Progressive Geographies

Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, The Spectre of State Capitalism – OUP, July 2024 (print and open access)

The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the 21st century, state-owned enterprises, sovereign funds, and policy banks have vastly expanded their control over assets and markets. Concurrently, governments have experimented with increasingly assertive modalities of statism, from techno-industrial policies and spatial development strategies to economic nationalism and trade and investment restrictions. 

This book argues that we are currently witnessing a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention, characterized by a drastic reconfiguration of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. It offers a comprehensive analysis of this “new state capitalism”, as commentators increasingly refer to it, and maps out its key empirical manifestations across a range of geographies, cases, and issue areas. Alami and Dixon show that the new state capitalism is rooted in deep geopolitical economic and financial processes pertaining to the secular development of global capitalism, as much as it is the product of the geoeconomic agency of states and the global corporate strategies of leading firms. The book demonstrates that the proliferation of muscular modalities of statist interventionism and the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of states indicate foundational shifts in global capitalism. This includes a growing fusion of private and state capital, and the development of flexible and liquid forms of property that collapse the distinction between state and private ownership, control, and management. This has fundamental implications for the nature and operations of global capitalism and world politics.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

I’m really pleased to have an article in the new issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Stuart Elden, “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 85 No 3, July 2024, 571-600

The biographical links between Michel Foucault and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil have received more attention than their intellectual connections. This article contributes by surveying Foucault’s engagements, from a 1957 radio lecture to his late lectures at the Collège de France. Particular focus is on lectures on structuralism and history in 1970, some references between 1970 and 1981, and the use of Dumézil’s work in each of Foucault’s two final courses at the Collège de France. In each, Foucault takes up Dumézil’s analyses of mythology in developing his own projects concerning history and antiquity.

The article is behind a paywall, but email me if you don’t have institutional access to a copy.

This piece is a sequel to an earlier book chapter on Foucault and Dumézil’s understandings of sovereignty, published last year in the Handbook on Governmentality, and a piece published earlier this year on the relationship between three of Foucault’s mentors – “Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries“. In my mind these make an informal trilogy of articles which bridge the Foucault and Canguilhem books, on the one hand, and my new project on Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France, on the other.

Preprints are available at Warwick’s WRAP site if you don’t have library access or, as I said above, I’ll share if you send me an email.

Theory and Social Inquiry – relaunch of Theory and Society as open access journal

Theory and Social Inquiry is dedicated to analyzing all facets and dimensions of social life, from micro-level interactions between individuals to the durable institutions that organize societies at a macro level. Our modal article asks big questions, theorizes boldly, and draws on thorough empirical research to arrive at knowledge that often challenges conventional wisdom. We endorse the principle that a critical analysis of existing social structures and social processes is not divorced from – but an important source of – scientific discovery. The journal values rigorous humanistic inquiry as well as historical perspectives on continuity and change. We are open to the full range of social scientific methods, including scholarship that draws on new and innovative approaches under the rubric of problem-solving sociology and engaged research. Theory-inspired, theory-driven, and theory-relevant social science takes many forms. Theory and Social Inquiry is interested in all these modes.

Shakespeare and the Reactionary Mind: Counterrevolution, Fascism, Militarism – Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, 31 August 2024

Speakers – John Gillies, Amy Lidster, Björn Quiring, Jennifer Rust and Richard Ashby.

Booking via Eventbrite

Conservatives have always tended to claim Shakespeare as one of their own. In the 1950s, E. M. W. Tillyard developed the influential thesis that
Shakespeare’s plays uphold the traditional social hierarchies and suggest that these hierarchies are embedded in nature. Ulysses’ speech on “degree”
in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ serves as one of the key witnesses in this context. Since Tillyard’s time, scholars have persistently pointed out elements of Shakespeare’s plays that do not fit this assumption: the actions on stage persistently seem to contradict and subvert the noble proclamations of Ulysses and his peers. In the histories and tragedies, the persons on top of the hierarchy mostly seem to end up there by a combination of luck, political manipulation and, first and foremost, the effective use of violence, rather than by any apparent inborn excellence.

Accordingly, Shakespeare’s plays represent a volatile social order in which communal life unfolds as perpetual warfare between interest groups – sometimes open, sometimes covert. With Corey Robin and others, one might venture the hypothesis that this apparent discrepancy between words and deeds delineates a symptomatic ambivalence that characterizes the reactionary worldview: while reactionaries claim to be conservative, their enforcement of traditional hierarchies often takes on the form of a violent interruption of these very traditions. In the name of nature and of “real life”, they voice unprecedented demands that those who are destined to rule may finally be allowed to rule as they must and to keep their inferiors in the subjugated position they deserve. The most extreme form these demands can take is that of fascism, a militant movement of
revolutionary conservatism that, according to Hannah Arendt, has the inherent tendency to destroy everything it ostensibly holds sacred (such as the family, the state and the nation). Shakespeare’s plays (first and foremost, ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Hamlet’) have been used to explore this ambivalence, by reactionaries and fascists as well as by their opponents. This one-day symposium aims to investigate this complex relationship.

If you read this blog on the web (rather than through an rss reader, for example), and don’t use an ad-blocker, how annoying are the adverts?

They are hopefully fairly minimal and have two benefits – they mean I don’t have to pay WordPress to not have them, and the tiny amount they bring in covers the running cost of the site (domain registration, file storage upgrade, etc.).

I’ve largely thought that if people find them that annoying they can use an ad-blocker – this site is hardly the only place where you experience them. But I’m tempted to remove them entirely, even if that costs me a bit. I’ve not wanted to go down the subscription model, or premium content, or donations…

Any thoughts appreciated.