Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T16:56:44.026Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Pragmatic Sources of Modern Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2010

Martijn Konings
Martijn Konings*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Economy, University of Sydney [martijn.konings@sydney.edu.au].
Get access

Abstract

Much work in present-day political economy still adheres to an economistic understanding of how markets operate - evident above all in the tendency to concentrate on the disciplinary and constraining effects of globalization. Using American power in financial affairs as an example, this essay proposes a shift of focus towards the constitution of actor capacities, which will permit more accurate conceptualizations of highly leveraged forms of agency. To this end, it turns to the philosophical foundations of the American pragmatist tradition, exploring the way in which it can inform a deeper understanding of the enabling qualities of institutions, the processes through which actor capacities emerge and the operation of power.

Résumé

Présentement, l’économie politique a clairement pour objectif premier de se démarquer du déterminisme économique. Cependant la focalisation sur les contraintes de la globalisation, par exemple – que l’on songe au pouvoir infrastructurel au sens de Michael Mann de la finance américaine – empêche de construire une représentation des formes hautement sophistiquées dudit pouvoir financier.

Tourner le regard vers la constitution d’un lieu de pouvoir et, à cette fin, explorer les voies que propose la philosophie pragmatiste américaine pour mieux comprendre les caractéristiques institutionnelles et les processus qui rendent possible l’émergence d’un lieu de pouvoir, tel est l’objectif de l’article.

Zusammenfassung

Zur Zeit hat die Wirtschaftspolitik eindeutig als erstes Ziel sich vom Wirtschaftsdeterminismus abzusetzen. Da jedoch hauptsächlich die Zwänge der Globalisierung im Vordergrund stehen – so die infrastrukturelle Macht, im Sinne von Michael Mann, der amerikanischen Finanzwelt – bleibt eine Darstellung der komplizierten Formen dieser Finanzmacht aus. Dieser Aufsatz will seinen Blick auf die Schaffung eines Machtzentrums richten und, zu diesem Zweck, die Wege erkunden, die die pragmatische amerikanische Philosophie vorschlägt, um die institutionnellen Charakteristika und die Abläufe zu verstehen, die ein solches Machtzentrum möglich machen.

Keywords

Pragmatismpolitical economyagencypowerstatePragmatismeÉconomie politiqueAgencyPouvoirÉtatPragmatismusWirtschaftspolitikAgenturMachtStaat
Type
Research Articles
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , April 2010 , pp. 55 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © A.E.S. 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, Philip, 1977. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1).Google Scholar
Aitken, Rob, 2007. Performing Capital. Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance (New York, Palgrave).Google Scholar
Altvater, Eltmar, 2009. “Postneoliberalism or Postcapitalism? The Failure of Neoliberalism in the Financial Market Crisis”, Development Dialogue, 51.Google Scholar
Archer, Margaret S., 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Arrighi, Giovanni, 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (London/New York, Verso).Google Scholar
Baker, Dean, 2009. Plunder and Blunder. The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (Sausalito, Polipoint Press).Google Scholar
Beckert, Jens, 2002. Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations of Economic Efficiency (Princeton, Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Beckert, Jens, 2003. “Economic Action and Embeddedness: How Shall we Conceptualize Economic Action?”, Journal of Economic Issues, 37.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Richard J., 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press).Google Scholar
Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, 1966. The Social Construction of Reality (New York, Anchor Books).Google Scholar
Berk, Gerald and Galvan, Dennis, 2009. “How People Experience and Change Institutions: A Field Guide to Creative Syncretism”, Theory & Society, 38 (6).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beunza, Daniel and Stark, David, 2004. “Tools of the Trade: the Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room”, Industrial and Corporate Change, 13 (2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhaskar, Roy, 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (3rded.New York/LondonRoutledge).Google Scholar
Bloch, Ernst, 1986. The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MIT Press).Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1991. Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (with Eagleton, Terry) (1992). “Doxa and Common Life”, New Left Review, 1(191).Google Scholar
Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, [1914] 1967. Other People’s Money and how the Bankers Use it (New York, Harper & Row).Google Scholar
Bratsis, Peter, 2006. Everyday Life and the State (Boulder, Paradigm).Google Scholar
Brenner, Robert, 2009. “What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America. The Origins of the Present Crisis”, Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, UCLA, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith, 1996. “Performativity’s Social Magic”, in Schatzki, Theodor R. and Natter, Wolfgang, eds., The social and political body (New York, Guilford Press).Google Scholar
Butler, Judith, 1997. Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative (London, Routledge).Google Scholar
Caplan, Leslie J. and Schooler, Carmi, 2007. “Socioeconomic Status and Financial Coping Strategies: The Mediating Role of Perceived Control”, Social Psychology Quarterly, 70 (1).Google Scholar
Clark, Gordon L. and Tracey, Paul, 2004. Global Competitiveness and Innovation: An Agent-Centered Perspective, (New York, Palgrave).Google Scholar
Crotty, James, 2009. “Structural Causes of the Global Financial Crisis: A Critical Assessment of the ‘New Financial Architecture’”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33 (4).Google Scholar
Da Silva, Filipe Carreira, 2007. G.H. Mead: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Polity).Google Scholar
De Cecco, Marcello, (s.d.). “The Lender of Last Resort”, CIDEI Working Paper n° 49.Google Scholar
De Goede, Marieke, 2001. “Discourses of Scientific Finance and the Failure of Long-Term Capital Management”, New Political Economy, 6 (2).Google Scholar
De Goede, Marieke, 2003. “Beyond Economism in International Political Economy”, Review of International Studies, 29 (1).Google Scholar
De Goede, Marieke, 2005. Virtue, Fortune and Faith: a Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press).Google Scholar
Dalton, Benjamin, 2004. “Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu”, Sociological Theory, 22 (4).Google Scholar
Dewey, John, [1920] 1957. Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston, Beacon Press).Google Scholar
Dewey, John, 1927. The public and its Problems (Denver, Alan Swallow).Google Scholar
Dewey, John, 1930. Individualism Old and New (New York, Minton, Balch & Company).Google Scholar
Dewey, John, [1925] 1998. “Nature, Life and Body-mind”, in Hickmanand, Larry and Alexander, Thomas M., eds., The Essential Dewey vol. 1. Pragmatism, Education, Democracy (Bloomington, Indiana University Press).Google Scholar
Dodds, Agnes E., Lawrence, Jeanette A. and Valsiner, Jaan, 1997. “The Personal and the Social. Mead’s Theory of the ‘Generalized other’”, Theory & Psychology, 7 (4).Google Scholar
Dunn, Robert G., 1997. “Self, Identity, and Difference. Mead and the poststructuralists”, Sociological Quarterly, 38 (4).Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry, 1991. Ideology: An Introduction (London, Verso).Google Scholar
Engelen, Ewald, Ismail, Erturk, Julie, Froud, Adam, Leaver and Karel, Williams, 2010. “Financial Innovation: Frame, Conjucture and Bricolage”, Economy & Society, 39 (1).Google Scholar
Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mische, Ann, 1998. “What is Agency?”, American Journal of Sociology, 103 (4).Google Scholar
Feffer, Andrew, 1993. The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, Vintage Books).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of The Prison (New York, Vintage Books).Google Scholar
Fromm, Erich, 1941. Escape from Freedom (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston).Google Scholar
Gamble, Andrew, 2009. The Spectre at the Feast. Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession (New York, Palgrave).Google Scholar
Garnar, Andrew, 2006. “Power, Actions, Signs: between Peirce and Foucault”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 42 (3).Google Scholar
Gemici, Kurtulus, 2008. “Karl Polanyi and the Antinomies of Embeddedness”, Socio-Economic Review, 6 (1).Google Scholar
Germain, Randall D., 1997. The International Organization of Credit. States and Global Finance in the World-Economy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony, 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley, University of California Press).Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, Polity Press).Google Scholar
Gowan, Peter, 2009. “Crisis in the Heartland: Consequences of the New Wall Street System”, New Left Review, 55.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio, 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, Lawrence and Wishart).Google Scholar
Harrington, Brooke, 2008. Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and Stock Market Populism, (Princeton, Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, Clarendon).Google Scholar
Helleiner, Eric, 1994. States and the Reemergence of Global Finance. From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Ithaca, Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Hobson, John M., 2000. The State and International Relations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Hodgson, Geoffrey M., 2004. “Reclaiming Habit for Institutional Economics”, Journal of Economic Psychology, 25 (5).Google Scholar
Holzman, Lois Hood, 1996. “Pragmatism and Dialectical Materialism in Language Development”, in Daniels, Harry (ed.), An introduction to Vygotsky (London/New York, Routledge).Google Scholar
Husserl, Edmund, [1931] 1999. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Dordrecht/Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers).Google Scholar
Immergluck, Dan, 2009. Foreclosed: High Risk Lending, Deregulation and the Undermining of America’s Mortgage Market (Ithaca, Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Jessop, Bob, 1990. State Theory. Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Cambridge, Polity).Google Scholar
Joas, Hans, 1993. Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Joas, Hans, 2004. “Morality in an Age of Contingency”, Acta Sociologica, 47 (4).Google Scholar
Jones, Andrew, 2008. “Beyond Embeddedness: Economic Practices and the Invisible Dimensions of Transnational Business Activity”, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (1).Google Scholar
Knafo, Samuel, 2008. “Critical Approaches and the Problem of Social Construction”, Working paper n° 3 (Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex).Google Scholar
Konings, Martijn, 2009. “Rethinking NeoLiberalism and the Subprime Crisis: beyond the Re-Regulation Agenda”, Competition and Change, 13 (2).Google Scholar
Knorr Cetina, Karin and Bruegger, Urs, 2002. “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets”, American Journal of Sociology, 107 (4).Google Scholar
Krippner, Gretar, 2002. “The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the Paradigm of Economic Sociology”, Theory and Society, 30 (6).Google Scholar
Krippner, Gretar, 2007. “The Making of US Monetary Policy: Central Bank Transparency and the Neoliberal Dilemma”, Theory & Society, 36 (6).Google Scholar
Langley, Paul, 2008. The Everyday Life of Global Finance. Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America (Oxford, Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Lee, Benjamin, 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press).Google Scholar
Livingston, James, 1994. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press).Google Scholar
Livingston, James, 2001. Pragmatism, Feminism and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York/London, Routledge).Google Scholar
Lloyd, Brian (1997) Left out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press).Google Scholar
Lukes, Steven, 1974. Power: A Radical View (New York/London, Macmillan).Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Donald, 2006. An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MIT Press).Google Scholar
Mann, Michael, 1984. “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results”, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 25.Google Scholar
Mann, Michael, 1993. The Sources of Social Power vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Martin, Randy, 2002. Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia, Temple University Press).Google Scholar
Mead, George Herbert, 1934. Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Miller, Daniel, 2002. “Turning Callon the Right Way up”, Economy & Society, 31 (2).Google Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy, 2005. “Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century”, in Steinmetz, George, ed., The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological others (Durham, Duke University Press).Google Scholar
Montgomerie, Johnna, 2007. “Financialization and Consumption: an Alternative account of Rising Consumer Debt Levels in Anglo-America”, CRESC Working Paper Series n° 43, (Manchester, University of Manchester).Google Scholar
Moorjani, Angela B., 2000. Beyond Fetishism and other Excursions in Psychopragmatics (New York, St. Martin’s Press).Google Scholar
Muller, John P., 1996. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad. Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Peirce, and Lacan (New York, Routledge).Google Scholar
Novak, William J., 2008. “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State”, American Historical Review, June.Google Scholar
Palan, Ronen, 1999. “Susan Strange: A Great International Theorist”, Review of International Political Economy, 6 (2).Google Scholar
Panitch, Leo and Gindin, Sam, 2000. “Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination”, in Panitch, Leo and Leys, Colin, eds., Socialist Register (London, Merlin).Google Scholar
Panitch, Leo and Gindin, Sam, 2005. “Finance and American Empire”, in Panitch, Leo and Leys, Colin, eds., Socialist Register (London, Merlin).Google Scholar
Pearlin, Leonard I. and Schooler, Carmi, 1978. “The Structure of Coping”, Journal of Health and Social Behavior’, 19 (1).Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S., [1877] 1992. “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, in Houser, Nathan and Kloesel, Christian J. W., eds., The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (Bloomington, University of Indian Press).Google Scholar
Phillips, Kevin, 2006. American Theocracy (New York, Viking).Google Scholar
Polanyi, Karl, 1957. The Great Transformation (Boston, Beacon Press).Google Scholar
Ross, Dorothy, 1991. The Origins of American Social Science (New York, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Roy, William G., 1997. Socializing Capital. The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Sarai, David, 2009. “US Structural Power and the Internationalization of the US Treasury”, in Panitch, Leo and Konings, Martijn, eds., American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance (New York, Palgrave).Google Scholar
Scharpf, Fritz W., 1997. Games Real Actors Play: Actor-Centered Institutionalism in Policy Research (Boulder, Westview).Google Scholar
Schutz, Alfred, 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, Northwestern University Press).Google Scholar
Seabrooke, Leonard, 2001. US Power in International Finance. The Victory of Dividends (New York, Palgrave).Google Scholar
Strange, Susan, 1988. States and Markets (London, Pinter).Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles, 1999. “To Follow a Rule…”, in Shusterman, Richard, ed., Bourdieu. A Critical Reader (Oxford/Malden, Blackwell).Google Scholar
Underhill, Geoffrey, 2000. “State, Market, and Global Political Economy: Genealogy of an (Inter-?) Discipline”, International Affairs, 76 (4).Google Scholar
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, 2007. The Self Awakened. Pragmatism Unbound, (Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Voloshinov, Valentin, 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Walter, Andrew, 1993. World Power and World Money. The Role of Hegemony and International Monetary order (New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf).Google Scholar
Westbrook, Robert B., 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca/London, Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Wiley, Norbert, 1994. The Semiotic Self (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Winch, Peter, 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul).Google Scholar
Wood, Ellen, 1995. Democracy against Capitalism. Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Wray, L. Randall, 2009. “The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism: a Minskian Approach”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33 (4).Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj, 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York/London, Verso).Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj, 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, Duke University Press).Google Scholar