Ellen Meiksins Wood

This article offers a reconstruction of the Gramscian conception of the emergence of capitalism. Such a reconstruction is necessary because Gramsci does not give us a systematic conception of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Despite this, we find reflections in his Prison Notebooks where he analyzes some elements that played a decisive role in this transition or, conversely, constituted obstacles to it (the importance of the construction of a national-popular collective will, thanks to a real hegemony of the bourgeoisie over the rest of the population, and the establishment of an integral State; the negative role of the Catholic Church, especially in Italian history, as opposed to the Protestant movements). This study of Gramscian thought is enriched by a dialogue with several important authors: Max Weber obviously, but also the historians Henri Pirenne and Robert Brenner.

Cet article propose une reconstruction de la conception gramscienne de l’émergence du capitalisme. Un tel travail de reconstruction est nécessaire dans la mesure où Gramsci ne propose pas une conception systématique de la transition du féodalisme au capitalisme. Malgré cela, les réflexions des Cahiers de prison  analysent des éléments ayant joué un rôle décisif dans cette transition ou ayant à l’inverse constitué des obstacles à cette dernière (importance de la construction d’une volonté collective nationale-populaire, grâce à une véritable hégémonie de la bourgeoisie sur le reste de la population, et à la mise en place d’un État intégral ; rôle négatif de l’Église catholique, en particulier dans l’histoire italienne, par opposition aux mouvements protestants). Cette étude de la pensée gramscienne s’enrichit d’un dialogue avec plusieurs auteurs importants : Max Weber évidemment, mais également les historiens Henri Pirenne et Robert Brenner.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, it has become a fashionable practice for left intellectuals to distance themselves from the traditional left, often this divorce has come as a complete rejection of the entire basis of post enlightenment thought. In this process all European thinkers from Locke, to Rousseau, and even Marx have been grouped together as if they were all members of a similar school of thought that would reproduce the ideology of European superiority. This is done through a series of intellectual gymnastics that rather than analysis of ideas and their origins within their specific historical contexts. This process denies the unique history of the composition of ideas leaving an intellectual practice that is as problematic as the actual Eurocentric views the thinkers attempt to critique. Quijano, as a particular example, works in his article “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” attempts to challenge traditional dogmatic views that look at Europe as the pinnacle of modernity, the last line in a linear progression of historical stages, But in the process of his critique Quijano clouds over the distinctive differences in forms of domination, the relations between dominators and dominated both at home and abroad, and the origin and logic of capitalism and how it manifests. Due to his oversights Quijano tends to fall into a common practice within the eurocentered world of naturalizing capitalism within the traditional commercialization model which limits his ability to recognize its universalizing tendencies as well as its specific logic and role as a specific historical form that has a beginning and will have an end. Ironically the historical materialist tradition which he attacks can shed a great amount of light on the issues with his specific argument and provide important answers to problems and questions which Quijano highlights. In the following pages through the lens of historical materialism I will look at some of the core assumptions of Quijano, and their implications, and deconstruct his arguments and assumptions to show the structural flaws in the foundation of his thought, when these weaknesses are brought to the surface it begs a rethinking of many of the conclusions which he had reached.

Since the late 1960s, the Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani has primarily worked on the border between sculpture and architecture, creating large-scale public installations such as reading rooms, gardens and bridges. These works commonly evidence a formal concern with relationships between part and whole. This article connects Armajani’s interest in part–whole relations with the writings of Robert Venturi, arguing that Armajani’s practice establishes a critical dialogue with the history of modernist architecture. However, it also demonstrates that Armajani’s practice complicates the proto-postmodern approach of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) in several ways. Unlike Venturi, Armajani explicitly politicizes the question of part–whole relations, presenting it not as a purely aesthetic question, but as a formal metaphor for egalitarian social relations. By incorporating certain distinctly modernist techniques into his sculptures, Armajani also shows that, contra Venturi, the question of how to safeguard diversity within a social collective was already a concern among modernists themselves. Finally, Armajani's work further contrasts with Venturi’s writing through its turn to the politics of class struggle. Drawing on the writings of the Marxist theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood, the article argues that Armajani drew attention to the limitations inherent in postmodernism’s ‘politics of diversity’, demonstrating its class blindness and thus its failure to sufficiently challenge contemporary capitalist ideologies.

http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/sj.2016.25.3.7

1) Este libro es, en principio, un intento de reconstruir la dialéctica de la ilustración estudiada por Adorno y Horkheimer desde la perspectiva de la crítica marxiana del capital.

2) En el pensamiento maduro de Marx, leído fundamentalmente desde Moishe Postone, encontramos toda una teoría de las formas de mediación sociales en el capitalismo. La modernidad capitalista se caracteriza por la primacía de lógicas de dominación abstractas antes que personales. Somos dominados por abstracciones reales que se mueven solas, como el propio capital que, en cuanto valor que se valoriza, constriñe las posibilidades de acción política democrática de las personas.

3) Esas dominaciones impersonales y ciegas, sin embargo, no se sostienen sin una serie de dominaciones particularistas (de clase, género y racialización) que les son co-constitutivas. Entonces, no hay dominación abstracta sin angatonismos, disputa y lucha.

4) La modernidad capitalista no es, sin embargo, solo dominación. Esta también una forma social generativa. El capital pone potencialidades emancipatorias que, de realizarse, lo negarían y superarían históricamente.

5) Esas potencialidades se encuentran en la democracia y la técnica modernas. Ambas existen bajo una forma capitalista, en la que se realizan como dominación (democracia domesticada por el mercado, tecnología que oprime trabajadorxs en la configuración material del capital fijo). Sin embargo, ambas portan las promesas incumplidas de una modernidad más allá del capital. Esas promesas nos sugieren una democracia radicalizada que se sacuda de encima el mecanismo ciego de la acumulación y una técnica nueva que profundice las posibilidades de autodeterminación colectiva a nivel de la vida material.

6) Es posible, por lo tanto, una crítica inmanente de la modernidad capitalista. Esta crítica evita las narrativas unilaterales del progreso y la decadencia. La modernidad es, como enseñan Bolívar Echeverría y Moishe Postone, ambigua: mezcla de dominación y emancipción, de opresiones terribles y aperturas de posibilidades emocionantes. El proyecto del marxismo es algo así como críticar la modernidad para realizar sus núcleos de verdad emancipatorios.

7) Sin embargo, también hay un gran potencial de catástrofe en la modernidad. Como vieron Adorno y Horkheimer, el capitalismo no configura una dominación estática con potencialidades de liberación latentes. El potencial de catástrofe de la modernidad se activa cuando, en lugar de la emancipación, triunfan movimientos que barren las libertades parciales conquistadas bajo la abstracción-valor. Los fascismos, los totalitarismos, el antisemitismo, los odios racistas, son ejemplos de este potencial de catástrofe de la modernidad. Por eso, si los proyectos emancipatorios no se realizan o quedan truncos, nos espera algo peor que un capitalismo de "business as usual". Los totalitarismos no son excepciones enloquecidas ante la política moderna, sino resultados inmanentes de su dinámica, tanto como las promesas de democracia, socialismo y libertad. Las encrucijadas de la modernidad no nos permiten, por lo tanto, descansar en la ilusión de una dominación estabilizada y esperar al futuro para realizar las promesas emancipatorias. Si la emancipación no ocurre, más temprano que tarde sobrevendrá otra vez la catástrofe.

This dissertation is a philosophical investigation into the concept of sovereignty as well as a historical investigation of the struggles of the French Revolution, analyzed from the perspective of sovereignty. It is argued that any conception of sovereignty, im- or explicitly, contains ideas and practices pertaining to the economic structure of society, political institutions, conceptions of rights, conceptions of citizenship, and spaces of politics understood as sites for sovereign political decision-making. Thus, unlike what is argued by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, it is demonstrated how conceptions of sovereignty cannot be completely separated from conceptions of government and practical political arrangements. If a certain subject is, or is to be, sovereign, it cannot govern in whatever way and still remain sovereign.
It is furthermore argued that a given author’s or practitioners conception of sovereignty is ultimately disclosed in his or her political practice, or indication of political practice. This is to say that any analysis of a given theorist’s conception of sovereignty cannot rely solely on his or her rhetoric, but must also include the actual political practices entailed in this position. Throughout the dissertation I demonstrate how the concrete political position of a given author can only be identified by analyzing the specific function of his or her individual texts, that is, how it is meant to intervene in a given political situation (what I, following Louis Althusser, have called ‘the conjuncture’). Thus, I criticize the tendency in much existing research on the political theories of French revolutionaries to abstracting, too severely, these theories from the concrete struggles of the French Revolution. My argument is not that one has to reduce the political theories of French revolutionaries to the conjuncture of the French Revolution. On the opposite, my aim is precisely to abstract, what I call, ‘doctrines of sovereignty’ from the French revolutionary context. But it is my argument that this abstraction must be based on a systematic contextualization and de-contextualization of French revolutionary political theory in relation to the specific and ever-changing conjuncture of the French Revolution.
The concrete analyses of French revolutionary political theory in relation to the French revolutionary conjuncture shows that the struggles of the French Revolution can ultimately be broken down to struggles between four competing doctrines of sovereignty: corporate sovereignty and absolutist sovereignty pertaining particularly to the political struggles of the old regime between (local) nobles and the royal court, and national sovereignty and popular sovereignty that enter the political scene with the advent of the French Revolution and which come to structure the struggles of the French Revolution. It is demonstrated that whereas the early parts of the Revolution (1789-92) can be understood mainly as a struggle against the old forms of sovereignty, the struggles of the later part of the Revolution (1792-94) are essentially struggles between proponents of national sovereignty and popular sovereignty.

The objective of the master thesis presented here is to chart a concept of causality adequate for a historical materialism at pace with the times, uncircumventable for grasping complex social phenomena and relationships, their reproduction and transformation following Marx’s materialist notion of social reality. Thereby the main focus does not lie on Marx’s notion of causality, which is not closer explicated by himself as causality. Rather this in general (systematically) relatively little theorized notion within Marxist discourses will be discussed alongside theoretical approaches which seem to be most fruitful for this enquiry: Structural Marxism, Political Marxism and Critical Realism. By means of a brief outline of the Marxian preface of 1859, which is central to many Marxist approaches, it will be attempted to es-tablish the main field under discussion in terms of a history of theory. With respect to an immanently critical and comparative method, the thesis henceforth expounds the aforementioned theories while taking their respective notions of causality as well as, among other things, the interrelated understanding of social structure in relation to agency, the specific effectivities of the involved entities and the notions of lawfulness into account. What is hereby striven for, is to contour though the critical and comparative exposition of the said theories a non-empiricist, non-teleological and non-determinist notion of causality appropriate to the complexity of social reality, without taking a recourse to theoretically restricted positivist or historico-philosophical patterns of explanation and interpretation. In the end the critical impetus of this thesis is to accentuate the importance of causality in a critical theory of society after Marx.

This thesis aims to identify the different approaches to historical materialism in a way describing the existing controversy between Political Marxism and mainstream (Orthodox) Marxism especially concentrating on their perspectives viewing the history of political thought. As the unique effort to understand the origins of political theory, the discipline namely ‘the social history of political theory’ -which was founded and developed by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016)- is revisited and reevaluated in comparison with the works of mainstream Marxism in writing history of political thought. In addition, this study aims to illuminate the influence of other epistemologies on Marxist historical materialism in a way setting up the outlines of historical materialism’s original position.

I just uploaded the manuscript to academia.edu --any feedback from the community, particularly historical materialist and Pynchon scholars would be most welcome.

A version of a subsection of Chapter 3 (It's My Job I Can't Back Out...") was published in  Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counter-narratives (Rodopi 2009), and a version of another subsection ("Where the Woodbine Twineth") was presented at APSA 2008

This book takes as its starting point the political theory of Ellen Meiksins Wood, who (following Robert Brenner) locates her understanding of the specificity of capitalism in the changes to the social property relations of feudal England, which imparted to this new social formation certain ineluctable imperatives surrounding the improvement of the value of property. Capitalism is distinct from all other cultural formations both in that it impels its agents toward ‘free’ exchange, and in the contradictory relationship that it grants to the category of the economic vis à vis the political: the economic sphere strives to eclipse the political even as it is dependent upon political force to maintain the ‘ground rules’ by which it operates.

These contradictions operate in the cultural ‘sphere’ as well, in that even as culture strives to assert its ‘relative autonomy’ from the economic ‘base’, it is always-already caught up in the fundamental contradictions outlined above. And while for traditional Marxist criticism the story ends here, with the cultural artifacts carrying such anxieties and tensions in their political ‘unconscious’ (with the cultural ‘superstructure’ merely seen as being crudely reflective of the economic ‘base’), I am interested rather in how the contemporary social novel employs modernist literary methods in order to come to a more dialectical understanding of both capitalism as a totalising system and of its own capacity for critique as an implicated part of that system.

Specifically, I argue that explicit continuities exist between the latent modernism of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx on the one hand and the contemporary social novels of David Lodge, Jonathan Franzen and Thomas Pynchon on the other, as the ‘Condition of England’ question gets exported to America and then again returns, under the guise of our current obsession with the problems of financialization. Thus David Lodge and Jonathan Franzen attempt (in Nice Work [1988] and The Twenty-Seventh City [1988] respectively) to ‘recuperate’ the Industrial Novel of Dickens and Gaskell just at the time that British and American manufacturing are ceding ground in face of the demands of international finance. Similarly, Thomas Pynchon (in Vineland [1990]) attempts to build a bridge to the late 19C in his depiction of the entwining of the political and economic spheres of finance or ‘vampire’ capitalism as bearing an uncanny resemblance to Bram Stoker’s Dracula,[1897] a novel which itself betrays acute anxieties concerning the threat that the burgeoning American economy will pose to a newly vulnerable England.

As Paul Maltby notes regarding Gravity's Rainbow, in early Pynchon capitalism is comprehended and critiqued from a broadly Weberian perspective, as ‘Capitalism is assailed not in the name of class exploitation but in that of “the grim rationalizing of the World”’ (GR 588). I would maintain that Vineland complicates this earlier picture immensely; using a
number of his trademark ‘throwaway gestures’ to induce the reader to trace the vital connections between the State and global capital, Pynchon shows that his idealist politics have taken a materialist turn, a turn that is set into even sharper relief when read against the thought of political historian Ellen Meiksins Wood.

According to Meiksins Wood, ‘global capitalism is what it is not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist’. By this she means that capitalism always strives to extend its economic imperatives beyond the reach of political power, yet remains forever dependent upon the State to back up those imperatives with extra‐economic coercion: The compulsions of the market must be continually reimplanted, both in terms of domestic class relations and imperial domination.

In Vineland Pynchon shows that he is more than aware of this; it is this fusing of economic and extra economic coercion , this incarnattion of the contradictions of capital in the person of Brock Vond, who, as a ‘vampire’, functions as an allusion to the 1890s, a time when (according to Franco Moretti) Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘bled finance capital’, and when England needed to flex its imperialist muscle to stave off an inevitable decline in its economic influence. The parallels with that other period of financialization – our own, which began with the recovery of 1982‐85 (fueled by what Robert Brenner terms Reagan’s ‘Military Keynesianism for the Rich’) – are striking indeed: Reading Vineland, then, is a political and historical experience, as Pynchon continually urges us, in his allusions and asides, to ‘go to the library sometime and read about it [. . .] Look it up, check it out’ (VL 264).

Malthus' very name is associated with pessimism-only somewhat undeservedly so. Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, appeared toward the end of a tumultuous decade in Great Britain. Where Adam Smith, in his 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, had imagined a commercial society harmoniously regulated by the operations of a self-regulating market generating self-sustaining growth, the vision of the economy which Malthus presented some two decades later was rather more grim, at least for the poor majority. Lacking a theoretical rigor on par with his peers, Malthus' Essay was nevertheless soon recognized as the second foundational work of Political Economy behind Smith's Inquiry. This paper will seek to situate Malthus in his time and will argue that his popularity with ruling landed elites can be explained by their need for a champion in the debates on economic theory and by his round condemnation of the poor as the agents of their own suffering by overpopulating.

Comment expliquer qu’un mode d’organisation capitaliste –  fondé sur un principe d’accumulation continue – autorise la perpétuation d’activités qui obéissent à une autre logique et paraissent lui poser des limites? Pour résoudre cette énigme, l’ouvrage évalue les clés de lecture disponibles et formule de nouvelles propositions. 

Pour nombre d’auteurs, le capitalisme procède de forces économiques naturelles et autonomes, accompagnées ou canalisées dans un second temps par quelques politiques publiques. Il se heurte parfois à une résistance – que le terme serve à désigner une force d’obstruction passive ou une capacité de mobilisation. L’ouvrage invite à inverser la perspective et à considérer plutôt les rapports de force politiques qui débouchent sur la représentation d’un ordre économique naturel et qui expliquent le développement du capitalisme. Il examine sur ce mode les activités des entrepreneurs, mais aussi les affrontements entre chercheurs et les luttes qui ont cours au sein des administrations publiques. Dans leur ensemble et par leur articulation, différents champs composent ainsi les structures politiques de l’accumulation. Dans certains cas et sous certaines conditions, des activités non capitalistes  s’en trouvent dans le même temps confortées: de multiples agents les perçoivent comme extérieures à l’ordre économique naturel ; ils anticipent leur disparition et se persuadent qu’il suffit de laisser la nature accomplir son œuvre. Nul ne travaille à leur élimination ni ne pousse à l’organisation d’un mouvement qui en prendrait la défense.

Pour mesurer la portée de ses propositions, l’auteur retient l’exemple de l’agriculture en Roumanie : il s’efforce d’expliquer la coexistence sur ce terrain de grandes exploitations capitalistes et de petites propriétés qui entretiennent des pratiques d’autoconsommation, sans prêter à la moindre forme d’accumulation. Au-delà de ce cas d’étude, l’ouvrage affiche une visée pédagogique et offre une présentation actualisée des théories du capitalisme. Il pose par ailleurs les bases d’un nouveau programme de recherche en économie politique.

A lo largo de su historia, la democracia ateniense encontró diversos modos de oposición que pusieron, en mayor o menor medida, en peligro su persistencia. Frente a esas amenazas reales, potenciales y, en algunos casos, imaginarias, la demokratía puso en práctica una multiplicidad de dispositivos orientados a garantizar su propia conservación.
En base a ello, en la presente comunicación analizaremos de qué manera el régimen político ateniense se organizó para cumplir con dos objetivos estrechamente entrelazados: a) evitar las concentraciones de poder consideradas excesivas en tanto que pudieran resultar contradictorias con el principio de la isonomía; y b) desarrollar una identidad y uno modelo de comportamiento cívicos tendientes a favorecer la unidad y el compromiso de los ciudadanos frente a las amenazas a la democracia. El miedo a la tiranía, en tanto sentimiento generalizado, constituyó un dispositivo dinámico que se amoldó a las diferentes coyunturas favoreciendo la consecución de los objetivos enunciados.

14 Ocak 2016’da, biz Türkiye’deki yoğunlaşan baskı ortamının içinde kabuğumuza çekilmişken, radikal felsefe ve siyasetin önemli isimlerinden Ellen Meiksins Wood bir süredir mücadele ettiği kanser nedeniyle Kanada’da hayatını kaybetti. Aramızdan ayrılmamış olsaydı Citizens to Lords (Yurttaşlardan Lordlara) ve Liberty & Property (Özgürlük ve Mülkiyet) ile başladığı
muazzam projenin son ayağını muhtemelen yakında tamamlamış olacaktı.

In this paper, I bracket food as the most constitutive element of the worker’s reproduction to capital because it arguably also represents the first site of capitalist accumulation. Without the commodification of food, there would be no wage labour or basis for exploitation. By accelerating value accumulation through food production, however, capital is rapidly undermining the ground of its own being as well as ours. My paper will analyze this crisis of capitalism using Marx’s theory of the subsumption of labour under capital, arguing that it can be applied to edible matter, as can be shown with the examples of genetically modified seeds and animal protein. I use the concepts of durability and distance from food regime theory to better articulate the shape our food commodities take under the coercion of capitalist imperatives.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Politics and the Communist Manifesto - Part 1,” in Against the Current, no.72, January-February 1998. 발췌 번역; 엘린 메익신즈 우드, 이재원 옮김, ｢[해외저널에서] 신자유주의, 계급투쟁 촉발시킨다: Against the Current｣, 『중대신문』, 1998년 3월 23일자. [참고링크] http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/1151; http://news.cauon.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=326;

"This paper takes as its frame the work of political historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, who maintains that most attempts to understand the history of capitalism have tended also to naturalize it, imputing a transhistorical, latent tendency (with Adam Smith) to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ onto the whole of human history. This in turn results in an often unintentional mis-comprehension of modern capitalism as the liberation of a natural tendency towards free exchange from the unnatural constraints that tradition or outworn political systems have placed upon it. Wood posits, against such a vision of Capitalism as latent opportunity, a ‘Culture of Improvement’ that arose from coercive medieval English property relations. This ‘pristine culture of capitalism’ never managed to shake the inner contradictions of its uniquely English theory of property (which impelled landlords and tenants alike to continually increase
the rate of profit), even as it was exported throughout Europe and the British Empire, and subsequently defined the trajectory of our contemporary, ‘globalized’ capitalist expansion. Today, as Wood’s book Empire of Capital (2003) shows, that coercive Culture of Improvement is caught in a most peculiarly capitalist bind, as the purely economic ‘sphere’ both struggles to liberate itself from the boundaries of the nation state even as it is dependent upon the nation state to provide the extra-economic force required to enforce and to reproduce the ‘laws’ imperatives) of the market. Vineland, I would maintain, easily lends itself to just such a reading of property relations, for there is always such a coercive ‘Culture of Improvement’ which underlies every seemingly free commercial opportunity in the novel. Vineland is bookended by the threat of extra-economic ‘persuasion’—by Zoyd’s compulsory transfenestration on the one hand and by the sudden cancellation of Brock Vond and his C.A.M.P. anti-marijuana crusade on the other. The tentacles of the shadowy ‘They’ who control the ‘House’ that Vond can only dream of entering are cast across the globe: they figure the ‘insurance’ scam that could have kept the cash-starved Kahuna Airlines from having to endure mid-air paramilitary boardings, are obviously connected to the ‘Chipco incident,’ and are also the key to the entire subplot involving the FBI, the ‘YakMaf grapevine’ and DL’s tale of indentured servitude. Against this larger story of international commerce and coercion, I examine the specific moments of local anxiety that surface in various characters’ relations to property: in each case, behind the veil of commercial opportunity lies the hidden
capitalist imperative."

Chloé Gaboriaux, Arnault Skornicki (dir.), Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, Paris, Presses du Septentrion, 2017.

L'histoire sociale des idées politiques correspond à un authentique projet de rénovation disciplinaire : ancrer l’histoire des idées politiques dans les sciences sociales. Cependant, ce projet doit encore devenir un programme articulé, entre la sociologie des intellectuels, la généalogie foucaldienne, la sémantique historique, l’analyse du discours et des langages politiques… Sans prétendre livrer la formule magique de son unité méthodologique, cette série de contributions et d’entretiens donne à voir la pluralité et le dynamisme de l’histoire sociale des idées politiques. Elle offre non seulement un panorama international, mais aussi de nombreuses pistes méthodologiques et empiriques, que ce soit sur la notion cardinale de « contexte », le rapport de Quentin Skinner à la sociologie, le laboratoire démocratique, ou l’histoire des idées en milieu populaire. Fruit d’un important effort collectif, cet ouvrage transdisciplinaire est le premier du genre sur un domaine en pleine expansion.

Introduction
Chloé Gaboriaux & Arnault Skornicki

Première partie
Héritages

L'histoire des idées politiques entre l’ère du soupçon et l’ère du sujet : les Annales en difficulté
Alain Guéry

Les sciences sociales, Vichy et l’idée de travail : un colloque en 1941
Isabelle Gouarné

Plus qu’un miroir le long du chemin : réflexions sur la littérature, en marge de l’histoire sociale des idées politiques
Sarah Al-Matary

Le « social » dans l’histoire des idées politiques : quelques réflexions à partir du cas italien
Fausto Proietti

Deuxième partie
Quels contextes ?

1. Autour de l’oeuvre de Skinner

Idées, histoire et sciences sociales. Entretien avec Quentin Skinner
Jérémie Barthas & Arnault Skornicki

De Skinner à Weber. Contextualisme et sociologie
Arnault Skornicki

L’histoire sociale des idées politiques peut-elle s’en tenir aux intentions ?
Une analyse comparée de l’histoire intellectuelle skinnérienne et de la sociologie des idées bourdieusienne
Mathieu Hauchecorne


La mise en controverse des idées politiques : vers une histoire sociale et pragmatique de la pensée politique ?
David Smadja

La mobilité intellectuelle comme problème herméneutique : vers un modèle de la pensée politique en groupe
Dina Gusejnova

2. Articuler la pluralité des contextes

Des idées et leurs milieux. Quel contexte pour les idées politiques ?
Thibaut Rioufreyt

Au-delà de l’opposition entre analyse interne et externe : les approches énonciatives
Loïse Bilat

La langue comme institution sociale : pour une grammaire discursive des concepts. Entretien avec Jacques Guilhaumou
Alexandre Escudier & Chloé Gaboriaux

Troisième partie
Objets, temporalités, sources : le laboratoire démocratique

1. Impensés, rationalités, dispositifs

Historiciser les catégories d’analyse : le cas du genre à l’époque de la Révolution.
De l’histoire sociale comme histoire sociologique des idées
Anne Verjus

Étudier les idées en révolution. Questions de méthode
Samuel Hayat

Lire et dire la société : de l’histoire conceptuelle du politique à l’histoire sociale des idées politiques
Chloé Gaboriaux

Itinéraire d’une socio-historienne : les sciences de gouvernement comme idées en action ? Entretien avec Martine Kaluszynski
Chloé Gaboriaux & Jérôme Tournadre

2. Vers une histoire populaire des idées politiques ?

La politique hétérogène du peuple
Déborah Cohen

À la recherche des sans-voix.
Sympathisant-e-s socialistes en Oklahoma rural, 1907-1917
Marie Plassart

Resumo: Entender o funcionamento da democracia burguesa implica necessariamente compreender como o processo de acumulação de capital implica, como sublinhou incansavelmente a autora Ellen Meiksins Wood, uma separação entre a esfera econômica e a esfera política no capitalismo. Afirmar isso significa que a produção capitalista demanda que a forma de apropriação do excedente de trabalho aconteça por meios puramente econômicos, o que quer dizer, em outras palavras, que a extração de mais-valor do trabalho assalariado independe de qualquer tipo de coação explícita que force o trabalhador a se submeter ao capital. Esse mecanismo estrutural da sociedade burguesa, que dá base ao processo de valorização do valor, faz com que a submissão de toda a reprodução social aos imperativos do mercado seja fundamental para a própria existência do capitalismo. O mercado, no entanto, não deve ser aqui entendido à moda liberal, como um espaço de livre troca entre agentes econômicos que se encontram em pé de igualdade, mas como um espaço de coerção impessoal que permite a exploração. Nesse sentido, o direito cumpre uma função central no processo de acumulação, uma vez que sua existência, como já o demonstrou E. B. Pachukanis, está umbilicalmente vinculada à forma mercadoria, ou seja, ao mercado. Se é assim, talvez seja possível pensar que o capitalismo necessariamente cria, ao lado do fetichismo da mercadoria, um fetichismo jurídico.
Abstract: To understand the workings of bourgeois democracy necessarily implies understanding how the process of capital accumulation entails, as the author Ellen Meiksins Wood has tirelessly emphasized, a separation between the economic sphere and the political sphere in capitalism. To assert this means that capitalist production demands that the form of appropriation of surplus labor be effected by purely economic means, which is to say, in other words, that the extraction of surplus value from wage labor does not depend on any kind of explicit coercion that forces the worker to submit to capital. This structural mechanism of bourgeois society, which gives rise to the process of valorization of value, renders the submission of all social reproduction to the imperatives of the market fundamental for the very existence of capitalism. The market, however, should not be understood here in the liberal fashion, as a space of free exchange between economic agents who are on an equal footing, but as a space of impersonal coercion that allows exploitation. In this sense, law plays a central role in the process of accumulation, since its existence, as has already been shown by E. B. Pachukanis, is umbilically linked to the commodity form, that is, to the market. If this is so, it may be possible to think that capitalism necessarily creates, alongside the commodity fetishism, a legal fetishism.

Veranstaltung im Rahmen der Reihe "Streit ums Politische 2018/19: »Demokratie ohne Mehrheit?«"
"Erinnerung ans Proletariat. Von der sozialen Bestreitung der Demokratie"
https://www.schaubuehne.de/de/seiten/streit-ums-politischeaktuell.html

https://soundcloud.com/user-299153345/streit-ums-politische-heinz-bude-im-gesprach-mit-patrick-eiden-offe

This Chapter demonstrates that religious humanitarianism of the Middle Ages advanced a view of justice which was an integral part of the feudal order, characterised by surplus extraction based on relations of personal/juridical dependence and carried out by means of political/military coercion.With the development of capitalism a totally different social setting emerges and with it the nature of Just War Theory is gradually fundamentally transformed.

Abstrakt: Ellen Meiksins Wood jest teoretyczką łączoną, wraz z Robertem Brennerem, z nurtem zwanym " politycznym marksizmem ". W niniejszym artykule postaram się przybliżyć, czym wyróżnia się ten nurt. W pierwszej części przedstawiam krótką charakterystykę " marksizmu politycznego " jako nurtu, w którym centrum zainteresowań stanowią stosunki reprodukcji społeczeństwa kapitalistycznego, oraz rekonstrukcję sporu o przejście od feudalizmu do kapitalizmu, czyli sporu o genezę tego społeczeństwa. Jednocześnie staram się wskazać, jak debata dotycząca problemu powstania kapitalizmu stanowi kluczowe zagadnienie, wokół rozwiązania którego zogniskowane zostały badania teoretyczki. W części drugiej omawiam to, w jaki sposób Meiksins Wood rozumie pojęcie " klasy " , a także jej badania dotyczące demokracji w antycznej Grecji.

'Work as Improvement – Husbandry, Housekeeping and Capitalism in 16th and 17th Century England', Slagmark - Tidsskrift for Idéhistorie (Danish journal for intellectual history), 2017 (peer-reviewed)

This article traces the development of a new attitude to work as improvement in early modern England. By focusing on agricultural manuals from the period, the author shows how the attitude to work as improvement developed as a response by yeomen and gentleman farmers to their increasing subjection to market imperatives. In contrast to the ethics of housekeeping, which stressed the good maintenance and ordering of the ‘house’ in the broadest sense as the primary aim of social and economic activities, the new idea of improvement focused on activities directed at the market. This idea established new distinctions between good and bad work, and it created new criteria for valorizing different types of agricultural activities. The constant drive to measure the value of agricultural work in terms of market price, and to continually raise productivity and efficiency and make use of the latest techniques and inventions became pivotal for these agricultural writers. The idea of work as improvement had a wide range of new moral, cultural and political dimensions, all of which consolidated into a more coherent ideology of improvement by the late 16th century.

Co-écrit avec Frédérick Guillaume Dufour et Ellen Meiksins Wood. Cet article est un entretien avec l'une des fondatrices du courant du marxisme politique, Ellen Meiksins Wood. L'article aborde et analyse quelques concepts clés du courant du marxisme politique comme la théorie de l'histoire, la mondialisation et l'impérialisme, les classes sociales et l'histoire des idées politiques.

La crítica inmanente de la modernidad del capital supone, sostendré, una especial y renovada atención a la especificidad histórica de la sociedad capitalista, comprendida como el marco social en cuyo seno la teoría crítica cobra sentido y validez. Esta forma de teoría reúne dimensiones normativas y descriptivas, constituyendo un análisis del capitalismo con una explícita intencionalidad emancipatoria. La teoría crítica puede formularse entonces como una teoría históricamente autorreflexiva sobre la contradicción entre las formas opresivas y las potencialidades liberadoras en la modernidad del capital.Fil: Martín, Facundo Nahuel. Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas. Instituto de Filosofía "Ezequiel de Olaso" - Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Filosofía "Ezequiel de Olaso"; Argentin

Resumo: O artigo resgata a proposta de Ellen Wood sobre a necessidade de sistematizar uma teoria sobre classes que embase uma renovação do materialismo histórico. Wood pretende em sua renovação embasar a luta pela Democracia Substantiva em que esteja ao alcance do poder do povo não só os ritos que desembocam em uma representação política, mas também a real possibilidade de isegoria, de autodeterminação dos produtores, mediante a "liberdade de livre associação (sic)". Tal intento só pode ocorrer a partir da organização da classe operária, de uma classe como sujeito histórico, para a luta de classes contra os apropriadores amparados pelo Poder Estatal. Para isto, o artigo resgata dados biográficos, o ideal humano e o contexto social da produção de Ellen Wood para compreender a especificidade histórica das suas ideias. Com isso, explica-se o motivo pelo qual a autora entende que a concepção de classe que atende ao empreendimento é a concepção formulada pelo historiador britânico E. P. Thompson.

It is possible to draw upon Marx’s thinking without emphasizing an automatic relationship between an economic ‘base’ and a political ‘superstructure’. The development of capitalism must then be understood as resulting from the ‘conceptual separation’ of the economic and political issues. However, the research that favours this approach fails to provide the tools for a precise and systematic study of the political work which makes this separation possible. For his part, through the development of field theory and the emphasis on the notion of symbolic power, Pierre Bourdieu offers the means to analyse the political work of multiple agents, but he does not formulate a theory of capitalism tailored to his findings. It seems worthwhile to take up and extend some of his proposals to open up avenues of thought in this direction. It is then about considering that different fields coexist, each of which lends itself to a political struggle based on the assertion of symbolic power; each field contributes to a ‘conceptual separation’ of the economic and political issues, which is itself constitutive of capitalism. As a result, production and trade operations seem to be part of a natural and autonomous process. Capital can thus be accumulated without necessitating the direct use of force. The combination of fields can lend itself to certain variations. It always shapes the political structures of accumulation.