Is the more or less grudging involvement of social theorists with the Libyan regime in the 2000s now shown to be an index of naivety, or stupidity, or venality? The involvement of David Held and the LSE has been much discussed this week, via Saif Gaddafi’s PhD, and an optimistic commentary by Anthony Giddens in 2007 unearthed. Rather more interesting perhaps is the democratic theorist Benjamin Barber, whose involvement with the Qadaffi Foundation is long-standing. Here is a comment by Barber in 2007 on the ‘normalisation’ of relations with Libya, around nuclear weapons and the ‘war on terror’ in particular. Barber has now resigned from this organisation, and this involvement is the basis of his rather sobering analysis of the prospects for democratization in Libya whatever the outcome of current events.
Deliberately Considered
Via Gone Public, news of a new blog set up by Jeffrey Goldfarb, author of the very wonderful The Politics of Small Things. Deliberately Considered aims to address contemporary issues in, well, a considered and deliberate way:
“Our task will be to respond to the events of the day by putting them in larger historical and theoretical contexts. We are dedicated to lending perspective by considering both what is close to home in the everyday life of ordinary people and what is happening elsewhere in other parts of the world, as well as analyzing what happens on the central political stage of American and global politics. We will consider problems with careful thought and with the longer, rather than the shorter, run in mind. We will not be primarily concerned with who’s up and who’s down or tendentious polemics, but rather with trying to understand the promise and perils of our politics and culture, exploring alternatives to prevailing social wrongs. We will deliberately consider the problems of our times.”
Big Questions for the Big Society
The New Economics Foundation has a new paper, trying to provide a left-inflection and critical redemption to the Big Society concept. It’s interesting not least because it indicates the degree of overlap between this notion and the sorts of ideas around The Good Society developed by Compass and others – and is an attempt too to identify some fundamental differences.
Favourite Thinkers V: Gideon Haigh
Highlights of the cricket World Cup make pretty good late night TV if you are sitting up late tending a new born. It’s about as much of this tournament that one really needs. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only reason that cricket is worth taking notice of anymore is because it provides the background for reading Mike Selvey in The Guardian, and especially for reading Gideon Haigh. Haigh’s Ashes 2011 is just published, barely a month after the end of the series – since he wasn’t writing for The Guardian, this is doubly worth it. It even contains the phrase ‘epistemological case study’ with reference to Ricky Ponting. I’ve also been reading Haigh’s latest collection of essays, Spheres of Influence, actually published by Melbourne University Press. It is mainly concerned with the institutional context of contemporary international cricket, and starts with a wonderful 60 page analysis of how India has come to dominate world cricket economically, written in a whirlwind style. Haigh is great at skewering the self-importance of cricket’s personality led culture; but he is really excellent at exposing the political economy of the game – that’s what this book does, reminding you that he was/is a business journalist, a vocation evident in his analyses of the Packer revolution or of the economics of early international cricket tours through the figure of Warwick Armstrong. The silliness that cricket has become is redeemed by this sort of writing and analysis.
Back to Syracuse?
One sidebar to political upheaval this week in Libya has been the story about Saif Gaddafi’s academic credentials, holding as he does a PhD from the LSE. In re-posted profiles from 2006 and 2009, he is presented as a reformer in waiting, and credited with influencing the relative normalisation of Libya’s international relations. Now it looks a little like a means of providing intellectual respectability for the anointed son. Gaddafi’s PhD was supervised by David Held, who has professed a certain degree of disappointment at the conduct of his former student this week. There is some discussion on the blogosphere suggesting that somehow the cosmopolitan theory that Gaddafi used in this thesis is now shown to be complicit with state-sponsored violence. A bit of a stretch, that argument.
The more interesting aspect of this story is the funding relationship between the LSE and the Libyan regime, which has suddenly become very embarrassing indeed, provoking sit-ins and rapid disavowals (this particular deal was opposed at the time it was established by the late Fred Halliday). This is hardly the first time that a University has been embroiled in potentially dubious relationships wfide runders. But it is timely, in the current context of UK debates about the future of University funding – the long term trajectory of institutions such as the LSE is to seek greater ‘independence’ by substituting public funding for a varied portfolio of private funding. Anyone who has received alumni literature from an Oxbridge college in the last few years will have had this aim more or less explicitly acknowledged. Again, not new, an old story in the US. Nevertheless, this is a relatively new phenomenon in the UK, and it remains the case that the putative ‘brand value’ of elite universities in the UK as private players in an international marketplace for higher education does depend on a massive, century old public subsidy. So the sorts of reputational risks involved in diversifying university funding are likely to be heightened for quite some time into the future. Cosmopolitanism can be a bit grubby, it turns out.
Ethics and behaviour change
Here is an interesting post by Jessica Pykett at the Soft Paternalism blog, on attending a seminar on the ethics of behaviour change by the House of Lords Inquiry into behaviour change initiatives in government. This is one of the few projects I know of that is engaging with this whole field in a critical way (I think too of Nikolas Rose‘s ongoing genealogy of psy-disciplines, extending now into work on neurosciences). Lots of geography, of course, is utterly complicit with this behaviour change agenda – one that is re-shaping how social sciences are understood in the public realm, to the detriment to the broadly ‘ethnographic’ dispositions of a great deal of critical-theoretically inclined social science.
‘Learning in and through action’: thinking with Arendt now
Further to yesterday’s post about violence and non-violence in contemporary Theory, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has posted some remarks on Arendt’s account of the difference between power and violence, originally made in an interesting context in Venezuela.
Keeping up with cultural theory
Just came across this on-line book review journal, Reviews in Cultural Theory. Reviews published bi-weekly. Latest is a review of Braun and Whatmore’s edited collection Political Matter; last month included a review of David Eng’s analysis of queer liberalism, The Feeling of Kinship. Looks like a good way to keep up with the books one should be reading if you worry about keeping up as one of the ‘Now People’ of cultural theory (sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t).
Republicanism in Spain: new book by Pettit
How’s this for public engagement – Philip Pettit‘s theory of republican freedom is a very real force in shaping Spanish government policy, it turns out; and not only that, he has been involved in auditing these policies for their success in achieving these theoretical objectives. For more on the background to this, see A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero’s Spain, and for a critical consideration, there is this. Would be interesting to know how this is playing now, in the wake of how the finanical crisis is resonating in Spain.
Religion and critique in the public sphere
From Columbia University Press, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, with contributions from Habermas, Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor. The audio of the symposium in 2009 from which the first of these derives is at The Immanent Frame site. Interesting for all sorts of reasons, including Habermas taking on the genealogy of the concept of ‘the political’. A related collection, Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique, has a set of dialogues with Butler, Fraser, Honneth, Kymlicka, Benhabib, and others.
Pop Theory 