Karl Marx states in Capital that “man, if not as Aristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal” (Marx, 1992, 444). That Marx draws from Aristotle’s work has been long-recognized, but one could argue that Marx’s very conception of man—what he calls “species-being”—is a derivative of Aristotle’s theory of the good life. This article explores the Aristotelian underpinnings of Marx’s political philosophy and argues that Marx’s theory of species-being and human emancipation supervenes upon Aristotle’s theory (...) of eudaimonia. The consequence of such a rethinking suggests that the Aristotelian good life itself is possible only in the communist society of Marx’s imaginings and, as such, is a state that must be realized—whether by nature or revolution—for human flourishing. Inspired by Aristotle’s assertion that “friendship exists to the extent that what is just exists” (Aristotle, 1991a, 527), this article draws from several of Aristotle’s and Marx’s texts to situate man as an inherently social being, whose need of other men serves both to edify and realize a common end toward which the state is oriented: the life of virtuous activity performed by and in an association of equals. (shrink)

This paper compares Marx's first conception of capital, in 1844, to his conception of the modern political state in 1843. It argues that in 1843 Marx conceives the modern democratic state as realising human 'species-being', that is, the universality and freedom inherent in human nature, but only in the form of 'abstract' universality and freedom, and therefore inadequately. In 1844 he conceives capital in the same way, as an abstract and therefore inadequate realisation of human species-being. Accordingly the (...) transition from capital to communism consists essentially in transforming the abstract universality and freedom realised in capital into a 'concrete' universality and freedom. The paper concludes by commenting on the implications of this early philosophical conception of capital for Marx's later writings. (shrink)

_Nomad Citizenship_ argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike. Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the (...) ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. Holland’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism—to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control. In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, Holland aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, he offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself. (shrink)

In this article, I will describe the evolution of capital punishment and the influence that ideology had during the founding years of Romania’s communist regime, until 1958, when the legislation and application of capital punishment reached its highest peak. Starting with the punishment of war criminals and fascists, I will then describe how the death penalty was used for political motives in a period when the regime had to consolidate, legitimate and fight different enemies. With ups and downs (...) like The Death Penalty Law of 1949 and the abolitionist attempt in 1956, it reached its climax in 1958-1959 after the enactment of Decree no. 318/1958. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of whether it is possible to be communist without Marx. This entails encountering the ontological dimension of communism, that is, the material tenor of this ontology, its residual effectiveness, the desire of human beings to go beyond capital, and the reality of the episode of statism.

The Centre for Communist Studies, an academic research centre staffed by an artistic and comradely collection of early-career researchers, lecturers, educators and workers, started several years ag...

Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.

This chapter contains sections titled: Humanity, Mutual Recognition, and the State in Hegel Species‐Being and Communism in Marx Hegel on the Roman World Marx on the Modern State and Capital Marx on His Relation to Hegel Conclusion Bibliography.

This article has four main objectives. First, it introduces the ideal types of domination of Weber. Contrary to the received wisdom, which knows only “three ideal types” (traditional, charismatic and legal rational) I present the “fourth” type of domination, Weber called “Wille der Beherrschten” as an important correction of his ideal type of legal-rational authority. Next I make a novel, critical distinction between patrimonial and prebendal types of traditional authority. Third, I discuss various ways that communist regimes tried to legitimate (...) themselves and how they entered eventually a legitimation crisis, leading to the collapse of communism. In the next section, I explore the different ways post-communist capitalisms seek legitimacy (with various combinations of legal rational authority and patrimonialism), and finally I conclude with a trend of re-convergence of some post-communist systems (especially Russia and Hungary, but with signs for similar trends elsewhere) into an illiberal, prebendal quasi-democratic system. (shrink)

In the wake of Communism's collapse in Eastern Europe, one of today's foremost interpreters of Marx's texts and ideas offers postmodern readings of canonical texts to discover what Marx has to say to our postmodern condition. Terrell Carver takes advantage of the ideological release of Marxism from its association with Soviet Communism to explore how Marx's writings can be reread in the spirit in which they were written: as a critique of capitalist society. Employing textual and narrative analysis (...) developed within postmodernism, Carver carefully examines Marx's language—and the language around Marx—to arrive at a reassessment that is free from the restraints of past dogma. He addresses ways in which Marx is changing: which texts are read, how hermeneutics and deconstruction have altered our reading of them, and trends toward viewing Marx not simply as a revolutionary or an economist but as a political thinker whose insights are relevant to current debates over free markets and mixed economies. Carver first leads readers through a new, detailed examination of _Capital_. He then explores Marx's relationship with the socialism of his contemporaries, critiques translations of Marx, examines works written with Engels, considers Marx's relationship to Hegel, and applies Marx's thought to issues of gender. These re-readings convey the importance of continuing to engage Marx's thought and show that there is more to Marx than we might ever hope to discover. It is a lucid and provocative work that liberates Marx's ideas for what they can contribute to a fresh evaluation of our present political milieu. (shrink)

The article contributes to the theorisation of collective memory involved in building the international representations of a nation, and examines how strategic responses to the legacy of the totalitarian past have been deployed to shape the image of the nations’ remembering agency via the connections with other actors within the global memory field. Drawing on the Bourdieusian concept of symbolic capital, the article develops a concept of the symbolic capital of mnemonics in order to uncover the role of (...) memory in enhancing international standing and prestige, a crucial preoccupation for semi-peripheral states emerging on the global arena. While recent scholarship on traumatic memory as a category of social analysis underlines the role of memory in bolstering the collective identity of nations, the article demonstrates how memories of the communist past provide a platform for connections between nation-states through shared meta-narratives. Through an empirical case study that uses an ethnographic approach, participant observation and analysis of media accounts, the article examines how the official commemorative practices of Kazakhstan have served to realign the country’s mnemonic agenda with that of the global memory of communism and to redeploy the symbolic capital gained through a shared mnemonics to reassert its legitimacy both abroad and at home. (shrink)

Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom. -/- This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist (...) Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today. (shrink)

In addition to the traditional personnel and human resource management (HRM), there is a need for a new approach to personnel management, which we will call Human Capital Management (HCM). HCM emphasises an alignment between the individual and the organization and in our view offers the challenge and the key to successful management in the future.

There is a wealth of resources— ideas, insights, discoveries, inventions, traditions, cultures, languages, arts, religions, sciences, narratives, stories, poems, customs and norms, music and songs, games and personal experiences, and advertisements—that we produce, curate, consume, transmit, and inherit as humans. This wealth, which I define as semantic capital, gives meaning to, and makes sense of, our own existence and the world surrounding us. It defines who we are and enables humans to develop an individual and social life. This paper (...) discusses the shift from analog to digital semantic capital, and the extent to which this might affect the semanticisation of our identities, our lives and our realities. -/- . (shrink)

Avant même d'être condamné pour "contestation de crime contre l'humanité" au tournant du siècle, Roger Garaudy était déjà marginalisé dans les champs intellectuel et politique français. Après avoir incarné la résistance au néostalinisme dans le Parti communiste, le philosophe qui fut longtemps l'interlocuteur privilégié de Jean-Paul Sartre au sein du PCF en fut spectaculairement exclu en 1970 pour s'être opposé aux Soviétiques qui venaient d'écraser le Printemps de Prague. Celui que l'historiographie du communisme retient plus volontiers comme le "stalinien modèle", (...) qu'il fut en effet dans l'après-guerre, était pourtant devenu, malgré sa proximité avec Thorez, un critique de plus en plus affirmé du stalinisme après les révélations du XXe Congrès du Parti communiste de l'Union soviétique (PCUS) en 1956 et un acteur majeur de l'aggiornamento du PCF. Son combat pour rénover le communisme français et son goût précoce pour l'écologie et le dialogue des civilisations en firent quelque temps une figure respectée du progressisme français, mais celui qui répétait que le Socialisme était condamné s'il refusait de s'ouvrir à la "transcendance" vit son étoile pâlir après 1970 au point qu'il devint un intellectuel illégitime, celui que l'on condamne sans l'avoir lu. Ce livre explique ce parcours singulier et les raisons de cette "descente aux enfers" de l'ancien philosophe du Bureau politique, avant sa condamnation ultime."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The most successful games today do not use a pay-for-product model, but involve complex and aggressive modes of monetizing their content (downloadable content, skins, in game currencies and markets, seasonal passes, etc.). While this has already been scrutinized, there are further consequences for games themselves and the economization of play. In my paper, I show how this strategy creates a conceptually novel situation, where playing can be considered to constitute reproductive labor-power and behavioral capital. In other words, playing here (...) represents not only consumption but also the very production of such consumption, insofar as the main reason behind the massive success of these games is precisely their massive pool of players and data concerning their activity. Firstly, I analyse PUBG: Battlegrounds as an example of the most successful model of monetizing games and maintaining a large number of players and interaction. I focus both on the economic incentives as well as on the gameplay that is generated or tailored towards aggressive monetization. Later, I set a theoretical context for my analysis stemming from ludocapitalist discourse (itself combining Marx with poststructuralism) and the concept of surveillance capitalism. I conclude my text with a systematization and definition of my original concept of behavioral capital and an attempt to formulate art critique and usage of games as a form of cultural production exposing several examples from contemporary art. (shrink)

Successful formation of a new venture is not the most critical indicator of the real success of an entrepreneurial venture. Instead, the sustainability of an entrepreneurial venture (i.e., entrepreneurial sustainability) is the most critical but the most difficulty goal. Entrepreneurial sustainability relies largely on positive collective psychology. This article offers systematic and detailed discussion of the effects of psychological capital on the critical elements of entrepreneurship sustainability – not just that on a successful formation of a new venture. The (...) goal is to shed light on potential practical designs and theoretical improvement in the future. (shrink)

Intellectual Capital is a driving force behind the financial performance of non-financial firms. Investing in intellectual and physical capital allows companies to optimize their financial performance by maximizing resource utilization. This study aims to determine whether IC efficiency impacts the financial performance of listed Pakistani and Indian companies between 2010 and 2020. Return on Assets and Return on Equity are used to calculate financial performance, and IC is calculated using the modified Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient model. Regression analysis is (...) performed using the STATA software developed by the South Texas Art Therapy Association. Human Capital, Structural Capital, and Capital Employed have a significant impact on Pakistani and Indian firms’ financial performance. Resource-based theory supports these findings. The findings should provide management with a prompt to improve financial performance and emphasize the importance of IC. A rare study has addressed the impact of IC on firm financial performance using the MVAIC model, rather than the VAIC model, in Pakistan and India. (shrink)

Against the background of the contemporary debate about financialisation, the paper conceptualises the capitalist labour economy as fundamentally a monetary system. It argues that money is not a capitalist means of organising its labour economy but that it is rather a capitalist end. The argument examines and finds wanting conceptions of money in political economy, including Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and argues that the debate about financialisation is fundamentally based on the propositions of political economy. It holds that Marx’s critique of (...) political economy conceives of money as the form of value and expounds money-making as the purpose of the capital labour economy. Thus, the labour theory of value is fundamentally a monetary theory of value, labour is the means of valorisation, and that is, of money in process, and as such capital. Making money out of money is capital as its most rational. In the form of credit, money posits wealth as a claim on future surplus value. (shrink)

Resumen: El siguiente estudio da cuenta de los resultados preliminares de una investigación acerca de las experiencias como lectores de los estudiantes que ingresan a la carrera de Pedagogía en Lengua Castellana y Comunicaciones de una universidad estatal del sur de Chile. El objetivo fue conocer y caracterizar el capital de lectura y las motivaciones que poseen los estudiantes hacia la lectura, entendiendo por capital de lectura, el acervo y repertorio de obras de la literatura reportadas por los/las (...) estudiantes y por motivaciones hacia la lectura, el impulso que dirige activamente la conducta hacia el logro de un objetivo como lector/a (Aragón y Arias, 2013). La investigación se desarrolló desde el paradigma cualitativo. En la recolección de datos se utilizaron encuestas, entrevistas semiestructuradas y grupos focales con dos cohortes de estudiantes. El procesamiento de los datos se realizó mediante análisis de contenido, estableciendo categorías devenidas de los discursos y testimonios de los sujetos de estudio. Los hallazgos dejan traslucir la diversidad del capital cultural heredado y coincidencias entre cohortes en relación con la importancia de la literatura en el desarrollo de la imaginación y la creatividad. Abstract: The following study reports the preliminary results of an investigation into the reading experiences of students entering the Pedagogy program in Spanish Language and Communications at a state university in southern Chile. The objective was to know and characterize the reading capital and the motivations that students have towards reading, understanding by reading capital, the collection, and repertoire of works of literature reported by the students, and by motivations towards reading, the impulse that actively directs behavior towards achieving an objective as a reader (Aragón and Arias, 2013). The research was developed from the qualitative paradigm. Surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups with two cohorts of students were used to collect data. Data processing was carried out through content analysis, establishing categories derived from the speeches and testimonies of the study subjects. The findings reveal the diversity of inherited cultural capital and coincidences between cohorts concerning the importance of literature in the development of imagination and creativity. (shrink)

Should Marxists support universal basic income (UBI), i.e., a regular cash income paid to all without a means test or work requirement? This paper considers one important argument that they should, namely that UBI would be instrumentally effective in helping to bring about communism. It argues that previous answers to this question have paid insufficient attention to a logically prior question: what is Marx’s account of communism? In reply, it distinguishes two different accounts: a left-libertarian version that associates (...) communism with the freedom to live and work how one wants, and a perfectionist version that associates communism with the overcoming of alienated labour and self-realisation in work. It argues that UBI would make steps towards the left-libertarian account but not the perfectionist account. Ultimately, then, the question “should Marxists support basic income?” is shown to partly depend on which account of communism Marxists want to bring about. (shrink)

Learning burnout is a pressing issue among Chinese medical undergraduates and Postgraduates and has drawn continuous attention worldwide. Studies have found that problematic smartphone use could affect learning burnout, but more research is needed in this direction. Furthermore, few studies focused on the mediating effect of psychological capital on the relationship between problematic smartphone use and learning burnout. The present study was a cross-sectional survey that recruited 1,800 participants from a medical university in Chongqing, China. A questionnaire based on (...) the Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale, Psychological Capital Questionnaire, Learning Burnout Scale, and demographic variables were administered to these students, and 1,475 provided valid responses. 771 were undergraduates and 704 were postgraduates. Hierarchical regression and the bootstrap method were used to examine the mediating effect of psychological capital. After controlling for demographic variables, problematic smartphone use positively predicted learning burnout in undergraduates and in postgraduates. The partial mediating effect of psychological capital was 0.068 in undergraduates and 0.074 in postgraduates, accounting for 20.67 and 21.64%, respectively, of the total effect of problematic smartphone use on learning burnout. All the 95% confidence intervals did not contain 0. Problematic smartphone use can directly predict learning burnout and their relationship was mediated by psychological capital in Chinese medical undergraduates and postgraduates. Strategies to alleviating problematic smartphone use and enhance psychological capital in medical undergraduates and postgraduates may provide useful suggestions for future interventions on dealing with learning burnout in Chinese medical undergraduates and postgraduates. (shrink)

In A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser Panagiotis Sotiris attempts a reading of the work of the French philosopher centered upon his deeply political conception of philosophy. Althusser's endeavour is presented as a quest for a new practice of philosophy that would enable a new practice of politics for communism, in opposition to idealism and teleology. The central point is that in his trajectory from the crucial interventions of the 1960s to the texts on aleatory materialism, Althusser remained (...) a communist in philosophy. This is based upon a reading of the tensions and dynamics running through Althusser's work and his dialogue with other thinkers. Particular attention is paid to crucial texts by Althusser that remained unpublished until relatively recently. (shrink)

Japanese society is often said to be one with a high premium on social capital. Two major theses have been put forward with regard to social capital in the last few years. One, advanced by Putnam (1993), is that social capital enables democracy to work. In other words, the historically acquired and accumulated social capital in terms of the propensity of individuals to engage with others in community and associational life facilitates the task of democratically working (...) out the resolution of conflicts of interest and collectively producing good public policy. The other, advanced by Fukuyama (1995), postulates that social capital allows the creation of prosperity. In other words, a high level of social capital enables business firms to take risks and stretch networks fully in the creation of wealth on a large scale for a prolonged period of time. (shrink)

Nowadays, it seems easy to regard some of the values and purposes that have led us to the society we live in today as dysfunctional. However, searching for a villain that justifies all our pain and confusion in recent years is a vain undertaking. It is imperative to protect the good in our society and to discover what we need to improve and accomplish. In this sense, spirituality is our unresolved issue. The purpose of this article is to survey the (...) different deliberations about capital as a measurable value of companies and to explore whether spiritual capital can be a new one, or even more importantly, an important one. (shrink)

ObjectiveWith the improvement in health awareness, humanistic care ability of nurses has become a focus of public attention. The aim of the study was to confirm the relationship between psychological capital and humanistic care ability of nurses, and to provide suggestions on improving the humanistic care ability of nurses.MethodsA cross-section survey was conducted. Three hundred thirty-nine nurses were recruited from a tertiary general hospital in Taizhou, China. Psychological capital and humanistic care ability were measured using a self-reported questionnaire. (...) Correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis were performed to analyze the correlation between psychological capital and humanistic care ability.ResultsThe psychological capital and humanistic care ability scores were 91.57 ± 13.96 and 189.08 ± 20.37, respectively. Differences in psychological capital scores across professional titles, departments, years of work, and marital status were statistically significant. There were statistical differences for the humanistic care ability scores among nurses based on marital status. The total psychological capital scores and the four sub-dimensions scores were positively correlated with the humanistic care ability scores among nurses. Self-efficacy was the main predictor of nurses’ humanistic care ability.ConclusionPsychological capital positively affected the humanistic care ability of nurses. Self-efficacy was the main predictor of humanistic care ability. Nursing managers can formulate strategies from the perspective of positive psychology to improve humanistic care ability of nurses. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore existing conceptualisations of emotional capital in educational research, and to undertake a critical analysis of these conceptualisations, including a reflection on my own explorations of teachers' and students' emotional practices. Drawing from Bourdieu's work, I offer a theoretical discussion of how emotional capital as a conceptual tool suggests a historically situated analysis of the often unrecognised mechanisms and emotion norms serving to maintain certain 'affective economies'. This point is made in reference to a (...) brief discussion of my ongoing ethnographic work over the last ten years. I conclude the article with outlining some new possibilities of theorising the potentiality and usefulness of the concept of emotional capital in the field of educational research. (shrink)

This study uses an interdisciplinary perspective to shed light on Ukraine’s continuous problems with media independence, which to date have not allowed Ukraine to become a country with a truly free media: since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 its media have consistently remained only “partly free.” The approach proposed in the paper combines theoretical tools of post-communist media studies with advancements in political science research in regime change and state-building to explore the continuities and changes in the institutional environment for the (...) media in post-communist new democracies. The approach is applied to analyze two cases of post-communist media change, both problematic to explain within the framework of media studies alone: the case of incomplete media transformation in a hybrid regime and the incident of backsliding in independent media in an advanced new democracy. The paper is structured as follows: I first present the shortcomings in the way institutions, or more specifically the institutional environment for media freedom, were previously approached in post-communist media studies. I then propose a more advanced approach based on theories and concepts originating from comparative-politics studies of regime change and state and institution-building. I apply this approach to analyze the institutional environment for the media in Ukraine. Next, I explore the case of a radical reconstruction of media-related institutions in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party came to power in 2010. (shrink)

Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination dating back to the 1940’s, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. Our purpose here is to defend the Movement’s call for death penalty abolition in terms congruent with its claim that the death penalty in the U.S. is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” We first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries (...) about racial injustice but have usually taken such evidence to warrant reform but not outright abolition. We argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in significant part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition, we contend, rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law. (shrink)

This Article argues that just as the act of forcing sex upon a rapist is itself rape, the execution of a murderer is itself murder. Part I clears the way by defeating three simple, but common, arguments that capital punishment is not murder. Part II shows that despite moral theorists' best attempts to show otherwise, executions seem to instantiate all the morally relevant properties of murder. Part III notes a lacuna in the literature on capital punishment: Even if (...) there is a good moral reason to execute murderers, the distinction between capital punishment and murder requires a plausible account of the state's right to execute citizens. We have no such account. (shrink)

The post-communist revolutions of 1989 triggered parallel transformation in the ideological landscape on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The geo-political opening after the end of the Cold War made global integration a highly salient factor in political mobilization, opting out to replace the capital-versus-labor dynamics of conflict that had shaped the ideological families of Europe during the 20th century. This has resulted in splitting the traditional constituencies of the Left and the Right and reorganizing them along new (...) fault-lines: those shaped by attitudes to globalization and EU enlargement (in the West) and by attitudes to EU accession and global economic competition (in the East). Thus, an ideational convergence between East and West is taking place in Europe, radically altering the structure of political competition in the early 21st century. As the new political cleavage cuts across, rather than runs along, the left—right ideological continuum, it is eroding the societal alliances that had supported the post-war European Social Model. The emerging structure of political competition enables substantive changes in the European Social Model in the direction of deepening labor commodification, thus defeating the emancipatory potential that earlier labor-market policies had contained. (shrink)

_Against Capital Punishment_ offers an innovative proceduralist argument against the death penalty. Worries about procedural injustice animate many popular and scholarly objections to capital punishment. Philosophers and legal theorists are attracted to procedural abolitionism because it sidesteps controversies over whether murderers deserve death, holding out a promise of gaining rational purchase among death penalty retentionists. Following in this path, the book remains agnostic on the substantive immorality of execution; in fact, it takes pains to reconstruct the best arguments (...) for capital punishment and presumes the appropriateness of execution in limited cases. At the same time, the book contends that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty. The heart of _Against Capital Punishment_ is a philosophical defense of the well-known irrevocability argument, which analyzes the argument’s premises, establishes their validity, and vindicates them against objections. The central claim is that execution violates the principle of remedy, which requires legal institutions to remedy their mistakes and to compensate those who suffer from wrongful sanctions. The death penalty is repellent to the principle of remedy by dint of its irrevocability. The incompatibility of remedy and execution is the crux of the irrevocability argument: because the wrongly executed cannot enjoy the obligatory remedial measures, execution is impermissible. _Against Capital Punishment_ also reveals itself to be free from two serious defects plaguing other versions of proceduralism: the retributivist challenge and the problem of controversial consequences. (shrink)

The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their work by proposing a new definition of cultural capital which (...) focuses on cultural and social exclusion. We note a number of theoretical ambiguities and gaps in the original model, as well as specific methodological problems. In the second section, we shift our attention to the American literature on cultural capital. We discuss its assumptions and compare it with the original work. We also propose a research agenda which focuses on social and cultural selection and decouples cultural capital from the French context in which it was originally conceived to take into consideration the distinctive features of American culture. This agenda consists in 1) assessing the relevance of the concept of legitimate culture in the U.S.; 2) documenting the distinctive American repertoire of high status cultural signals; and 3) analyzing how cultural capital is turned into profits in America. (shrink)

While the explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx's Capital remained largely limited to Reading Capital, after 1968, Nick Nesbitt argues, this theoretical intervention remained insistent, adopting the form of a general theory of materialist dialectic. The book thus analyzes the Althusserianist theory of a materialist dialectic across diverse sites including Althusser's unpublished archive, Macherey's exposition of Spinoza's Ethics, and Badiou's Logics of Worlds, while simultaneously bringing this fully-developed theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of (...) class='Hi'>Capital itself, to show that Spinoza's influence on Marx is far greater--and that of Hegel increasingly diminishing--than has been previously thought. (shrink)

How can we explain the positive references of René Capitant, an anti-fascist jurist who observed the destabilization of the Weimar republic from Strasbourg, to Carl Schmitt, a critic of the Weimar constitution who would rally to nazism in 1933? Is it a reversal use? This article documents the fact that while opposing Schmitt on the conception of democracy and the values of equality and respect for the individual on which it is based, Capitant is sensitive to some of the strategic (...) arguments of the author of Legality and Lgitimacy on the limits of legalism in the face of enemies who seem to play the game of legality only to bring it down. (shrink)

En contraste a los efectos positivos del capital social, diversos autores llaman la atención sobre su “lado oscuro”. En este artículo exploramos una de sus manifestaciones. Proponemos que el capital social puede ser utilizado por políticos en relaciones clientelares para coaccionar a los ciudadanos, condicionando la continuidad de estas relaciones si los ciudadanos utilizan mecanismos de control social para sancionarlos. Proponemos entonces que el capital social puede limitar el ejercicio del control social. Luego de realizar distinciones analíticas (...) sobre el capital social, analizamos la relación entre ciudadanos y políticos desde la teoría principal-agente y para explicar la asimetría de poder entre ambos, utilizamos la teoría del intercambio disputadoformulada por la economía política radical. La tesis central es que tal como el capital favorece la dominación de los obreros en los mercados de trabajo capitalistas, el capital social puede favorecer la dominación de los ciudadanos en las relaciones clientelares. (shrink)

In section 1, I develop epistemic communism, my view of the function of epistemically evaluative terms such as ‘rational’. The function is to support the coordination of our belief-forming rules, which in turn supports the reliable acquisition of beliefs through testimony. This view is motivated by the existence of valid inferences that we hesitate to call rational. I defend the view against the worry that it fails to account for a function of evaluations within first-personal deliberation. In the rest (...) of the paper, I then argue, on the basis of epistemic communism, for a view about rationality itself. I set up the argument in section 2 by saying what a theory of rational deduction is supposed to do. I claim that such a theory would provide a necessary, sufficient, and explanatorily unifying condition for being a rational rule for inferring deductive consequences. I argue in section 3 that, given epistemic communism and the conventionality that it entails, there is no such theory. Nothing explains why certain rules for deductive reasoning are rational. (shrink)