leisure time to enjoy it. (We work, in effect, for the promise of a work-free future.) This time, of course, never comes, and the use-value of the music lies forever unrealized.

More positive accounts of consumption, not least in that they suggested the potential of consumption as a form of political resistance, first emerged in association with subcultural theory. Youth subcultures, from the 1950s onwards, were seen as consuming the products of capitalism, but not in a manner that accorded with the expectations of the producers. The consumer is thus credited with the ability to make his or her own use-value from the commodity. Michel de Certeau (1984) thus describes consumption as 'secondary production'. While the products may be imposed by capitalism, the ways of using them are not. The shopping center itself (as well as a number of key contemporary commodities such as the 'Walkman' (du Gay et al. 1997) and 'Barbie' (Rand 1995)) has become the focus of much analysis from cultural studies. Shopping is recognized as a highly popular leisure activity (and not simply the means to other leisure activities). The shopping center becomes one focus of this activity, not least in so far as the shopping center may offer attractions other than shopping (including restaurants, cinemas, and other leisure facilities). Yet, again, different groups will consume the center itself differently. The young, unemployed, elderly and homeless, despite the fact that they are overtly excluded from consumerism due to lack of economic resources, will still find use within the center (for example as a source of shelter, warmth and entertainment, or as a meeting place) (Morris 1993).

The theoretical issues in the analysis of the political and social significance of consumption perhaps revolve around the conceptualization and understanding of human autonomy and individuality. Empirical evidence (for example that 80 cent of all new products are rejected by consumers) is, in itself, of little value in establishing whether or not consumers have exercised active and autonomous choice. Simmel's pseudo-individualism, and even Horkheimer and Adorno's culture industry are not incompatible with such statistics. Yet, consideration of consumption does indicate much about how humans find scope for self-expression (however glorious or impoverished this expression is ultimately judged to be) within the close restrictions of their everyday life.

1. The term 'counterculture was coined in the 1960s, largely in respons to the emergence of middle-class youth movements (such as the hippies), to refer to groups that questioned the values of the dominant culture. While centering on an opposition to the Vietnam War, the hippie counterculture also expressed its dissatisfaction with the values and goals of capitalism, such as consumerism, the work ethic and a dependence on technology. In general, the concept of counterculture may now be extended to the values, beliefs and attitudes of any minority group that opposed the dominant culture, but more precisely, does so in a relatively articulate and reflective manner. Thus, at its emergence, the Christian religion was a counterculture, in opposition to the dominant Jewish and Roman cultures. In the early period of British capitalism, the Quakers and the Methodists represented countercultures in opposition to the dominant values of Anglicanism. (See also subculture, youth culture.)

1. Class membership is defined, at least within the Marxist tradition, in terms of the individual's access to and control of economic capital (such as industrial machinery, raw materials and also finance). Pierre Bourdieu (1973) drew an analogy to an individual's access to cultural resources in order to explain the workings of the educational system in a class-divided capitalist society. Children will have differing degrees of cultural competence (including information and skills), acquired prior to school within the family. The educational system will not then overtly discriminate in favor of the children of the dominant class. Rather, all children will be assessed 'neutrally', in terms of their ability to perform according to the same criteria of excellence. These criteria will, however, be derived from the dominant culture. The children of the dominant class will do better, so yielding interest (in terms of 'symbolic power') on their parents' investment in cultural capital.

1. The view that fundamentally different standards of morality, practices and belief systems operate in different cultures and cannot be judged with regard to their worth from a standpoint exterior to them. Cultural relativism thus holds that there is a fundamental incommensurability between the value-systems of different cultures. Whether or not such a view commits one to a relativism with regard to questions of knowledge (see epistemology) is a further issue which depends upon whether or not one is inclined to hold that the rules of validity which apply With regard to the construction of knowledge claims (for example, the principle of non-contradiction) are culturally constructed. However, it is difficult to see how a cultural relativist can defend any notion of epistemic validity from the charge of being likewise culturally produced, and therefore incommensurable with conceptions of validity that are generated within different cultures or contexts. It is possible to define more recent cultural relativism in terms of its commitment to a particular model of language and meaning derived from (or having strong parallels with) the work of the later Wittgenstein. Thus, Richard Rorty's espousal of a liberalism and postmodernism which is relativistic about the practices and procedures that constitute interpretative communities owes a debt to the Wittgensteinean 'meaning is use' thesis. Although it has often been claimed that the cultural relativist is interested in giving voice to the perspectives of marginalized interests and cultures, it is by no means clear that this is the case. Some have argued (CF, Christopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties (1985)) that Rorty's espousal of cultural and epistemic relativism brings with it the specter of cultural imperialism.

1. The term 'cultural reproduction' was coined by Pierre Bourdieu (1973), to refer to the process by which the culture, and thus political power, of the dominant class is maintained from one generation to the next, through the education system. More generally, the term may be seen to highlight the problem of how societies continue to exist and remain relatively stable over long periods of time. This continued existence requires more than just physical reproduction, in the sense of sufficient births to replace those who have died or left the society. The culture of that society must be transmitted to the new generation. Cultural reproduction is thus intimately linked to the role that socialization, or the process through which individuals internalize the culture of their societies, plays in this stability. As Bourdieu's definition highlights, part of this problem of cultural transmission is not simply the stability of the manner in which society is organized, or the stability of the key values and beliefs of its culture, but rather the stability of the political structures and the structures of domination and exploitation within the society. As such, it may be seen as a process by which political structures are given legitimacy or authority.

In the Marxist tradition, social reproduction refers to conditions necessary for the renewal of labor. Again, this is not simply a matter of physically replacing laborers, but more centrally involves the place of social and cultural institutions, such as housing, education and health care in that process.

1. 'Culture' is not easily defined, not least because it can have different meanings in different contexts. However, the concept that lies at the core of cultural studies, it may be suggested, is very much the concept that is found in cultural anthropology. As such, it avoids any exclusive concern with 'high' culture (which is still found, for example, in the writings of Arnold, Leavis and elite and mass society theories). It entails recognition that all human beings live in a world that is created by human beings, and in which they find meaning. Culture is the complex everyday world we all encounter and through which we all move. Culture begins at the point at which humans surpass whatever is simply given in their natural inheritance. The cultivation of the natural world, in agriculture and horticulture, is thus a fundamental element of a culture. As such, the two most important or general elements of culture may be the ability of human beings to construct and to build, and the ability to use language (understood most broadly, to embrace all forms of sign system).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Gillian Rose's use of the Jewish myth of the Tower of Babel is illuminating in this context (1993). At Babel, humans attempted to reach heaven by building a tower. God did not merely destroy the Tower, but in order to prevent a further attempt, He prevented communication by imposing a multiplicity of languages. This story is often seen as an allegory of language. Rose, however, takes it further, as an allegory of language and architecture. It is therefore seen to comment upon key themes of cultural studies, including the community, the conflict of diverse cultures, power, law and morality, and knowledge. A few of these themes may be outlined. Rose's argument is that Babel represents, not simply an architectural project, but also the building of a city. Cities are a crucial cultural watershed, for in the city, diverse cultures (customs, beliefs and values) come together. In a city, people become aware, perhaps for the first time, that they have a culture, for there is always someone who disagrees with what you have always taken for granted. Our self-awareness as cultural beings is grounded in this confrontation, and thus in the exercise of power (as we struggle to sustain our own values against an assault from others). The point of Babel, and perhaps of all human culture, is that in the architectural achievement of the tower-city, humans gained a sort of immortality. While the individual may die, the buildings of his or her generation will live on and become part of the future. Cultures endure even though the individuals who build them die. So, at the very least, our understanding of time is transformed, and our understanding of history created. Yet this ‘reach,’ as Rose calls it, entails the loss of a naïve self-certainty. The unity and universality of the isolated, nomadic early Jewish tribe is confronted and questioned by its encounter with a plurality of other cultures and their claims to universality. Paradoxically, at the very moment in which we become aware of ourselves as cultural beings, we are both enabled (we can do new things, and in principle, do anything we like), but can no longer ever be certain what is the right thing to do, and so in doing anything, we fall into conflict with others.  Thus, cultural studies is necessarily concerned with artificiality, and the political struggle to find and defend meaning.
 
 

2. Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cultura, Latin, from the rootword colere, Latin, had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus ‘inhabit’ developed through colonus, Latin to colony. ‘Honor with worship’ developed through cultus, Latin to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (in English culture as ‘worship’ in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, which has since developed its own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by the early 15^th century had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth.

Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter – ploughshare, had traveled by a different linguistic route, from culter, Latin – ploughshare, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter, and as late as the early 17^th century culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: ‘hot burning cultures’). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From the early 16^th century the tending of natural growth was extended to the process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Thus More: ‘to the culture and profit of their minds’; Bacon: ‘the culture and manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes ‘a culture of their minds’ (1651); Johnson: ‘she neglected the culture of her understanding’ (1759). At various points in the development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such as process, is not important before the late 18^th century and is not common before the mid 19^th century. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): ‘spread much more Knowledg and Civility, yea, Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected.’ Here the metaphorical sense (‘natural heat’) still appears to be present, and civility is still written where in the 19^th century we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also read ‘government and culture’ in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In 18^th-century England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala to Mrs. Clayton; cit Plumb, England in the 18th Century) which has this clear sense: ‘it has not been customary for persons of either birth of culture to breed up their children to the Church.’ Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote ‘…nor purple state nor culture can bestow.’ Wordsworth wrote ‘where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown’ (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) ‘every advantage of discipline and culture.’

It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, we have to look also at developments in other languages and especially in German.

In French, until the 18^th century, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use an independent noun dates from the mid 18^th century, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in the mid 18^th century; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated. There was at this point an important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (late 18^th century) Cultur and from the 19^th century Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming ‘civilized’ or ‘cultivated’; second, in the sense which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in the popular 18^th century forms of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods'. He attacked, the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization' or 'culture' - the historical self-development of humanity - was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of 18^th-century European culture. Indeed he attacked what he called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and wrote:

1. The term ‘culture industry’ was coined by the Frankfurt School

This account of the absorption of use-value into production goes hand in hand with Adorno's analysis of the fate of the relationship between the forces and relations of production in 20th-century capitalism. The independence of use-value in 19th -century capitalism gave the human subject genuine autonomy and thus potential for resistance (thereby destabilizing capitalism). This autonomy is now increasingly lost. Similarly, administrative techniques, that developed as part of the forces of production (to increase the efficiency of industry), now become fundamental to the relations of production (so that market exchange and property ownership are subordinated to bureaucratic organization, and the employed and the unemployed alike become claimants for welfare payments). The contradiction between the forces and relations of production, that for Marx would bring about the fall of capitalism, is removed in this totally administered society

The account of the culture industry has frequently been trivialized by its critics (not least those within cultural studies). Horkheimer and Adorno do not, for example, obviously assume that human subjects are passive victims of the culture industry, and nor is the culture industry an instrument of class rule. The total administration of contemporary capitalism, embraces and constrains everyone, so that although the property-owning bourgeoisie may continue to benefit materially from the system, they are as powerless before it as the non-property owning classes. Yet these powerless subjects continue to struggle with the system, and to survive within it. Horkheimer and Adorno hint that consumption of culture industry products is diverse. The radio ham, for example, attempts to retain some autonomy and individuality by building and operating his or her own radio, rather than accepting what is given, ready made. Others use the cover of culture industry institutions, such as the cinema, to admit the unhappiness that would paralyze them in the real world. Even within the culture industry, not all of its products are homogeneous. Orson Welles (and later Michelangelo Antonioni) demonstrate that cinema has the critical and self-reflective potential that Adorno attributes to all autonomous art; Bette Davis keeps alive the tradition of great acting; and if the nuances of the text are to be believed, Warner Brothers cartoons do not share the simple minded capitulation to authority that is the hall-mark of Disney.

D

democracy

3. In the classical Greek polis, democracy was the name of a constitution in which the poorer people (demos) exercised power in their own interest as against the interest of the rich and aristocratic. Aristotle thought it a debased form of constitution) and it played relatively little part in subsequent political thought, largely because Polybius and other writers diffused the idea that only mixed and balanced constitutions (incorporating monarchic, aristocratic and democratic elements) could be stable. Democracies were commonly regarded as aggressive and unstable and likely to lead (as in Plato's Republic) to tyranny. Their propensity to oppress minorities (especially the propertied) was what Burke meant when he described a perfect democracy as the most shameless thing in the world.

Democracy as popular power in an approving sense may occasionally be found in early modern times (in the radical thinkers of the English Civil Way, the constitution of Rhode Island of 164 1, and in the deliberations of the framers of the American Constitution), but the real vogue for democracy dates from the French Revolution. The main reason is that 'democracy' came to be the new name for the long-entrenched tradition of classical republicanism which, transmitted through Machiavelli, had long constituted a criticism of the dominant monarchical institutions of Europe. This tradition had often emphasized the importance of aristocratic guidance in a republic, and many of its adherents throughout Europe considered that the British constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament was the very model of a proper republic. This idea fused in the 19th century with demand to extend the franchise, and the resulting package generally to be called 'democracy'.

It is important to emphasize that democracy was a package, because the name had always previously described a source of power rather than a manner of governing. By the 19th century, however, the idea of democracy included representative parliaments, the separation of powers, the rule of law, civil rights and other such liberal desirabilities. All of these conditions were taken to be the culmination of human moral evolution, and the politics of the period often revolved around extensions of the franchise, first to adult males then to women, and subsequently to such classes as young people of 18 (rather than 21) and, recently in Britain, to voluntary patients In mental hospitals. Democracy proved to be a fertile and effervescent principle of political perfection. Inevitably, each advance towards democracy disappointed) many adherents, but the true ideal could always be relocated in new refinements of the idea. The basis of many such extensions had been laid by the fact that democracy was a Greek term used, for accidental reasons, to describe a complicated set of institutions whose real roots were medieval. The most important was representation, supported by some American founding fathers precisely because it might moderate rather than reflect the passions of an untutored multitude. The Greekness of the name, however, continually suggests that the practice of representation is not intrinsic to modern democracy, but rather a contingent imperfection resulting from the sheer size of modern nations by comparison with ancient city states. In fact, modern constitutional government is quite unrelated to the democracy of the Greeks.

Although modern democracy is a complicated package, the logic of the expression suggests a single principle. The problem is: what precisely is the principle? A further question arises: how far should it extend? So far as the first question is concerned, democracy might be identified with popular sovereignty, majority rule, protection of minorities, affability, constitutional liberties, participation in decisions at every level, egalitarianism, and much else. Parties emphasize one or other of these principles according to current convenience, but most parties in the modern world (the fascist parties between 1918 and 1945 are the most important exception) have seldom failed to claim a democratic legitimacy. The principle of democracy was thus a suitably restless principle for a restless people ever searching for constitutional perfection.

Democracy is irresistible as a slogan because it seems to promise a form of government in which rulers and ruled are in such harmony that little actual governing will be required. Democracy was thus equated with a dream for freedom. For this reason, the nationalist theories which helped destroy the great European empires were a department of the grand principle of democracy, since everybody assumed that the people would want to be ruled by politicians of their own kind. The demographic complexities of many areas, however, were such that many people would inevitably be ruled by foreigners – rather than on national principle, which constitutes some as the nation, and the rest as minorities. In claiming to be democratic, rulers might hope to persuade their subjects that they ruled in the popular interest.

Democracy is possible only when a population can recognize both sectional and public interests, and organize itself for political action. Hence no state is seriously democratic unless an opposition is permitted to criticize governments, organize support, and contest elections. But in many countries, such oppositions are likely to be based upon tribes, nations or regions, which do not recognize a common or universal good in the state. Where political parties are of this kind, democratic institutions generate quarrels rather than law and order. In these circumstances, democracy is impossible, and the outcome has been the emergence of some other unifying principle: sometimes an army claiming to stand above 'politics,’ and sometimes an ideological party in which a doctrine supplies a simulacrum of the missing universal element. One-party states often lay claim to some eccentric (and superior) kind of democracy - basic, popular, guided and so on. In fact, the very name ‘party' requires pluralism. Hence, in one- party states, the party is a different kind of political entity altogether, and the claim to democracy is merely window-dressing. This does not necessarily mean, however, that such governments are entirely without virtue. It would be foolish to think that one manner of government suited all peoples.

Democracy as an ideal in the 19^th century took for granted citizens who were rationally reflective about the voting choices open to them. Modern political scientists have concentrated their attention upon the actual irrationalities of the democratic process. Some have even argued that a high degree of political apathy is preferable to mass enthusiasm which endangers constitutional forms. See also citizenship, democratization.

democratization

3. The process through which authoritarian regimes are transformed into democratic regimes is called democratization. It must be kept analytically distinct both from the process of liberalization and from the process of transition. Liberalization is simply the decompression of the authoritarian regime taking place within its framework. It is controlled by the authoritarian rulers themselves. It consists in the relaxation of the most heinous features of authoritarianism: the end of torture, the liberation of political prisoners, the lifting of censorship and the toleration of some opposition. Liberalization may be the first stage in the transition to democracy. However, the transition to democracy truly begins when tile authoritarian rulers are no longer capable of controlling domestic political developments and are obliged to relinquish political power. At that point, an explosion of groups, associations, movements and parties signals that the transition has started.

There is no guarantee that, once begun, a transition from authoritarianism will necessarily lead to a democratic regime. Though it will simply be impossible to restore the previous authoritarian regime, in marry cases the political transition will be long, protracted and ineffective. In other cases, the major features of a democratic regime will come into being. Usually, political parties re-emerge representing the old political memories of the country or new parties are created to represent the dissenting groups and the adamant oppositions during the authoritarian regime. Depending on the tenure of the previous authoritarian regimes, there will appear different leadership groups. If the authoritarian regime has lasted for some decades, then few old political leaders retain enough social popularity and political support to be able to play a significant role in the transition and new young leaders will quickly replace them. If the authoritarian regime has lasted less than a decade, it will be possible for the political leaders ousted by the authoritarian regime to restructure their political organizations and to reacquire Reference governmental power. During the process of democratization new institutions will be created. The once atomized and compressed society enters into a process of self-reorganization and provides the social basis for new political actors.

The reorganization of society has proved easier in non-communist authoritarian regimes. In former communist authoritarian regimes, all social organizations have been destroyed by the communist party. Only groups supporting the communist party and dominated by it were allowed to function. Few dissenting associations and movements were tolerated and allowed to be active in politics. On the contraq6 in southern European and Latin American countries, the various authoritarian regimes never succeeded in destroying all forms of pluralism, or organized groups. Moreover, their rate of economic growth, though limited, created the premises of a pluralist society almost ready-made for the process of democratization. Eastern European communist authoritarian regimes collapsed in a sort of sociopolitical void. Only in Poland a powerful organized movement existed, Solidarnosc, that could inherit political power. Otherwise, citizens' forums and umbrella associations had to emerge while former communists slowly reorganized themselves. For these reasons, free elections have determined a new distribution of political power in eastern Europe without yet stabilizing a democratic regime.

According to Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (1991) so far there have been three waves of democratization and two reversals: the first wave took place from 1828 to 1926 and the first reverse wave from 1922 to 1942. The second wave appeared from 1943 to 1962 and the second reverse wave from 1958 to 1973. Finally, the third wave materialized starting from 1974 and is still going on. The overall process of democratization has moved from the Anglo-Saxon and northern European countries to the southern European rim and to the Latin American continent. It has now reached all eastern European and several Asian countries. Democratization is no longer a culturally bounded phenomenon and, contrary to previous periods, it has found a largely supportive international climate. Though not all newly created democratic regimes are politically stable and socioeconomically effective, they appear to have won the bitter and prolonged struggle against authoritarian actors and mentalities. Only Muslim fundamentalist movements now represent a powerful and dogmatic alternative to the attempts to democratize contemporary regimes. See also democracy.

demographic transition

3.Demographic transition, also known as the demographic cycle, describes the movement of death and birth rates in a society from a situation where both are high to one where both are low. In the more developed economics, it was appreciated in the 19th century that mortality was declining. Fertility began to fall in France in the late 18th century; and in north-west and central Europe, as well as in English-speaking countries of overseas European settlement, in the last three decades of the 19^th century. Fertility levels were believed to have approximated mortality levels over much of human history, but the fact that fertility declined later than mortality during demographic transition inevitably produced rapid population growth. In France this situation appeared to have passed by 1910, as birth and death rates once again drew close to each other, and by the 1930s this also seemed to be happening in the rest of the countries referred to above.

Thompson (1929) categorized the countries of the world into three groups according to their stage in this movement of vital rates (later also to be termed the vital revolution). This process was to be carried further by C. R Blacker (1947), who discerned five stages of which the last was not the reattainment of nearly stationary demographic conditions but of declining population, a possibility suggested by the experience of a range of countries in the economic depression of the 1930s. However, it was a paper published in 1945 by Notestein, the director of Princeton University's Office of Population Research, which introduced the term demographic transition. Notestein implied the inevitability of the transition for all societies and, together with another paper published seven years later, began to explore the mechanisms which might explain the change. Notestein argued that the mortality decline was the resu1t of scientific and economic change, and was generally welcomed. However, fertility had been kept sufficiently high in high-mortality countries to avoid population decline only by a whole array of religious and cultural mechanisms which slowly decayed once lower mortality meant that they were to longer needed. He also believed that the growth of city populations, and economic development more generally, created individualism and rationalism which undermined the cultural props supporting uncontrolled fertility. Demographic transition theory is less a theory than a body of observations and explanations. Coale (1973) has summarized research on the European demo graphic transition as indicating the importance of the diffusion of birth control behavior within cultural units, usually linguistic ones, with diffusion halting at cultural frontiers. Caldwell (1976) has argued that high fertility is economically rewarding in pre-transitional societies to the decision makers, usually the parents, and that, if subsequent changes in the social relations between the generations mean that the cost of children outweighs the lifelong returns from them, then fertility begins to fall. The Chicago Household Economists (see Schultz 1974) place stress on the underlying social and economic changes in the value of women's time as well as on the changing marginal value of children.

After the Second World War doubt was cast as to whether the transition necessarily ended with near- stationary population growth because of the occurrence in many industrialized countries of a baby boom, but by the 1970s this was regarded as an aberrant phenomenon related largely to a perhaps temporary movement toward early and universal marriages. By this time the demographic transition's claim to be globally applicable had received support from fertility declines (usually assisted in developing countries by government family planning programs) in most of the world with the major exceptions of Africa and the Middle East.

Although demographic transition refers to the decline of both mortality and fertility, social scientists have often employed it to refer almost exclusively to the latter phenomenon. Because the world's first persistent fertility decline began in north-west and central Europe in the second half of the 19^th century, demographers were tempted to employ the term second demographic transition for subsequent large-scale movements of this type, such as the somewhat later fail of the births rates in southern and eastern Europe or the fertility decline in much of Latin America and Asia from the 1960s. However, second demographic transition has now found acceptance as the description of the fertility decline which followed the baby boom in developed countries and which began first in those countries which earliest participated in the first demographic transition, north-west and central Europe and the English-speaking countries of overseas European settlement. Between the mid-1960s and early 1980s fertility fell by 30-50 per cent in nearly all these countries so that by the latter date fertility was below the long-term replacement level in nearly all of them and the rest of Europe as well. Philippe Ariès (1980) wrote of two successive motivations for the decline of the Western birth rate', stating that, while the first had aimed at improving the chances of the children in achieving social and occupational advancement in the world, the second was parent- oriented rather than child-oriented and had in fact resulted in the dethroning of the child-king (his term). Ariés and others agreed that in a faster changing world parents were now planning for their own futures as well as those of their children, that die process had been accelerated by later and fewer marriages and the trend towards most women working outside the home, and that it had been facilitated by the development of more effective methods of birth control, such as the pill and IUD, and readier resort to sterilization. Henri Léridon (1981) wrote of the second contraceptive revolution, Ron Lesthaege and Dirk van der Kaa (1986) of two demo- graphic transitions and van der Kaa (1987) of the second demographic transition. See also fertility.

dialectical and historical materialism

1. Historical materialism is the theory of social change developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. History is divided into a series of epochs or modes of production. Each is characterized by a distinct economy and a distinct class structure. Historical change is fuelled by the progressive expansion of the productive power of the economy (and thus the development of technology, or the forces of production) and is manifest in overt class conflict and revolution.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Dialectical materialism encompasses those aspects of Marxist philosophy other than the theory of history, including epistemology and ontology. It became the dogmatic official philosophy of the Soviet Union. The term was not used by Marx or Engels, with attempts to develop a coherent dialectical materialist philosophy beginning with Plekhanov and Lenin, building on Engels's Anti-Dühring (1947), and Dialectics of Nature (1973). Dialectical materialism is characterized by its materialism and its rejection of any form of skepticism. The material world is held to have primacy over the mental, so that the body is the precondition for consciousness. It is held that this material world is, in principle, knowable through the work of the empirical sciences. In addition, the philosophy is dialectical, in that it presents reality as in development. This is to argue, not simply that there is change in the material world, but rather that reality is characterized by the emergence of qualitatively new properties.

economic development

3. A central question in the study of economic development has turned out to be ‘in what precisely does the economic development of a society consist?’ For about twenty years after 1945, the accepted view was that the prolonged and steady increase of national income was an adequate indicator of economic development. This was held to be so because it was believed that such an increase could be sustained over long periods only if specific economic (and social) processes were at work.

These processes, which were supposed to be basic to development, can be briefly summarized as follows:

1. The share of invest merit in national expenditure rises, leading to a rise in capital stock per person employed.
2. The structure of national production changes, becoming more diversified as industry, utilities and prices take a larger relative share, compared with agriculture and other forms of primary production
3. The foreign trade sector expands relative to the whole economy, particularly as manufactured exports take a larger share in an increased export total.
4. The government budget rises relative to national income, as the government undertakes expanded commitments to construct economic and social infrastructure.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Accompanying these structural changes in the economy, major changes of social structure also occur:

5. The population expands rapidly as death rates fall in advance of birth rates. Thereafter, a demographic transition occurs in which improved living conditions in turn bring the birth rate down, to check the rate of overall population increase.
6. The population living in urban areas changes from a small minority to a large majority.
7. Literacy, skills and other forms of educational attainment are spread rapidly through the population.

Another major doubt about the adequacy of the view of development described in processes 1-7 centers around the question of income distribution. If the basic development processes described above either do not make the distribution of income more equal, or actually worsen the degree of inequality for more than a short period, some theorists would argue that economic development has not taken place. They prefer to distinguish economic growth from economic development which, by their definition, cannot leave the majority of the population as impoverished as they originally were. For them, indicators of growth and structural change must be complemented by indicators of improvement in the quality of everyday life for most people.

The latter can be of various kinds. They can focus on the availability of basic needs goods - food, shelter, clean water, clothing and household utensils. Or they can focus on life expectation tables and statistics of morbidity. The availability and cost of education opportunities are also relevant. Although the distribution of income may be a good starting-point, the distribution of entitlements to consume of all kinds is the terminus. Similar kinds of consideration arise when one examines the role of political liberty in economic development. Is rapid growth and structural change induced by an oppressive, authoritarian regime true development? Those who object to the 'costs' of the development strategies of the former Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China do not think so. From a libertarian standpoint, they refuse to accept the standard account of economic development as sufficiently comprehensive.

The difficulty here is clearly with weighting all of the different indices involved to arrive at a single measure of the degree of development in this extended sense. Perhaps it cannot be done; and perhaps, if policy rather than international league tables is our main concern, this failure is not very important. The most familiar recent attempt in this vein is the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report series (UNDP 1990- ).

Linked with these questions about the meaning of development is the problem of conceptualizing the process of development. Perhaps the most famous of all models of this process is the classically-based model of Sir Arthur Lewis (1954). This attempts to capture the simultaneous determination of income growth and income distribution. Its key assumptions are the availability within traditional, technologically backward agriculture of surplus population (surplus in the sense that their marginal product in agriculture is zero); and the existence of a conventional subsistence wage in the industrial sector which does not rise as the surplus agricultural population is transferred to industrial employment. The transfer of labor from agriculture to industry at a constant wage rate (which may or may not involve physical migration, but usually does) permits industrial capitalists to receive an increasing share of a rising national income as profit and to reinvest their profits in activities which progressively expand the share of industry in the national output. Thus Lewis explained what he regarded as the central puzzle of economic development, namely to understand the process which converted economies which habitually saved and invested 4-5 per cent of the national income into economies which save and invest 12-15 per cent.

The Lewis model can be elaborated to explain other stylized facts of development. If labor transfer involves physical migration, urbanization will follow. If capitalists are defined as those with an accumulation mentality, (as Lewis does), they can operate in the public as well as the private sector, and expansion of the government share in national output can be under- stood in these terms. If industrial employment in some sense requires labor to be healthy and educated, these major social changes - including a demographic transition - may be set in train.

Much of the subsequent literature on economic development can be read as an extended commentary on the Lewis model. Neo-classical economists have criticized the assumptions of the model, questioning whether labor in the agricultural sector does have a zero marginal product, and whether labor transfer can be effected without raising the real wage rate. Alternatives to the Lewis model as an account of rural-urban migration have been proposed. The Lewis model's sharp focus on physical capital formation has been strongly questioned. Some critics have gone so far as to deny that physical capital formation is necessary at all to economic development (e.g. Bauer 1981). A less extreme view is that human capital formation or investment in the acquisition of good health and skills is a prerequisite, rather than air inevitable consequence, of the successful operation of physical capital. A balance is therefore required between physical and human investments to ensure that an economy raises its level of technological capability in advance of a physical investment drive.

The sectoral destination of investment in the Lewis model also provoked a strong reaction. Although less narrowly focused than Dobb's model (1955) where investment priority was given to the capital goods sector of industry, the Lewis model's focus on investment in the modern industrial sector was seen as inimical to the development of agriculture, and the failure of agricultural development was increasingly identified as a cause of slow growth and income maldistribution in developing countries (as argued by Lipton 1977). The debate about sectoral investment balance has since been subsumed into the analysis of project appraisal, as pioneered by Little and Mirrlees (1974) and others. This provides, in principle, a calculus of social profitability of projects in all sectors of the economy. It is worth noting, however, that the rationale for the social pricing of labor in the Little and Mirrlees method is based on the Lewis conception of agriculture-industry labor transfer. * The Lewis model recognized the possibilities of state capitalism as well as private capitalism. The infrequency in practice with which such potential has been realized has led to demands that governments confine themselves to their so-called 'traditional functions’ and the creation of an incentive and regulatory framework for the promotion of private enterprise. This has been one of the major thrusts of the counter-revolution in development dunking and policy of the 1980s (Toye 1993).

Foreign trade plays a minor role in the Lewis model and other early models of economic development. This reflected the pessimism of many pioneers (such as Prebisch (1959) and Singer 1950) about the tendency of the terms of trade of primary commodity producers to decline. It also responded to a belief that, historically, isolation from the world economy had spurred development in Meiji Japan (Baran 1973) and Latin America in the 1930s (Frank 1969). More recently, the expansion of manufactured exports has been seen as a major element, in the astonishingly successful development performances of East Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. Debate still rages, however, about whether this kind of trade expansion experience validates liberal trade and finance policies, or an intelligent and selective style of government intervention in these markets (as argued by Wade 1990).

The concessional transfer of finance and technical assistance from developed to developing countries fitted well with the Lewis emphasis on physical capital formation as the key to growth and income distribution. More recently, the effectiveness of aid has been questioned. Although simple supporters and enemies remain vocal, it is common now to see more clearly the complexities of the aid process, and to stress the many lessons that have been learned from hard experience to improve the likelihood of aid achieving its desired objectives (e.g. Cassen and Associates1986; Lipton and Toye 1990). Somewhat greater agreement exists on the facts of recent economic development than on the bringing it about. That many poor countries have experienced much economic growth and structural change since 1945 is widely accepted. Few still claim that growth in developed countries systematically causes increased poverty in other, poorer countries. A weaker version of this thesis is that there is an Ever-widening gap between richest and poorest, which can arise when the welfare of the poorest is constant or rising. Even this weaker version is controversial, on the Grounds that countries are ranged evenly along a spectrum of wealth/poverty, and thus to split this spectrum into two groups of rich and poor in order to compare group statistics of economic performance can be somewhat arbitrary. In fact, the measured growth rates of developed and developing countries since the early 1960s show relatively small differences and ones that may well lie within the margins of error that attach to such estimates. The countries classified as developing also show increasing differentiation among themselves.

But, although the overall record of economic growth at least need not give cause for deep gloom, certain geographical regions do appear to have markedly unfavorable development prospects. Such regions include sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, and of Central and South America. The reasons for their poor prospects vary from place to place. Some are held back by severe pressure of population on cultivable land; some by inability to generate indigenous sources of appropriate technical progress; some by the persistence of intense social and political conflict; some by unenlightened policy making; and some by the continuing failure to evolve a worldwide financial system which does not tend to amplify the inherent unevenness (over place and time) of economic development.

It is also true that the rapid increase in the world's population makes it possible for the absolute number of people whose consumption falls below a given poverty line to increase, even when the percentage of the world's people who are poor on this definition is falling. This is what seems to be happening at the moment. Despite all the evidence of widespread economic development, theoretical and practical work on poverty alleviation has, therefore, a growing urgency and relevance. See also economic growth, industrial revolution, modernization, underdevelopment.

economic growth

Economic growth is usually taken to mean the growth of the value of real income or output. The word 'real' signifies that only changes in quantities, and not changes in prices, are allowed to affect the measure. It is not equivalent to growth in welfare or happiness, although It may have important consequences for both, and there has been much debate about its benefits and costs. Measurable real income means, in turn, the maximum rate of measurable real consumption of goods and services that could be sustained indefinitely from the chosen point of time forward. It therefore presupposes that the costs of maintaining that rate of consumption are fully met, for example, that flocks are renewed, that roads are maintained, as also are the numbers of people and levels of their health and education. In principle, properly measured income would be net of the costs of environmental degradation, and would allow for depletion of minerals, thus acknowledging concerns which, however, have often been exaggerated. If income were all consumed, we would have a static economy in which all outputs would be maintained, but in which economic arrangements would be essentially unchanged.

To make the economy grow requires economic arrangements to change, and the cost of making these changes is investment. This can take many different forms, for example, increasing flocks, building more or better roads, making more or better machinery, educating more people, or to a higher standard, under- taking research and development, and so on. Countries will grow faster the more of their incomes they devote to investment and the more efficient that investment is. The former Soviet Union invested a large fraction of its income, but it was so inefficiently done that little benefit accrued to its people. Experience suggests that efficiency is best secured through a free market system, although there are some important large-scale investments that need to be centrally planned. In a market system, profits are important for investment for several reasons. They generally provide most of the savings and finance, High profits strengthen business confidence to undertake investment. Apart from taxation, the higher the share of profits, the lower must be the share of wages, and the stronger the incentive to employ more labor. But profits must not be the result of monopolistic agreements to raise prices and restrict output. Such agreements reduce growth, as does government protection from foreign competition.

The above emphasis on investment as the source of economic growth may seem little more than common sense. For a long time, however, economists have placed their emphasis on technical progress. This is because of the seemingly well-established empirical finding that, taken together, investment and employment growth can account for little more than one-half of the growth of many developed economics. The residual, unexplained, part of growth is then attributed to technical progress, which, according to theory, is the discovery of new ways to increase output from given inputs of labor and capital. Unfortunately, the residual in these studies results from the mistaken way in which the contribution of investment to growth has been estimated. In reality this contribution has been far greater, and there is no residual to be explained.

The earlier growth theories of Solow and others not only attributed too little growth to investment but also claimed that in the long run increasing the share of investment in output would leave the rate of growth unchanged. What mattered was technical progress, but its causes were left unexplained. Subsequently, attempts were made to explain it, usually by attributing it to some narrow category of investment such as research and development expenditure. These theories have erred in implicitly treating most investment as if it were just reduplication of existing assets. Since investment is the cost of changing economic arrangements, it is never mere reduplication. It is this which explains why investment opportunities are continually present, and are not steadily eliminated as they are taken up. Undertaking investment creates new opportunities as fast as it eliminates others. In the 19^th century; for example, it was the railways and the telegraph which opened up the interior of the USA and which led to the development of much larger manufacturing and distributing enterprises able to take advantage of economics of scale and scope. Research and development are important, especially for some industries (e.g. aerospace, electronics and pharmaceuticals), but they are by no means t tic only important generators of investment opportunities. The fastest growing countries in the world are not those with the greatest expenditures on research and development. They are those Asian countries in which wages are low and profitability and investment are both high, as businesspeople take advantage of their ability to imitate and catch up the more developed countries in a relatively free market system. They have also benefited through a large transfer of workers from agriculture to manufacturing and other enterprises. Perhaps the chief constraint on growth in the west is the fact that a prolonged boom, which is needed to generate high rates of profit and investment, results too soon in unacceptably high rates of inflation, and leads western governments to slam on the brakes. By contrast, the Asian countries seem able to sustain their booms for much longer. See also economic development.

elite
 

1. An elite is a small group that has leadership in some sphere of social life (such as a cultural elite), or has leadership of society as a whole. The elite is typically understood to be relatively homogeneous and with a largely closed membership. Modern elite theory developed in the early years of the 20th century, through the work of Vilfredo Pareto (1963), Gaetano Mosca (1939) and others. This theory was opposed to socialism, not least in so far as it argued for the inevitability of the division of all societies into an elite (with superior organization abilities), and an inferior mass. More significantly, at a theoretical level, elite theory suggested, again in contrast to socialism and Marxism, that the power of the dominant group in society did not have to be rooted in economic power. In so far as classes are economically defined, elite theory therefore offered an alternative account of social stratification and hierarchies than that provided by class theory. In this light, the work of C. Wright Mills (1956) on the 'power elite' is significant. Mills argued that contemporary America was dominated by an elite that unified three key spheres of society: industry, politics and the military. Unlike earlier elite theorists, Mills' concern was to expose the elite, and the adverse effects that it had on democracy, rather than to celebrate its inevitability.
In the study of culture, elite theory has had its greatest impact through mass society theory, and in the assumption that there is an inherently superior elite culture. This culture is seen, at worst, to be threatened and eroded by the contemporary mass media, or at best, that the mass media are incapable of serving elite culture. As such, elite theory explicitly or implicitly judges popular culture by the standards of elite culture, and finds it wanting. It is therefore typically insensitive to the subtleties and complexities of popular culture.

3. The term elite is part of a tradition which makes modern social scientists uneasy. At the same time, its use facilitates historical and contemporary analysis by providing an idiom of comparison that sets aside institutional details and culture-specific practices, and calls attention instead to intuitively understood equivalencies. Typically, an adjective precedes the word elite, clarifying its aim (oligarchic elite, modernizing elite) or its style (innovating elite, brokerage elite) or its institutional domain (legislative elite, bureaucratic elite) or its resources base (media elite, financial elite) or the decisional stage it dominates (planning elite, implementing elite) or its eligibility grounds (birth elite, credentialed elite).

Two quite different traditions of inquiry persist. In the older tradition, elites are treated as exemplars: fulfilling some historic mission, meeting a crucial need, possessing superior talents, or otherwise demonstrating qualities which set them apart. Whether they stabilize the old order or transform it into a new one, they are seen as pattern setters.

In the newer approach, elites are routinely understood to be incumbents: those who are collectively the influential figures in the governance of any sector of society, any institutional structure, any geographic locality or translocal community. Idiomatically, elites are thus roughly the same as leaders, decision makers or influentials, and not too different from spokes-persons, dignitaries or central figures. This second usage is more matter-of-fact, less normative in tone.

Still, elites are seen by many as selfish people in power, bent upon protecting their vested interests, contemptuous of the restraints on constitutional order, callous about the needs of larger publics, ready to manipulate opinion, to rig elections, to use force if necessary to retain power. A conspiratorial variant worries those who fear revolutionary subversive elites: fanatical, selfless, disciplined, competent and devoted to their cause, equally contemptuous of political democracy, constitutional order or mass contentment, willing to exploit hatred and misery, to misrepresent beliefs and facts, and to face personal degradation and social obloquy. Whether to preserve old patterns of life or to exemplify new cries, elites are those who set the styles.

When most social scientists talk about elites, they have in mind 'those who run things' - that is, certain key actors playing structured, functionally understand- able roles, not only in a nation's governance processes but also in other institutional settings - religious, military, academic industrial, communications, and so on.

Early formulations lacked this pluralist assumption. Mosca (1896) and Pareto both presumed that a ruling class effectively monopolized the command posts of a society. Michels (1911) insisted that his 'iron law of oligarchy' was inevitable; in any organization, an inner circle of participants would take over, and run it for their own selfish purposes. By contrast, Lasswell's (1936) formulation in the 1930s was radically pluralistic. Elites are those who get the most of what there is to get in any institutionalized sector of society and not only in the governing institutions and ancillary processes of organized political life. At every functional stage of any decision process - indeed, in any relevant arena - seine participants will be found who have sequestered disproportionate shares of those values, whether money, esteem, power or some other condition of life which people seek and struggle for. They are the elite at that stage and in that context. For Lasswell (1977), the question whether a situation is fully egalitarian - that is, extends elite status to every participant - is an empirical question, not a conceptual one. Nor is there necessarily any institutional stability. Macro-analysis of history shows periods of ascendancy for those with different kinds of skills, such as in the use of violence, propaganda, organization, or bargaining strategy.

The social formations - classes, communities and movements - from which elites derive are not fixed. Elites are usefully studied by asking which communities they represent or dominate, which classes they are exponents or products of, which interests they reflect or foreshadow, which personality types they are prone to recruit or to shunt aside, which circumstances of time and place (periods of crisis, tranquillity or transition) seem to provide missions and challenges for them.

Elites may change their character. Elite transformation has often been traced. Pareto saw vitality and decay as an endless cycle. Students of Third-World modernization often note the heightened tensions within a governing elite that accompany the shift in power from a revolutionary-agitational generation to a programmatic-exective generation. Specialized elites engineers, soldiers or priests – have often served as second-tier elites, recruited in the service of a ruling class that continues to set a governing style but whose members lack the skill to cope with new and pressing problems. Some scholars hold true that a true elite emerges when those who perform the historic mission – whether to bring change adapt to change, or resist to the end – become convinced that only they can carry out the mission properly. Self-consciously, they come to think of themselves as superior by nature – for example, able to think like scientists or soldiers, willing to take risks like capitalists or revolutionaries.

For some centuries, the historical forces that have been shaping the institutions of modern, urban, industrial, interdependent, institutionally differentiated societies have had a net effect that enlarges, democratizes and equalizes the life chances for elitehood. Everywhere the political stratification system typically resembles a pyramid, reflecting the striking cross-national uniformity that only tiny fractions of a country’s citizens have more than an infinitesimal chance of directly influencing national policy or even translocal policies. At the same time, fewer disadvantages linked to social status, educational attainment, geographic residence, cultural claims, age and sex attributes, or institutional credentials now appear to operate as conclusively or comprehensively as in the past.

Viewed as incumbents, those who hold key positions in the governing institutions of a community are, collectively, the elite. They are the custodians of the machinery for making policy. Once a sector of society becomes institutionally differentiated, its ability to adjust to conditions on its own terms is likely to be seriously constrained. Even with its semi-autonomous domains, a custodial elite finds it hard to sustain a network or co-ordinate sector-wide efforts. Medical elites are typically locality-rooted. Military services feud with one another. Scientists are engrossed with specialized lines of inquiry. Commercial elites are fragmented. Industrial giants are rivals.

In the modern world, when elites are seen as housed within conventionally recognized establishments such as military, diplomatic, legislative or party organizational structures, mid-elites and cadres are linked hierarchically to top elites and specialized to implement the specific public and system goals of their domains. When elites are viewed as the top talent in a vocational field – lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, and so on – the elite structure is much more disjointed. Mid-elites are the source of eligible talent, engaged in tasks having no necessary articulation with what top-elites do, but nonetheless tasks that train and test, groom and screen individuals who may in due course reach top elitehood in their field.

Top elites in a custodial structure do not necessarily work well together. The structural complexity of legislatures is such that they typically have rather segmented power structures. In characterizing a military elite, the rivalries of services and branches, the geographic deployment and generational gaps between echelons all must be acknowledged. The illusion of homogeneity about the administrative elite is dispelled when one looks closely. Career services give some coherence to relatively autonomous fields, like police, fire, diplomacy and health. But in specific policy domains, clientele elite often dominate the picture especially when talking about elites in rather amorphous fields of endeavor, the implications of structural disjunctions on the perspectives of those in top positions seems far reaching. Most communications elites are set at working odds with one another in the various media where their contacts and skills apply. At community levels, civic leaders rarely sustain close contacts with their counterparts in other localities. Elites are studied both in context, in what can be called elite characterization work, and out of context, in what is referred to as elite survey work. There are two main genres of the former: those in which elites are characterized by their mission or function, and those in which elites are seems in custodial capacity, and characterized by the performance of the institutional processes they control. In a corresponding way, elite surveys – in which elites are taken out of context – also have two main genres: those in which the investigator is mainly interested in what the elites think, in the acumen, loyalty and ideological bent of mind typical of certain elite perspectives, and those which explore the recruitment of elite figures by looking at the changing opportunity structure, at social credentials, screening criteria, processes of sponsorship, grooming and socialization, and at those who are the gatekeepers, brokers and mentors who affect the corsus honorum of a career. In modern systematic survey work, it is customary to say at the outset how, when and where the elite status of those studied has been established, whether by reputation, position held, or process participated in. Interviews are then held, often rather long interviews, to learn their beliefs, perceptions, preferences and appraisals. Necessarily, in survey work, elites are not studies ‘in action.’ See social mobility, social stratification.

1. An intellectual movement which occurred in France (but also in Britain in the form of the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’) during the latter part of the 18^th century. Key thinkers associated with The Enlightenment were d’Alembert, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Smith and Voltaire. The maxim propounded by Kant, ‘Dare to understand!,’ sums up well the underlying optimism which spurred much Enlightenment thinking. This thinking was characterized by a number of significant attitudes: a faith in the ability of reason to solve social as well as intellectual and scientific problems, an aggressively critical perspective on what were perceived as the regressive influences of tradition and institutional religion (the latter expressed in Voltaire's famous declaration concerning the Christian religion: 'Crush the infamy'), a faith in humanism and the ideal of progress, the espousal of a politics of toleration and free thinking. In spite of the generally critical stance towards religion, not all Enlightenment thinkers were, like Diderot, avowed atheists; Voltaire espoused a passionately held belief in a non-Christian deity, whilst Hume was phlegmatically agnostic with regard to such matters, although his famous criticism of the belief in miracles demonstrates a typical Enlightenment commitment to a skeptical view of metaphysical beliefs in the light of advances in the physical sciences after Newton's Principia. That said, Hume's thought often cuts against the grain of the Enlightenment faith in reason, while Rousseau's writings are often associated with the development of Romanticism.

Commentators such as Habermas continue to adhere to the basic project of Enlightenment as set out by Kant, i.e. an adherence to a critical project of modernity which has as its aim the articulation of a rational basis for discourses of knowledge, and political and social criticism. Lyotard (most notorious for his early (1979) espousal of postmodernism) also takes the Enlightenment to signify a key moment in the development of critical reason, namely the initiation of postmodernity (found in the writings of Kant - principally the Critique of Judgement). Other thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries have either reacted against the Enlightenment project, or attempted to rearticulate it in diverse ways. For example, (i) Nietzsche's thinking (in spite of his current association with postmodern anti-Enlightenment thought) without doubt owes a significant debt to the Enlightenment tradition, especially his books of the late 1870s and early 1880s (Human, All-Too-Human (1878), for instance, was dedicated to the memory of Voltaire when it was first published, and adopts a methodological skepticism which shows the influence of Enlightenment thought); and (ii) Horkheimer and Adorno’s work (c.f. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)), which seeks to unpack the key methodological presuppositions underlying the Enlightenment conception of rationality while adhering to its critical ideals.

3. The term entrepreneur seems to have been introduced into economic theory by Cantillon (1755) and was first accorded prominence by Say (1803). It was variously translated into English as merchant, adventurer or employer, though the precise meaning is the undertaker of a project. John Stuart Mill (1848) popularized the term in Britain.

In the neo-classical theory of the firm, entrepreneurial ability is analogous to a fixed factor endowment because it sets a limit to the efficient size of the firm. The static and passive role of the entrepreneur in the classical theory reflects the theory's emphasis on perfect information which trivializes management and decision making and on perfect markets - which do all the coordination that is necessary and leave nothing for the entrepreneur.

According to Schumpeter (1934), entrepreneurs are the prime movers in economic development, and their function is to innovate or carry out new combinations. Five types of innovation are distinguished: the introduction of a new good (or an improvement in the quality of an existing good); the introduction of a new method of production; the opening of a new market - in particular an export market in new territory; the 'conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials or half-manufactured goods'; and the creating 'Of a new type of industrial organization - in particular the formation of a trust or some other type of monopoly.

Schumpeter is also very clear about what entrepreneurs are not: they are not inventors, but people who decide to allocate resources to tile exploitation of an invention; they are not risk-bearers: risk-bearing is the function of the capitalist who lends funds to the entrepreneur. Essentially, therefore, Schumpeter's entrepreneur has a managerial or decision-making role.

This view receives qualified support from Hayek (1937) and Kirzner (1973), who emphasize the role of entrepreneurs in acquiring and using information. Entrepreneurs' alertness to profit-opportunities, and their readiness to exploit these through arbitrage-type operations, makes them the key element in the market process. Hayek and Kirzner regard entrepreneurs as responding to change - as reflected in the information they receive -- while Schumpeter emphasizes the role of entrepreneurs as a source of change. These two views are not incompatible: a change effected by one entrepreneur may cause spill-over effects, which alter the environment of other entrepreneurs. Hayek and Kirzner do not insist on the novelty of entrepreneurial activity, however, and it is certainly true that a correct decision is not always a decision to innovate; premature innovation may be commercially disastrous. Schumpeter begs the question of whether someone who is the first to evaluate an innovation, but decides (correctly) not to innovate, qualifies as an entrepreneur.

Knight (1921) insists that decision making involves uncertainty Each business situation is unique, and the relative frequencies of past events cannot be used to evaluate the probabilities of future outcomes, According to Knight, measurable risks can be diversified (or laid off) through insurance markets, but uncertainties cannot. Those who take decisions in highly uncertain environments must bear the full consequences of those decisions themselves. These people are entrepreneurs: they are the owners of businesses and not the salaried managers that make the day-to- day decisions.

Leibenstein (1968) regards the entrepreneur as someone who -achieves success by avoiding the inefficiencies to which other people - or the organizations to which they belong - are prone. Leibenstein's approach has the virtue of emphasizing that, in the real world, success is exceptional and failure is the norm.

Casson (1982) defines the entrepreneur as someone who specializes in taking decisions where, because of unequal access to information, different people would opt for different strategies. Casson shows that the evaluation of innovations, as discussed by Schumpeter, and the assessment of arbitrage opportunities, as discussed by Hayek and Kirzner, can be regarded as special cases. Casson also shows that if Knight's emphasis on the uniqueness of business situations is used to establish that differences of opinion are very likely in all business decisions, then the Knightian entrepreneur can be embraced within his definition as well. Because the definition identifies the function of the entrepreneur, it is possible to use conventional economic concepts to discuss the valuation of entrepreneurial services and many other aspects of the market for entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the aspect of entrepreneurship that has attracted most attention is the motivation of the entrepreneur. Hayek and Kirzner take the Austrian view that the entrepreneur typifies purposeful human action directed towards individualistic ends. Schumpeter, however, refers to the dream and will to found a private dynasty, the will to conquer and the joy of creating, while Weber (1930) emphasizes the Protestant Ethic and the concept of calling, and Redlich (1956) the role of militaristic values in the culture of the entrepreneur. Writers of business biographies have ascribed a whole range of different motives to people whom they describe as entrepreneurs. For many students of business behavior, it seems that the entrepreneur is simply someone who finds adventure and personal fulfillment in the world of business. The persistence of this heroic concept suggests that many people do not want a scientific account of the role of the entrepreneur.

Successful entrepreneurship provides an avenue of social advancement that is particularly attractive to people who are denied opportunities elsewhere. This may explain why it is claimed that immigrants, religious minorities and people denied higher education are over-represented among entrepreneurs. Hypotheses of this kind are difficult to test without care- fully controlled sampling procedures. The limited evidence available suggests that, in absolute terms, the most common type of entrepreneur is the son of an entrepreneur.

1. A philosophical term meaning ‘theory of knowledge.’ Epistemology concerns itself with the analysis of what is meant by the term ‘knowledge’ itself, and with questions about (i) what we can be said to know (the limits and scope of knowledge), (ii) its reliability, and what constitutes justification or warrant for holding a belief and thereby deeming that belief to be ‘knowledge.’ Thus, philosophers may ask: ‘Is there any difference between knowing and believing something to be the case?’ or, ‘To what extent does the acquisition of knowledge depend upon reason or the senses?’ There have been a wide variety of approaches to this issue. Plato (c. 428-348 BC) held that our rational capabilities are an intrinsic property of our minds and are the sole source of knowledge (a view usually placed under the rubric of ‘rationalism’). The exponents of empiricism, in contrast, argue that human understanding and hence knowledge is a result of sense experience alone. Hence, according to empiricism, what we know is the consequence of our ability to have perceptions of the world via our senses (this view is primarily associated with thinkers such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Against the empiricists' the German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that there are necessary conditions of knowing that cannot be reduced to mere experience. Thus, Kant offered an account of the 'a priori' conditions of the possibility of experience. A priori judgements can be arrived at independently of experience. On this view, we have a form of knowledge (a priori knowledge) which exists prior to, and independently of, any empirical knowledge. Indeed, according to Kant such knowledge (for example, the 'pure intuitions' of time and space) is the precondition of the possibility of our having any knowledge of experience at all. One can best understand Kant's point by way of a comparison with Locke's empiricist conception of the mind. According to Locke, the human mind is like a 'blank sheet' which is then 'written' upon by sensory experience. This view, however, is open to the objection that if the mind is capable of having experiences then this must be so in virtue of some structure that it has prior to having any particular experience. If our minds were simply 'blank sheets' then how would we be able to recognize any experience as an experience in the first place? The ability to have experiences, Kant argues, cannot therefore be derived from any particular experience, hence there must be a priori judgements which constitute the conditions of the possibility of experience. Kant holds that there are two kinds of a priori knowledge, one based upon 'analytic' judgements, the other upon I synthetic' judgements. Analytic a priori knowledge would include such propositions as 'all triangles have three sides' (i.e. it is true by definition, and we need no experiential data to establish its truth). Thus, in thinking a subject, A, and a predicate, B, the predicate is contained within A as part of it. In contrast, in synthetic judgements the predicate, B, is external to the subject, A (Critique of Pure Reason, A7/B11). Synthetic judgements thus involve an act of inference which goes beyond the scope of the analytically derived concepts one has at one's disposal independently of experience (i.e. such judgements involve the empirical or external world). All judgements concerning experience are, for Kant, synthetic, and all knowledge that has any genuine value is knowledge about experience.

In addition to such debates as those listed above concerning where our knowledge comes from, it is worth noting that philosophers also tend to draw distinctions between kinds of knowing. For example: (i) ‘knowing that…,’ which involves knowledge claims that are factual and capable of being established by way of reference to evidence; (ii) ‘knowing how …,’ the kind of knowledge required to do certain kinds of things (such as riding a bicycle); (iii) ‘knowledge by acquaintance,’ which includes such things as knowledge gained through individual experience, or personal knowledge (e.g. memories) and is not necessarily verifiable in the way that the knowledge mentioned in (i) is; (iv) ‘knowledge by description,’ which involves knowledge that is derived from our being informed about certain relevant facts, characteristics, etc. that pertain to something or someone (e.g. ‘Shakespeare’ is the person who wrote Hamlet, King Lear and other plays, was married to Anne Hathaway, and so on). As is often the case with philosophers, there is some considerable disagreement as to the usefulness of these definitions.

Significant amongst other perspectives on knowledge are the view put forward by thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and, following him, Michel Foucault (1926-84). There are many possible interpretations of Nietzsche’s attitude to questions of knowledge (his work has, for instance, certain parallels with some of the ideas central to pragmatism). However, one dominant interpretation of knowledge that has exerted an influence upon views associated with post-modernism and post-structuralism is derived from the manner in which Foucault interpreted Nietzsche’s work. For Nietzsche, ‘knowledge’ is not something which can be analyzed properly in the absence of considerations of relations of power. This is because, on Nietzsche’s view, what we deem ‘knowledge’ is in fact the expression of an assemblage of drives and interests (see for instance the posthumously published notes which go to make up The Will to Power). This attitude parallels Nietzsche’s interpretation of the meaning of morality, offered in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Here, Nietzsche offers an account of ethical systems which identifies the values they espouse with their genealogical heritage: 'slave' morals valorize the 'meek' because the slave is a victim; 'noble' morality, in contrast, values what is powerful. Both slave and master, in short, in one way or another affirm themselves through their moralities. Foucault developed an argument on the basis of this account which sought to analyze knowledge forms as expressions of determinate social interests (see genealogy). Whatever the respective merits and problems with their views one thing is clear: neither Nietzsche (as represented in this way) nor Foucault have an 'epistemology' in the way in which other thinkers, such as Kant, have had. Indeed, if we are persuaded by them, then it is a short step to abandoning epistemology in favor of an intricate analysis of social relations (although what the status of such analyses would be as forms of knowledge is perhaps an awkward issue, especially for Foucault).

However, it is not clear that one can abandon epistemology so easily. Thus, as Nietzsche himself noted at the beginning of Human, All-Too-Human (1878-80) providing an analysis of something's origins does not necessarily count as an exhaustive explanation of it. Thus, whatever the conditions or intentions that gave rise to a discourse, it may not be a straightforward matter to reduce its meaning merely to those conditions. Equally, although he certainly did not construct a formal ‘theory of knowledge,’ Nietzsche did not entirely abandon the temptation to pose epistemic questions. Thus, many of his observations remain relevant to the study of epistemology (for instance, it is arguable that from the Genealogy one could derive a normative account of justification which could be situated comfortably within the domain of epistemological inquiry). Equally, the genealogical method developed by Foucault can be subjected to various criticisms derived from alternative readings of Nietzsche (a good example is offered by Peter Dews, in Krell and Wood 1988). What is offered by this kind of perspective that is perhaps most significant is its inherently critical attitude to Cartesian epistemology, for in so far as power is constitutive of modes of knowledge it is also constitutive of the knower.

essentialism

1. The view that there are essential properties which define whatsomething is, and without which it could not be what it is. One form of essentialism ascribes these properties in virtue of a definition being given. For example, an essentialist of this kind would hold that there are certain essential properties which define what the term 'gold' refers to (a particular atomic weight, color, properties of hardness, malleability, etc.). In turn, any piece of gold must have those properties which are included within the definition of 'gold' in order to be designated as real gold. Whether or not adoption of this view commits one to holding that these properties must exist in reality prior to the act of naming an object, so that a definition, if it is true is a priori true (see Lyotard's criticism of essentialism in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988), is perhaps an open question.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Note also that there is a difference between this form of essentialism and the view which holds that objects must possess a hidden, concrete or 'real' essence which in turn causes us to attribute to them their observable properties (i.e. their 'nominal essence'). This position was first elaborated by empiricist philosopher John Locke. A variant of this view was revived in the 1980s in the wake of American philosopher Saul Kripke'S arguments about the nature of proper names. Simply put, Kripke'S account implies that since language succeeds in referring to things by means of proper names (Kripke calls such names 'rigid designators', it should be noted that, for him, instances such as 'gold' are proper names), what it refers to must possess properties which make the referent of the name what it is independently of that language. This position is often referred to as ‘a posteriori [i.e. after the fact] essentialism.’ This is because on Kripke's account it is only the act of naming and thereby fixing a reference that is necessary a priori (i.e. before the fact), whereas the particular properties selected when one names something may be ‘accidental’ to what is referred to, and it could turn out that what is named does not have all or some of these properties.

ethnic/ethnicity

1. Generally a word used to refer to different racial or national groups which identifies them in virtue of their shared practices, norms and systems of belief. By terming groups 'ethnic' they are usually implicitly identified as being in a minority, and as possessing a different range of attitudes or traditions to the ones held and adhered to by the majority of a society's members. In turn, 'ethnicity' denotes the self-awareness on the part of a particular group of its own cultural distinctiveness. As is self-evident, the assertion of ethnic identity can be unifying or divisive in equal measure - often depending upon who is asserting it, of whom, and in which context. In some situations the self-aware possession of an ethnic identity could be a unifying experience (for instance, a point of focus for a given community). In other instances, the attribution of 'ethnicity' might well be regarded as a provocative and injuring form of stereotyping embodying racism. Thus, the issue turns upon who actively designates one particular social grouping as 'ethnic': for to be defined as 'ethinic' and to assert one's own 'ethnicity' are two very different things. In both cases, what is at stake may well be an issue of power, in so far as the affirmation of ethnicity can be read as an assertion of identity in the face of a social status quo, whereas to be defined in this way by 'majority opinion' others may well be an oppressive manifestation of the power of more dominant forces and interests within a society.

3. Ethnicity is a fundamental category of social organization which is based on membership defined by a sense of common historical origins and which may also include shared culture, religion or language. Is to be distinguished from kinship in so far as kinship depends on biological inheritance. The term is derived from the Greek noun ethnos, which may be translated as 'a people or a nation.’ One of the most influential definitions of ethnicity can be found in Max Weber's Economy and Society (1922) where he describes ethnic groups as ‘human groups (other than kinship groups) which cherish a belief in their common origins of such a kind that it provides a basis for the creation of a community.’

The difficulty in reaching a precise definition of the term is reflected in the many different words employed in the literature to describe related or similar concepts, such as race and nation. While usage varies, 'race', like kinship has biological connotations, although these are frequently without foundation, and nation implies a political agenda - the goal of separate statehood - beyond that generally associated with ethnic groups. According to Weber (1922), 'a nation is the political extension of the ethnic community as its members and leadership search for a unique political structure by establishing an independent state.’

In predominantly immigrant societies, like the USA, Argentina, Australia and Canada, the study of ethnic groups forms a central theme of their social, economic and political life. Systematic research on American ethnic groups can be traced to the sociologists of the Chicago School during the 1920s, led by W. I. Thomas And Robert Ezra Park, who were concerned with the processes of ethnic group assimilation into the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) mainstream. Park's 'race relations cycle', outlining a sequence of stages consisting of 'contact, competition, accommodation and assimilation', implied that successive ethnic groups would be absorbed into a relatively homogenous US society. The underlying assumption of ethnic group theory was that a gradual process would result in the disappearance of separate ethnic groups into an American melting pot.

This unilinear interpretation gave way to more pluralistic conceptions of ethnicity in the USA, in which various dimensions of assimilation were identified by sociologists like Milton Gordon (1964). Gordon distinguished between cultural assimilation (acculturation) and structural assimilation, the former signifying the adoption of the language, values and ideals of the dominant society, while the latter reflected the incorporation of ethnic groups into the institutions of mainstream society. While cultural assimilation did not necessarily result in an ethnic group's inclusion within the principal institutions of society, structural assimilation invariably meant that assimilation on all other dimensions - from personal identification to inter- marriage – had already taken place.

This conceptualization contrasts with that of M. G. Smith (1987), who argued that the key issue involved in a general theory of ethnic relations was the differential incorporation of ethnic groups into larger social units. Smith distinguished between three types of social incorporation: the universalistic type, where individuals are incorporated directly and on identical conditions in a common society; the differential mode, which is the same process except that individuals are incorporated on an unequal basis, either in a superior 'or inferior position; and segmental incorporation, where ethnic groups are incorporated in a common society 'as units of equivalent status on identical terms'. In this third case, individuals are incorporated indirectly, either on an egalitarian or unequal basis, giving a variety of possible ethnic outcomes.

Scholarly concern with ethnicity and ethnic groups has become increasingly salient since the 1960s. Faced with the proliferation of separatist movements throughout the world, and the rise of the so-called 'unmeltable ethnics' in North America, the inadequate assumptions underlying theories of modernization have been exposed in all types of societies, whether they are in the capitalist, socialist or developing world. The notion that modernity would result in a smooth transition from gemeinschaft (community) to gesellschaft (association), with the gradual dissolution of ethnic affiliations, simply did not fit the facts. Some social scientists argued that there was a primordial basis to ethnic attachments, while others explained the apparent persistence of ethnicity in largely instrumental terms, as a political resource to be mobilized in appropriate situations. Not only has ethnic loyalty taken on new meaning in many industrial societies, but also ethnic divisions have continued to frustrate the efforts of nation-building in most post-colonial societies. Even the countries of the Communist bloc could contain the ethnic demands of their multi- national, subject populations only by a judicious blend of co-optation and political oppression.

The focus of research on ethnicity has shifted away from studies of specific groups to the broad processes of ethnogenesis, the construction and perpetuation of ethnic boundaries, and the meaning of ethnic identity. The question of the ethnic origin of nations has produced the same tension between those who stress the continuity of ethnic history and others who emphasize its situational nature. While most social scientists recognize the flexibi1ity of ethnic identification, that under certain circumstances ethnicity becomes salient whereas in others it remains a dormant capacity waiting to be mobilized, some take the position that its impact has been greatly exaggerated. It is often merely ‘symbolic ethnicity’, or its influence is largely an illusion based on the 'invention of tradition, to serve the interests of ethnic political entrepreneurs or, in the neo-Marxist literature, the ruling class.

One of the most influential writers on ethnic boundaries has been the anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969), whose stress on not processes of group inclusion and exclusion can be seen as a parallel development to the sociological insights of Max Weber. Weber pointed to the tendency of social groups to attempt to monopolize wealth, prestige and political power by systematically excluding outsiders from achieving membership. Immigration restrictions are one way this can be attempted in modern societies. Another is the manner in which citizenship is defined by the state, so that in the case of Germany, for example, the dominant principle reflects a sense of shared ancestry, jus sanguinis, while in France the critical factor has been residence, jus soli. While some writers have stressed the voluntary nature of ethnic group membership and the variety of ethnic options available to individuals in many post-industrial societies, others point to the coercive element to be found in all forms of ethnic stratification that can be viewed as more crucial in most situations than any hypothetical elements of preference and choice.

A central concern of social scientists has been the attempt to understand the nature of ethnic conflict and violence. Few issues have been of greater practical importance as the post-Cold War era has been marked by a resurgence of ethnic, warfare and genocide in societies as diverse, and remote from each other, as Bosnia and Rwanda. In other societies, like South Africa, a relatively peaceful transfer of power in the elections of April 1994, from a white minority to the black majority, rests on a volatile sub-structure of ethnic divisions and fragile compromises.

A wide variety of theoretical perspectives can be found supporting contemporary studies of ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Some, like rational choice theory, are methodologically individualistic and apply a cost-benefit formula to account for ethnic preferences and to explain the dynamics of ethnic group formation. These have been criticized on the grounds that they fail to appreciate the collective dynamics of much ethnic behavior and underestimate the irrational side of ethnic violence. Other common perspectives focus on ethnic stratification: neo-Marxist theories stress the economic components underlying much ethnic discrimination; while those following in the tradition of scholars like Weber and Furnivall provide a more pluralistic interpretation of differences in ethnic power. In general, these originate from conquest and migration, and, are used to account for the hierarchical ordering of ethnic and racial groups. Further theories point to psychological factors, like prejudice and ethnocentrism, as important explanations for the persistence of ethnicity. Two highly controversial arguments center on genetic imperatives, which operate through the mechanism of kin-selection, and form part of the application of sociobiological thinking to ethnic relations, and neo-conservative theories that concentrate attention on cultural characteristics, which (it is asserted) are disproportionately distributed among certain ethnic groups. Such theories have been vigorously challenged because of their deterministic implications. The heat of the debate reinforces the conclusion that no one theory provides a generally accepted and comprehensive paradigm to explain the complexity of ethnic group formation or the persistence of ethnic conflict in the world today. See also ethnic politics, race.

ethnic politics

3. More than 80 per cent of contemporary states that comprise the United Nations are ethnically plural, in that they contain two or more mobilized ethnic communities. These communities compete, sometimes by civic methods, sometimes by violence for hegemony (control of the state apparatus), for autonomy (ranging from regional self-government to secession), or for incorporation into the society and polity on more favorable terms. Inter-ethnic relations may vary from stratificational (one group dominating the others politically and economically), to segmentational (each party controlling significant resources and institutions). In the contemporary era, ethnic politics implicate the state, because the state has become the principal allocator of the values that affect the relative power, status, material welfare, and life-chances of ethnic collectivities and their individual constituents. The values at stake may be political - control of territory, citizenship, voting rights, eligibility for public office and the symbols of the state; economic - access to higher education, employment, land, capital, credit and business opportunities; or cultural - the position of religion, the relative status of language in education and in government transactions.

Ethnic politics may be generated by the grievances of territorially concentrated peoples, demanding greater autonomy for their homeland and more equitable representation in the central government; or by immigrant diasporas asking for more equitable terms of inclusion in the Polity, combined often with claims for recognition and official support for their distinctive cultural institutions. These initiatives often trigger counter-mobilization in the interest of ethnic groups that feel threatened by these claims and by state authorities committed to the- ethnic status quo.

The latter have the principal responsibility for managing or regulating ethnic conflicts. Their strategies may be directed in three ways: first, at maintaining pluralism by coercive domination of subordinated ethnic communities or by consensual processes such as federalism and power sharing, second, at eliminating pluralism by genocide, expulsion or induced assimilation; or third, at reducing the political salience of ethnic solidarity by cultivating crosscutting affiliations, dc- legitimizing ethnic organizations and ethnic political messages, and emphasizing individual participation In the economy and polity. Ethnic conflicts are seldom settled or resolved; though specific issues may be successfully compromised, the parties remain to focus their grievances and demands on other issues. Thus ethnic politics is a continuing feature of ethnically divided states.

Government policies may contribute to stimulating and rewarding ethnic mobilization, as well as to mitigating ethnic conflict. Complicating inter-ethnic relations is the inevitability of factions within ethnic communities, each competing for available resources, for support within their constituency, and for the right to represent it to outsiders. Factional conflicts within ethnic communities may result in expedient, often tacit, understandings and coalitions with counterparts across hostile ethnic boundaries or representatives of the state.

Many ethnic disputes spill over the borders of individual states, especially where ethnic kinfolk inhabit neighboring states. Domestic ethnic conflicts thus intrude into international relations, prompting intervention by other states, by sympathizers with one of the parties to the dispute, and by international organizations attempting to mediate, restore and maintain order or mitigate the suffering of civilians and refugees. With the termination of the Cold War, violent ethnic conflicts including full-scale civil wars have emerged as a major source of international instability that preoccupies national politicians and attentive publics; they have overwhelmed the diplomatic, financial and operational capacities of the United Nations. Liberals, Marxists and modernizers, despite their differences, have joined in perceiving ethnic solidarity as the residue of earlier stages of human development and in predicting and advocating its early disappearance in favor of more rational forms of association. They continue to treat it as a dangerous and essentially illegitimate phenomenon. Others explain the resurgence of politicized ethnicity and thus ethnic politics variously as, first, the search for community in increasingly bureaucratized and impersonal industrialized second, more reliable sources of security and material opportunity than class-based organizations or weak, unrepresentative Third-World governments; third, efficient vehicles for mobilization and representation of individual and collective interests in modern societies, or fourth, the consequence of the disintegration of colonial empires and multi-ethnic states that leave ethnic collectivities as their residual legatees These explanations relate to an ongoing dispute between 'primordialists', who argue that collective ethnic identities are deeply-rooted historical continuities nurtured by early socialization and reinforced by collective sanctions, and 'instrumentalists', who hold that ethnic identities and solidarities are fluid, pragmatic and opportunistic, often constructed by ethnic entrepreneurs to justify demands for Political and especially material advantages. Self-determination is the ideology that legitimizes ethnic activism on behalf of peoples who demand independence or increased territorial autonomy. Multiculturalism justifies demands for institutional separation and self-management where territorial autonomy is not feasible. Demands for non-discriminatory inclusion which may run parallel to cultural pluralism are inspired by universalistic liberal principles. State nationalism may either confirm the super ordinate position of a dominant ethnic community claim a higher order allegiance to the state that amalgamates and supersedes constituent loyalties in an ethnically plural society. See also ethnicity, multicultural education, nationalism.

ethnocentrism

1. The tendency to refer exclusively to one's own cultural values and practices, even if engaged with others who may not share those values. Likewise, the tendency to describe and judge the systems of value and dominant practices of other cultures from the standpoint of one's own. Such an attitude has connections with the stereotyping of others and can be a feature of racism and prejudice.

ethnography

3. Ethnography is a term that carries several historically situated meanings. In its most general sense, the term refers to a study of the culture that a given group of people more or less share. The term is double-edged and has implications for both the method of study and the result of such study. When used as a method, ethnography typically refers to fieldwork (alternatively, participant observation) conducted by a single investigator who ‘lives with and lives like' those who are studied, usually for a year or more. When used as a result, ethnography ordinarily refers to the written representation of a culture. Contemporary students of culture emphasize the latter usage and thus look to define ethnography in terms of its topical, stylistic and rhetorical features.

There are three moments (discernible activity phases) associated with ethnography. The first moment concerns the collection of information or data on a specified culture. The second refers to the construction of an ethnographic report; in particular, the compositional practices used by an ethnographer to fashion a cultural portrait. The third moment of ethnography deals with the reading and reception that an ethnography receives across relevant audience segments both narrow and broad. Each phase raises distinctive issues.

The greatest attention in the social sciences has been directed to the first moment of ethnography -- field- work. This form of social research is both a product of and a reaction to the cultural studies of the mid- to late 19^th century. Early ethnography is marked by considerable distance between the researcher and researched. The anthropologists of the day based their cultural representations not on firsthand study but on their readings of documents, reports and letters originating from colonial administrators, members of scientific expeditions, adventurers and, perhaps most importantly faraway correspondents guided by questions posed by their stay-at-home pen-pals. Not until the early 20^th century did ethnographers begin to enter, experience and stay for more than brief periods of time in the strange (to them) social worlds about which they wrote. Bronislaw Malinowski is most often credited with initiating by example a modern form of fieldwork that requires of the ethnographer the sustained intimate and personal acquaintance with ‘what the natives say and do.’

There is, however, a good deal of variation in terms of just what activities are involved in fieldwork and, more critically, just how such activities result in a written depiction of culture. Current practices include intensive interviewing, count-and-classify survey work, participation in everyday routines or occasional ceremonies engaged in by those studied, the collecting of samples of native behavior across a range of social situations, and so on. There is now a rather large literature designed to help novice or veteran fieldworkers carry out ethnographic research.

Yet much of the advise offered in fieldwork manuals defies codification and lacks the consensual approval of those who produce ethnographies. Fieldnotes, for example, are more or less de rigueur in terms of documenting what is learned in the field but there is little agreement as to what a standard fieldnote - much less a collection of fieldnotes - might be. Moreover, how one moves from a period of lengthy in situ study to a written account presumably based on such study is by no means clear. Despite seventy or so years of practice, fieldwork remains a sprawling and quite diverse activity. The second moment of ethnography - writing it up - has by and large been organized by a genre labeled 'ethnographic realism.' It is a genre that has itself shifted over time from a relatively unreflective, closed and general (holistic) description of native sayings and doings to a more tentative, open and partial interpretation of native sayings and doings. Yet realism remains a governing style for a good deal of ethnography, descriptive or interpretative. It is marked by a number of compositional conventions that include, for example, the suppression of the individual cultural member's perspective in favor of a typified or common denominator 'native's point of view' the placement of a culture within a timeless ethnographic present and a claim for descriptive or interpretive validity based on the author's 'being there' (fieldwork) experience.

Some ethnographers, though by no means all, express a degree of dissatisfaction with ethnographic realism. Partly a response to critics located outside ethnographic circles who wonder just how personal experience serves as the basis for a scientific study of culture, some ethnographers make visible - or, more accurately, textualize - their discovery practices and procedures. Confessional ethnography results when the fieldwork process itself becomes the focus in an ethnographic text. Its composition rests on moving the fieldworker to center stage and displaying how the writer comes to know a given culture. While often carefully segregated from an author's realist writings, confessional ethnography often manages to convey a good deal of the same sort of cultural knowledge put forth in conventional realist works but in a more personalized fashion.

Other genres utilized for ethnographic reporting are available as well. Dramatic Ethnographies, for example, rest on the narration of a particular event or sequence of events of apparent significance to the cultural members studied. Such ethnographies present an unfolding story and rely more on literary techniques drawn from fiction than on plain-speaking, documentary (techniques - 'the style of non-style' - drawn from scientific reports. Critical ethnographies provide another format wherein the represented culture is located within a larger historical, political, economic, social and symbolic context than is said to be recognized by cultural members, thus pushing the writer to move beyond traditional ethnographic frameworks and interests when constructing the text. Even self or auto-ethnographics have emerged in which the culture of the ethnographer's own group is textualized. Such writings offer the passionate, emotional voice of a positioned and explicitly judge- mental fieldworker and thus obliterates the customary distinction between the researcher and the researched.

A good deal of the narrative variety of ethnographic writing is a consequence of the post-1970s spread of the specialized and relatively insular disciplinary aims of anthropology and, to a lesser degree, sociology. Growing interest in the contemporary idea of culture - as something held by all identifiable groups, organizations and societies - has put ethnography in play virtually everywhere. No longer is ethnography organized simply by geographic region, society or community. Adjectival ethnographies have become common and sizeable literatures can be found in such areas as medical ethnography, organizational ethnography, conversation ethnography, school ethnography, occupational ethnography, family ethnography and many more. The results of the intellectual and territorial moves of both away and at-home ethnography include a proliferation of styles across domains and an increase in the number of experimental or provisional forms in which ethnography is cast.

The expansion of ethnographic interests, methods and styles is a product of the third moment of ethnography -- the reading of ethnographic texts by particular audiences and the kinds of responses these texts appear to generate. Of particular interest are the categories of readers that an ethnographer recognizes and courts through the topical choices, analytic techniques and composition practices displayed in a text. Three audience categories stand out. First, collegial readers are those who follow particular ethnographic domains most avidly. They are usually the most careful and critical readers of one another's work and the most familiar with the past and present of ethnography. Second, general social science readers operate outside of ethnographic circles. These are readers attracted to a particular ethnography because the presumed facts (and perhaps the arguments) conveyed in the work helps further their own research agenda. Third, there are some who read ethnography for pleasure more than professional enlightenment. Certain ethnographic works attract a large, unspecialized audience for whom the storytelling and allegorical nature of an ethnography is salient. Such readers look for familiar formats – the traveler’s tale – the adventure story, the investigative report and, perhaps most frequently, the popular ethnographic classics of the past – when appraising the writing. Ironically, the ethnographer charged with being a novelist manqué by colleagues and other social scientists is quite likely to be the ethnographer with the largest number of readers.

For each reader segment, particular ethnographic styles are more or less attractive. Collegial readers may take in their stride what those outside the field find inelegant, pinched and abstruse. The growing segmentation across collegial readers suggests that many may be puzzled as to what nominal ethnographic colleagues are up to with their increasingly focused research techniques and refined, seemingly indecipherable, prose styles. This creates something of a dilemma for ethnographers for it suggests the distance between the general reader and the ethnographic specialist as well as the distance between differing segments of the ethnographic specialists themselves is growing. While ethnography itself is in little or no danger of vanishing those who read broadly across ethnographic fields may be fewer in number than in generations past. This is a shame, for strictly speaking an unread ethnography is no ethnography at all.

exchange-value

1. Exchange-value is one of the key concepts in Marxist economics. Mark identifies two forms of value in commodities. Use-value is grounded in the possibility of the object satisfying some identifiable human need or desire. The ‘value’ of the object, however, lies in the fact that is it a product of human labor. According to Marx’s version the labor theory of value, the value of a commodity depends upon the amount of labor time that has been spent in its production. Marx qualifies this simple observation, by noting that the actual labor time expended is not relevant(so that the products of a slow, lazy or unskilled worker will not be worth more than those of a fast and efficient worker, simply because the slow worker took longer to produce anything). Rather, Marx refers to 'socially necessary labourtime,’ which is that required to produce a given amount of a useful commodity, 'under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society.’ This value is understood as exchange-value, when different sorts of commodities (that is, commodities with different use-values) are exchanged. Thus, if it takes 5 hours to produce 10 yards of linen, and 20 hours to produce a coat, then 40 yards of linen are equivalent to (or have the same exchange-value as) one coat. Exchange-value is expressed in (although is not strictly identical to) a monetary price.

F

false consciousness

1. In Marxism, false consciousness occurs when a class fails to recognize the course of political action and allegiances that are in its real interests. Such a class is under the sway of an ideology.

1. The core of feminism is the belief that women are subordinated to men

The first well documented feminist theorist in the Anglo-American tradition is Mary Wollstonecraft who produced a social theory of the subordination of women in her tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Wollstonecraft engendered a political activism that has remained at the core of western feminism.

Initially, feminism was primarily concerned with women's political and economic equality with men. It gathered pace in the 19^th century with political publications cataloguing the injustice of sexual inequality, for example The Subjection of Women(co-authored by J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill in 1869), and through activist organization of women's suffrage groups such as the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) (founded in 1903). The 20^th century saw the proliferation of civil rights movements and groups campaigning for economic equality who focused on the issues of state welfare for mothers, equal education and equal pay. These early feminist issues continue to be a priority for all feminists and are a vital prop for later feminist theory in their emphasis on the importance of economic and political equality as a prerequisite for women's emancipation. They are especially prominent in Liberal Feminism, which has its roots in the civil rights movement and which maintains that equal opportunities and equal rights are the key to full social equality.

Whereas early feminism emphasized political and economic equality with men, the feminism that had its beginnings in the decades after the Second World War aimed to achieve a fuller and more sophisticated understanding of the cultural nature of oppression. To this end 'second wave' feminists look at the ways in which cultural institutions themselves underpin and perpetuate women's subordination. In particular, feminists reject the assumed universality of male values. Instead, they argue, in order to fully emancipate themselves from patriarchy, women must look to their own experience to create their own values and their own identities.

As feminism has developed, different areas of theory have concentrated on different aspects of oppression: Marxist Feminism claims all oppression to be a product of social and economic structures; Radical Feminism locates sexual oppression in the male manipulation of women's sexuality; Psychoanalytic Feminism looks at the construction of women's subjectivity in a sexist culture; Socialist Feminism combines many of these insights in a theory of the systematic oppression and exploitation of women in a patriarchal society, where women's procreative role is co-opted in the service of capitalism.

Moreover, theorists argue that women's oppression is deeply rooted in the very structures of our cultural norms. A Particular feature is the existence of binary oppositions predicated on the assumed polarity of the sexes which work to undermine the feminine in a variety of instances. For example, in politics the distinction between the public (male) and the private (female) serves to exclude women from positions of social importance and authority; in language, Hélène Cixous (The Newly Born Woman, 1987) has argued that gendered binary oppositions are an intrinsic part of grammar and syntax and so affect the possibilities of knowledge; in ethics, Carol Gilligan (In A Difference Voice, 1982) has argued that care, traditionally the province of the female, is devalued in opposition to a male idea of justice.

Recently, western feminism has come to the realization that it is itself a product of a particular cultural tradition, that belonging to the white European/American, rather than a universal expression of women’s struggle for emancipation. For black women and women of color the fight for liberation is as much a racial as a gender issue. They criticize the ethnocentricity of the western feminist tradition at the same time as endorsing the common fight against oppression.

Partly as a reaction to the charge of ethnocentricity, so-called ‘third wave’ feminism seeks to overcome the difficulties surrounding the question of what or who exactly ‘woman’ is, and who it is that the feminist movement claims to represent. In common with post-structuralism, third wave feminism abandons the concept of a single collective identity. Instead it offers ideas of ambiguity and difference as a means of understanding the unique issues and interests of each woman. This development is a controversial issue within feminism. Its critics argue that the notion of identity is itself fundamental to the analysis of oppression. Its dissolution undercuts the possibility of resistance and change, thus compromising feminism’s political commitment.

feminist theory

All variants of feminist theory tend to share major assumptions: gender is a social construction that oppresses women more than men; patriarchy (the male domination of social institutions) shapes these constructions, women's experiential knowledge best helps us to envision a future non-sexist society. These shared premises shape a double agenda: the task of critique (attacking gender stereotypes) and the task of construction, sometimes called feminist praxis (constructing new models). Feminist theory focuses particularly on women's experiences of sexuality, work and the family and so inevitably challenges traditional frameworks of knowledge and puts in question many assumptions of the social sciences, such as universalism.

Although foremothers like Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) are often claimed as feminist, the term feminism began to be used only in the 1890s. In the 20^th century Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) anticipate second wave feminism's attack on women's oppression. In the 1960s student and civil rights movements gave an impetus, shaping the topics and language of current feminist theory. As an identifiable area of the social sciences then, feminist theory dates from the 1970s with the publication of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics.

Feminist theory is, first, intensely interdisciplinary, ranging across customary subject divisions in the social sciences, including history, philosophy, anthropology and the arts among others. Second, certain themes recur: reproduction, representation and the sexual division of labor. Third, and most striking, are new concepts such as sexism and essentialism created to address absences in existing knowledge as the social discriminations these concepts describe. Fourth, women's subjective experiences are drawn upon to enrich scholarship and scientific theories. The starting-point is often consciousness raising where the personal can become political. MacKinnon argues that feminist theory is the first theory to emerge from those interest it affirms. Androcentric knowledge, feminist psychoanalysts claim, derives from masculine experiences of separation learned in childhood.

Since feminism developed at a time when the participation of women in the workforce was rising fast but while discrimination persisted, critics first focused on the sexism of language and of cultural and economic institutions. While intellectual ideas rarely present themselves in neat chronological order, the 1970s tackled the causes of women’s oppression (capitalism/ masculinity) describing society as a structure of oppressors (male) and oppressed (female). This moment is usually divided into forms of feminism (liberal, Marxist/ socialist, cultural/radical). Liberal feminism argues that women's liberation will come with equal legal, political and economic rights, and Friedan attacked the 'feminine mystique' preventing women from claiming equality. More comprehensive Marxist/socialist assessments of economic gender exploitation were made by Juliet Mitchell and others. The key questions were: Did women form a distinct sex-class? How far is capitalism structured by patriarchy? By widening the Marxist concept of production to include household labor and childcare, feminists could highlight further sexual divisions (‘domestic labor' debate) as well as women's unequal status at work ('reserve army of labor'). For example, Firestone argued that the 'material' of woman's reproductive body was as much a source of oppression as material inequality.

While dual systems theory argues that both capitalism and patriarchy construct gender, requiring a synthesis of Marxism with radical feminism, MacKinnon suggests that only radical feminism is feminism because it is post-Marxist. In opposition to a Marxist focus on production, cultural and radical feminists focused on reproduction and mothering and creativity. Although the labels cultural or radical are often misapplied, in general radical theorists take the view that sexuality, specifically male violence, is the cause of women's oppression condoned by the institutionalization of heterosexuality. This is the theme of Rich’s milestone essay 'Compulsory Heterosexuality' which builds on de Beauvoir's premise that women are originally homosexual, to propose that lesbianism can be part of every women's cultural, if not physical experience. This argument that ‘lesbian' is shaped as much by ideological preferences as by explicit practice built on ‘women identified women’ and ‘feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’ in second wave feminism.

A major rethinking of symbolic and social structures of gender difference was undertaken by French feminists (écriture feminine). They claimed that the cultural and gendered binaries man/woman, culture/nature always made ‘woman’ inferior. Binaries ignore women’s fluid identity and the semiotic world of mother/infant bonding. American feminists drew on object relations psychoanalysis to locate the source of male power and fear of women in men's early experience of learning to be 'not the mother'. These accounts of gender identity and objectification greatly enriched feminist film and media study. The notion that there is a distinctive and gendered perception (the male 'gaze') is supported by the feminist standpoint theorists who challenge false notions of rationality and universalism in the social sciences. The 1980s saw a crucial shift in feminist theory when black feminist writers directed attention to ethnic dif1crenccs. Criticizing the three form, or phase typology (liberal/Marxist/cultural) as a white women' mental map which ignored the experiences of black women, they describe discrimination as an interlocking system based on race, class and gender. They also introduced fresh theoretical arguments, suggesting, for example, that the family was not necessarily patriarchal but could be a site of resistance. Black theory derives from Afrocentric history, as well as from a 'both/or' reality (the act of being simultaneously inside and outside society) and has a particular view of mothering experience.

These critiques of white essentialism were paralleled by feminist post-structuralist and post-modern critiques of structured systems of subjectivity Drawing on ideas from deconstruction and discourse analysis, feminists argued that gender structures are historically variable and not predetermined. This led to what Barrett calls 'the turn to culture' and a renewed interest in cultural symbols. Italian feminists, for example, created the term autocoscienza or the collective construction of new identities, Through cultural study many of these themes were brought together in feminist peace theory which argues that violence stems from traditional gender socialization. In opposition, pacifists created women-centered symbolic models of environmental action.

Feminist challenges to mainstream social science are diverse and influential, a central claim being that all science is motivated by gendered ideologies whether these are conscious or unconscious. The academic future of feminist theory is now more secure with the growth of women's studies. See also gender and sex, patriarchy.

fertility

Fertility (also referred to as natality) always refers in demographic usage to the achievement of live births. This is in keeping with its Latin etymological derivation from ferre (to bear) but in contrast to the verb, fertilize, which relates to conception. In English-language social science, the capacity to bear children is described as fecundity and the fact of giving birth as fertility. This is the reverse of the usage in French and other Romance languages. It also conflicts with much popular, medical and biological usage where infertility means not childlessness but infecundity or sterility (confusingly, the last can be employed in both senses even by demographers).

Fertility has long been identified with fruitfulness and productiveness, not only in terms of human reproduction but also with regard to the availability of game for hunters and the yield of crops. Indeed, the perceived relationship has played a major role in religion since paleolithic times. The dependence of fertility upon preceding sexual relations has meant that both fertility and coitus play a central role in much of human culture and morality. In some cultures, particularly in the Middle East, the fact of pregnancy or childbirth to a married woman is usually the cause of pleasure, but should she not be married the reaction of her relatives might be so antagonistic as to result in her death and in great problems in securing the marriage of her siblings.

In spite of the biblical advice to be fruitful and multiply, and its mirroring in the adages of many pre- industrial societies, the maximization of fertility is usually constrained by other competing social objectives. Fertility is usually not favored outside marriage partly because it may interfere with achieving the desired marriage. It may be discouraged soon after the birth of another child, because of the risk to health and life of both mother and children, or by grandmothers, because of the conflict between grandmaternal and maternal duties. Traditionally these constraints have been embedded in religion and mores rather than being expressed solely in terms of conflicting roles and danger to health.

Fertility may be expressed as a measure of the behavior of a society, a couple or an individual. In theory, reproductive measures are just as valid for individual males as females, but estimates for the former are rarely attempted because the fact of a man’s fathering a child is less obvious to the community and may be unknown to the progenitor himself. The most meaningful measures of a woman's reproduction is the number of births she experiences between menarch (or puberty) and menopause. For the whole society, the average for all women is known as completed fertility. However, this measure can be determined only in retrospect, a quarter of a century after the peak in fertility for most women completing their reproductive spans, and societies frequently demand more immediate measures which are necessarily those for aggregate populations of different ages for a specified period (usually one year and hence described as an annual rate). The most common aggregate measure is the crude birth rate or the number of live births per year, per thousand population. For national populations, this varied in 1993 from 53 in Malawi to 10 in Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain. The crude birth rate can prove to be an unsatisfactory measure in a society where immigration or other social changes have distorted the distribution of the population by sex or age, and more statistically refined measures relate births only to women of specified age or marital condition The general fertility rate is the ratio of the births during a year to the total number of women 15-49 years of age. The relating of births to women of a specific age, or age range, for a specified period (usually one year) is termed the age-specific birth rate (or fertility rate) and its sum over the whole reproductive age range is the total fertility rate, which in a society characterized by constant fertility over several decades, is an annual measure of the same magnitude as completed fertility. The total fertility rate ranged in 1993 from 7.7 in Malawi to 1. 2 in Hong Kong, 1.3 in Italy and Spain and 1.4 in Germany and Macao. In former East Germany it was lower still, while in Asia levels of 1.5 were found in Japan, 1.6 in South Korea, 1.7 in Singapore and 1.9 in China. Attention may be confined to married women so as to determine marital age-specific birth rates and the total marital fertility rate. If only female births are related to mothers of each age, then the cumulative measure is known as the gross reproduction rate. Because for societies the effective measure of reproduction is not live births but surviving children, a measure known as the net reproduction rate has been devised. This may be defined as the ratio of female births in the next generation to those in this generation in conditions of constant fertility and mortality, and hence measures the eventual multiplication of societies' numbers from one generation to the next, once the age structure changes so as to conform with these stable conditions. If the society maintains a rate of unity for a considerable period (half a century or more in societies which were previously growing rapidly) it will become stationary, while a lower rate will imply eventually declining population size, and a higher rate, a growing population. In 1980, levels below unity were recorded by thirty-six European countries (the exceptions being (Iceland, Ireland and Moldavia), seven East Asian Countries (including China), seven Caribbean countries, and also the USA, Canada, Australia and Georgia. However, only Hungary also exhibited a decline in numbers (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia and Romania being stationary), because such rates have been achieved so recently that there are still disproportionately more women in the potentially most fertile ages than would be the case in a population which had exhibited a net reproduction rate at or below unity for many years. Births within marriage may be described as nuptial or legitimate and those outside as exnuptial or illegitimate.

The female reproductive span varies between women and between societies (or the same society at different dates), but approximately spans ages from around 15 years to the late forties. If fertility were in no way constrained, not even by the institution of marriage or by the practice of breast-feeding which tends to depress fertility, completed family size would be around 15 employs 15.3 in his model). The total marital fertility rate of the Hutterites, a religious community opposed to deliberate fertility control, was in the western USA in the late 1920s at least 12.4 - a level employed by Coale in his model - but this figure was almost certainly rising because of the reduction of the period of breast-feeding. Where breast-feeding is of traditional duration two years or more) the following completed family sizes are found if deliberate control of marital fertility is not practiced. First, where female marriage is, early and widow remarriage is common, as among the Ashanti of West Africa (who practice only short periods postpartum abstinence), around 8. Second, where female marriage is early and widow remarriage is discouraged, as in India prior to the family planning program, around 6.5. Third, where female marriage is late and there are no strong feelings about widow remarriage, as western Europe before the Industrial Revolution, around 6. The term natural fertility has Been employed to describe the level of fertility and its structure by female age, found in societies which do not deliberately restrict marital fertility (but in which sexual abstinence may be practiced after childbirth and terminal sexual abstinence after becoming a grandmother).

However, contemporary interest in fertility largely arises from the decline in fertility in all industrialized and many other societies and the possibility of further reduction in developing countries. The latter has been assisted by family planning programs which have now been instituted by a majority of Third-World governments (beginning with India in 1952). The determinants of fertility have been classified as first, intercourse variables (age at first entrance to sexual union; the proportion of women never entering a union; the period spent after or between union; voluntary and involuntary abstinence, and frequency of intercourse), - second, conception variables (subfecundity or infecundity; contraception, and sterilization), and third, gestation variables (spontaneous or induced abortion). The list does not separately identify the duration of breast-feeding, which was undoubtedly in most traditional societies the major determinant of marital fertility, or sexual activity outside stable unions. Bongaarts has demonstrated that only four factors - the proportion of the female reproductive period spent in a sexual union (in many societies the period of marriage), the duration of postpartum infecundability (that is, the period without menstruation or ovulation plus any period beyond this of postpartum sexual abstinence), the practice of contraception and its effectiveness, and the extent of induced abortion -- provide 96 per cent of the explanation of the variance in fertility levels in nearly all societies.

Beginning in France in the late 18th century, and becoming more general in industrialized countries from the late 19^th century, fertility has fallen in economically developed countries so that most appear likely to attain zero population growth. This has been achieved largely through the deliberate control of marital fertility, in most countries by contraception (before the 1960s by chemical or mechanical means as well as rhythm, abstinence, and withdrawal or coitus interruptus and subsequently increasingly by the use of the Pill, intrauterine devices and sterilization), supplemented by different levels of abortion. By 1993 fertility was clearly low or declining in every major world region except sub-Saharan Africa (where birth rates had begun to fall in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Kenya - too few countries to affect the regional rate). Fertility also remained high and constant in parts of the Middle East and South-west Asia. Increasingly the relationship between the sexual act and conception has been weakened, and this has allowed a weakening in the relation between sexual activity and marriage. See also demographic transition.

feudalism

1. In Marxist theory, feudalism is the mode of production (or historical

forces of production

(such as machines, tools and sources of power), and the physical and

intellectual skills and capacities of the population. Marx suggests that forces of production continue to develop, in terms of their productive capacity, throughout history. Social change occurs through the growing conflict between the developing forces of production and the essentially static economic, political and legal organization of a society (the relations of production). Exploitation of a new technology will therefore require the overthrow of the existing order. (See mode of production).

Fordism/post-Fordism

1. A significant development in the organization of systems of

The term 'post-Fordism' signals a move away from this model of mass production into diversified sites of production. Thus, the large-scale factory is replaced by smaller industrial units. This is evident even in the case of the production of commodities like cars, where it is often the case that the parts of a product are made in a variety of different places, and then assembled elsewhere. Post-Fordism is often associated with the rise of modern technology, and with the replacement of older, heavy-industry forms of production by it. The significance of this transition is a matter of some debate; as is the relationship between the two forms of production – in so far as post-Fordist models still utilize strategies that are common to the earliest Fordist model and rely upon the same basic commodity-based conception of value as exchangevalue. Aspects of post-Fordism have been related to postmodernism - including the implications of technology for cultural and social life. On David Harvey’s account of postmodernity, the postmodern era signifies precisely this movement away from large-scale centers of production. Thus, post-Fordism/postmodernism may be characterized in terms of a historical development into a global capitalist culture, which uses and coordinates the efforts of localized workforces in order to deal with a more flexible market.

3. Fordism is generally understood as a post-war affair, often synonymous with the long post-war boom from the 1950s to the early 19/0s, and centered largely on the US and European economics. Antonio Gramsci is attributed with the first rise of the term to convey some- thing distinctive about the cultural values emanating front the American way of life in the 1930s; indeed, it is the broad vision of Fordism as more than just an economic phenomenon which has tended to hold sway. For many, Fordism symbolizes the arrival of a new type of mass worker, a different kind of mass lifestyle, and the onset of art interventionist, welfare state. Put another way, Fordism acts as a metaphor for modern capitalism. The looseness of the term has been reduced, however, by Sayer's (1989) specification of four different senses of Fordism.

The first sense of Fordism takes its cue from the mass production systems pioneered by Henry Ford and his engineers at the Detroit car factory in 1913/14. Fordism essentially refers to a labor process based upon assembly-line techniques, specialized machinery, a fragmentation of tasks, and control by management over the line. The influence of Frederick Taylor's form of scientific management is to be found in the standardization of work tasks and the more detailed division of labor, as well as in the rise of semi-skilled labor. Where Fordism differs from Taylorism, however, is in the use of technology to impose a work discipline upon the labor force, rather than rely upon the reorganization of work.

The second sense of Fordism goes beyond the labor process to include the economic role of the mass production industries within an economy as a whole. In relation to their size, Fordist industries are seen to have a disproportionate effect on economic growth through their ability to generate and transmit growth to other sectors, many of which will include small-scale producers. Growth in the car industry, for example, creates a demand for a whole range of inputs, from electrical components to glass fittings and plastic accessories. Such industries may grow by meeting the demands of the mass Producers. Equally, the mass producers may generate disproportionate amounts of growth through the economies that arise from their scale of production. Although Fordist plants have high fixed costs, once in place they can realize increasing returns to scale as output rises. They are thus able to exert a dominant role in an economy.

A third meaning attached to Fordism refers to its hegemonic role in an economy. This again refers to the disproportionate role of the mass production industries, although in this instance it refers to the influence of the Fordist model outside of the mass production sector. So, for example, the extent to which collective bargaining agreements, rate-for-the-job contracts, or the imposition of managerial hierarchies occurs among small batch producers or even in the public services sector would be regarded as air indication of how wide- spread the Fordist model had become.

A fourth sense of Fordism comes closer to the notion of Fordism as an industrial era. It refers to Fordism as a mode of regulation aimed at sustaining a particular kind of economic growth; namely one that attempts to maintain the balance between mass production and mass consumption. Institutions such as the state are seen as central to the maintenance of such a balance, and, in the case of the long post-war boom the Keynesian interventionist, welfare state is as an example of how a mode of regulation may hold together a particular industrial era. Michel Aglietta’s account of Fordism set out in A Theory of CapitalistRegulation: The US Experience (1979) is perhaps the best known regulationist study of the long post-war boom and, indeed, equally well known For drawing attention to the much heralded crisis of Fordism.

The crisis of Fordism which dates from the early 1970s, is said to mark the end of an industrial era and the movement towards a new era based upon more flexible forms of economic organization and production, together with more diverse patterns of consumption and lifestyles. The terms used to describe shift are neo- or post-Fordism, depending upon which characteristics of the route out of Fordism are stressed. Neo-Fordism emphasizes the continuity of the labor process under Fordism, whereas post-Fordism stresses a break with all that is Fordism. The hallmark of both, however, is that flexibility is said to represent a solution to the rigidities of an economy organized along Fordist lines.

Such solutions are far from unanimously held, however, as indeed is the notion of Fordism itself. One weakness of the concept of Fordism, noted by post- industrialists in particular, is the inability to see beyond large-scale mass production and to take into consideration the development of the set-vice industries in the post-war period. At root here is the assumption disputed by post-industrialists, that manufacturing, not services, represents the ‘engine of growth’ within a modern economy. See also Taylorism.

functionalism

1. Functionalism was the dominant paradigm within cultural

The American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1968) proposed the distinction between manifest and latent functions. Latent functions of social institutions are those functions of which the social actors are not conscious. Such functions then go beyond any deliberate intentions that the actors may have in carrying out their own particular activities. Thus, the priests or shamen who initiate at a rain dance, may regard themselves as attempting to control the weather. The functionalist sociologist or anthropologist will rather say that the ceremony serves to raise the morale of the group, and thus stabilize and integrate it, perhaps in the face of stresses caused by sustained bad weather.

The most complex version of functionalism was developed largely by Talcott Parsons (1951). He used a systems theory approach borrowed from cybernetics. A system is theorized as maintaining its integrity in relation to an external environment. If a society is treated as a system, then there would be a set of four 'functional pre-requisites' that the social system, like any system, would have to perform in order to maintain integrity and so survive. The first functional prerequisite that needs to be satisfied is the adaptation to the external environment. This, in effect, is the task of the economy in any society (to make the resources of the external environment available to the society). The second pre-requisite is goal-attainment. Certain institutions in society (such as the political institutions) must be capable of directing the society. Integration, the third pre-requisite, maintains internal order (so can be seen the work of the police and education). The final pre-requisite, pattern-maintenance, entails the motivation of the members of the system to perform the functions required of them. This pre-requisite is met by the cultural sub-system. Culture is thus, for Parsons, itself to be understood as a system (and thus it will have the four pre-requisites of any system). In principle, Parsons' analysis of sub-systems within systems can be carried on ad infinitum, or at least down to the individual social agent, who is, him- or herself, also a system.

Functionalism has been criticized for its inability to deal with social conflict and social change. Functionalists tend to assume that society is a largely homogeneous whole, with a substantial consensus over the core norms and values. In terms of its analysis of culture, functionalism gives no scope for a theory of ideology, with the implication that a consensus could be manufactured or contested. There is, in addition, little scope to recognize conflict between sub-groups within the society, either as suggested by the Marxist model of class conflict, or in terms of the conflict theorist’s account of conflict as a sign of a politically vibrant, open society. Deviance from the consensual norm is condemned as ‘dysfuntional,’ which is to say disruptive to the social whole. The conservatism inherent in this account of conflict is also seen in the treatment of social change. Societies are seen to change not through revolutionary convulsions, as suggested by the Marxists, but rather through a ever finer differentiation of social functions (and thus, creation of sub-systems). As societies become more sophisticated, new specialist institutions will arise to fulfill functions previously carried out less satisfactorily elsewhere. Thus, the pre-industrial family was largely responsible for a child’s education. In industrial society, the school emerges as a specialist educational institution.

Functionalism’s greatest fault was perhaps its inability to deal with meaning, and to be able to recognize the capacity of social actors actively to recognize and construct a meaningful social world in which they could live and move. For this reason, the first significant challenge to functionalism’s supremacy in the social sciences came from symbolic interactionism. The more sophisticated versions of functionalism, linked to systems theory, have seen a revival in recent years, not least in the work of German social theorist Niklaus Luhmann. This version of functionalist theory has also been influential in the work of Jürgen Habermas.

G

GATT

3. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is a treaty between states (contracting parties) under which they undertake to adhere to specific rules and principles relating to trade policies and to participate in periodic rounds of multilateral trade negotiations (MTNs) to lower trade barriers. MTN rounds have in fact lowered average tariffs substantially, restricted domestic pressures for protection and contributed significantly to post-war reconstruction, growth and globalization of the world economy. From its creation in 1947, GATT has evolved from a replacement for the stillborn International Trade Organization into a pillar of the international trading system. Under the Uruguay Round agreement (1994) it will be subsumed into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

The WTO is to oversee the GATT, as well as two further agreements arising from the Uruguay Round: the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the Agreement on Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). The GATT will continue as a separate body concerned with trade in goods, indeed with its range of influence expanded and basic disciplines reinforced.

The influence of GATT has increased steadily over time, as the number of contracting parties (over 120 by 1994 and set to grow further as more developing and eastern European countries join) and as the policy instruments subject to GATT rules have increased. Agricultural and industrial producer lobbies, consumer Associations and political parties are concerned with the outcome of MTNs. As a result, GATT and MTNs are the focus of major political debate, national and international, and of the mass media.

There are a number of possible reasons for GATT's longevity as an institution. There has, for instance, been a significant momentum for trade liberalization during much of the post-Second World War era, particularly until the first oil shock of 1973-4. Memories of the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that were pursued in the 1930s have remained sufficiently vivid. This historical perspective has been reinforced by the experience of the growth of incomes in the major trading nations that accompanied liberal trade policies. Clearly trade liberalization was not the sole facto at work here, but the association between trade liberalization and growth has certainly not been harmful to GATT's status.

The Articles of the GATT unambiguously call for open markets and the use of transparent and non- discriminatory policies so as to foster free and fair competition in international trade. In practice GAFT has tended to be a rather more pragmatic and Flexible institution. The MTNs have largely ignored at times certain sensitive issues, such as protectionism in agriculture and textiles, or have introduced different treatment for special cases such as the developing countries. Similarly GATT rules have often been broken by contracting countries without GATT trying to enforce its obligations, in order to avoid serious conflict between important members. In large part this has been a reflection of the nature of its relatively small, Geneva-based secretariat, which has had limited power and resources to police the international trading system and has had therefore to serve the wishes of its members, in particular its most powerful members. But GATT has demonstrated a capacity to respond to new challenges and to widen its competence. Initially largely restricted to customs duties, GATT first shifted its attention to other non-tariff measures in the Kennedy Round (1964-7) and now is more concerned with regulating the use of a potentially enormous array of non-border controls (including subsidies, competition policies and anti-dumping procedures) that may be used by national governments to restrict international competition. Following the Uruguay Round and the creation of the WTO, that competence and power to regulate the trading system is likely to increase. See also international trade.

gender

1. The concept of 'gender' is typically placed in opposition to the

gender and sex

The study of gender has its roots in the anthropology of women and for this reason is often mistakenly taken to be solely about women. Gender studies, however, are concerned with the cultural construction of embodied human beings, women and men. They examine the differences and similarities as experienced and interpreted in various contexts, taking this to mean all relationships whether they involve subjects of the same or different genders. Gender has often implied and/or been contrasted to sex, the biologically defined categories of male and female.

Despite the fact that the biologically determining nature of sexual differences had been questioned by Margaret Mead as early as 1935, gender studies began essentially in the 1960s with the growing awareness of the need to 'write women into' male-biased ethnographies. This women-centered approach, the anthropology of women as it came to be known, did not, as Moore notes, arise from the absence of women in the traditional ethnographies, but was rather due to a growing concern that women and their world-views were not being adequately represented.

In order to redress this imbalance, women's views had to be heard in the ethnographies. It was felt that women researchers, as women, were more capable of approaching and understanding women in other cultures. Underlying this belief was the view, often identified as essentialist, that there exists a universal women's nature: that despite cultural variations, bio- logical sexual differences are stable and pre-social and are reflected in the socially constructed gender categories, men and women.

Many anthropologists felt that this position was untenable. In order to avoid the ghettoization that would occur with an anthropology of women, and equally important in order to surpass past, male-biased theories and biological determinism, they had to develop new theoretical and analytical approaches. They had to shift their interests from the study of women to gender studies, that is, to the study of women and men. In constructionist terms they asked how sexual differences were constituted through social and historic discourse and interaction. The question which remained central to their thesis was why and how women in nearly all societies seemed to experience some form of subordination to men.

One of the first to adopt such an approach was Edwin Ardener. He proposed a theory of ‘muted groups' in which dominance was explained as a group's ability, the group often identified with men, to express a world-view while in turn muting alternative, often women's, models. Other authors noted the western bias for language as a means of expression often controlled by men, as opposed to other non-verbal forms of expression such as bodily gestures, weaving and cooking. Furthermore, anthropologists, both men and women, use male models which have been drawn from their own culture to interpret models present in other cultures.

By pointing out that women anthropologists were not necessarily privileged in their studies of women of other cultures, researchers were able to pursue the study of gender as a cultural and sociological construction. Two theoretical approaches can be discerned in the study of the position of women and of gender. The first, influenced by Engels's distinction between Production and reproduction and his analysis of the sexual division of labor, took economic relations as central to its thesis. This approach preceded the anthropology of women but late fed into the study of gender. The second based its analysis on the separation between nature and culture, rooted in the works of Freud and Lévi-Strauss.

Marxist-oriented researchers associated the subordination of women with the domestic/public dichotomy and the sexual division of labor. This analysis aligned the subordination of women with their exclusion from the public sphere of production and their subsequent relegation to reproductive labor within the household. They sought to explain women's position in society on the basis of women's access to the means of production. This view proved to be too narrow and ethnocentric, its theoretical premises rooted in industrialized, class-based societies. For example, some anthropologists noted that in hunter-gatherer societies where there is no sharp distinction between the public and private domains, the sexual division of labor is not based on relations of inequality and asymmetry but on relations of complementarity. Other ethnographic evidence showed how women often took part in both productive and reproductive labor. Although the definition of reproduction was expanded in some instance to include social reproduction, the subordination of women was still often linked to their role in biological reproduction.

By contrast, adopting a structuralist approach and in line with Simone de Beauvoir's position, Sherry Ortner argued that women's universal subordination was a result of their association with nature due to their ability to bear children, whereas men were everywhere associated with the implied superior domain of culture and its production. Michelle Rosaldo, in the same vein, pointed out that women were identified with the domestic domain because of their roles as mothers, She stressed the distinction between the ascribed status of women and the achieved status of men. For Rosaldo, women could overcome their subordinate role only if they moved out of the domestic and into the public, male domain.

These propositions were widely criticized for making too simple a universalisation. For example, in MacCormack and Strathern, the contributors showed that the structuralist dichotomy between nature and culture was a western construct, historically constituted. In many societies, it was noted, this dichotomy was differently constructed and in some it was questioned whether it existed at all. Rosaldo, too, later modified her position noting that the distinction between the domestic and the public could not necessarily be universally applied.

In view of this critique, gender categories and the relations between gender have to be understood in a different manner. Ortner and Whitehead proposed that gender could be understood as ‘prestige structure' and had to be correlated with other systems of social evaluation. Errington, for example notes that in island Southeast Asia, the differences between men and women are not highly marker. This may be due to their social invisibility to western-trained researchers. It might also have to do with how Euro- Americans define power and status. Women in these societies have instrumental power and control over practical matters and money. Yet their economic power may be the opposite of the spiritual power which brings the greatest prestige.

In short, the universals that had been proposed, that is the dichotomy between nature and culture, and its companion, domestic and public, had been questioned and undermined by the ethnographic evidence. Similarly questioned was the universality of such categories as subordination and inequality since these categories were shown to be context bound. Also brought to light were the multiple experiences of women and men, even within the same society. Women of different race, class and ethnic backgrounds did not necessarily share the experiences of white, middle-class women. It also challenged those theories which viewed the categories of women and men as universally given. Gender categories, it was argued had to be observed and interpreted within a particular time and place.

Of equal importance was that the sex categories, male and female, were increasingly being viewed as presumed rather than proven by researchers. It was increasingly becoming evident that though the distinction between biological determined sex and culturally determined gender had assisted researchers in examining the relations between men and women and in viewing gender categories as socially and culturally constituted, this dichotomy in the end echoed that of nature and culture. Sex, as biologically given and therefore pre-social and causally prior to gender, was being challenged.

Social historians, prominent among them Michel Foucault, laid bare the historical construct of sex as a western category. Laqueur for example notes how recent the two-sex model of Euro-America is. For centuries people held a one-sex model in which women were seen as inverted men. The two-sexed model developed not only in consequence of the dominance of the Cartesian model but also due to the growing power of biomedical discourses.

In line with Schneider's critique on kinship, Yanagisako and Collier argued that the two different and exclusive biologically defined categories, male and female, are derived from the Euro-American folk model of heterosexual reproduction - the same model underlying concepts of kinship. Therefore, in order to free ourselves from the blinkering category of sex, Collier and Yanagisako proposed that the study of gender should be disengaged from sex; that cultural construction alone should be studied.

Some reacted to this proposition. Errington, for example, makes the distinction between 'sex', 'Sex', and ‘gender.’ By 'Sex' she refers to a particular social construct of human bodies. The term 'sex' by contrast refers to the physical nature of human bodies, while ‘gender’ refers to what different cultures make of sex. Given these distinctions she suggests that Yanagisako And Collier have conflated the meaning of sex and Sex. To disassociate gender from sex, that is from physical bodies, would lead to a confusion about what gender and would simply reaffirm the distinction between nature and culture and the presumed hierarchical relations between them. Rather, the relation between sex and gender, biology and culture is interactive, the one not predetermining the other.

Yet if sex as a biological category is itself a product of western history, can it exist independently outside of a social matrix? Moore notes this, taking issue with both Yanagisako and Collier and with Errington. She argues that if the category sex does not exist independently of a social context we can only really speak of Sex in any given society. As is shown by, historical studies as well as by ethnographic research, not all societies have two mutually exclusive sexual categories but they do have a model of Sex. Given this, the analytic distinction, as Moore and others note, between sex and gender is no longer clear.

This does not mean that we must necessarily do away with the analytical categories of sex and gender; rather we must explore them further, and examine how they define and encompass one another in different contexts and discourses. Anthropologists seem to be moving towards new ways of understanding peoples' views of themselves and their relations, towards what some would define as an anthropology of identity. See also feminist theory, patriarchy.

genealogy

1. A method of analysis of forms of ethical (Nietzsche) or

Nietzsche's genealogical method is in fact a variant on a project outlined in one of his earlier works, Human, All-Too Human (1878-80). In the opening sections of that work he argues for the construction of a 'chemistry' of the religious and moral sensations and values. In other words, Nietzsche takes the view that values (and, indeed, feelings/sensations) can be revealingly understood by producing a causal and historical account of them which seeks to unearth their origins. To this extent, the genealogical approach fits in with much of Nietzsche's philosophical thinking, which often expresses the view that what has hitherto been regarded as valuable (or even sacred) can be adequately accounted for within a materialist methodology of explanation. Foucault's genealogical method of investigation, likewise, takes as its point of departure the historical conditions which constitute discourses of knowledge. His analysis of, for example, the clinical definitions and treatments of madness since the 17th century, emphasizes the importance of social relations (above all, relations of power) in the construction of knowledge, and seeks to reveal through painstaking historical analysis the influences and interests which underlie and are concealed by discourses which claim to articulate objective knowledge. A key problem, at least with Foucault's application of the genealogical method, is that in applying it to forms of knowledge he opens himself to the criticism that his own discourse is itself a production of historical factors and an expression of interests (see Peter Dews's criticisms listed in the readings below, which provides a Nietzschean criticism of Foucault's methodology).

globalization

3. The development of the world economy has a long history dating from at least the 16th century, and is associated with the economic and imperial expansionism of the great powers. By globalization we refer to a more advanced stage of this process of development. The global economy is one in which all aspects of the economy - raw materials, labour information and transportation, finance, distribution, marketing - integrated or interdependent on a global scale. Moreover, they are so on an almost instantaneous basis. By global economy, ‘we mean an economy that works as a unit in real time on a planetary basis'. The forces of globalization thereby tend to erode the integrity and autonomy of national economies.

Newly emerging and consolidating global corporations are the driving force behind these developments. Where multinational corporations in the past operated across a number of national economies, economic globalization now requires corporate interests to treat the world as a single entity, competing in all major markets simultaneously, rather than sequentially. This may involve the marketing of global products or world brands such as Coca Cola, McDonald's or Kodak. In most cases, however, global competitiveness will require more complex and differentiated strategies. Managing in a borderless world in fact necessitates the segmentation of corporate organization and marketing according to transnational regions, notably those of Europe, North America and the Far East. Some global corporations describe their approach, more precisely, as one of global localization, recognizing the continuing significance of geogaphical difference and heterogeneity. The globalization of economies is more accurately seen in terms of an emergence of global-local nexus.

Globalization has been made possible through the establishment of worldwide information and communication networks. New telecommunication and computer networks are overcoming the barriers of time and space, allowing corporate and financial interests to operate on a twenty-four-hour basis across the planet. The inauguration of information superhighways promises to further extend this compression of our spatial and temporal worlds. Global media are also part of this complex pattern of transborder information flows. Using new satellite and cable systems, channels like CNN and MTV have begun to create truly global television markets and audiences (though here too, there is growing realization of the need to be sensitive to local differences). Instantaneous and ubiquitous communication gives substance to Marshall McLuhan's idea, first put forward in the 1960s, that the world is becoming a global village.

As national economic spaces become less functional in the global context, cities and city-regions are assuming a new role as the basing points in the spatial organization of international business. Cities are consequently compelled to attract and accommodate the key functions of the global economy (services, finance, communications, etc.). This results in inter-urban competition across national borders, leading to the formation of a new international urban hierarchy. Cities must aim to become key hubs in the new global networks. Metropolitan centers such as New York, Tokyo and London may be described as truly 'world cities' or 'global cities,’ the command centers in the global economy. Competition among second-level global cities involves the struggle to achieve ascendancy within particular zones of the world. This competition also requires cities to distinguish their assets and endowments through strategies of place marketing and differentiation: in a context of increasing mobility, the particularities of place become a salient factor in the global positioning of cities. As well as attracting global investors and tourists, cities are also the destinations of migrant and refugee populations from across the world. Global cities are also microcosms in which to observe the growing dualism between the world's rich and poor and the encounter of global cultures.

We should consider what globalization means for the world's cultures. Is there a global culture? What might we mean by this? In the case of commercial culture (film and television, popular music, etc.), there are certainly aspirations towards creating a unitary, worldwide market. Global media corporations, such as Time Warner, Sony and News Corporation, are thinking in terms of global products and global audiences. This is possible only with certain kinds of programming, however, and for the most part global media interests operate in terms of transnational media spaces (e.g. the 'Eurovision' region; the 'Asian' region served by Murdoch's Star TV). At the same time, there are contrary tendencies, towards the proliferation of national and also regional (e.g. Basque, Gaelic) media. This may be seen in terms of the (re)assertion of cultural difference and distinction in the face of globalizing tendencies. Again it is the relation between the global and the local that is significant. The globalization of the media should be understood, then, in terms of the construction of a complex new map of transnational, national and subnational cultural spaces.

Cultural globalization – associated with flows of media and communication, but also with flows of migrants, refugees and tourists – has brought to the fore questions of cultural identity. For some, the proliferation of shared or common cultural references across the world evokes cosmopolitan ideals. There is the sense that cultural encounters across frontiers can create new and productive kinds of cultural fusion and hybridity. Where some see cosmopolitan complexities, others perceive (and oppose) cultural homogenization and the erosion of cultural specificity. Globalization is also linked, then, to the revalidation of particularistic cultures and identities. Across the world, there are those who respond to global upheaval by returning to their ‘roots,’ by reclaiming what they see as their ethnic and national homelands, by recovering the certainties of religious tradition and fundamentals. Globalization pulls cultures in different, contradictory, and often conflictual, ways. It is about the deterritorialization of culture, but it also involved cultural reterritorialization. It is about the increasing mobility of culture, but also about new cultural fixities.

We may see globalization in terms of the new possibilities opened up by global communications, global travel and global products. Or, alternatively, we may consider it from the perspective of those for whom it represents unwelcome destabilization and disorientation. To some extent, this difference may be a matter of who will gain from global change and who will lose or be marginalized. Globalization occurs as a contradictory and uneven process, involving new kinds of polarization (economic, social and cultural) at a range of geographical scales. The encounter and possible confrontation of social and cultural values is an inevitable consequence. We have a global economy and a global culture: we do not, however, have global political institutions that could mediate this encounter and confrontation. See also multinational enterprises, world-system theory.

grand narrative

1. A term associated with Jean-François Lyotard’s account of

H

hegemony

1. The term 'hegemony' is derived from the Greek hegemon, meaning

2. Hegemony was probably taken directly into English from the word egemonia, Greek, root word egemon, Greek - leader, ruler, often in the sense of a state other than his own. Its sense of a political predominance,usually_9f one state over another, is not common before the 19^th century, but has since persisted and is now fairly common, together with hegemonic, to describe a policy expressing or aimed at political predominance. More recently hegemonism has been used to describe specifically 'great power' or 'superpower' politics, intended to dominate others,(indeed hegemonism has some currency as an alternative to imperialism).

There was an occasional early use in, English to indicate predominance of a more general kind. From 1567 there is 'Aegemonie or Sufferaigntie of things growing upon ye earth,’ and from 1656 'the Supream or Hegemonick part of the Soul.’ Hegemonic, especially, continued in this sense of 'predominant' or of a 'master principle.’

The word has become important in one form of 20^th-century Marxism, especially from the work of Gramsci (in whose writings, however, the term is both complicated and variable. In its simplest use it extends the notion of political predominance from relations between states to relations between social classes, as in bourgeois hegemony. But the character of this predominance can be seen in a way which produces an extended sense in many ways similar to earlier English uses of hegemonic. That is to say, it is not limited to matters of direct political control but seeks to describe a more general predominance which includes, as one of its key features, a particular way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships. It is different in this sense from the notion of 'world-view,’ in that the ways of seeing the world and ourselves and others are not just intellectual but political facts; expressed over a range from institutions to relationships and consciousness. It is also different from ideology in that it is seen to depend for its hold not only on its expression of the interests of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as 'normal reality' or 'commonsense,’ by those in practice subordinated to it. It thus affects thinking about revolution in that it stresses not only the transfer of political or economic power, but the overthrow of a specific hegemony: that is to say an integral form of class rule which exists not only in political and economic institutions and relationships but also in active forms of experience and consciousness. This can only be done, it is argued, by creating an alternative hegemony - a new predominant practice and consciousness. The idea is then distinct, for example, from the idea that new institutions and relationships will of themselves create new experience and consciousness. Thus an emphasis on hegemony and the hegemonic has come to include cultural as well as political and economic factors; it is distinct, in this sense, from the alternative idea of an economic base and a political and cultural superstructure, where as the base changes the superstructure is changed, with whatever degree of indirectness or delay. The idea of hegemony, in its wide sense, is then especially important in societies in which electoral -politics and public opinion are significant factors, and in which social practice is seen to depend on consent to certain dominant ideas which in fact express the needs of a dominant class. Except in extreme versions of economic determinism, where an economic system or structure rises and falls by its own laws, the struggle for hegemony is seen as a necessary or as the decisive factor in radical change of any kind, including many kinds of change in the base. See culture, imperialism.

historicism

1. A theory which holds that an historical analysis of human beliefs, concepts, moralities and ways of living is the only tenable means of explaining such phenomena. Thus, an historicist rejects the belief that, for example, there are any a-historical necessary truths concerning the construction of human identity (see also essentialism), on the grounds that such concepts are the result of historical processes particular to specific cultures and cultural forms. Historicism therefore extols a cultural relativism. Thinkers associated with the historicist approach include sociologist Karl Mannheim, who (combining an epistemological relativism and a cultural relativism) argued that all knowledge of history is a matter of relations, and that the perspective of the observer cannot be excised from historical analysis. Michel Foucault's work, in turn, argues for the belief that the self is historically constructed, rather than a naturally produced and universal structure common to all times and cultures. This position has led to arguments about the construction of aspects of identity in relation to issues of race and gender.

historicism

In the United States, Foucault's work (as well as that of Raymond Williams) has had an influence in initiating New Historicism, which takes as its point of departure a crossfertilization between theories associated with poststructuralism and Marxism. New Historicists are interested in the social and ideological effects of meaning and its construction. They offer readings of primarily literary texts which, in contrast to the non-historical, text-based approach of traditional criticism, seek to interpret them in the cultural context of their production by way of an historical methodology, and yet spurn the development of grand narratives of history or knowledge. Writers who have adopted this approach include Stephen Greenblatt, who provided a first elaboration of New Historicism in his The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance (1980).

history

2. In its earliest uses history was a narrative account of events. The word came into English from the word histoire, French, historia, Latin, from the root word istoria, Greek, which had the early sense of inquiry and a developed sense of the results of inquiry and then an account of knowledge. In all these words the sense has ranged from a story of events to a narrative of past events, but the sense of inquiry has also often been present (cf. Herodotus: '…why they went to war with each other'). In early English use, history and story (the alternative English form derived ultimately from the same root) were both applied to an account either of imaginary events or of events supposed to be true. The use of history for imagined events has persisted, in a diminished form, especially in novels. But from the 15^th century history moved towards an account past real events, and story towards a range which includes less formal accounts of past events and accounts of imagined events. History in the sense of organized knowledge of the past was from the late 15^th century a generalized extension from the earlier sense of a specific written account. Historian, historic and historical followed mainly this, general sense, although with some persistent uses referring to actual writing.

It can be said that this established general sense of history has lasted into contemporary English as the predominant meaning. But it is necessary to distinguish an important sense of history which is more than, though it includes, organized knowledge of the past. It is not easy either to date or define this, but the source is probably the sense of history as human self-development which is evident from the early 18^th century in Vico and in the new kinds of Universal Histories. One way of expressing this new sense is to say that past events are seen not as specific histories but as a continuous and connected process. Various systematizations and interpretations of this continuous and connected process then become history in a new general and eventually abstract sense. Moreover, given the stress on human self-development, history in many of these uses loses its exclusive association with the past and becomes connected not only to the present but also to the future. In German there is a verbal distinction which makes this clearer: Historie refers mainly to the past, while Geschichte (and the associated Geschichtsphilosophie) can refer to a process including past, present and future. History in this controversial modern sense draws on several kinds of intellectual system: notably on the Enlightenment sense of the progress and development of civilization; on the idealist sense, as in Hegel, of world-historical process; and on the political sense, primarily associated with the French Revolution and later with the socialist movement and especially with Marxism, of historical forces - products of the past which are active in the present and which will shape the future in knowable ways. There is of course controversy between these varying forms of the sense of process, and between all of them and those who continue to regard history as an account, or a series of accounts, of actual past events, in which no necessary design, or, sometimes alternatively, no necessary implication for the future, can properly be discerned. Historicism, as it has been used in mid-20^th century, has three senses: (i) a relatively neutral definition of a method of study which relies on the facts of the past and traces precedents of current events; (ii) a deliberate emphasis on variable historical conditions and contexts, through which all specific events must be interpreted;(iii) a hostile sense, to attack all forms of interpretation or prediction by 'historical necessity' or the discovery of general 'laws of historical development' (cf. Popper). It is not always easy to distinguish this kind of attack on historicism, which rejects ideas of a necessary or even probable future, from a related attack on the notion of any future (in its specialized sense of a better, a more developed life) which uses the lessons of history, in a quite generalized sense(history as a tale of accidents, unforeseen events, frustration of conscious purposes), as an argument especially against hope. Though it is not always recognized or acknowledged as such, this latter use of history is probably a specific 20^th century form of history as general process, though now used, in contrast with the sense of achievement or promise of the earlier and still active versions, to indicate a general pattern of frustration and defeat.

It is then not easy to say which sense of history is currently dominant. Historian remains precise, in its earlier meaning. Historical relates mainly but not exclusively to this sense of the past, but historic is most often used to include a sense of process or destiny. History itself retains its whole range, and still, in different hands, teaches or shows us most kinds of knowable past and almost every kind of imaginable future.

holism

1. A contextualist theory of truth, meaning and interpretation favored by some philosophers - notably WV Quine - and also by many cultural and literary theorists working in the broadly hermeneutic tradition that runs from Schleiermacher to Heidegger and Gadamer. On this view it is impossible to assign meanings or interpret beliefs except in a context wider than that of the individual statement or utterance. Opinions vary as to just how Widely this interpretive 'horizon' has to be drawn, or whether - in principle - there is any limit to the range of relevant background knowledge that might be involved. For the most part philosophers in the Anglo-American ('analytic') camp tend to adopt a pragmatic outlook and not worry too much about the demarcation issue while 'continental' thinkers follow Heidegger in espousing a depth-hermeneutic approach that concerns itself centrally with just this issue.

Thus, for Heidegger, the history of 'western metaphysics' from Plato to Husserl is essentially the history of an error, that which resulted when thinking turned away from truth-as-unconcealment (aletheia) vouchsafed through language, and instead sought to analyze the structure and content of truth through various theories of knowledge and representation. Only by overcoming that fateful legacy - nurturing a receptive openness to language holistically construed - could philosophy be set back upon the path to authentic, primordial truth. Heidegger's interpreters have differed widely in the extent of their willingness to follow him along this path. For his closest disciples, Gadamer among them, it is the way towards a deeper and fuller understanding of the so-called 'hermeneutic circle', that is to say, the ongoing dialogue between past and present wherein interpretation is always guided - or its 'horizon' already marked out - by traditional meanings and values. Hence, the charge of uncritical conservatism leveled against Gadamer by Jürgen Habermas and other dissenting commentators.

This charge has a bearing on our topic here since the holistic turn in philosophy of language and interpretation theory can be seen as lending support to various forms of cultural-relativist argument. For if the truth-value of individual statements is a function of their role within the wider context of statements-held-true at any given time, and if these make sense only when construed against the background horizon of communally sanctioned beliefs, then it follows that statements and beliefs cannot be criticized except on the evaluative terms laid down by some existing cultural consensus. Such is the reading of Heidegger proposed by a number of Anglo-American philosophers in quest of alternative ideas from outside the mainstream analytic tradition. Thus, according to Richard Rorty, we can dump all that portentous depth-ontological talk about 'western metaphysics,’ truth-as-unconcealment, authentic Dasein, etc., while taking Heidegger's pragmatist point about language as a way of being-in-the-world which requires nothing more in the way of justifying grounds or epistemological back-up. This goes some way towards explaining the recent (on the face of it unlikely) convergence between a certain strain of 'post-analytic' philosophy and a certain, albeit selective, appropriation of

Heideggerian themes. What unites them across some otherwise sizeable differences of method and approach is the belief that meaning cannot be accounted for by the kinds of logicosemantic analysis that characterized philosophy of language in the line of descent from Frege and Russell.

Quine's essay 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' is a classic statement of the case and one that has exerted a strong influence on recent Anglo-American debate. Its argument may be stated very briefly as follows. Philosophers have often assumed that there exists a clear-cut categorical distinction between analytic statements (such as 'all batchelors are unmarried men') whose truth is purely definitional and hence self-evident to reason, and synthetic statements (such as 'water is the substance with molecular structure H 2 0') which involve some item of acquired knowledge, and whose truth is therefore neither self-evident nor merely tautological. Such was the position maintained by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason where he also asserted the existence of a priori synthetic truths, i.e., those - like the principle of causality - that were always necessarily presupposed in every act of empirical judgement, and which thus provided the transcendental ground (or condition of possibility) for all experience and knowledge. The empiricist Hume also drew a distinction between 'truths of reason' and 'matters of fact', one that was taken up and developed by various 20th-century thinkers, among them Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap and the Logical Positivists. Where the two traditions converged - despite all their deep-laid differences of philosophic principle - was on the basic point that individual statements (judgements or propositions) were the units of meaningful discourse, and moreover that these could be analyzed so as to reveal their underlying structure or logico-semantic form.

Such was Russell's celebrated 'Theory of Descriptions', designed to remove certain ambiguities of reference and scope in ordinary (natural) language by providing a clear-cut logical paraphrase in terms of quantifiers, variables, and logical constants. In this respect it paralleled Frege's theory of sense and reference which sought to distinguish genuinely referring

expressions from other (e.g. fictive or mythical) names – such as 'Pegasus' or 'Odysseus' - that failed to correspond to any real-world, objective, or historically existent entity. These are paradigm examples of analytic philosophy in so far as they assume (1) that the meaning of a statement is given by its truth-conditions, and (2) that those conditions are definable

in terms of its various component parts. Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' was an attack on this entire program of analysis, especially the version of it laid out in Carnap's book The Logical Construction of the World. According to Quine that program ran up against a number of intractable problems. The most basic of these was its failure to justify the presumed distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, or logical truths-of-reason and empirical matters-of-fact. For it could always be shown that any definition of the term 'analytic' had to rely on other terms - like 'synonymous' or 'logically equivalent' - which themselves relied on the notion of analyticity, thus falling prey to the charge of circular argument. In which case there is no possibility of holding a firm, categorical line between logic conceived as the a priori basis of all valid reasoning and those various items of empirical knowledge that are always open to challenge or revision under pressure from recalcitrant evidence. That is to say, we might always be forced to revise some presumptive logical 'law of thought' - such as bivalence or excluded middle - if it came into conflict with the best current theories of physical science. Thus, to take Quine's example: on one interpretation of quantum mechanics it might be deemed necessary to suspend the 'law' of excluded middle so as to accommodate otherwise unthinkable phenomena like quantum superposition or the wave/particle dualism.

It is in this context that Quine offers his famous metaphor of the totality of human knowledge at any given time as a 'man-made fabric' extending all the way from a core region of putative logical ground-rules to a periphery where observation-statements link up with the data of empirical experience. His point is that nothing is immune from revision since we can always save some cherished item of belief or conserve some pragmatically useful theory by making adjustments elsewhere in the fabric. Hence Quine's argument concerning the holistic character of all interpretation - whether in the natural or the social and human sciences - and the lack of any ultimate (non-scheme-relative) criteria for distinguishing factual from theoretical components in our overall scheme of beliefs. For theories are always 'underdetermined' by the best evidence to hand, while observation-statements are always 'theory-laden' in the sense that they involve a wide range of standing ontological commitments, from the 'posits' of our everyday commonsense object-language to quarks, gluons, muons and other such specialized candidate items. According to Quine there is no good reason - pragmatic convenience apart - for supposing that some of these objects enjoy a privileged ontological status (i.e., that they really exist quite apart from our present framework of beliefs) whereas others must be counted theory-dependent or as 'existing' only by virtue of their role in the discourse of advanced theoretical physics. Such distinctions have to drop out if we take his point about ontological relativity and the extent to which all our reality-ascriptions are contingent on this or that preferred way of adjusting the belief-fabric.

Indeed Quine is willing to push this argument to the stage of denying that there is ultimately any difference between macrophysical 'posits' (such as brick houses on Elm Street), subatomic particles, forces, numbers, mathematical sets or classes, centaurs and the gods of Homer. All these entities 'enter our conception only as cultural posits', even if - as Quine readily concedes - 'the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious ... as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience'. Thus, any choice between them will always turn on 'vaguely pragmatic inclination' (that which leads us to adjust one or another strand in the fabric) plus an empirically informed estimate of 'the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experience'. His own inclination is to go with the current best theories of physical science and admit just that range of posits - from brick houses to certain forces, particles, and whatever is required in the way of more abstract entities such as numbers, classes, etc. – in order to bring theory into line with the best observational data. Thus ‘[f]or my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise.’ However, ‘in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ in degree not kind,’ since they are both – along with every other candidate item – imported into various conceptual schemes as a matter of pragmatic convenience or predisposed belief.

It is not hard to see why Quine’s argument has struck a sympathetic cord not only among ‘post-analytic’ philosophers like Rorty but also with theorists in a range of other disciplines such as cultural studies, sociology of knowledge, ethnography, literary criticism and the human sciences at large. It is often invoked by way of support for the cultural-relativist (or social-constructivist) that truth and reality just are whatever we make of them according to some particular set of linguistic, discursive or social conventions. Thus, Quine turns up in a range of improbable contexts or allied with thinkers whose arguments he would scarcely find congenial, given his own attitude of sturdy confidence in a physicalist (if not a realist) approach to epistemological issues. Among them are Kuhnian philosophers of science who adopt a holistic theory of scientific paradigm-change; Foucauldian archeologists (or genealogists) of knowledge who push this doctrine yet further in a sceptical-relativist direction; Wittgensteinian social theorists who view all truth-claims as relative (or ‘internal’) to some given language-game or cultural ‘form-of-life’; and proponents of a depth hermeneutical approach who greet Quine’s arguments as marking the end of a narrowly analytic or reductionist conception of meaning, knowledge and truth. In one case only – Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions – can the theory be said to derive directly from Quine’s philosophical ideas to represent a consistent working-out their further implications for philosophy and history of science. But there is also a plausible link between Quine’s argument for a full-fledged contextualist (or meaning-holistic) approach and Foucault's notion that 'truth' is nothing more than a product of historically shifting configurations in the discursively-produced and socially-mediated 'order of things.’

The theory of meaning-holism developed out of a strong reaction against the kinds of logico-semantic approach that took the isolated statement or proposition as their primary object of analysis. In particular it marked a determined break with the philosophy of logical atomism espoused (however briefly) by Russell and carried on in a somewhat different, less overtly reductionist form by logical empiricists like Carnap and Tarski. Thus, according to Quine, 'it is nonsense, and the root of much nonsense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement.’ Such was the error of logical empiricism and such the mistake of all those philosophers - from Kant and Hume on down - who thought to distinguish analytic from synthetic judgements, or 'truths of reason' from 'matters of fact'. 'Taken collectively', Quine continues, 'science has its double dependence upon language and experience; but this duality is not significantly traceable into the statements of science taken one by one! In which case we should give up the fruitless quest for a theory of knowledge (or philosophy of science) premised on the old-style atomist belief that any statement could be verified - or falsified - by adducing this or that item of empirical evidence. Rather, 'any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system'. And again: 'even a statement very close to the [observational] periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws.’

It is this aspect of Quine's thinking - his contextualist and (arguably) cultural-relativist theory of knowledge and truth that has opened a way to the current rapprochement between certain strains of 'post-analytic' and 'continental' thought. However, it is a distinctly strained alliance and one that takes no account of Quine's frequent protestations of belief in science as our best, most rational source of guidance in epistemological matters. Nevertheless ‘Two Dogmas’ lays itself open to just such a skeptical-relativist reading through its adoption of a meaning-holistic approach and – following from that – its doctrine of wholesale ontological relativity. At any rate, cultural theorists should be aware that there exist strong arguments against this approach (see for instance Fodor and LePore (1991)) and in favor of a truth-based propositional account of meaning and belief-content. These arguments have been mostly advanced by philosophers in the Anglo-American camp who seek to avoid what they see as the path leading from holistic theories of interpretation to cultural-relativist or strong-sociological modes of thought. The issue is posed with particular force when Wittgensteinian social theorists such as Peter Winch deny that it is possible to criticize beliefs, language-games or cultural ‘life-forms’ other than our own without presuming to adopt a stance outside and above the communal practices in question, and hence failing to understand them on their own internally self-validating terms. In which case, as the critics of this doctrine point out, we could never be justified in criticizing any cultural practice – from witchburning to clitoridectomy, racial segregation or (a good example offered by Mary Midgeley) the samurai custom of chopping off the head of the first stranger one meets in order to test new one’s new sword – since of course these practices are interwoven with a vast range of other customs and beliefs which we denizens of a late 20^th-century secular culture just happen not to share.

So there are some large issues behind the debate as to whether certain items of belief can be criticized on factual, logical, ethical or other grounds without bringing in the entire background range of associated meanings and values. In philosophy of science likewise it is hard to see how discoveries or progress could ever come about if indeed there was always the possibility – as Quine argues – of invoking some alternative auxiliary hypothesis in order to save appearances, or redistributing predicates and truth-values over the total fabric of belief so as to achieve a workable trade-off between logic, theory and empirical observation. ‘Conservatism figures in such choices,’ Quine remarks, ‘and so does the quest for simplicity.’ Some statements – those nearest the periphery – may seem especially ‘germane’ to certain experiences, i.e., strongly supported by the evidence and hence most resistant to challenge. However, ‘in this relation of "germaneness" I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in light of recalcitrant experience.’ And, as we have seen, this thesis across-the-board revisability extends from the logical ‘laws of thought’ to statements concerning the existence of physical ‘posits’ like brick houses on Elm Street. So there is clearly a sense -whatever his own more cautious 'statements on the matter - in which meaning-holism of the Quinean variety consorts readily enough with other skeptical-relativist doctrines such as those promoted by post-structuralists, postmodernists, disciples of Foucault and strong sociologists of knowledge.

As I have said, resistance to this line of thought has come mainly from philosophers trained up in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. However, there are also continental theorists - notably Paul Ricoeur - who have drawn upon various analytic and other (e.g. Habermasian) theories of meaning and truth in order to criticize certain aspects of hermeneutic thinking in the Heidegger-Gadamer line of descent. Ricoeur is himself much influenced by hermeneutic theory and has devoted the larger part of his work to issues in just that sphere. However, he also acknowledges the implicit conservatism - as well as the methodological quandaries - of any theory or philosophy of interpretation which conceives understanding as always caught within the 'hermeneutic circle' of pre-existent values, meanings and beliefs. What is required in order to break that circle is something more than vague Gadamerian talk of the 'fusion' of interpretive horizons or the interplay of past and present cultural perspectives. In brief, it is the capacity of critical thought to analyze its own and other people's presuppositions or acculturated habits of belief, and to do so (moreover) without claiming some impossible vantage-point above and beyond all belief-attachments or value-commitments.

Of course this goes clean against the holistic thesis that

statements have meaning or beliefs possess content only when construed in relation to the entirety of what counts as knowledge at any given time. For in that case - as the Wittgensteinians are fond of observing - we could never

criticize any item of belief without bringing an entire belief-system into question and thus, in effect, disqualifying ourselves as competent interpreters or critics. Thus the doctrine of radical meaning-holism very often leads on to

an outlook of generalized skepticism with regard to the very possibility of interpreting other people's meanings and beliefs while dissenting from them on this or that matter of factual, logical, or ethical-evaluative judgement. Which is also to suggest - in company with various critics of the doctrine -

that holism need not (so to speak) be swallowed whole since we can assign content and truth-conditions to particular statements while acknowledging the extent to which they are informed by a range of background beliefs and presuppositions. As so often with such debates there is a tendency to polarize the issue so that somehow - absurdly - we are offered what amounts to a straight choice between logical atomism (or something very like it) and the idea of meaning and belief-content as unspecifiable except with reference to the entire circumambient culture. It is, to say the least, an unenviable

choice and one that bears no resemblance to what actually goes in our everyday decision-procedures as well as in other, more specialized (e.g., scientific) contexts of inquiry.

Literary critics have mostly got by on some weaker version

of meaning-holism, whether as applied to the complex of

meanings within some particular text, or to the various kinds

of relationship assumed to exist between text and wider historical or cultural context. Thus, formalist critics tend to emphasize immanent structures of metaphor, ambiguity, irony, etc., on the premise that contextualism can be held within well-defined bounds, while New Historicists and Cultural Materialists focus rather on the social dynamics of meaning or the force-field of 'resistance and negotiation' (Stephen Greenblatt) which exceeds all such restrictively work-based ideas of what counts as a relevant context. In this respect they share the holistic approach of a hermeneutic theorist like Gadamer, though reading more often on the look-out for conflicts and instances of ideological tension, and not with a view to some ultimate convergence of interpretive horizons.

Of course it may be said that literary criticism, as generally practiced, is not so much concerned with any truth-claims, propositions, or statements to be found in literary texts, but rather with interpreting their meaning or significance in a broadly contextual and non-assertoric sense. To this extent holism – in one or another version – is the default philosophy of most literary criticism. At any rate it doesn’t entail the kinds of far-reaching anti-realist or skeptical conclusion that result when similar arguments are applied to philosophy of science or other branches of epistemological inquiry. Nevertheless some critics - including William Empson in his book The Structure of Complex Words (1951) - have made a strong case for interpreting literary language in terms of its implicit propositional structures or logico-semantic grammar, rather than some vaguely inclusive rhetoric of paradox, irony, or whatever. Thus, Empson rejects the holistic theory, developed by I.A. Richards, that meanings are somehow 'spread out' over more or less extended passages, and hence that any implied propositional content can only be a matter of associative linkage through a process of gradually emergent contextual definition. On the contrary, Empson argues: what often occurs is the reverse process whereby a whole range of meanings and the various logical entailment relations between them are condensed into a single 'complex word' which is then felt to carry a 'compacted doctrine' and to act as a focal point for interpreting the wider context of argument.

Among these keywords are 'wit' in Pope's Essay on Criticism; sense' in a wide range of texts from Shakespeare to Jane Austen and Wordsworth; 'all' in Milton's Paradise Lost; 'honest' in Othello; 'fool' in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly and King Lear, and 'dog' (when addressed to human beings) as a word which runs the whole gamut of meanings from cynical contempt -as in Timon of Athens - to a Restoration usage where it serves to convey a kind of proto-Darwinian admiration for those 'rock-bottom' animal virtues (fidelity, stoicism, a straightforward pleasure in the senses) that mark the emergence of a secular-humanist ethos. In each case Empson applies his logico-semantic 'machinery' - developed at length in the book's early chapters - to draw out the various verbal 'equations' (or structures of implied statement) which enable those words to express such a range of complex, ideologically charged, and often conflictual meanings. It was this aspect of his work that inspired Raymond Williams to write his book Keywords (1976) where the method is extended - minus much of the machinery - to an analysis of various words that Williams sees as having played a crucial role in the shaping of social and cultural attitudes over the past two centuries.

Empson's main theoretical point, as against Richards, is that we simply could not interpret language - let alone explain its power to communicate across large distances of time and cultural milieu - on anything like the full-scale meaning holistic account. For on this theory, as Richards describes it,

there is nothing more to the business of interpretation than a kind of open-ended contextual adjustment very like the process that Quine describes in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. And from here it is but a short step to the conclusion - eagerly embraced by cultural relativists - that meaning and truth are likewise nothing more than products of pragmatic or interpretive convenience. This is why Empson devotes such efforts to developing an alternative, i.e., a truth-based, propositional theory of complex words with application both to literary texts and to (so-called) 'ordinary language'. Even in the case of 'simple flat prosaic' words such as the deceptively unassuming 'quite' there is room for some quite extraordinary subtleties of tone, meaning and social implication. For it is precisely Empson's point - as against the 'old' New Critics and formalists of various persuasion - that poets communicate

in much the same way as everyday language-users, albeit very often at a higher level of semantic complexity. What enables them to do so - and readers to interpret their meaning – is this capacity of language for conveying intentions through structures of implied logico-semantic entailment, structures that are context-sensitive but not entirely context-dependent or (in the Quinean-holistic sense) context-relative. At any rate it seems fair to conclude - like Fodor and LePore in their survey of the field - that an adequate case for meaning-holism has not yet been made and that so far the doctrine has produced more problems than constructive or persuasive solutions.

human capital

3. Human capital is the stock of acquired talents, skills and knowledge which may enhance a worker's earning power in the labor market. A distinction is commonly made between general human capital - which is considered as affecting potential earnings in a broad range of jobs and occupations - and specific human capital, which augments people's earning power within the particular firm in which they are employed but is of negligible value elsewhere. An example of the former would be formal education in general skills such as mathematics; an example of the latter would be the acquired knowledge about the workings of, and personal contacts within, a particular firm. In many cases human capital is of an intermediate form, whether it be acquired 'off the job', in the form of schooling or vocational training, or ‘on the job’ in terms of work experience.

In several respects the economic analysis capital raises problems similar to that of capital as conventionally understood in terms of firms’ plant and equipment. It Is likely to be heterogeneous in form; it is accumulated over a substantial period of time using labour and capital already in existence further investment usually requires immediate sacrifices (in terms of forgone earnings and tuition fees); its quality will be affected by technical progress: the prospective returns to an individual are likely to be fairly uncertain, and the capital stock will be, subject to physical deterioration and obsolescence. Nevertheless there are considerable differences. Whereas one can realize the returns on physical or financial capital either by receiving the flow of profits accruing to the owner of the asset or by sale of the asset itself, the returns on human capital can usually be received only by the person in whom the investments have been made (although there are exceptions, such as independent workers), and usually require further effort in the form of labor in order to be realized in cash terms. The stock of human capital cannot be transferred as can the titles to other forms of wealth, although the investments that parents make in their children's schooling and in informal education at home are sometimes taken as analogous to bequests of financial capital.

While the idea of investment in oneself commands wide acceptance in terms of its general principles, many economists are unwilling to accept stronger versions of the theory of earnings determination and the theory of income distribution that have been based on the pioneering work of Becker and Mincer. This analysis generally assumes that everywhere labor markets are sufficiently competitive, the services of different types of human capital sufficiently substitutable and educational opportunities sufficiently open, such that earnings differentials can be unambiguously related to differential acquisition of human capital. On the basis of such assumptions estimates have been made of the returns (in terms of increased potential earnings) to human investment (measured in terms of foregone earnings and other costs) by using the observed earnings of workers in cross-sectional samples and in panel studies over time. The rates of return to such investment has usually been found to be in the range of 10-15 per cent. However, it should be emphasized that such estimates often neglect the impact of other economic and social factors which may affect the dispersion of earnings.

human nature

3. The concept of human nature, central to the study of human social life, can be traced to the ancient Greeks who elaborated the idea of ‘nature’ underlying western science. After Thales, Anaxagoras and other cosmologists began the quest for universal principles that explain the world; Sophists like Antiphon and Gorgias concluded that such rules of nature were different from – and contradicted by – human-made rules of law or cultural conventions. Socrates and his students challenges such a division between human nature and law or social virtue, claiming that what is ‘right’ or ‘just’ is ‘according to nature’ (Plato, Republic) and that humankind is ‘the political animal’ (Aristotle, Politics). Ever since, some political and social theorists (e.g. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau) have viewed human nature as essentially selfish and derived society from the behavior of individuals, whereas others (e.g. Hegel, Marx and Durkheim) have argued that humans are naturally sociable and traced individual traits to society and its history. The former assumption has generally been adopted in such disciplines and behaviorist psychology and classical economics, the latter in sociology, cultural anthropology and history.

Contemporary scientific research has demonstrated the impossibility of reducing this ancient controversy to the simplistic nature vs nurture dichotomy. Some aspects human behavior seem primarily shaped by individual experience, the present social situation or the cultural environment, while others can be influenced by genetic predisposition, prenatal events or critical periods in childhood development. Many individual variations in physiology and behavior are by hormones, neurotransmitters or innate structures in the brain, but such biological response systems depend in turn on individual development or experience.

Due to this interaction of genetic, developmental and social factors, human nature is complex and highly adaptable. Individuals of our species are thus by nature both cooperative and competitive, both selfish and altruistic. As a result, ‘mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever-changing patterns between sexes and across families and entire populations.’ An evolutionary perspective clarifies the age-old debates concerning human nature by distinguishing relatively invariant and universal aspects of human behavior from sources of variability that are, at least in part, under biological control. Not only does human nature entail the development of linguistic and cultural abilities that vary from one social environment to another, but also many differences among humans need to be understood as natural.

Common traits shared with other species

Among those attributes shared by every human being, some can be traced to our earliest vertebrate ancestors and are generally found among sexually reproducing animals: the overall bodily structure of vertebrates and basic drives, including food, sex, security and - for social species - predictable status. Like mammals, humans are warm-blooded, develop social bonds, and express emotions in ways that serve as social signals. Like primates, we are a highly intelligent species adopting varied social patterns and individual behavioral strategies in response to food supplies, physical environments, and individual or group experiences. This evolutionary history is reflected in the 'triune' structure of the human central nervous system, in which the brain stem controls the basic drives common to all vertebrates, the limbic system modulates the mammalian emotions, and the enlarged primate neo-cortex permits extraordinary learning and behavioral plasticity.

Each of these levels of evolution has behavioral consequences for all members of our species. Like most vertebrates, humans exhibit what ethologoists call fixed action patterns, including social displays and the consummatory behaviors satisfying needs of nutrition and reproduction. Like most mammals, human females give birth after gestation, breastfeed and care for neonates (unless the mother-infant bond has been disturbed) and hence usually invest more than males in the reproductive process. Like most primates, humans recognize other members of the group individually and use a repertoire of non-verbal displays, including facial expressions, to modulate social interactions. Also common to all humans are traits unique to our species. Most obvious are speech (the complex of linguistic abilities, utilizing grammar and syntax to produce a truly 'open' means of communication and information processing), complex productive technologies (including domestication of other species, elaborate manufacture of tools or weapons, irrigated agriculture, and industrial machinery) and of course cultural systems that use symbolic and linguistic skills to elaborate religious, political and artistic achievements unknown to other animals. Although chimpanzees exhibit many aspects of cultural variability, human nature cannot be reduced to its evolutionary roots.

Variable traits shared by all humans

The amazing diversity of our species' social and cultural behaviors is itself a characteristic of human nature. Some elements of this variability are themselves influenced by biological factors. Personality differences can be traced to heritable temperaments which vary along multiple dimensions such as shyness and sociability, risk-taking and harm-avoidance, or novelty- seeking and predictability. Individual variations in mate choice and sexual behavior may be partly due to genetics, partly due to prenatal hormonal exposure, and partly due to individual experience or social setting. Although the evidence on IQ highly contested, differences in such specific abilities as fine or gross motor co-ordination, musical or artistic skills, and excellence in mathematics, while requiring training for full expression, seem to some degree heritable. Some have also found evidence of genetic susceptibility to cancer, mental disease, learning disabilities, alcoholism and crime, though each of these categories can apparently be produced by different combinations of inherited, developmental and environmental factors.

The exploration of a heritable component in gender differences has been particularly controversial, in part because both critics and proponents often ignore the way that patterns of variation overlap. For example, although the personality dimensions described above are normally distributed, males are on average more predisposed to risk-taking than females. As a result, a given personality type may be widely observed among both males and females even though there is a significant gender difference in the overall distribution of the trait. Often, such statistical patterns can be traced to hormonal differences during neonatal development.

Some behavioral traits reflect physiological responses to specific situations of evolutionary chance. In humans as in many primates, for instance, dominant males have elevated levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin which depend on the sight of submissive behavior by subordinates; after social status has changed, there are corresponding modifications in neurotransmitter levels. It seems likely that such natural mechanisms of plastic behavioral response will be greatly elucidated by research in the late 1990s.

Cultural variation and the environment

At the level of entire societies, there seem to be natural relationships between cultural practices and the natural or social environment comparable to those studied in other species by behavioral ethologists. Among hunter-scavengers or hunter-gatherers like the Kalahari San, egalitarian status patterns with informal group leadership can be viewed as an adaptive response to the environment, whereas hypergamous patterns of social stratification and gender inequality are characteristic responses to an environment of chaotic resource flows and interspecific or intraspecific predation.

Although many social scientists assume that such variations have little, to do with human nature, many facultative traits depend on a specific environment for their expression. As a result, human nature is in many respects a variable rather than a constant. Because the environment plays such an important role in shaping the expression of natural potentialities, for example, it is no longer possible to assert that a specific social institution like monogamous marriage is always and everywhere more 'natural' than alternatives, such as polygamy, homosexuality or (in some situations) celibacy. References to 'human nature' in the singular, therefore, need to be understood as describing a central tendency that is often subject to shaping or variation, depending on time and place. While there are indeed broad universals, such as the sense of justice expressed when moralistic aggression is directed at violations of group norms, these general patterns can rarely be used to decide social conflicts in complex societies undergoing rapid change. While future scientific research will add further detail to this picture, contemporary evidence confirms the view that human nature is a hodgepodge that is complex and changeable rather than a fixed essence that could be deduced from an eternal and immutable natural law. See also human rights, nature, sociobiology.

human rights

3. Human rights are rights which all persons hold by virtue of the human condition. They are thus not dependent upon grant or permission of the state and they cannot be withdrawn by fiat of the state. While laws under different national legal systems may vary, the human rights to which each person is entitled are rights in international law. For example, the human right to a fair trial is the same for a person who lives under a legal system of common law, civil law or Roman law. States have the obligation to ensure that their discrete legal systems reflect and protect the inter- national human rights which those within their jurisdiction hold.

Are human rights universal?

There has been a long-running debate on whether human rights are universal or whether they are necessarily the product of particular cultures and societies. The suggestion that human rights represent western values, and are imposed upon others, is more a product of liberal democratic sensitivity than a reflection of the views of non-western states or their populations. The very wide acceptance of the International Covenants on Human Rights of 1966 (themselves based on the unanimously adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights) appeared to have answered this issue, in favor Of the perceived universality of the rights. Over 140 states are parties to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. These include the former socialist countries of eastern Europe as well as many developing countries. Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq and Iran are among the Islamic countries that have freely chosen to ratify this instrument. Large numbers of socialist, non-Christian and developing states have accepted that their citizens are as entitled as those residing in western countries to fundamental freedoms and human rights. Human rights constitute the common language of humanity. If individuals choose to identify with a particular culture, which may restrict the rights to which they would otherwise be entitled by international law, that is their prerogative choice. But that identification with a culture or religion may not be imposed by a state against the wish of an individual. This is not to insist upon 'western' human rights, but rather to insist that human rights are for people and not for states.

From the entry into force of the Covenants until the catty 1990s there was an incremental growth in the concept of the universality of human rights. In 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was decided to convene a World Conference. on Human Rights, The conference took place in Vienna in 1993 and the preparations therefore, and the conference meetings themselves, were used by some states who had never undertaken the obligations of the Covenants to try to persuade others that human rights represented a western cultural imperialism. This was coupled with proposals for new regional human rights treaties that would be more reflective of cultural particularity. These efforts did not in fact prevail. Article 5 of the Vienna Declaration, in the formulation of which all UN members participated and which was adopted by consensus, proclaims that

from universal standards, but to reinforce them.

The content of human rights

Human rights do not consist only of civil and political rights. There also exist economic, social and cultural rights, notably those reflected in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Western countries have been skeptical about whether the requirements contained in that instrument (for example, the right to housing, the right to education) should properly be described as rights, or whether they are mere aspirations. It has also been suggested that if a stated obligation is not justiciable in the courts, it is not a legal right. Developing countries have been anxious about their ability to deliver these rights in the short term. However, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is now ratified by countries from all parts of the world. The work of its monitoring Committee has done much to address these concerns. It has made clear, for example, that while the full attainment of an economic right may not be immediate, there is an immediate obligation to take designated and agreed to steps to that end. Economic, social and cultural rights entail immediate obligations of ‘best efforts,’ coupled with obligations of result. All of these factors are to be taken into account in determining whether, at any given moment, a specific country is or is not in violation of its obligations regarding such rights. Certain aspects of this category of rights may be justiciable, for example, if housing is being provided in a discriminatory manner. But the absence of justiciability in any event reflects not an absence of entitlement but a need for diverse mechanisms for guaranteeing such entitlements.

Individual and group rights

The beneficiaries of human rights, as reflected in the major international instruments, are individuals. This is true even of minority rights, which are articulated as the right of individuals to pursue their culture, or speak their language, or engage in worship, with others from their group. The sole exception arises in relation to the right to self-determination, which stands in a separate part of each of the Covenants, and is a right of ‘all peoples.’ From the western perspective, the emphasis on the individual as the beneficiary of rights is a necessary antithesis to the power of the state, and also to the power of groups that serve the purposes of the state. There is, however, now an interest in exploring again whether some rights do not properly adhere to groups. The cataclysmic events in the former Yugoslavia and in eastern Europe in the early 1990s have led to the perception that minority rights may need to be more broadly fashioned than is possible so long as they remain the rights of individuals. The question of group rights has also become relevant in the context of new ‘third and fourth generation’ rights now being proposed, such as the right to a clean environment, the right to sustainable development, the rights of indigenous people and others. With regard to these ‘new generation’ rights, there is still considerable debate as to their status as human rights, not only because of the novelty of groups or peoples as the beneficiary, but also because of the uncertainty of the content of the right or the obligations imposed thereby and on whom.

The sources and institutions of human rights law

General international law is the source of some human rights, but they are most clearly set out in a remarkable system of international treaties, all developed since the mid-1960s. The two International Covenants on Human Rights (1966) cover between them all the major civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights. They are open to all states. Certain of those have been made the subject of single topic treaties, which specify the right concerned in more detail and provide for further procedural guarantees. These, too, are open to all states. These UN treaties have monitoring bodies, which receive reports, examine the state parties, and, in certain cases, sit as quasi-judicial tribunals in respect of individual claims. The Committee under the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in particular has developed a significant jurisprudence. At the regional level, too, there are, treaties that cover the generality of human rights and treaties that address single topics. These are open to the states of the region, or the regional institutions. The American Convention on Human Rights, which has its own Commission and Court, is an important instrument for the Americas. The Commission does much important work, much of it in loco. In the last fifteen years the Court has begun to develop its jurisprudence. All members of the Council of Europe adhere to the European Convention on Human Rights. Those newly seeking admission to the Council of Europe must also be prepared to ratify the European Convention and accept the right of their citizens to bring cases against them. The European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights have since 1950 developed the most detailed and important jurisprudence on the rights. They also deal with some inter-state cases. The jurisprudence of the European Court of Rights is relied on in the courts of those states that have made the European Convention part of their own domestic law, whether by incorporation or otherwise. Even in those few countries that have not – for example, the United Kingdom – the decisions of the European court are binding and an adverse finding may require alterations to legislation or to administrative practices. In 1994 a Protocol was signed which envisages important alterations to the institutions of the European Convention, most notably replacing the Commission and Court with a new permanent Court.

Limitations on rights

The balance between the rights of individuals and the legitimate concerns of the state, which has to take into account the general good, is met through the device of permitted limitations. Very few human rights are absolute. The prohibition against torture is such a right. Most rights may be qualified, in a particular case, if certain conditions are met. A law prescribing the limitation must pre-exist its use and be accessible and known. A restriction upon the right must be shown to be necessary. There are usually further conditions to be met, for example, that a restriction be for reasons of public order, public health or state security. In times of national emergency states are permitted to derogate from human rights - that is to say, to suspend their obligations to guarantee these rights for the duration of the emergency. Again, certain rights may not be derogated from, whatever the circumstances. For example, no emergency justifies torture, nor can it remove a person's freedom of thought, conscience or of religion. See also citizenship, human nature.

humanism

1. A word with a variety of meanings. Usually, a viewpoint which

all things.’ During the period of Renaissance Europe, those who

studied the classics (i.e. Ancient Greek and Roman texts) were deemed humanists. They espoused an optimism about human possibilities and achievements. During the 20^th century, being a humanist commonly implies an attitude antithetical to religious beliefs and institutions.

In the post-war period debates have been waged between academics over the term humanism in a variety of contexts (e.g. politics, ethics, philosophy of language). In this context, a humanist has come to signify (amongst other things) someone who advocates a view of human nature with stresses the autonomy of human agency with regard to such matters as moral or political choice, or one who adheres to the view that human subjectivity is the source of meaning in language-use. A humanist, on this view, is someone who presupposed that there are essential properties (e.g. autonomy, freedom, intentionality, the ability to use language for the purpose of producing meaningful propositions, rationality) which define what it is to be human. Such a conception of subjectivity has been criticized by way of an invocation of theories of meaning derived from stucturalism and post-structuralism. Following on from such thinkers as Nietzsche, writers within these schools have argued that the production of meaning, and therefore subjectivity, is a matter of relations of discourses of power (Foucault) or processes of semantic slippage within language (Derrida) rather than a matter of an extra-linguistic subject who exists ‘outside’ the domain of language and subsequently ‘uses’ language to express their intentions. Such views have been taken up by advocates of postmodernism, who have claimed, for example, that the politics that purportedly accompanies humanism is susceptible to being undermined by these forms of analysis. Such a view depends upon whether or not one is inclined to accept the claim that the advocacy of a particular ontology of the subject commits one to a particular kind of politics. Certainly, many facets of liberalism are not so easily swept away by advocating anti-humanism. For example, the anti-humanism implicit in Jean-François Lyotard’s conventionalist account of language in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute does not circumvent certain key principles of liberal thought as elaborated by J.S. Mill in On Liberty, but might rather be said to be compatible with them.

Other thinkers who adopt an anti-humanist attitude include Heidegger (whose conception of dasein should not be confused with ‘humanist’ accounts of subjectivity; indeed, Heidegger explicitly rejected the humanism of Jean-Paul Satre’s existentialism in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947)); and Louis Althusser, whose ‘structural Marxism’ opposed Marx’s contention that humans were the authors of their own destiny with the view that social relations are instrumental in the construction of identity, belief systems and forms of consciousness.

I

identity

1. The issue of identity is central to cultural studies, in so far as cultural studies examines the contexts within which and through which both individuals and groups construct, negotiate and defend their identity or self-understanding. Cultural studies draw heavily on those approaches to the problem of identity that question what may be called orthodox accounts of identity. Orthodoxy assumes that the self is something autonomous (being stable and independent of all external influences). Cultural studies draws on those approaches that hold that identity is a response to something external and different from it (an other).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In orthodox European philosophy, at least from Descartes' writings in the 17^th century, it has been assumed that the self (ego or subject) exists as an autonomous source of meaning and agency. Descartes himself found that the only thing that he could not doubt was that he existed, and that this existence took the form of a 'thinking substance.’ This notion of the autonomous subject, sure of its own identity and continuing throughout the individual human being's life, was dominant not just in philosophy, but also in political thought (not least as a grounding assumption of liberalism) and psychology. The idea was questioned however, not least by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, in the 18th century. Hume observed that the contents of his consciousness included images (or sense-impressions) of everything of which he was thinking (either directly perceiving, or recalling in memory). There was, though, no image of the self that was supposedly doing this perceiving and remembering. Hume therefore proffered what was commonly known as the 'bundle theory' of the self, such that the self is nothing more than a bundle of sense impressions, that continually changed as the individual had new experiences or recalled old ones.

In the late 19^th century, Emile Durkheim posed a fundamental challenge to liberal individualism. The liberal presupposed the primacy of the individual, and thus that society was composed out of individuals (brought together, for example, in a social contract). In contrast, Durkheim argued that the individual was a product of society (not that society was a product of individuals). His point was that a modern understanding of individuality (and thus, self-understanding of humans in modern society) was a product of that particular culture. In pre-industrial societies, with little or nor economic specialization (or division of labor), all members of that society would be similar in attitudes, values and norms. Such societies were held together purely because of this homogeneity. In contrast, in industrial society, with its high degree of specialization, individualism occurs because people live distinctive lives with distinctive experiences. Their values and attitudes can then diverge. Durkheim therefore argues that individual identity is not primary, but it a product of economic organization.

George Herbert Mead’s analysis of self poses an alternative set of problems for the idea of the autonomous ego. For Mead, the self is constructed through its relations with others. Mead distinguishes the ‘I’ from the ‘me,’ arguing that: ‘The "I" is the response of the organism to the attitudes of others which one himself assumes.’ The ego thus collapses into little more than an animal response. The self, and thus self-consciousness, rests rather upon the internalization of the viewpoint of others. The ‘I’ becomes self-conscious only in so far as it can imagine how it is seen by others, and responds accordingly. The development of the self therefore depends upon the others it encounters. This line of thought it fundamental to the symbolic interactionist approach in sociology. In the work of Erving Goffman (1959) it is taken further. Goffman suggests that the self is a product of particular interactions, in so far as the individual’s capacities, attitudes and ways of behaving (and possibly, of conceiving of him- of herself) changes as the people around him or her change. Alone, a person is either not self-conscious, and as such does not have, at that moment a self, or is self-conscious, in so far as he or she is aware of how he or she would appear to some more or less specific other. The self therefore has no stability, being almost as fluid as the self proposed by Hume.

Psychoanalysis opens up a further series of questions against the orthodox view of identity. For Freud, identity rests on the child’s assimilation of external persons. The self is structured through the relationship of the ego, id and super-ego. While the id is the instinctive substrate of the self, and the super-ego crucially, is the constraining moral consciousness that is internalized in the process of psychological development, the ego may be understood either as the combination of the id and super-ego, or as an agency separate from these two. The latter interpretation is, in the current context, possibly the more interesting, for it suggests that the ego is never self-identical. Erik Erikson's psychodynamic theory develops upon this. Identity for Erikson is a process between the identity of the individual and the identity of the communal culture. It was Erikson who coined the phrase 'identity crisis' in the 1940s. At first, the term referred to a person who had lost a sense of 'personal sameness and historical continuity.’ As such, the individual is separated from the culture that can give coherence to his or her sense of self Later, it came to characterize youth, as a stage in the psychological development of any individual.

In Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud, the problematic identity of the self or subject, is explored further. For Lacan, self-consciousness emerges only at the mirror stage (at approximately six to eighteen months). Here the infant recognizes its reflection as a reflection of itself. It therefore comes to know itself, not directly, but through the mirror image. The self emerges as the promise of control in the face of the fragmentation that occurs as the child is separated from the mother. However, as for Freud, the male child's identity depends upon that of the mother (allowing, in English at least, a pun on (in) other). The child enters language through the imposition of the law by the father, with the 'no' that prohibits incest with the mother. The child desires the mother in order to regain a primal unity. This is a desire to disobey the father's prohibition, and yet it must be repressed. Thus, Lacan can argue, the unconscious is structured like language. In effect, this is to argue that the self (or more properly the subject) is positioned by language, which is to say that it is positioned as always repressing its own lack of unity. Althusser's structuralist version of Marxism offers a parallel account of the subject, albeit now as a product of ideology. Social institutions such as the church, education, police, family and mass media 'interpellate' or hail the subject, again positioning him or her within society.

The work of Foucault may also be interpreted through the centrality of the question of identity. Thus, in his early work on madness (1971), he analyses how madness is conceived differently in different ages (comparing, for example, the Renaissance view of madness as its own form of reason, with the rationalist 17th -century's exclusion of the insane from society). Madness is thus socially constructed and specific, and historically variable social practices exist to constrain it. Yet, crucially for the 17th and 18th centuries, madness is also the other, in comparison to which the sane and rational define themselves. The identity of the dominant group in society therefore depends upon its construction of its own other. In Foucault's later writings, he turns to the problem of the construction of the 'self' (especially in relation to sexuality) through its positioning within discourses (1981). From this, the self may be theorized in terms of the conceptual and other intellectual resources that it calls upon in order to write or talk about itself, and in the way in which it is written about, or written to. The way in which a text is composed will anticipate, and thus situate, a certain self as reader.

Structuralist and post-structuralist questioning of the nature of self-identity, as found in the work of Lacan, Althusser and Foucault, may also be linked to an identity politics. The recognition that identity is not merely constructed, but depends upon some other, opens up the theoretical space for marginal or oppressed groups to challenge and re-negotiate the identities that have been forced upon them in the process of domination. Ethnic identities, gay and lesbian identities and female identities are thus brought into a process of political change. (See also self.)

1. It can be plausibly be suggested that a theory of ideology is fundamental to any critical social or cultural science. However, the exact meaning of the term is often elusive or confused. Its most common use may be simply to refer to a more or less coherent set of beliefs (such as political ideology, meaning the beliefs, values and basic principles of a political party or faction). ‘Ideology’ is used in this sense in some branches of political science. In Marxism and the sociology of knowledge, however, it has taken on much more subtle meanings, in order to analyze the way in which knowledge and beliefs are determined by the societies in which they emerge and are held.

The term was coined at the end of the 18^th century, by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy, to refer to a science (logos) of ideas. Such a science would be based in analysis of human perception, conceived itself as a sub-discipline of biology, and the idéologues sought to reform educational practice on the basis of it. (This origin is more important than it may initially seem, for it presents the argument that ideas depend on some, non-ideational, substrate. For de Tracy, this is biology; for social science it will be the material, economic and political practices and structures of society). Napoleon’s ridiculing of the idéologues led to ‘ideology’ becoming a pejorative term.

It is with Marx that ideology becomes an important critical concept. Marx’s approach to ideology may be introduced through the famous observation that, for any society, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. This is to suggest that our understanding and knowledge of the world (and especially, if not exclusively, of the social world) is determined by political interests. There are certain beliefs, and certain ways of seeing the world, that will be in the interests of the dominant class (but not in the interests of the subordinate classes). For example, it was in the interests of the dominant class in feudalism to believe in the divine right of kings. The authority of the king and the aristocracy is given by God, and is thus beyond question. It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie (the owners and controllers of industry) in capitalism to see the social world as highly individualistic and competitive. What for Marx is the genuinely social and collective nature of human life (not least in class membership) is thereby concealed, and the possibilities of effective proletarian resistance to capitalism are minimized. The dominant class is able to propagate its ideas throughout society due to its control of various forms of communication and education (such as the mass media, church and schools).

While ideology, in the Marxist sense, is a distorted way of viewing the world, it is not strictly false (and so ideology is not simply a synonym for false consciousness). Marx’s observation that religion is the opium of the masses expresses this more complex idea. On one level, religion does distort the subordinate classes’ understanding of the social world, not least in its promise of a reward in heaven, for the injustices suffered in this world. Yet, the metaphorical reference to opium is important, not just because opium dulls our experience of pain, but also because opium induces dreams. Heaven is therefore an idea to be taken seriously (although not literally), for it does contain an image of justice – but one that should not be realized in this world, not the hereafter. In this sense, ideology is an illusory solution to a real problem. The task of the critic of ideology is therefore to recognize this – to recognize the way in which ideology inverts our understanding of real problems – and thereby identify and tackle the real problem.

The Marxist theory of ideology presupposes that ideology is a distortion. It may therefore be set against true knowledge. In the sociology of knowledge, not least in its development by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1960), ideology loses its links to class and to domination, and so challenges this notion of truth. Mannheim retains the link that Marx establishes between ideas and the material base of society, but in order to argue that people from different sections of societywill understand the world in different ways. The difference between the bourgeois understanding of the world and the proletariat is not then the difference between the views of a dominant and reactionary class and a subordinated, progressive class, but simply the difference between two, equally valid, worldviews. For Mannheim, there is then no single truth against which all ideologies can be judged. Each ideology will have its own standards of truth and accuracy, dependent upon the social circumstances within which it is produced.

The Marxist account of ideology can be seen to have under gone two important revisions in the 20th century. First, the development of the theory of hegemony, by the Italian theorist Gramsci, tackled the problem that the theory of ideology appeared to suggest that ideas could be passively imposed upon the subordinate classes. The theory of hegemony suggests, rather, that ideologies are actually negotiated in the face of contradictory evidence and life experiences. The second revision stems from the work of the French structuralist, Althusser. Althusser overturned the emphasis in the theory of ideology on ideas. Ideology need not be about what people think, but rather about how they act - 'lived relations'. Ideological practices, which are taken-for-granted, constitute the human subject and his or her identity within capitalism, thus allowing him or her to function.

2. Ideology first appeared in English in 1796, as a direct translation of the new French word idéologie which had been proposed in that year by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy. Taylor (1796): 'Tracy read a paper and proposed to call the philosophy of mind, ideology.’ Taylor, (1797): '. . . ideology, or the science of ideas, in order to distinguish it from the ancient metaphysics.’ In this scientific sense, ideology was used in epistemology and linguistic theory until 1ate 19^th century.

A different sense, initiating the main modern meaning, was popularized by Napoleon Bonaparte. In an attack on the proponents of democracy - 'who misled the people by elevating them to a sovereignty which they were incapable of exercising' - he attacked the principles of the Enlightenment as 'ideology.’

It is to the doctrine of the ideologues - to this diffuse metaphysics, which in a contrived manner seeks to find the primary causes and on this foundation would erect the legislation of peoples, instead of adapting the laws to a knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history - to which one must attribute all the misfortunes which have befallen our beautiful France.

This use reverberated throughout the 19^th century. It is still very common in conservative criticism of any social policy which is in part or in whole derived from social theory in a conscious way. It is especially used of democratic or socialist policies, and indeed, following Napoleon's use, ideologist was often in the 19^th century generally equivalent to revolutionary. But ideology and ideologist and ideological also acquired, by process of broadening from Napoleon's attack, a sense of abstract, impractical or fanatical theory. It is interesting in view of the later history of the word to read Scott (Napoleon, vi, 251): 'ideology, by which nickname the French ruler used to distinguish every species of theory, which, resting in no respect upon the basis of self-interest, could, he thought, prevail with none save hot-brained boys and crazed enthusiasts' (1827). Carlyle, aware of this use, tried to counter it: 'does the British reader ... call this unpleasant doctrine of ours ideology?' (Chartism, vi, 148; 1839).

There is then some direct continuity between the pejorative sense of ideology, as it had been used in early 19^th century by conservative thinkers, and the pejorative sense popularized by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (1845-7) and subsequently. Scott had distinguished ideology as theory 'resting in no respect upon the basis of self-interest,’ though Napoleon's alternative had actually been the (suitably vague) 'knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history'. Marx and Engels, in their critique of the thought of their radical German contemporaries, concentrated on its abstraction from the real processes of history. Ideas, as they said specifically of the ruling ideas of an epoch, 'are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.’ Failure to realize this produced ideology: an upside-down version of reality.

2. Imperialism developed as a word during the second half of the 19^th century. Imperialist is much older, from the early 17^th century, but until the late 19^th century it meant the adherent of an emperor or of an imperial form of government. Imperial itself, in the same older sense, was in English from the 14^th century; from the word imperialis, Latin, root word imperium, Latin - command or supreme power.

Imperialism, and imperialist in its modern sense, developed primarily in English, especially after 1870. Its meaning was always in some dispute, as different justifications and glosses were given to a system of organized colonial trade and organized colonial rule. The argument within England was sharply altered by the evident emergence of rival imperialisms. There were arguments for and against the military control of colonies to keep them within a single economic, usually protectionist system. There was also a sustained political campaign to equate imperialism with modern civilization and a 'civilizing mission'.

Imperialism acquired a new specific connotation in the early 20^th century, in the work of a number of writers - Kautsky, Bauer, Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin - who in varying ways related the phenomenon of modern imperialism to a particular stage of development of capitalist economy. There is an immense continuing literature on this subject. Its main effect on the use: of the word has been an evident uncertainty, and at times ambiguity, between emphases on a political system and on an economic system. If imperialism, as normally defined in late 19^th century England, is primarily a political system in which colonies are governed from an imperial center, for economic but also for other reasons held to be important, then the subsequent grant of independence or self-government to these colonies can be described, as indeed it widely has been, as 'the end of imperialism'. On the other hand, if imperialism is understood primarily as an economic system of external investment and the penetration and control of markets and sources of raw materials, political changes in the status of colonies or former colonies will not greatly affect description of the continuing economic system as imperialist. In current political argument the ambiguity is often confusing. This is especially the case with 'American imperialism,’ where the primarily political reference is less relevant, especially if it carries the 19^th century sense of direct government from an imperial center, but where the primarily economic reference, with implications of consequent indirect or manipulated political and military control, is still exact, Neo-imperialism and especially neo-colonialism have been widely used, from the mid-20^th century, to describe this latter type of imperialism. At the same time, a variation of the older sense has been revived in counter-descriptions of 'Soviet imperialism', and, in the Chinese version, 'social imperialism', to describe either the political or the economic nature of the relations of the USSR with its 'satellites' (cf. 'the Soviet Empire'). Thus the same powerful word, now used almost universally in a negative sense, is employed to indicate radically different and consciously opposed political and economic systems. But as in the case of democracy, which is used in a positive sense to describe, from particular positions, radically different and consciously opposed political systems, imperialism, like any word which refers to fundamental social and political conflicts, cannot be reduced, semantically, to a single proper meaning. Its important historical and contemporary variations of meaning point to real processes which have to be studied in their own terms. See hegemony.

individual/ism

1. A person or a self. Taken in the sense of something which cannot be subject to any further division, an individual is often contrasted with a group. The view that individual selves are (i) irreducible, (ii) endowed with the ability to use their rationality according to their own dispositions and desires, and (iii) ought to be free civic agents, is associated with individualism. This conceived of the individual as a free agent in the market place and advocates a view of political and social liberty on these terms. It is often linked to the influence of the writings of Adam Smith (for example, in the UK in the 1980s to the impact of his ideas on Margaret Thatcher, who advocated a free-market individualism).

 
2.  Individual originally meant indivisible. That now sounds like paradox. 'Individual' stresses a distinction from others; 'indivisible' a necessary connection. The development of the modern meaning from the original meaning is a record in language of an extraordinary social and political history.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The immediate fore word individualis, Latin, is derived from individuus, Latin, 6^th century, a negative (in-) adjective from the root word dividere, Latin - divide. Individuus was used to translate atomos, Greek - not cuttable, not divisible. Boethius, 6^th century, defined the meanings of individuus:

The emergence of notions of individuality, in the modern sense, can be related to the break-up of the medieval social, economic and religious order. In the general movement against feudalism there was a new stress on a man's personal existence over and above his place or function in a rigid hierarchical society. There was a related stress, in Protestantism, on a man's direct and individual relation to God, as opposed to this relation mediated by the Church. But it was not until the late 17^th century and the 18^th century that a new mode of analysis, in logic and mathematics, postulated the individual as the substantial entity (cf. Leibniz's 'monads'), from which other categories and especially collective categories were derived. The political thought of the Enlightenment mainly followed this model. Argument began from individuals, who had an initial and primary existence, and laws and forms of society were derived from them: by submission, as in Hobbes; by contract or consent, or by the new version of natural law, in liberal thought. In classical economics, trade was described in a model which postulated separate individuals who decided, at some starting point, to enter into economic or commercial relations. In utilitarian ethics, separate individuals calculated the consequences of this or that action Which they might undertake. Liberal thought based on 'the individual' as starting point was criticized from conservative positions - 'the individual is foolish ... the species is wise'(Burke) - but also, in the 19^th century, from socialist positions, as most thoroughly in Marx, who attacked the opposition of the abstract categories 'individual' and 'society' and argued that the individual is a social creation, born into relationships and determined by them.

The modern sense of individual is then a result of the development of a certain phase of scientific thought and of a phase of political and economic thought. But already from early 19^th century a distinction began to be made within this. It can be summed up in the development of two derived words: individuality and individualism. The latter corresponds to the main movement of liberal political and economic thought. But there is a distinction indicated by Simmel: 'the individualism of uniqueness - Einzigheit - as against that of singleness - Einzelheit'. 'Singleness' - abstract individualism – is based, Simmel argued, on the quantitative thought, centered in mathematics and physics, of 18^th century. 'Uniqueness', by contrast, is a qualitative category, and is a concept of the Romantic movement. It is also a concept of evolutionary biology, in which the species is stressed and the individual related to it, but with the recognition of uniqueness within a kind. Many arguments about 'the individual 'now confuse the distinct senses to which individualism and individuality point. Individuality has the longer history, and comes out of the complex of meanings in which individual developed, stressing both a unique person and his (indivisible) membership of a group. Individualism is a 19^th century coinage: 'a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth' (tr. Tocqueville, 1,835): a theory not only of abstract individuals but of the primacy of individual states and interests. See society.

2. There are two main senses of industry: (i) the human quality of sustained application or effort; (ii) an institution or set of institutions for production or trade. The two senses are neatly divided by their modern adjectives industrious and industrial.

Industry has been in English since the 15^th century, from the word industrie, French, root word industria, Latin - diligence. Elyot wrote in 1531: 'industrie hath nat benso longe tyme used in the englisshe tonge as Providence; wherfore it is the more straunge, and requireth the more plaine exposition,’ and he went on to define it as quick perception, fresh invention and speedy counsel. Yet there were uses, contemporary with this, in contrast to sloth and dullness; as a synonym for diligence; and, in a specialized use, as a working method or device. Industrious, meaning either skilful or assiduous, was the common derived adjective from the mid-16^th century, but there was also a 16^th century appearance of industrial in a distinction between cultivated (industriall) and natural fruits. Industrial is then rare or absent until the late 18^th century, when it began the development which made it common by the mid-19^th century, perhaps in a new borrowing from French.

It was from the 18^th century that the sense of industry as an institution or set of institutions began to come through. There was mention of a 'College of Industry for all useful Trades and Husbandry' in 1696,and of subsequent 'schools of industry' associated with Sunday Schools. But the most widespread 18^th century use was in 'House of Industry,’ the workhouse, where the ideas of forced application and useful work came together. Then, in Adam Smith, there was a modern generalizing use: funds destined for the maintenance of industry' (Wealth of Nations, II, iii; 1776). By the 1840s, at latest, this use was common: Disraeli - 'our national industries' (1844);Carlyle - 'Leaders of Industry' (1843). Industry as a human quality rather than an institution, while continuing to be used, was on the whole subordinate after this period, and survives mainly in different kinds of patronizing reference.

The sense of industry as an institution was radically affected, from the period of its main early uses, by two further derivations: industrialism, introduced by Carlyle in the 1830s to indicate a new order of society based on organized mechanical production, and the phrase industrial revolution, which is now so central a term. Industrial revolution is especially difficult to trace. It is usually recorded as first used by Arnold Toynbee, in lectures given in 1881. But there were much earlier uses in French and German. Bezanson (1922) traced several French associations of révolution and industrielle between 1806 and the 1830s, but analysis of these depends on understanding the ways in which both revolution and industrial were shifting, in both English and French. Most of the early uses referred to technical changes in production – a common later meaning of industrial revolution itself - and this was still the primary sense as late as 'Grande Révolution Industrielle'(1827). The key transition, in the developed sense of revolution as instituting a new order of society, was in the 1830s, notably in Lamartine: 'le 1789 du commerce et de l’industrie,’ which he described as the real revolution. Wade (History of the Middle and Working Classes, 1833) wrote in similar terms of 'this extraordinary revolution.’ This sense of a major social change, amounting to a new order of life, was contemporary with Carlyle's related sense of industrialism, and was a definition dependent on a distinguishable body of thinking, in English as well as in French, from the 1790s.The idea of a new social order based on major industrial change was clear in Southey and Owen, between 1811 and 1818, and was implicit as early as Blake in the early 1790s and Wordsworth at the turn of the century. In the 1840s, in both English and French ('a complete industrial revolution', Mill, Principles of Political Economy, III, xvii; 1848 - revised to 'a sort of industrial revolution'; l’ere des révolutions industrielles,’ Guilbert, 1847) the phrase became more common. But the decisive uses were probably by Blanqui (Histoire de l’économie politique, 11, 38; 1837): 'la fin du dix-huitième siècle ... Watt et Arkwright ... la révolution industrielle se mit en possession de l'Angleterre'; and by Engels (Condition of the Working Class in England; written in German, 1845): 'these inventions ... gave the impulse to an industrial revolution, a revolution which at the same time changed the whole of civil society.’ Though the phrase was not in common use in English until the late 19^th century, the idea was common from the mid-19^th century and was clearly forming in the early 19^th century. It is interesting that it has survived in two distinct (though overlapping) senses: of the series of technical inventions (from which we can speak of Second or Third Industrial Revolutions); and of a wider but also more historically specific social change - the institution of industrialism or industrial capitalism. (It must be noted also that the relations between industrialism and capitalism are problematic, and that this is sometimes masked by the terms. In one use, industrialism is euphemistic for capitalism, but problems of 'socialist' industrialization have elements in common with the industrial capitalist history.)

From the early 19^th century, association with organized mechanical production, and the series of mechanical inventions, gave industry a primary reference to productive institutions of that type, and distinctions like heavy industry and light-industry were developed in relation to them. Industrialists - employers in this kind of institution – were regularly contrasted not only with workpeople - their employees, but with other kinds of employer - merchants, landowners, etc. This contrast between industry as factory production and other kinds of organized work was normal to the mid-20^th century and is still current. Yet since 1945, perhaps under American influence, industry has again been generalized, along the line from effort, to organized effort, to an institution. It is common now to hear of the holiday industry, the leisure industry, the entertainment industry and, in a reversal of what was once a distinction, the agricultural industry. This reflects the increasing capitalization, organization and mechanization of what were formerly thought of as non-industrial kinds of service and work. But the development is not complete: industrial workers, for example, still primarily indicates factory workers, as distinct from other kinds of worker, and the same is true of industrial areas, industrial town and industrial estate. Industrial relations, however, has become specialized to relations between employers and workers in most kinds of work; cf. industrial dispute and the interesting industrial action (strikes, etc.), where the sense depends on a contrast, within the Labor Movement, with political action.

industrial revolutions

3. The term industrial revolution is of fundamental importance in the study of economic history and economic development. The phrase is, however, full of pitfalls for the unwary, partly because it has been used with several different meanings, and has, of course, generated a good deal of controversy.

An early use of 'industrial revolution' referred to what are best seen as periods of industrial growth with quite limited implications for overall economic development. Well-known examples include Carsus-Wilson on the 13^th and Nef on the 16^th centuries. This usage is now seen as unhelpful and is generally disparaged.

Still very much extant is thinking of 'industrial revolution’ in the sense of technological revolution, as does Freeman. This approach is often used by researchers concentrating on science and technology to describe developments which they feel had widespread economic and social ramifications. This school of thought envisages successive technological or (if you will) industrial revolutions. These would typically include the famous inventions of the period 1750-1850 based on steam power, the so-called second industrial revolution of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries involving new chemicals) electricity and automobiles, and the information technology revolution of the years after 1970.

Among economists and economic historians 'industrial revolution' most frequently relates to a fundamental part of the experience of economic development, namely the spread of industrialization in the economy as a whole. Since Kuznets, this has been associated with the onset of modern economic growth. Econometric research has confirmed the existence of systematic patterns of change in the structure of economies as real incomes rise, although it is widely recognized that countries have not followed identical routes to modernity. Industrialization is typically accompanied by acceleration in economic growth, increases in investment in both physical and human capital, and improvements in technology and urbanization.

Perhaps the most common use of all refers to the classic and pioneering example of industrialization which occurred in Britain during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, famously described by Rostow as featuring a spectacular take-off into self-sustained growth. It now seems more probable that this episode was characterized by particularly rapid changes in economic structure but quite slow growth. fir this sense the British industrial revolution not only subsumed technological innovation in industry but also embraced much wider organizational changes in agriculture, finance, commerce, trade, etc. Indeed the term 'Industrial revolution' is a metaphor which should not be taken literally in this context.

A large literature has sought the ultimate causes of the first industrial revolution and has produced a great variety of hypotheses, many of which are unpersuasive, although hard completely to refute. What is generally accepted is that British industrialization resulted from prowess in technology and investment but ultimately depended on the institutions of a market economy which had their origins in the distant past. While the structural changes and their implications for living standards can fairly be described as revolutionary, this does not detract from the point that the industrial revolution was the culmination of evolutionary changes which had been proceeding for centuries. See also economic development.

information society

The information society is a broad concept which has been used since the 1970s to refer to the wide range of social and economic changes linked to the growing impact of information technology. It highlights the role that information technology plays in the way that individuals live, work, travel and entertain themselves. The use of the term information society has now become so widespread that the concept cannot be understood as a reference to any specific thesis. Journalists, futurists and social scientists often use this term to denote a more information-centric society in the same vein as others use such concepts as the information economy, the wired nation, the communications revolution, the microelectronics revolution and the knowledge society.

Others see the information society in terms of a prescription rather than a forecast. In Japan and Europe, as well as North America, the information society is often promoted as a vision for the 21^st century as a means to help policy makers anticipate and nurture the information sector in local, national and regional economies. In the 1990s US and other national initiatives to build modern information infrastructures – the so-called ‘information super-highway’ – were based on such visions.

For social scientists interested in the role of information and communication technology in social and economic development, the information society is a central idea. It builds on seminal work by the American sociologist Daniel Bell, who focused on forecasting the ‘post-industrial society.’ Bell posited information as the defining technology of the post-Second World War era, while raw materials were the core technology of the agricultural society, and energy was the core technology of the industrial society.

Broadly speaking, information technology refers to knowledge about how to create, manage and use information o accomplish human purposes, and so includes not only advances in computing and telecommunications, but also advances in the techniques and skills for using these systems for such purposes as modeling and computer simulation.

Bell identified major trends in what he called the post-industrial society, focusing on the USA as the exemplary case. The principal trends tied to the development of an information society include the growth of employment in information-related work; business and industry tied to the production, transmission and analysis of information; and the increasing centrality of technologists - managers and professionals skilled in the use of information for planning and analysis - to decision making.

The most significant trend is the shift in the majority of the labor force from agriculture (the primary sector) and manufacturing (the secondary sector) to services (the tertiary sector). Growth in information work, primarily white-collar occupations, has contributed to growth in service sectors. Information work includes a broad array of jobs, ranging from programmers and software engineers to teachers and researchers. New information industries, such as the providers of on-line data and communication services, account for some of this growth, but information work has also become more central to every sector of the economy, including agriculture and manufacturing. In this respect, the occupational shifts associated with the information society do not necessarily imply a decline in the relevance of primary or secondary sectors to national or global economies, as some critics have argued, but rather a diminishing need for labor within these sectors as computing, telecommunications and management science techniques are used to redesign the way in which work is accomplished.

A second trend identified in post-industrial information societies is the increasing importance of knowledge - including theoretical knowledge and methodological techniques, and its codification – to the management of social and economic institutions. Knowledge and technique, such as systems theory, operations research, modeling and simulation, are viewed as critical to forecasting, planning and managing complex organizations and systems, which Bell posited as central problems of the post-industrial era. According to Bell, the complexity and scale of emerging social and economic systems requires systematic forecasting and foresight rather than a previously trusted reliance on common sense or reasoning based on surveys and experiments.

A third set of trends involves power shifts, particularly the growing prominence of the professional and managerial class – the knowledge workers. These are the individuals who understand and know how to work with knowledge, information systems, simulation and related analytical techniques. They will become increasingly vital to decision-making processes in situations of growing complexity. Thus, the relative power of experts should rise with the emergence of an information society.

Despite the significance and longevity of the concept, there remains no consensus on the definition of an information society, or indeed whether we are in fact living in an increasingly information-oriented society. Controversy over the trends and historical underpinnings of an information society generated a lively debate within the social sciences. Critics of Bell's theory focus on his identification of information technology central to long-term macrolevel changes in society – particularly in the structure of occupations and social strata - and the resultant deterministic view of social change. Whether or not this is an oversimplification of the information society thesis, it has led to a valuable shift in the focus of social science inquiry. This no longer looks only at the social implications of technological change, but also considers the social, political and economic factors that have shaped the design and use of information and communication technologies.

institution

1. As a technical term in social science, an institution is a regular and continuously repeated social practice. As such, the term has a wider coverage than in everyday usage, including not merely, prisons, asylums, schools, hospitals and government offices, but also language, and moral and cultural practices.

intellectuals

3. A strict definition of intellectuals would be that they are persons whose role is to deal with the advancement and propagation of knowledge, and with the articulation of the values of their particular society. In that sense all societies have their intellectuals, since even the most so-called primitive will maintain priests or other interpreters of the divine will and natural order. For most of history, intellectuals have of necessity been supported by the political and religious institutions of their societies, so that rebels against accepted institutions and mores have tended to be critical of what they regarded as the over-intellectual approach of the recognized teachers of their time.

The role of intellectuals was altered in major respects by the advent of printing, and consequently of a public for a wide variety of reading matter including freer discussion of basic problems in science, morals, politics, and even religion. The French philosophes of the 18^th century, later to be saddled by some historians with responsibility for the advent of the great Revolution, gave a precedent for the modern idea that intellectuals stand somehow outside the power structures and are, by definition, critical of existing social arrangements.

In the 19^th century, the concept and its resonance differed in different societies. In France and the other advanced countries of western Europe, intellectuals were distinguished from scientists and scholars who depended upon institutions and academies funded by the state, and from those practitioners of literature whose appeal was strictly aesthetic. To be an intellectual was to claim a degree of independence of outlook; and the word in general parlance implied respect and approval. In central Europe, where the state was more suspicious of radical ideas, intellectuals, while courted by the political parties, were looked upon with suspicion by the authorities especially if they were recruited largely from minority groups. Nationalist (and late fascist) movements appealed to populist anti-intellectual prejudice against the Jewish intellectuals of Vienna at the turn of the century, and in the German Weimar Republic.

Britain differed from its neighbors in that, although there were eminent social critics in the Victorian age, the interaction between the world of the intellect and the political and administrative worlds was very close. Intellectuals could preach reform and hope to have an influence. For this reason, the word intellectuals was held to represent a foreign rather than a British reality and was given a slightly scornful edge, as implying a lack of contact with everyday life. Few British people would have wished or now would wish to be called intellectuals. In the USA the similar role of intellectuals was diminished after their triumph in the success of the anti-slavery movement. Towards the end of the 19^th century, a new movement of radical social criticism did develop among what can be seen as the American equivalent of European intellectuals, and this was renewed after the First World War and Woodrow Wilson’s temporary mobilization of some of them in pursuit of his domestic and international ideals. So great was their alienation in this second phase that they became susceptible to Communist penetration and influence to a greater extent than was common in Europe in the 1930s, although Marxism was to enjoy an efflorescence in liberated Europe after the Second World War, notably in the Latin countries.

In Tsarist Russia the differentiation between intellectuals and the members of learned professions was narrower, and they were grouped together as members of the intelligentsia. Faced with an absolutist regime, to be a member of the intelligentsia was almost by definition to be a critic of the social order and an opponent of the regime, although on occasion from a right-wing angle rather than left-wing angle. In the former Soviet Union, and subsequently in eastern Europe as well, the monopoly of the communist party in defining and expounding the ruling doctrine, and the monopoly of the state and party in access to the media, forced intellectuals seeking to follow their own bent to go underground so that, as under Tsarism, to be intellectual is to be classed as an opponent of regimes whose instruments of repression are greater and used with less scruple than those of earlier times.

In the overseas European empires of the 19th and 20^th centuries, a class of intellectuals influenced by their western-style education came into being alongside the more traditionally educated and motivated intellectuals of the indigenous tradition. The ideas to which they were exposed, combined with the limited roles available to them, produced a similar effect to that noted in relation to tsarist Russia, predisposing them towards political opposition. Another similarity was the extension of the concept to include more than the small minority who were full-time intellectuals in the western sense. What was created was again an intelligentsia. This important aspect of the prelude to independence of the counties of the so-called Third World has had strong repercussions. Ingrained habits of criticism and opposition proved difficult to discard when these intelligentsias took power. Intellectuals, when called upon to rule, rarely perform well and usually have to give way to more disciplined elements such as the military.

A reaction against the adoption of western values and attitudes by intellectuals in Third-World countries has produced a revival of a traditional, largely religious-oriented leadership, notably in parts of the Islamic world, and a specific repudiation of intellectuals thought to be tarnished by western liberal or Marxist contacts.

Intellectuals whose mission is to examine everything are naturally prone to examine their own roles. Their self-consciousness has been heightened by the anti-intellectualism of some populist movements, an anti-intellectualism which has surfaced more than once on the American political scene. There are a number of recurring problems for intellectuals generally. Should they seek solitude to produce and develop their own ideas, or does the notion itself imply a constant commerce between intellectuals such as took place in the salons of 18th -century Paris and Regency London, or later in the cafes of Paris and Vienna, or as it now takes place in the many international congresses and seminars supported by American foundations? Should intellectuals engage directly in current controversies or content themselves with publishing their own ideas, leaving the arena to others? Should they accept public office or even seek the suffrages of the people for themselves? Should philosophers be kings?

international relations

3. In the most general sense international relations have existed ever since people formed themselves into social groups and then developed external relations with groups like themselves. Relationships were most frequently conflictual or warlike, although occasionally they were cooperative; but they took place in a system of anarchy and not within the framework of any political or legal or customary rules. These peculiar relationships were little considered by writers in the western world before Machiavelli, but from the 17^th century onwards international law (Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel) and the problems of war and peace (Rousseau, Kant) began to attract attention. These historical origins, combined with the horror of the First World War, led to the subject's emergence as a policy-making perspective and normative study: war was an intolerable evil, its recurrence most forever be prevented, and the duty of international relations scholars was to show how to achieve this. It was assumed that nobody could want war, so if states were democratic and governments were accountable to their peoples, and if the system’s anarchy were ended (hence the League of Nations), was might be banished.

The diagnosis was too simple. The aspirations and actions of Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese, and the Bolsheviks in Moscow showed the truth of the dictum of Morgenthau that peace and security is the ideology of satisfied powers. Scholars now turned their minds away from the study of ways to achieve a supposedly universal goal to study of how things in the internal arena in fact were. The modern subject of international relations was born. From the outset, though at first not explicitly, the subject was approached by different scholars from two different points of view. The first sought to establish why the significant units (or actors) on the international stage behaved the in the ways they did: most such scholars saw states as the significant actors, and this branch of the subject became foreign policy analysis. The second group focused on the arena within which relations occurred, and was concerned to identify the mechanisms by which patterned relationships with a fair degree of stability and order were able to be maintained in conditions which, formally at least, were anarchical.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a burgeoning of methodological experimentation and quasi-theoretical speculation, and a proliferation of journals. The behavioralist revolution in the USA invaded international relations, as it did other social sciences, and a great debate with the so-called traditionalists raged through the 1960s and early 1970s, and is not yet concluded. But in the 1970s and 1980s disappointment at the relative lack of success in the creation of theories with explanatory power for real-world problems led to some redirection of attention towards substantive questions, to smaller-scale analyses and to theorizing over limited ranges of phenomena.

Foreign policy analysis is the branch of the subject in which most practical advances have occurred. Many conceptual frameworks have been developed, the most comprehensive probably being that of Brecher et. al., but the central components of such frameworks are now widely agreed. States are conceived as having objectives of various kinds – political/security, economic, ideological. Objectives are not consistently compatible one with another, and a short-term objective may be inconsistent with a long-term goal. Objectives are ranked differently by different groups, organizations, and political leaderships within states, and rankings change over time. Explanation of policy decisions thus requires understanding of political interplay and bureaucratic process. But the determination of policy is conditioned also by states’ capabilities - economic, demographic, political, military – and by decision makers’ perceptions of the comparative efficacy of their own capabilities as against those of the other state(s) with which they are dealing, all in the context of support relationships (alliances, economic aid) and of respective commitments elsewhere in the system. Most, if not all, relationships have elements of conflict and common interest, and are essentially of a bargaining character; but the conflictual element usually predominates, and the concept or power is thus central to the analysis. A check-list of such considerations affecting foreign-policy decisions enables rudimentary comparisons of foreign policies to be made, but also makes possible greater awareness among policy makers of the likely consequences of their decisions.

The purposes of studies at the second or system level are to determine the factors that make the stability of the system more or less probable, and the effect on international outcomes of the system‘s structure. Essential structural components are the number of significant units (or actors) in the system, the nature, quality and quantity of interactions among the units, the distribution of capabilities among them, and the degree to which realignment of relationships is easy or is constrained (a system that is ideologically highly polarized, for example, is relatively inflexible). Analysis at the system level is commonly more highly abstract than analysis of state behavior: this makes possible theory construction of a more rigorous kind, but by the same token makes application of theory to the real world more difficult.

At both levels statistical and mathematical techniques are used, as well as more traditional methods relying on historical and verbally described data. The distinction between levels is, of course, analytical only. To take just one example of interdependence: at the unit behavior level, the extent to which states are economically, militarily or ideologically interdependent will very greatly affect the policy choices that are open; at the system level, the extent to which the realignment of units is impeded by their interdependence will fundamentally affect both outcomes and the stability of the system. Mention of interdependence calls attention to the fact that while states are widely accepted as still the most significant actors in the international arena, there are now many other actors, including intergovernmental organizations (the International Monetary Fund) and non-governmental organizations (guerilla groups or multinational corporations). The roles of these, in interplay with the behavior of states, and as components of international systems, all form part – and some would say an increasingly important part- of the study of international relations.

international trade

International trade is not intrinsically different from transactions in which commodities do not cross national boundaries. Nevertheless, the study of inter- national trade has traditionally constituted a separate branch of microeconomics, It may be distinguished from other branches by its focus on situations where some but not all goods and factors are mobile between countries; and from international macroeconomics by its focus on real rather than nominal variables (trade flows and relative prices rather than exchange rates and money supplies), and by a tendency to examine medium-run issues rising equilibrium analysis rather than short-run positions of disequilibrium. One of the first and most durable contributions to the analysis of international trade is the principle of comparative advantage due to Ricardo. This is the antecedent of both the normative and positive strands of international trade theory, At a normative level, it postulates that an absolutely inefficient country will nevertheless gain from trade; at a positive level, it predicts the direction of trade: each country will tend to export those goods which it produces relatively cheaply in the absence of trade. As an explanation of trade patterns, the principle has met with some success. However, in its classical form it is open to two objections: it assumes unrealistically that unit production costs are independent of scale or factor proportions; and it fails to explain why they differ between countries in the first place.

A theory which overcomes these deficiencies was developed by the Swedish economists Heckscher and Ohlin, who stressed international differences in factor endowments as the basis for comparative advantage and trade. Thus a country which is relatively capital-abundant will tend to export goods which are produced by relatively capital-intensive techniques. Largely through the influence of Samuelson a Highly simplified version of this theory, assuming only two goods and two factors in each country, has come to dominate the textbooks. In this form, it is a useful teaching device for introducing some of the basic concepts of general equilibrium theory but, not surprisingly, it is overwhelmingly rejected by the data. The most notable example of this is the so-called Leontief Paradox, an early application by Leontief of his technique of input-output analysis, which found that the presumably capital-abundant USA exported labor-intensive commodities, thus contradicting the theory. Nevertheless, for most economists probably the preferred explanation of trade patterns between countries at different levels of economic development is an eclectic theory of comparative advantage along Heckscher-Ohlin lines, allowing for many factors of production, some of them (such as natural resources) specific to individual sectors.

Even this theory fails to account for certain features of contemporary international trade, especially between advanced economies with similar technology and factor endowments. Such trade is frequently intra-industry, involving differentiated products within a single industry. Various theories explain such trade in terms of imperfectly competitive firms producing under conditions of increasing returns. Attention has also focused on the increased international mobility of factors (in part through the medium of multinational corporations) which in different circumstances may act as a substitute for or a complement to trade.

As well as attempting to explain the pattern of trade, positive trade theory also makes predictions about many aspects of open economies. Most notorious of these is the implication of the Hecksher-Ohlin model known as the factor price equalization theorem, which predicts that free trade will equalize the prices of internationally immobile factors. The theory also makes predictions concerning such issues as the effects of tariffs and international transfers on foreign and domestic prices, the effects of trade policy on domestic income distribution, and the consequences of structural change. Turning to normative trade theory, its traditional focus has been the merits of free trade relative to autarky, stemming from increased specialization in production and increased efficiency and diversity of choice in consumption. Similar arguments favor partially restricted trade relative to autarky, although the benefits of selective trade liberalization such as the formation of a customs union) are not as clear-cut. The persistence of protectionist sentiment, despite these theoretical arguments, may be explained by the fact that gains from trade accruing to the economy as a whole are not inconsistent with losses to individual groups, especially owners of factors specific to import-competing sectors.

Two exceptions to the case for free trade are normally admitted. The optimal tariff argument states that a country with sufficient market power can gain by behaving like a monopolist and restricting the supply of its exports. The infant-industryargument defends transitional protection to enable a new industry to benefit from learning and scale economies. (As with many arguments for trade restriction, the latter on closer examination is less an argument against free trade than against laissez faire). Work on strategic trade policy has added to these arguments the possibility that a government’s ability to pre-commit tariffs or subsidies may allow it to give an advantage to home firms competing in oligopolistic markets.

Other special models have been developed to deal with important features of contemporary international trade. Thus, the growth of trade in intermediate goods (as opposed to goods for final consumption) has inspired the theory of effective protection, which builds on the insight that an industry benefits from tariffs on its outputs but is harmed by tariffs on its inputs. The post-war decline in importance of tariffs (at least between developed countries), due largely to international agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the formation of free-trade areas and customs unions such as the European Union (formerly the EC), has focused attention on the widespread use of non-tariff barriers (such as quotas, health and safety regulations and government procurement policies) as methods of restricting trade.

irony

1. The term 'irony' is derived from the Greek eironeia, meaning 'simulated ignorance.’ Its precise definition is, however, elusive. At its simplest, it is a figure of speech in which what a person says is the opposite to what he or she means (so referring to the tall as short, the cowardly as courageous, and so on). This inversion captures little of the subtlety of irony. A liar or confidence trickster may say the opposite of what he or she means, but the liar is not using irony, for those who understand an utterance as ironic will recognize the inversion of meaning. The point of the inversion is therefore important - why say the opposite of what you mean, unless you are trying to deceive your audience? Two reasons can be offered. First, irony is a form of mockery or critical comment. Ironically to dub the cowardly courageous is to mock their lack of courage. Irony usefully saves the speaker from committing him or herself to a positive position, and to a degree may keep the speaker detached from the issues upon which he or she comments. (A classic example of literary irony is Swifts Modest Proposal (1729), in which he advocated eating Irish babies as a solution to the population problem. He thereby ridicules existing solutions to the 'Irish problem', without offering a serious solution of his own.) Second, recognition of irony as irony may serve to distinguish the sophisticated members of an in-group, from the more simple creatures without.

Two special meanings of irony may be noted. 'Socratic irony' refers to the manner of argument employed by Socrates, at least as he is represented in the early dialogues of Plato. Socrates pretends both ignorance and a sympathy with the position of a supposed expert on some topic. This affectation allows Socrates to question his victims, harrying them until their arguments and contradictions collapse into contradiction and incoherence. ‘Romantic irony’ is especially associated with early 19^th-century German philosopher-poets, including Hölderlin and Friedrich Schlegel. Such irony, drawing on Socratic irony, is explicitly associated with ambiguity, uncertainty and fragmentation of meaning. For Schlegel, in irony ‘everything should be playful and serious, guielessly open and deeply hidden.’ Or again: ‘Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything which is simultaneously good and great.’ Irony therefore disrupts the taken-for-granted meaningfulness of utterance and writing, exposing its artificiality. It is this emphasis on the problematic and ultimately indeterminate nature of the interpretation of any utterance or text that carries irony into contemporary literary theory. Thus, for Barthes, irony is the ‘essence of writing,’ in that it exposed the inability of the writer to control the interpretation of the text.

L

labor

1. In economics labor is one of the four factors of production, alongside capital, land (or natural resources) and enterprise, which is to say, it is one of the four general types of input or resource required for economic production. In orthodox economics, labor includes the number of people actually employed in, or who are available for, production, or a little more abstractly, the capacity to produce (understood in terms of intellectual and manual skills, and the exertion). In Marxist economics, labor is the source of all economic value, (hence the labor theory of value). In addition, the proletariat (the subordinate class within capitalism) are characterized by having to exchange their capacity to labor (or labor-power) for the commodities that they require in order to live.

labor theory of value

1. The labor theory of value is an attempt to explain the value of goods and services in terms of the costs of their production, as opposed to their usefulness (or use-value). Elements of the labor theory can be traced back, at least to the 17^th century political philosopher John Locke, who analyzed the appropriation of private property in terms of a person's ability to 'mix' their

labor with natural resources. The British economist David Ricardo (1772-1823) gave the first coherent account of the theory, in part in response to the

paradox of value.’ It was argued that the usefulness of a good could not determine its value, as very useful entities, such as air and water, are generally free or very inexpensive. In contrast, apparently useless luxury goods (gold and diamonds, say) can be very expensive. The labor theory explains this in terms of the amount of labor (or labor-time) that went into their production, either directly, or indirectly through having being stored up by having been expended in the production of machinery and other capital goods. Water is easily found and conveyed to consumers, in contrast to the great amount of time needed to find and extract diamonds. In practice, the actual amount of labor expended in production is of less relevance than a social average labor-time (for otherwise the theory would imply that the products of the lazy would be worth more than those of the efficient). While the theory is fundamental to Marxist economics, in orthodox economics, since the late 19^th century, it has been replaced by more sophisticated explanations of value grounded in usefulness (beginning with Marshall's account of marginal utility).

legitimation

1. A term in sociologist’s Max Weber’s sociology of politics which means the acknowledgement on the part of a society’s subjects of the right of their rulers to rule them. In the post-war period legitimation has become a central issue in social, political and cultural discussion. For Jean-François Lyotard, for example, the question of legitimation is one that is continually suspended within a theoretical double-bind. Questions of legitimation, on this view, are really genre-questions concerning appropriate means to particular ends, and cannot be divorced from considerations of their social and cultural dimension. Lyotard argues that there are no universal criteria for legitimation and that, in consequence, the political level is a realm of cultural antagonism between contending purposes rather than goal-oriented. He does, however, reserve a critical space for the study of language: the open-ended philosophical analysis of rules. Politics, on a Lyotardean model, would be about competing claims being fought out within the space of cultural life, not in terms of some overall, most desirable state of affairs towards which society should be aiming. Jürgen Habermas, in contrast, has tried to argue against this view (which endorses a politics of conflict or ‘dissensus’) with a consensual reading of the social language of ‘communicative action.’ (See also rationality).

liberalism

1. A key term within political philosophy, the word 'liberalism' is associated with a large number of thinkers (including Locke, Adam Smith, Malthus, Condorcet, J.S. Mill, Kawls and more recently Richard Porty). The origins of liberalism can be traced back at least as far as the writings of John Locke (1632-1704). Indeed, Locke’s work exhibits many of the key features that have subsequently been used to define liberalism. For instance, in the Two Treatises of Government (1690) Locke is concerned to show that the analysis of political power involves consideration of certain key attributes all human beings possess (in Locke’s case this means analyzing human beings in their ‘natural state,’ or the ‘state of nature’ – a notion derived from the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)). By taking this approach Locke in effect asserts that there are a number of principles of political right that operate outside the realm of civil society, and indeed function to ground it. These principles are (i) freedom of action, and (ii) equality of right. Thus, in the state of nature no individual has the right to transgress another individual’s basic freedom. Locke justifies this claim by way of reference to a conception of natural law derived from the claims of reason, ‘the common rule and measure God hath given to mankind.’ From a rational point of view, it is claimed, every individual has the right both to self-protection and to claim compensation for suffering a wrong at the hands of another. From this it is clear that a particular conception of the human individual (conceived in a manner which divorces human subjectivity from the constraints of modes of social organization) forms the basis for Locke’s political discourse.

Each individual is, in Locke’s view, self-interested. From this it follows that some form of regulative body is required for the impartial administration of these rights. This forms part of the basis of Locke’s justification for the existence of government, which constitutes a means of arbitrating between the disputes which necessarily will arise between individuals situated in a state of nature. Government, in turn, rests on the constitution of a civil society, which is voluntarily arrived at through a contract. Thus, in Locke’s view the legitimacy of governmental power should be derived from the consent of those who fall under it. In principle, one is only subject to the power of government if one has agreed to enter into civil society, and thereby become a civil agent.

For Locke, civil society is ultimately derived from one basic principle of natural law which operates within the state of nature: the right to the possession of one's own body and the products thereof Locke's argument can be summarized thus: (i) all humans situated in the right to selfpreservation; (ii) the earth is the common possession of all human beings equally; (iii) its natural products thus belong in principle to everybody; (iv) however, since these products are available for use it follows that there must be some means whereby they may be appropriated and thereby subsequently owned; (v) there is one piece of property all humans possess, namely their own bodies; (vi) if you own your body, then the products of your labor are state of nature have the also yours; (vii) hence, if you appropriate anything from the state of nature this must, by definition, be the result of your labor and consequently become yours. Once the latter point has been reached, Locke says, it follows that other persons do not have the right to take possession of what is now yours, viz. the products of your labor, for goods appropriated in this manner from the state of nature become through this process a matter of 'private right'. This right is God-given, since God would not have put the world of nature at humanity's disposal if they were not to be taken advantage of. There is, it follows, a 'law of reason', I an original law of nature', which grounds the ownership of private property and thereby grounds civil society. In turn, on a Lockean account, the proper function of government is to protect the rights of individuals and of their property (both in the form of the individual's own body and the products of their labor). A limitation to appropriation in the state of nature is set by use: one may only own what can be used without waste (e.g. if one appropriates more apples than one can eat they will go off and be wasted; and the same point goes for land). However, with the invention of money (which is a nonperishable good) this limitation is overcome. For instance, one may indeed own a large quantity of land, the products of which can be exchanged for cash and hence do not go to waste. In turn, it is possible thereby to justify unequal property ownership: 'since gold and silver, being little one basic useful to the life of man, in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men it is plain that the consent of men have agreed to the disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.’ Liberty, it follows, does not guarantee equality. Indeed, the progression from the state of nature to civil society is, for

Locke, one which brings with it a necessary inequality with regard to the possession of goods.

Locke's thought exhibits a number of features common to many liberal thinkers. First, a central concern is with the basis of the individual's right to the ownership of goods, including above all their own body. Second, this right is paramount and it is the function of good government to protect it. Third, liberty, in turn, is understood as the freedom to be left alone to pursue one's own goals with the minimum of interference from others. Fourth, the function of the state is articulated and established within this basic assumption concerning liberty: a state should be based on consent (from which it derives its legitimacy and authority), and has as its proper function the protection of the rights of civil agents. Fifth, the state therefore has a limited role in the lives of individuals: it is not there to prescribe particular modes of behavior which individuals ought to adhere to, but rather ought only to oversee the behavior of individuals to the extent of ensuring that one person's actions do not infringe the rights of another. It follows that for thinkers within the liberal tradition the individual takes precedence over all other political concerns (i.e. individual liberty has priority over other values, such as equality).

These features are also evident in J.S. Mill's classic text On Liberty (1859). Mill's avowed aim in this text is to explore 'the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual' in the context of the social 'struggle between liberty and authority.’ There is, for Mill, an inherent political tension which exists between the spheres of liberty and authority, between individual freedom of thought and 'collective opinion' (manifested at its worst in the 'tyranny of the majority'). The individual is for Mill an independent entity with an accompanying right to this independence: 'his independence is, of right, absolute.’ An individual exhibits abilities (such as those of reflection and choice) as well as passions, desires and purposes. Taken together, these features allow for the identification of the individual as that which possesses interests. Given a situation in which a diversity of individuals are present in a society, it follows that such a society will also contain a diversity of interests. It is just such a form of society, one which both contains and is an expression of the diversity of human possibility, manifested in the form of the individual, that Mill favors as being the most progressive. Hence, Mill's account of individuality and political authority simultaneously implies an affirmation of a particular conception of cultural life. A more 'progressive culture' is taken to be synonymous with a liberal political culture, i.e. one in which individuality is fostered as the key basic value: 'It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual ... but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights of others, that human beings become a beautiful and noble object