Citations related to POLITICS (works cited listed at bottom):
“So long as we think of ourselves as discrete, atomistic, autonomous
beings, we will be saddled with a politics of antagonism and clashing
interests. This is so because when we think of ourselves as discrete
substances, we will tend to think of our interests and tastes as fixed and
exclusive. Instead of looking for ways that our interests intersect, we
will focus on how they differ. Instead of seeing the polis–that is, our
communities–as constitutive of our being, we will see them as separate
sites of struggle.” McAfee, Noelle. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship.
Cornell University Press. 2000. p. 7.
"First, culture is almost identical to people or nation, as in French
culture, German culture, Iranian culture, etc. Second, culture refers to
art, music, literature, educational television, certain kinds of
movies--in short, everything that is uplifting and edifying, as opposed to
commerce. The link is that culture is what makes possible, on a high
level, the rich social life that constitutes a people, their customs,
styles, tastes, festivals, rituals, gods--all that binds individuals into
a group with roots, a community in which they think and will generally,
with the people a moral unity, and the individual united within himself. A
culture is a work of art, of which the fine arts are the sublime
expression. From this point of view, liberal democracies look like
disorderly markets to which individuals bring their produce in the morning
and from which they return in the evening to enjoy privately what they
have purchased with the proceeds of their sales. In culture, on the other
hand, the individuals are formed by the collectivity as are the members of
the chorus of a Greek drama. A Charles de Gaulle or, for that matter, an
Alexander Solzhenitsyn sees the United States as a mere aggregate of
individuals, a dumping ground for the refuse from other places, devoted to
consuming; in short, no culture.
"Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity
to break out of nature's narrow bonds, and hence out of the degrading
interpretation of man in modern natural and political science. Culture
founds the dignity of man. Culture as a form of community is the fabric of
relations in which the self finds its diverse and elaborate expression. It
is the house of the self, but also its product. It is profounder than the
modern state, which deals only with man's bodily needs and tends to
degenerate into mere economy. Such a state is not a forum in which man can
act without deforming himself. This is why in the better circles it always
seems in poor taste to speak of love of country, while devotion to
Western, or even American, culture is perfectly respectable. Culture
restores 'the unity in art and life' of the ancient polis.
"The only element of the polis absent from culture is politics....
"The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of
modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics
tends to disappear into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be
higher than politics (culture)..." Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the
American Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987, pps. 187-8.
"Here is the inner contradiction in liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Sonship and brotherhood are espoused against fatherhood: but without a
father there can be no sons or brothers. Locke's sons, like Freud's,
cannot free themselves from father psychology, and are crucified by the
contradictory commands issuing from the Freudian super-ego, which says
both 'thou shalt be like the father,' and 'thou shalt not be like the
father,' that is, many things are his prerogative. Fraternal organization
in the body politic corresponds to ego-organization in the body physical.
As fraternal organization covertly assumes a father, ego-organization
covertly assumes a super-ego." O. Brown, Norman, Love's Body, Vintage,
1966, pp. 5-6.
“States dominate the world scene like so many drunk and brutal Titans,
simultaneously powerful and impotent. How can we survive their barbarous
reign?” Morin, Edgar. Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium.
1999. Hampton Press. p. 56.
“A ‘psychology of faculties’ has been cast upon political organization.
The problem for a democratic order under law is to determine the
collective will by reason, rather than desire. Politics is conceived as a
struggle between good and evil, represented by reason and desire. This
Manichean image of struggle ensures the continuing centrality of the idea
of reform.” Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of Law. University of Chicago
Press. 1999. p. 17.
“Reason and will are equally foundational but ultimately irreconcilable
principles of the legal order. They are reconciled in practice, but not in
theory....
Some contemporary legal scholarship seeks a position between these two
poles, holding for intellectual coherence in a compromise that does not
appeal simply to a practice of judicial statesmanship. These theorists tend
to attack the traditional abstractness of both reason and will. What is
abstract appears either as empty or, even worse, as a mere cover for very
particular interests. Abstract reason may be only a false appearance, for
example, of patriarchal interests; abstract will, only a false appearance
of class-based, economic interests. Opposed to this dialectic of the
abstract and the particular, these theories seek compromise in ideas of
narrative, discourse, and communities of interpretation. On this view, law
is founded in an historically specific discourse that gives shape
simultaneously to individual identity and community values.” Kahn, Paul.
The Cultural Study of Law. University of Chicago Press. 1999. pps. 22-3.
“The history of scientific inquiry is a narrative of progress in which the
present constantly supersedes the past. The history of law’s rule, on the
other hand, is a collection of interpretive commentaries.” Kahn, Paul. The
Cultural Study of Law. University of Chicago Press. 1999. p 54.
“Law is indifferent to the unique character of the acting subject or the
unique circumstances of the act. For a legal decision maker to be swayed
by either appears unfair and prejudicial. This is true even if that
outcome appears otherwise morally compelling. Under the rule of law, the
morally good do not necessarily win their cases over the morally evil.
Justice under law, we say, is blind. It need not see what actually
happens, because law’s meaning is already exhausted by what can happen.
Only in law is blindness a good thing; in a complete inversion of our
ordinary experience, sight appears to lead to arbitrary and capricious
behavior by the legal decision maker.”
“Political action understands the event in just the opposite way. It
locates the meaning of the event in the fact of its happening, not in its
realization of a possibility already established by a rule. Its concern is
the unique subject and the particular historical circumstances. Action
sees the event as the product of particular choices made by particular
subjects at unique moments. It is a matter of seizing opportunities, not
maintaining the past. Political action emphasizes the subject’s
responsibility for the choice made: what matters is what we do, not what
it is possible for us to do. Action is seen as a test of character: it
tells us–and others–who we actually are. Possibilities are always
indefinite and indeterminate. They cannot determine the actual course of
events. For law, possibility precedes and limits actuality. For action, it
is the actual choice that constructs future possibilities.” Kahn, Paul.
The Cultural Study of Law. University of Chicago Press. 1999. p. 70.
“Legal practice includes a variety of techniques for suppressing the
subjecthood of the judge.” Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of Law.
University of Chicago Press. 1999. p. 79.
“If we could not achieve the suppression of our particular, unique
subjecthood, we would see law’s rule as something done to us, rather than
as something we do as a part of the transtemporal, popular sovereign.”
Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of Law. University of Chicago Press. 1999.
p. 81.
“Punishment marks another point of convergence of this double conception
of the self as sovereign and as subject. The prisoner suffers the complete
suppression of the self as a potential political actor. We judge him
entirely by his crime and deny any meaning to the criminal act beyond the
expression of law’s rule through the act’s negation. His subjecthood is
exhausted in his representation of the rule of law. He is no longer a
person but a legal placeholder. The tremendous rates of incarceration in
this country have to do not just with failures of the welfare state and
programs of rehabilitation; they also express our unique commitment to
law’s rule as our political culture.” Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of
Law. University of Chicago Press. 1999. p. 82.
“Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vico sought to defend and to define existing
political institutions on the basis of a realistic assessment of ‘man as
he is, not as he should be.’ They represent basic prototypes of
anti-utopian thinking grown out of the experience of the modern state.
Their defense of political realism is based on a radical interpretation of
society or the state as a product of human efforts, or labor. Yet, an
ultimate difference separates Vico from both Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes
and Spinoza believed society to be an outcome of rational design, though
Hobbes believed only one design could ensure the durability of the state.
Vico, on the other hand, believed it to be a product of a long evolution
in which the individual or a group could not, or should not, interfere.
The ‘mechanization’ of political theory or its rejection thus helped to
forumlate two basic patterns in the varieties of the conservative
ideologies to come. We can call them, in anticipation, the positivistic
and the evolutionary defense of existing orders. Hobbes and Spinoza
believed that the state needs the mature participation of each of its
members; every order, inasmuch as it is genuine order, is worth
conservation, yet conserving it is an incessant and conscious task for
all. This type of conservatism shares its premises with the utopian or
revolutionary ideologies it detests, namely the recognition of the state
as a product of design; it merely negates the wisdom of radical changes.
Unwillingly, one could say, Hobbes and Spinoza even prepared the rational
idiom of revolutions, while Vico, well aware of the dangers implied in
regarding the state as a design always in need of deliberate adjustments
to new realities, insisted on the anonymous, almost instinctive
amelioration of the human condition. In it he saw the working of
providence, the ‘invisible hand’ of God or nature.” Funkenstein, Amos.
Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Middle Ages to the
Seventeenth Century. Princeton University Press. 1986. p. 288-9.
"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the
other infinite.
"A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for
the purpose of continuing the play...."
"Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with
boundaries...."
"A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future
possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the
past...."
"Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to
continue...."
"When I speak as the genius I am, I speak these words for the first time.
To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in
which case I am not saying them...."
"When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I
also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not."
"I am touched only if I respond from my own center--that is,
spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own
center, out of your own genius....
"The opposite of touching is moving. You move me by pressing me from
without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared. It
is a staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved
yourself....
"A finite game occurs within a world. The fact that it must be limited
temporally, numerically, and spatially means that there is something
against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite
game....
"...a finite game occurs within time....
"The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it." Carse,
James P., Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and
Possibility, Ballantine Books, 1986, pps. 3, 12, 22, 81, 90, 107, 112-3.
“The opposition of law and love is as unresolvable as that of law and
revolution. Neither can exist in the presence of the other: one rests on
division and distinction , the other on a radical equality. Yet, this
opposition, like that of law and revolution, is wholly unstable. Love
draws its power from the denial of just those distinctions of
citizen/alien, guilty/innocent, rule/ruler upon which law depends. The
greater law’s power to affirm itself–to insist upon these distinctions–the
more individuals are likely to feel the power of love as an infinite
longing to transcend law. Accordingly, law cannot simply exile love to the
exterior of the state. No one exercising political power can live in a
state that wholly excludes love. The very denial of love’s relevance to
political order will call it forth. Love, therefore, threatens law, just
as much as law threatens love....
“The relationship of law to love now begins to look like that of law to
political action: a competition within a mutual dependence. Each term can
literally become the other. Thus love without the protection of law has no
power to endure. Without law, love is indistinguishable from madness–the
political community has little patience for those who preach the abolition
of borders and the common community of mankind. Accordingly, love needs
law, as much as law needs love. Love must reenter the city because unless
it can colonize the political it cannot survive. Love’s ambition,
therefore, is to realize a new community in history. Love spawns its own
utopian politics.” Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of Law. University of
Chicago Press. 1999. pp. 121-2.
“A genealogical politics has no necessary political entailments: indeed,
the particular kind of discursive space it affords for political thought,
judgment, and political interventions is precisely a space free of the
notion of necessary entailments. This characteristic is often considered a
failing when viewed from a perspective in which legitimate political
positions must flow directly from the endpoint of ‘objective’ or
‘systematic’ political critiques, but genealogy refuses this ruse and
features instead forthrightly contingent elements of desire, attachment,
judgment, and alliance as the composition material of political
attachments and positions.” Brown, Wendy. Politics Out of History.
Princeton University Press. 2001. P. 119.
“The political spokespersons come to represent the quarrelsome and
calculating multitude of citizens; the scientific spokespersons come to
represent the mute and material multitude of objects. The former translate
their principals, who cannot all speak at once; the latter translate their
constituents, who are mute from birth.” Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been
Modern. Harvard. 1993. P. 29.
"To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his
1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and
factionalism. In this he was echoing conclusions drawn centuries before by
Pedro Pizaro. Had Wayna Qhapaq 'been alive when we Spaniards entered this
land, 'the conquistador remarked, 'it would have been impossible for us to
win it... And likewise, had the land not been divided by the
[smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win
the land.'"
"Pizarro's words, Dobyns realized, applied beyond Tawantinsuyu. He had
studied demographic records in both Peru and southern Arizona. In both, as
in New England, epidemic disease arrived before the first successful
colonists. When the Europeans actually arrived, the battered, fragmented
cultures could not unite to resist the incursion. Instead one party,
believing that it was about to lose the struggle for dominance, allied
with the invaders to improve its position. The alliance was often
successful, in that the party gained the desired advantage. But its
success was usually temporary and the culture as a whole always lost."
"Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this pattern occurred
again and again in the Americas. It was a kind of master narative of
post-contact history. In fact, Europeans routinely lost when they could
not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation. Conquistadors
tried to take Florida half a dozen times between 1510 and 1560--and failed
each time. In 1532 King Joao III of Portugal divided the coast of Brazil
into fourteen provinces and dispatched colonists to each one. By 1550 only
two settlements survived." Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of
the Americas before Columbus. Alfred Knopf. Pp. 90-2.
"Andean societies were based on the widespread exchange of goods and
services, but kin and government, not market forces, directed the flow.
The citizenry grew its own food and made its own clothes, or obtained them
through their lineages, or picked them up in government warehouses. And
the city, as Kolata put it, was a place for 'symbolically concentrating
the political and religious authority of the elite.' Other Andean cities,
Wari among them, shared this quality. but Tiwanaku carried it to an
extreme."
"Tiwanaku has been excavated for a century, and the more archaeologists
delve into it the less there seems to be. To Vranich, the capital's lack
of resemblance to Eurpoean imperial cities extends well beyond the absence
of marketplaces. Far from being the powerful administrative center
envisioned by earlier researchers, he says, Tiwanaku was a combination of
the Vatican and Disneyland, a religious show capital with a relatively
small population--almost a staff--that attracted pilgrims by the thousand.
Like the tourists at the solstice today, visitors came to this empire of
appearances to be dazzled and awed. 'In the central city, buildings and
monuments went up and down, up and down, at an incredible rate,' Vranich
told me at Tiwanaku, where he had been working since 1996. 'Nothing ever
got finished completely, because they were just concerned with the
facades. They had to keep changing the exhibits to keep the crowds
coming.'" Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas
before Columbus. Alfred Knopf. Pp. 233-4.
“Distance
is not measured only in miles across land and sea; it can also involve
less tangible spaces, more abstract conceptions in which distance is
assessed across organizations, hierarchies, event sequences, social
strata, market relationships, migration patterns, and a host of other
nonterritorial spaces. Thus to a large extent distant proximities are
subjective appraisals–what people feel or think is remote, and what they
think or feel is close-at-hand. There is no self-evident line that divides
the distant from the proximate, no established criteria for
differentiating among statistics or situations that are reflective of
either the more remote or the close-at-hand environment. In other words,
nearness and farness connote scale as well as space. Both are ranges
across which people and their thoughts roam; and as they roam, they can be
active in both geographic locales and scalar spaces that have been
socially constructed. Each is a context, a ‘habitat of meaning,’ a
mind-set that may often correspond with spatial distance even as there are
other scalar contexts that can make the close-at-hand feel very remote and
the faraway seem immediately present.” Rosenau, James. Distant
Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization. 2003. Princeton University
Press. Pp. 6-7.
“In
Collective Intelligence, Pierre Levy proposes what he calls an ‘achievable
utopia’: he asks us to imagine what would happen when the sharing of
knowledge and the exercise of grassroots power become normative. In Levy’s
world, people from fundamentally different perspectives see a value in
talking and listening to one another, and such deliberations form the
basis for mutual respect and trust. A similar ideal underlies the work of
the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. Interested
in how to reconnect a notion of deliberation – the active ‘weighing’ of
evidence and argument – back to popular democracy, they have run a series
of tests around the world of new processes whereby participants of diverse
political background are brought together – online and sometimes
face-to-face – over an extended period of time, given detailed briefing
books on public policy issues as well as the chance to question one
another and experts. Over time, they found dramatic shifts in the ways
participants thought about the issues as they learned to listen to
alternative viewpoints and factor diverse experiences and ideas into their
thinking about the issues.” Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture; Where Old
and New Media Collide. 2006. New York University Press. P. 235.
“The reason why Levy was optimistic that the emergence of a
knowledge-based culture would enhance democracy and global understanding
was that it would model new protocols for interacting across our
differences. Of course, those protocols do not emerge spontaneously as an
inevitable consequence of technological change. They will emerge through
experimentation and conscious effort. This is part of what constitutes the
‘apprenticeship’ phase that Levy envisioned. We are still learning what it
is like to operate within a knowledge culture. We are still debating and
resolving the core principles that will define our interactions with each
other.” Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture; Where Old and New Media
Collide. 2006. New York University Press. P238.
“Just as studying fan culture helped us to understand the innovations that
occur on the fringes of the media industry, we may also want to look at
the structures of fan communities as showing us new ways of thinking about
citizenship and collaboration. The political effects of these fan
communities come not simply through the production and circulation of new
ideas (the critical reading of favorite texts) but also through access to
new social structures (collective intelligence) and new models of cultural
production (participatory culture).” Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture;
Where Old and New Media Collide. 2006. New York University Press. P. 246.
“By the appeal to values, we mean first of all that other propositions
have not been taken into account, other entities have not been
consulted–propositions and entities that seemed to have a right to be
heard. Every time the debate over values appears, the number of parties
involved, the range of stakeholders in the discussion, is always
extended.” Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences
into Democracy. 2004. Harvard University Press. Translated by Catherine
Porter. Pp. 105-6.
“In contrast, a gradient is going to be established between the interior
of the collective and its exterior, which will gradually fill up with
excluded entities, beings that the collectivity has decided to do without,
for which it has refused to take responsibility–let us remember that these
entities can be humans, but also animal species, research programs,
concepts, any of the rejected propositions that at one moment or another
are consigned to the dumping ground of a given collective. We no longer
have a society surrounded by a nature, but a collective producing a clear
distinction between what it has internalized and what it has
externalized.” Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the
Sciences into Democracy. 2004. Harvard University Press. Translated by
Catherine Porter. P. 124.
“The collective, as we understand now, is not a thing in the world, a
being with fixed and definitive borders, but a movement of establishing
provisional cohesion that will have to be started all over again every
single day. Its borders, by definition, cannot be the object of any
stabilization, any naturalization, despite the continual efforts of the
great scientific narratives to unify what brings us all together under the
auspices of nature. To this totalization, the politicians bring a
provisional unity through the incessantly resumed circuit of its envelope,
what I have called its progressive composition. The politicians do not
hope to fall, by an unanticipated stroke of luck, on an
already-constituted ‘whole,’ or even to compose once and for all an ‘us’
that would no longer need to be reconsidered. They expect the outline of
the borders of the collective to come from nothing but the very movement
of incessant resumption, rather like the way burning brands trace shapes
in the darkness of night only through the rapid motion to which we subject
them.” Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
Democracy. 2004. Harvard University Press. Translated by Catherine Porter.
Pp. 147-8.
“In order to grow, the collective needs these two functions , dispersed
everywhere; one allows it to catch hold of the multitudes without crushing
them, and the other allows it to get them to speak in a single voice
without scattering.” Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the
Sciences into Democracy. 2004. Harvard University Press. Translated by
Catherine Porter. Pp. 149-150.
“Territory, authority, and rights are complex institutionalizations
constituted through specific processes and arising out of struggles and
competing interests. They are not simply attributes. They are
interdependent, even as they maintain their specificity. Each can, thus,
be identified. Specificity is partly conditioned by level of formalization
and institutionalization. Across time and space, territory, authority, and
rights have been assembled into distinct formations within which they have
had variable levels of performance. Further, the types of instruments
through which each gets constituted vary, as do the sites where each is in
turn embedded–private or public, law or custom, metropolitan or colonial,
national or supranational, and so on.” Sassen, Saskia. Territory,
Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. 2006. Princeton
University Press. Pp. 4-5.
“As political activity becomes the production of representation, the
dynamic of commerce is reproduced in politics. Because political
representations must contend with clutter, they must be packaged in a
certain way, they must grab the most attention possible in the least
amount of time and get across some simple message.” De Zengotita, Thomas.
2005. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in
It. Bloomsbury. P. 134.
“In any case, that was how the pros began to describe the effect of
mediation on politics, that was their take on the fact that politics was
becoming representation.
“In concrete terms, this simply means that making presentations of some
kind, and turning actual events into presentations of some kind, becomes
what institutions are for. You can see it happening to some degree or
another in whatever institution you are involved in, I’m sure, but it is
especially true of political institutions.” De Zengotita, Thomas. 2005.
Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It.
Bloomsbury. Pp. 134-5.
“With the obligation to succeed, politicians shed their brightest light.
‘We have to get on with it, and in a hurry; time is passing; let’s
decide.’ Such is the impulse that suddenly animates the second house when
the politicians add their grain of salt. Researchers, too, know how to
make decisions, to get on with it, as we have seen, but politicians add an
even more indispensable skill: they can make enemies. Without this
ability, the meaning of decisiveness, the ability to ‘cut to the chase,’
would be only the mark of arbitrariness–the arbitrariness that so
frightened scientists in the other Constitution, worried as they were that
they would be obliged to know too soon. Without the ability to divide the
collective into friends and enemies, the requirement of closure could
never be fulfilled: one would want to embrace everything, keep everything,
satisfy everyone, all the humans and all the nonhumans together, and the
collective, left agape, would no longer be able to learn, because it would
no longer have the capacity to take up again, in the next cycle, the
integration of the excluded entities that would have appealed.” Latour,
Bruno. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.
2004. Harvard University Press. P. 146.
“Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that
they might find some way of mobilising their theoretical and empirical
knowledge and their evaluative systems so as both to locate themselves and
their projects in some larger imaginative structure that makes sense to
them, and to guide their actions to bring about what they would find to be
satisfactory outcomes or to improve in some other way the life they live.
Furthermore, many modern agents would like it to be the case that the form
of orientation which their life has is, if not ‘true,’ at least compatible
with the best available knowledge, and they would like the principles by
which they guide their action to be in some kind of contact with reality,
although anyone would be hard put to say precisely what was meant by
that.” Geuss, Raymond. Philosophy and Real Politics. 2008. Princeton
University Press. P. 42.
"In light of the widely perceived tension between the ‘partisan’ and
‘civic’ dimensions of public life, it is tempting to see these as polar
opposites, and demand cynically or idealistically that they be separated.
And yet in practice, they are deeply intertwined. Rather than seeing them
as categorical opposites, or even as two poles on a continuum, we should
look at the different ways in which partisanship and civic life come
together. I have argued in this book that we can usefully distinguish
between four skilled modes or ‘footings’ underlying democratic
communication, which I have called exploratory dialogue, discursive
positioning, reflective problem solving, and tactical maneuver. These are
loosely associated with the ideas of Habermas, Gramsci, Dewey, and
Machiavelli, respectively, although they are not just abstract theoretical
models, but rather involve concrete sets of discursive practices." Mische,
Ann. Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian
Youth Activist Networks. 2008. Princeton University Press. Pp. 339-40.
"Political actors
should avoid seeing one stylistic orientation as intrinsically better than
another. All four modes of communication have characteristic strengths and
weaknesses. Groups that are dominated by one particular mode will tend to
shipwreck on those weaknesses, limiting the force of their social
intervention. They may circle around in the free exchange of ideas until
they peter out from lack of concrete proposals. They may retreat into
ideological sectarianism, limiting their ability to make alliances or
effectively intervene in the political field. They may become enmeshed in
devious and cynical manipulations in the attempt to maintain institutional
control, losing the trust of potential allies and recruits. Or they may go
so far to avoid conflict that they reduce their intervention to
technocratic problem solving." Mische, Ann. Partisan Publics:
Communication and Contention across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks.
2008. Princeton University Press. Pp. 358-9.
"This view [‘law usually
associated with jurists and often taught in law school’] approaches law as
a more or less coherent set of principles and rules that relate to each
other according to a particular logic or dynamic. The objects of study in
jurisprudence is this internal logic and the rules and principles that
circulate within it. According to this approach, law comprises a
self-contained system that, with some notable exceptions, works like a
syllogism, with abstract principles and legal precedents combined with the
concrete facts of the issue at hand leading deductively to legal
outcomes." Calavita, Kitty. Invitation to Law & Society: An
Introduction to the Study of Real Law. 2010. University of Chicago
Press. P. 4.
"Anthropological evidence
suggests that premodern societies used primarily restitutive law
and more complex modern societies emphasize repressive sanctions,
not vice versa." Calavita, Kitty. Invitation to Law & Society: An
Introduction to the Study of Real Law. 2010. University of Chicago
Press. P. 16.
"Many of us follow the lead of
anthropologists like Malinowski who have an inclusive view of law as any
set of norms that regulates conduct and provides for social control;
others insist on the benefits of terminological precision and, like
Schwartz, argue that not all societies have ‘law,’ which, they say, only
occurs when informal controls are weak." Calavita, Kitty. Invitation to
Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law. 2010.
University of Chicago Press. P. 150.
"Law is both ‘hegemonic and
oppositional,’ simultaneously contributing to the taken-for-grantedness of
existing social arrangements and provoking people to contest that power.
Law can be both fatal to reform efforts and reformers’ best weapon."
Calavita, Kitty. Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the
Study of Real Law. 2010. University of Chicago Press. P. 151.
"Sovereignty is a hypothetical
trade, in which two potentially (or really) conflicting sides, respecting
de facto realities of power, exchange such recognitions as their least
costly strategy." Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 44.
"From the point of view of
entrepreneurs operating in the capitalist world-economy, the sovereign
states assert authority in at least seven principal areas of direct
interest to them: (1) States set the rules on whether and under what
conditions commodities, capital, and labor may cross their borders. (2)
They create the rules concerning property rights within their states. (3)
They set rules concerning employment and the compensation of employees.
(4) They decide which costs firms must internalize. (5) They decide what
kinds of economic processes may be monopolized, and to what degree. (6)
They tax. (7) Finally, when firms based within their boundaries may be
affected, they can use their power externally to affect the decisions of
other states." Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 46.
"Strength of states is most
usefully defined as the ability to get legal decisions actually carried
out. One simple measure that one might use is the percentage of taxes
levied that are actually collected and reach the taxing authority."
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction.
2004. Duke University Press. Pp. 52-3.
"There are however two quite
different ways in which states might realize dominance. One is to
transform the world-economy into a world-empire. The second is to obtain
what may be called hegemony in the world-system. It is important to
distinguish the two modalities, and to understand why no state has been
able to transform the modern world-system into a world-empire but several
states have, at different times, achieved hegemony." Wallerstein,
Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke
University Press. P. 57.
"In the modern world-system,
there have been two basic reasons for taxation. One is to provide the
state structures with the means to offer security services, build
infrastructure, and employ a bureaucracy with which to provide public
services as well as collect taxes. These costs are inescapable, although
obviously there can be strong and wide differences in views as to what
should be spent and how.
"There is however a second reason
to tax, which is more recent. This second reason is the consequence of
political democratization, which has led to demands by the citizenry on
the states to provide them with three major benefits, which have come to
be seen as entitlements: education, health, and guarantees of lifetime
income." Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction.
2004. Duke University Press. P. 82.
"Even if we assume that everyone
is in fact in favor of liberty, which is a rash assumption, there is the
enormous and never-ending difficulty of deciding what is the line between
the liberty of the majority and the liberty of the minorities–that is, in
what spheres and issues one or the other takes precedence. In the struggle
over the system (or systems) that will succeed our existing world-system,
the fundamental cleavage will be between those who wish to expand both
liberties–that of the majority and that of the minorities–and those who
will seek to create a non-libertarian system under the guise of preferring
either the liberty of the majority or the liberty of the minorities. In
such a struggle, it becomes clear what the role of opacity is in the
struggle. Opacity leads to confusion, and this favors the cause of those
who wish to limit liberty." Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems
Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 89.
"Americans and Zande therefore
confront the dilemma faced by all societies in which a neutral is
empowered to judge the disputes of others: how to legitimate that person’s
decisions so that compliance is likely, so that the constituting authority
is not (by unacceptable decisions) delegitimized, and so that the decision
maker does not become an object of revenge by the losing party." Chase,
Oscar. Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-cultural
Context. 2005. New York University Press. P. 32.
Authors & Works
cited in this section:
Bloom, Allan, The
Closing of the American Mind
Brown, Wendy. Politics Out of History
Calavita, Kitty. Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study
of Real Law
Carse, James P., Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life
Chase, Oscar. Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in
Cross-cultural Context
De Zengotita, T. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World
Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination
Geuss, Raymond. Philosophy and Real Politics
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture; Where Old and New Media Collide
Kahn, Paul. The Cultural Study of Law
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern
Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
Democracy
Mann, Charles. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas
McAfee, Noelle. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship.
Mische, Ann. Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across
Brazilian Youth
Morin, Edgar. Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium.
O. Brown, Norman, Love's Body
Rosenau, James. Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization
Sassen, Saskia. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global
Assemblages
Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction
