Critiques and developments in world­systems analysis: an introduction to the special collection

Author(s): Richard E. Lee / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

From its inception, the world-systems perspective was not only enormously influential in long-term, large-scale social research; it also attracted a set of serious critiques. These fell into the general areas of the emergence of the capitalist world-economy; reductionism in the mode of argument; surplus appropriation and accumulation, including the question of class; and the general exclusion of an analysis of any role for “culture.” It is concrete developments in world-systems analysis over the past three decades, although not to the exclusion of explicit responses to critiques, that have gone a long way in addressing these concerns. They fall most notably into the areas of commodity chains, households, world-ecology, and the structures of knowledge.

Nonwaged peasants in the modern world-system: African households as dialectical units of capitalist exploitation and indigenous resistance, 1890-1930

Author(s): Wilma A. Dunaway / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

Colonialism did not transform African peasants into waged labor. A majority of peasants worked as forced laborers, often unpaid, and they returned to their agricultural household labor as soon as they completed work assignments mandated by the colonizers. Colonial Africans resided in mixed livelihood households in which nonwaged labor forms (both free and unfree) predominated, and very few became dependent on wages. For a majority of colonial Africans, informal sector activities, tenancy, sharecropping, and subsistence production on communal plots were not temporary nonwaged forms on an inevitable path toward proletarianization. Wage earning was not the primary mechanism through which these households were integrated into the modern world-system. Instead, these households primarily provided nonwaged labors to capitalist commodity chains that, in turn, extracted surpluses from them and externalized costs of production to them.

"This lofty mountain of silver could conquer the whole world”: Potosí and the political ecology of underdevelopment, 1545-1800

Author(s): Jason W. Moore / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

By the 1570’s, Potosí, and its silver, had become the hub of a commodity revolution that reorganized Peru’s peoples and landscapes to serve capital and empire. This was a decisive moment in the world ecological revolution of the long seventeenth century. Primitive accumulation in Peru was particularly successful: the mita’s spatial program enabled the colonial state to marshal a huge supply of low-cost and tractable labor in the midst of sustained demographic contraction. The relatively centralized character of Peru’s mining frontier facilitated imperial control in a way the more dispersed silver frontiers of New Spain did not. Historical capitalism has sustained itself on the basis of exploiting, and thereby undermining, a vast web of socio-ecological relations. As may be observed in colonial Peru, the commodity frontier strategy effected both the destruction and creation of premodern socio-ecological arrangements.

The rise, maturity and geographic diffusion of the cotton industry, 1760-1900

Author(s): Florence Molk / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

This article examines the trajectory of the cotton industry, including calico printing, over the period 1760-1900. From its beginnings in England as a leading industry of the capitalist world-economy, it spread geographically on a major scale to finally reach the United States and Japan. Over the long term, it is argued that as it expanded and competition increased, profit rates tended to fall, although unevenly.

"The dangerous classes”: Hugo Grotius and seventeenth-century piracy as a primitive anti-systemic movement

Author(s): Eric Wilson / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

This essay discusses the historical and textual representations of piracy in the writings of Hugo Grotius, primarily De Indis/De iure praedae (1603-1608) and the Commentarius in Theses XI (c. 1600). Contrary to popular belief, Grotius, in stark contrast to Jean Bodin, was not an advocate of the constitutionally homogenous Nation-State. Rather, his central concept of divisible sovereignty, the lynchpin of the constitutional theory of his early writings, unambiguously presents us with the object of the heterogeneous State. In Grotian theory, the State may be “read” as a composite construction, with a residual degree of inalienable sovereignty accruing at each unit-level. Even if only unconsciously, Grotius describes a concurrent para-political sub-division of the state between institutional Government (the “magistrates”) and civil society, one that constitutes an operational system of governance within the Nation-State. Like his contemporary Johannes Althusius, Grotius’ theory allows for the emergence of a wholly “private,” albeit lawful, mode of authority. This is most apparent in Grotius’ treatment of the mercantile trading Company and its Privateering operations. The corporatist theory of sovereignty permits the Company’s private agents of violence, the legally ambivalent Privateer/Pirate, to be invested with a requisite degree of sovereignty. The Grotian theory of divisible sovereignty, investing the seventeenth-century Pirate band with legal personality, serves as a vital historical precursor to the quasi-statist (trans-) national criminal cartels of the twenty-first century. The Grotian Pirate/Privateer/Just Avenger, therefore, is a “nomad”: a liminal entity that simultaneously transverses both geographical and juro-political spaces, rendering him or herself in-determinable.

Structures of knowledge in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, 1731­-1980

Author(s): Sanem Güvenç-SalgÂrl / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

It is argued that the historiographical approaches prevalent in the Ottoman Empire and then in the Turkish Republic, observable in both academic and cultural production and implemented in the education system, were closely related to material transformations in politics and economics. It is further shown, however, that these relations were not of a one-way causality in either direction, but rather part of a singular whole. Debates over the construction of the past and the modernization project survive today in discussions arising from Turkey’s possible candidacy for membership in the European Union.

Malthus’s idea of a moral and political science

Author(s): Sergio Cremaschi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

This paper discusses, first, the kind of Newtonian methodology Malthus had been exposed to at Cambridge; secondly, the views on algebra and the doctrine of proportions he inherited from MacLaurin and the contribution of his colleague Bewick Bewin in devising a special role for this doctrine in the moral sciences; thirdly, Malthus’s ideas on language and the reasons for rejection of an artificial language for political economy. Then it discusses his idea of political economy as a moral science and his claims to be Adam Smith’s true heir. The conclusion is that Hollander is right when he contends that Malthus’s and Ricardo’s methods, as contrasted with their methodologies, were just two opposite poles within one spectrum, but also that the Cantabrigian and Scottish tradition provided staple for a design of a moral and political science alternative to the Unitarian and the Benthamite programs.

Towards a critical realist-inspired economic methodology

Author(s): Bjørn-Ivar Davidsen / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

This paper argues that critical realism conceived as a meta­theory for scientific activities offers a consistent set of helpful philosophical resources from which a potentially fruitful position of economic methodology may be developed. When fully developed, a critical realist­inspired economic methodology may in turn underlabour for more concrete scientific undertakings, economic theorising and applied analyses. Adopting such a strategy for further advancement of the critical realist project would prove a much needed supplement to, or perhaps even substitute for, the currently dominating strategy of grand scale philosophical underlabouring aimed at reorienting more or less the whole discipline of economics. The main trust of the argument made then, is that critical realism comes with a constructive and practical potential that goes beyond critiques of mainstream economics and philosophical underlabouring for already existing schools of thought within economics and that it is time for this potential to be actualised.

Because I said so: the persistence of mainstream policy advice

Author(s): Nathaniel Cline,Kirsten Ford,Matías Vernengo / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

The current global crisis has shown the limitations of the mainstream approach. We trace the origins of the limitations of the dominant neoclassical views to the capital debates and to the rise to dominance of intertemporal general equilibrium. The limited use of the Arrow­Debreu model, which became dominant after the capital debates, in terms of policymaking, is central to understand the persistence of policy guided by the aggregative model. We use the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a case study of this perplexing continuity of policy advice. Given our survey, we conclude that even though the economy is in the midst of the worst capitalist crisis since the Great Depression, a significant paradigmatic shift in economics is extraordinarily unlikely.

Schumpeter’s theory of leadership: a brief sketch

Author(s): Panayotis Michaelides,Ourania Kardasi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

So far, it has hardly been recognized that the great Austrian thinker Joseph Alois Schumpeter had developed a general theory of leadership. In this paper, we analyze how leaders promote change by building on Schumpeter’s understanding of entrepreneurial leadership which fuses the concepts of entrepreneurship and leadership. Also, we analyze Schumpeter’s shift in emphasis regarding his leadership theory. Specifically, Schumpeter in his early works defined entrepreneurs as individuals whose acts have significant effects on firms. However, in his late works he seems to have realized the need to extend further the boundaries of his early approach, to account for social forces.

The internal consistency of perfect competition

Author(s): Stephan Pühringer,Jakob Kapeller / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

This article surveys some arguments brought forward in defense of the theory of perfect competition. While some critics propose that the theory of perfect competition, and thus also the theory of the firm, are logically flawed, (mainstream) economists defend their most popular textbook model by a series of apparently different arguments. Here it is examined whether these arguments are comparable, consistent and convincing from the point of view of philosophy of science.

On technological change and stage evolution in the works of Seneca and Adam Smith

Author(s): Christos P. Baloglou / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

The present paper investigates the links that connect Seneca and Adam Smith in relation to the concept of the technological change and the evolution of society. The Roman philosopher and jurist discusses extensively the technical achievements in various factors of production which are an outcome of the division of labour. The main question concerning the fact, if all inventions stem originally from the cogitations of philosophers, or, the common workman is exposed to the manufacturing process in his daily tasks appears also in Adam Smith’s thought. The analysis shows Smith’s classical roots and the significance of the Roman literature.

Commentary on black political economy

Author(s): Curtis Haynes Jr / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2010

Six choice metaphors and their social implications

Author(s): Frederic B. Jennings Jr. / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009

The six metaphors analyzed in this paper unfold stepwise into an interdisciplinary systems framework based on planning horizons. The notion of planning horizons serves as an ordinal measure of rationality and organization, in a social systemic context of ecological interdependence. Each metaphor opens into the next to extend our understanding.The neighborhood store is where almost all neoclassical choices are made, with visible options spread on shelves and a budget allocated among them, maximizing its worth. The chessboard demands strategic contingency planning in an evolving context of incompletely projectable outcomes. A transportation network combines substitutes and complements into a static complex system, intertwined and non­decomposable, leaving economists with a problem of institutional choice. Love is a complementary good – virtually costless to produce and distribute, always in demand – that should be abundant, though it is scarce. The educational system brings inter­horizonal complementarities into our field of view, where contagion effects of longer horizons enhance complementarity at the expense of substitution, shifting the mix of interdependence away from conflicts to concerts of interest. Human ecology is a dynamic complex system of interactive phenomena opening into time, evolving constantly in its structure, relationships and diversity and demanding ethics in our relations. These six metaphors raise some pressing questions on the invisible limits of models standing on substitution applied where they have no place. Symptoms of failure reveal themselves in myopia, ecological loss and the rise of violence in society. Economic implications of these metaphors are reviewed to illustrate the basis for an interdisciplinary approach to social scientific constructions.

The inheritance of heterodox economic thought: an examination of history of economic thought textbooks

Author(s): Mary V. Wrenn / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009

The inheritance of heterodox economics hinges upon the degree to which the next generation is exposed to the history of the discipline’s thought. The potential to include heterodox thought into the curriculum presents itself most easily through history of economic thought classes. The potential is limited by the professor, but it is also circumscribed by the material presented or withheld in history of economic thought textbooks. If included, the presentation of heterodox methodologies and philosophies impresses upon students the relevance and importance of pluralism and dissenting views and by consequence, the future course of the discipline. This research seeks to examine the presentation of heterodox economics in history of economic thought textbooks and to assess the amount of space dedicated to its study and further, to explore how textbook adoption impacts the inheritance and heritage of heterodox thought and philosophy.

The epistemology of modern finance

Author(s): Xavier De Scheemaekere / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009

Modern finance is a social science where the complexity of mathematical models compares to that of physics. The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for the interpretation of mathematical models in finance, in order to determine the epistemological standards according to which financial theory must be assessed. The analysis enlightens the contrast between highly objective results and the radical uncertainty that governs the markets. The main contribution of the paper is to show that the reasons why finance models are relative and non-causal are deeply rooted in the nature of finance theory itself. An important consequence is that arbitrage-free model prices are reference prices and indicators of the economical features underlying mathematical models. As such, they can be used to structure and support final pricing and hedging decisions, but not to predict future market prices

A review of Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Cult of Statistical Significance. How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2008, 320 pages

Author(s): Tamás Dusek / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009

A review of Peter Söderbaum, Understanding Sustainability Economics. Towards Pluralism in Economics, London, Sterling/VA: earthscan, 2008, 158 pages

Author(s): Karl Georg Zinn / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009

A review of Ralph Harris in His Own Words, the Selected Writings of Lord Harris, Edited by Colin Robinson, Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar and the Institute of Economic Affairs, 2008, 343 pages

Author(s): Valentin Cojanu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009

Commentary on Teaching Economics with Podcasts, Literature and Movies

Author(s): James Moulder / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2009