College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item The International Political Economy of Fascism(2018) Wasser, Matthias; Korzeniewicz, Patricio; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on the intersection between security, governance, and the international economic system in the interwar period - constructing an analytic narrative to explain why so many states adopted the policy prescriptions of the radical right, which states did so, and what form these prescriptions took. While many new authoritarian states were established in the 1920s - and Fascist Italy was not the only one where radical right activists played a major role in regime consolidation - the ends pursued by these states were largely traditional. In the wake of the Great Depression, however, the difficulties in simultaneously attaining full employment, freedom of labor, and profitability forced capitalist states to adopt active macroeconomic policies - and, in turn, either move left, assigning labor a significant role in governance, or right, repressing organized labor. The fascist and “para-fascist” regimes which would be established in the 1930s would represent a renegotiation - whether brokered from within democratic or extra-democratic politics - between these conservative elites and fascist activists. Although the balance between the two would differ from place to place - from especially strong movement activists in Germany to especially strong traditional elites in Japan or Balkan royal dictatorships - all of these new compacts represented a willingness of the conservative elites to turn their back on economic and geopolitical liberalism forever. Which path elites chose to take, I argue, depended upon their positionality in the world economy. High-mobility fractions of capital were concentrated in the leading states, could discipline governments through exit, and benefited from a worldwide open market economy. Low-mobility fractions of capital, by contrast, especially those attached to semiperipheral states, needed to discipline governments through monopolies on voice. Further, relatively richer economies at the core of the world-system were in a better position to compromise with labor. This process resulted in a polarization within countries and in turn a polarization among countries - in favor of a relatively more liberal and international capitalism as against a relatively more nationalist and state-monopoly variant of capitalism.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.