College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item A TALE OF TWO MODERNITIES: A LIBERAL ALTERNATIVE TO A LIBERAL MODERNITY FROM VICO TO HAVEL(2014) Otruba, Alexander Peter; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The resurgence of the political theory of Marx, Lenin and even Communism itself is increasingly seen in left political theory as the only means of successfully mobilizing the "energy and rage" of the people against capitalism in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It also threatens to draw politics and political theory back into the dangerous territory of twentieth-century illusions. This dissertation--taking its cue from Jeffrey Isaac's 1995 article in DISSENT condemning the "strange silence of political theory" regarding the revolutions of 1989--looks to introduce the political thought of 1989 into contemporary left political theory. The work of Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and Gyorgy Konrad are representative of a political theory that consciously works to avoid the ideological traps and illusions packaged within modernity's displacement of the authority of the natural world with the Cartesian promise to be able to both know, order, and modify that world. This dissertation places the east and central European dissident theorists of 1989 in conversation with Giambattista Vico--who in his oration On method in contemporary fields of study (1710) recognized the presence of this tension that would undergird modernity--and the Italian antifascist theorists Benedetto Croce, Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, whom he would later inspire. Through their similar confrontations with modern totalitarian states, both the Italian antifascist theorists and the theorists of 1989 identified within modernity a rupture between "truth", concrete reality, and humanity itself. A rupture that produced regimes and politics that promised humanity's emancipation from absolutism, while normalizing its subjugation in new and increasingly sophisticated ways. Their revised theoretical approach to modernity sets aside the ideological illusions of the twentieth-century in a compelling manner, and instead offer a principled foundation for the active preservation of democracy and human autonomy. Read collectively they represent more just a critique, but also a sophisticated set of political ideas that answer those who would otherwise approach them as naïve revolutionists or even defenders of the status quo.Item LABORING IN STONE: THE URBANIZATION OF CAPITAL IN THE QUARRY TOWN OF TEXAS, MARYLAND, AND ITS EFFECTS, 1840 TO 1940(2014) Fracchia, Adam; Brighton, Stephen A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Capitalism is founded on the unequal relationship between capital and labor, a relationship that along with the expansion and accumulation of capital and labor power has come to influence everyday life and values. The quarry town of Texas, in Baltimore County, Maryland, offers an opportunity to explore this important relationship between labor and capital. Established in the mid-nineteenth century to quarry and burn limestone at a time of expanding industry and an expanding nation. The town was created to house the workers, primarily Irish immigrants and later African Americans hired to toil in this hazardous industry, and a community was formed and eventually destroyed. This study examines the logic and process of capitalism, drawing on David Harvey's theoretization of the urbanization of capital to understand how life at Texas was influenced by capitalism. The role of and changes to the quarry industry's operations are studied along with their impact on life in Texas and how industry aligned social relations in town to facilitate capitalism through the manipulation of material culture and space. Through an analysis of the built landscape and artifacts of everyday life, such as ceramic tableware and smoking pipes, in their social context, daily interactions can be studied within a wider framework and scale. Studying Texas in this manner demonstrates the utility and necessity of using a totalizing approach, as suggested by Harvey, to examine capitalism in historical archaeology.Item BECAUSE WE WILL IT: THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY IN LATE MODERNITY(2006-07-25) Olson, Lawrence James; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cornelius Castoriadis' life can be characterized as one of engaged dissent. As a founding member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, Castoriadis maintained a consistent position as an opponent of both Western capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism during the Cold War. This position also placed Castoriadis in opposition to the mainstream French left, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, who supported the French Communist Party and defended the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the group, Castoriadis continued to assert the possibility of constructing participatory democratic institutions in opposition to the existing bureaucratic capitalist institutional structure in the Western world. The bureaucratic-capitalist institutional apparatus of the late modern era perpetuates a system where the individual is increasingly excluded from the democratic political process and isolated within the private sphere. However, the private sphere is not a refuge from the intrusion of the bureaucratic-capitalist imaginary, which consistently seeks to subject the whole of society to rational planning. Each individual is shaped by his relationship to the bureaucracy; on the one hand, his relationships with other become subjected to an instrumental calculus, while at the same time, the individual seeks to find some meaning for the world around him by turning to the private sphere. Furthermore, a crisis of meaning pervades late modern societies, where institutions are incapable of providing answers to the questions posed to them by individuals living in these societies. As a result, when individuals are able to participate in the democratic process, they tend to carry political ideas constructed in the private world into the public sphere, often to the detriment of the democratic process itself. Castoriadis seeks to reconcile liberty and broad public participation through the inclusion of the imaginary in democratic theory. He contends that it is possible to construct an autonomous society that emphasizes the creativity of the individual and the collective in the construction of the institutions that govern it. However, democratic theory conceived in this fashion must construct limits to political participation in order to insure that the democratic process itself is not destroyed by the emergence of political ideas antithetical to democracy.Item The Big Issue of Small Businesses: Contract Enforcement in the New Russia(2005-06-08) Vinogradova, Elena; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation explores the problem of institution-building in nascent capitalist economies, with the emphasis on the role of culture in the genesis of new institutional forms. To help better understand the nature of the post-communist transformation in Russia, I address the questions of organizational adaptation and change in business practices resulting from the changing role of the state in the economy and society, focusing specifically on the problem of contract enforcement among small firms. The main source of data was the empirical research that I conducted in St.Petersburg, Russia, where I interviewed owners and/or managers of forty-five firms in 2001 and 2002. When firms perceive state institutions as unable to guarantee the enforcement of contracts and property rights, they rely on alternative (non-state) ways of enforcing their agreements. My research shows that these strategies can be either based on a given firm's own resources (financial or social), or come from various agencies that offer enforcement services for sale, which vary from government licensed private courts to criminals. Non-state enforcement strategies are rooted in preexisting institutions and cultural practices, and develop in response to specific kinds of state failure to provide contract enforcement. My research findings demonstrate a proliferation of non-state strategies of contract enforcement and dispute resolution, as well as the significance that state contract enforcement institutions have for economic exchange and building of market institutions. The lessons concerning the powerful structuring role of enforcement institutions which my dissertation draws from Russian experience have wider implications not only for analysis but also for policy, and contributes to the literature on the role of the state in capitalist development, and cultural neo-institutionalism. The evidence that I have collected contradicts the neo-liberal belief in the sufficiency of self-regulating markets for the smooth functioning of an economy. It supports an argument that that the capability to provide independent enforcement services for businesses is an indispensable feature of the modern state, and essential to the creation of successful modern capitalism. This is an argument of central importance not only for developing and "transition" countries, but for the long-term future of developed societies as well.