Thinking Politically
Motivated Force and the Imaginative Enterprise of Power Politics: Biding Realism and Utopia through E.H. Carr and Hannah Arendt
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Arturo Chang Quiroz
Edward Hallet Carr’s contributions to the foundational realist approach to politics cannot be understated. Carr, in claiming realistic politics, sought not only the ideal, but also the necessary and the possible in political life. Carr’s important contributions to shaping the field of international relations and social science, however, have been blurred at times by a dichotomous understanding of realism and utopia. The work of Hannah Arendt on the topic of power politics and violence is similarly fundamental to political science, though often distant from theories of international relations and political realism. Hannah Arendt’s conception of politics assumes the human role of tending to the world in a realist sense, prescribing a fundamental, creative role for power in political activity. This project links E.H. Carr and Hannah Arendt to better delineate the role of realism and utopia in the study of politics and social change. It produces two important findings. First, I demonstrate that Carr’s critique in The Twenty Years’ Crisis is aimed at an unfounded moralization of politics and violence—not utopianism as usually understood. Second, the project produces a methodological analysis of the uses of utopia and realism for appraising the deployment of power, violence, and conflict in politics. This paper discusses the possibilities of a reality and utopia within the parameters of today’s unpredictable political world.
The Constitution of Capital: Achille Mbembe and the Critique of Capitalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Owen Brown
There is a contemporary tendency to view economics, and by extension political economy, as following essentially eternal law-like regularities, thereby discounting and overlooking its contingency and historical instantiation. One factor commonly ignored in the contemporary literature in political economy is race, its connection to colonialism, and imbrications with the capitalist economy. However, numerous works that are not ostensibly works of political economy have devoted at least part of their analyses to connections between race and capitalism, and to how this racialised economy has become an ineluctable aspect of the modern condition. One scholar whose varied work has connected race, politics, and economics is political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose recent volume, Critique of Black Reason, offers a subtle yet incisive critique contemporary and historical capitalism through a novel conceptualisation of race and Blackness. Moreover, Mbembe’s book can be read as an invitation to scholars of political economy to further examine the interconnectedness of colonialism, race, and capitalism, taking his somewhat cursory exploration and extending it across disciplines to uncover the ways in which race structures economic order. As such, in this paper, I offer a reading of Mbembe’s analysis of capitalism and its racialised nature, connecting it to other theorists and thinkers of race and the colonial, as well as to the literature on the political economy of difference, in order to draw out the possible ways in which an analytic of race might, and indeed should be, taken up and recognised by scholars of political economy.
Utilizing a Multi-disciplinary Framework for Analyzing and Developing Family-centered Public Policies: A Family-In-Environment Perspective
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Vafeas, Barbe Fogarty, Janice Gasker
The family-in-environment (FIE) perspective represents a paradigmatic shift in how social welfare programs and practices are conceptualized and delivered. FIE, and its goal of family-focused services, has had an “uneven but persistent and growing influence on social welfare policy and practice world-wide (Gasker & Vafeas, 2010). A family-centered approach seeks to empower families by redefining their role as experts and equal participants in structuring services and policies that directly affect them. The family policy continuum (Lawson, Briar-Lawson, Hennon, & Jones, 2001) provides a useful framework for analyzing how current policy debates reflect this family-centered ideal. This paper describes the process of applying the family policy continuum to state-level legislative policy debates in order to identify public discourses that support or undermine family-centered initiatives. Such an analysis is critical for advocates who wish to promote the development of sustainable, family-centered policies that support and strengthen family well-being.
Reality, Truth, and the Effect of Science on the Behavior of Human Society
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Roger Ellman
The point of view that the questions, "What is truth?" and "What is real?" are meaningless is not only incorrect but negative and harmful in its suppression of inquiry and progress that could otherwise take place. That state of affairs has existed for so many human lifetimes that it has essentially implanted in our collective and individual thinking the incorrect belief that there is no absolute truth. We have gone from inability to determine the truth to non-belief in its existence and then to belief that truth, and reality, are whatever we choose to believe them to be and can force on our fellows.The great damage that such thinking does is the license that it gives to create, choose, decide upon one's own "reality" and then act accordingly. Such thinking ultimately gives us war, rapine, holocausts, genocide. Science on the large scale, dealing with the fundamentals of reality and the universe, has always had a major effect on the non-scientific - social - general philosophic thinking of society and its leaders. And, upon Einstein’s insistence that there is no absolute frame of reference, the probabilistic universe of quantum mechanics, and the distortion of Heisenberg uncertainty from measurement uncertainty to actual indeterminacy we can lay some of the responsibility for the horrors and tragedies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
