Economic and Political Sociology Workshop

Adaner Usmani

Why Some Are So Rich: What’s Imperialism Got to Do with It?

(Note: This is a bit of an odd paper for EPS, since there are no pretensions to original research, and no ambitions to publish it in an academic venue. What I’d like most, in terms of feedback, is suggestions about how this paper could be made more compelling for a lay (Left) audience–aside from abridging it. What sorts of doubts persist, about the thesis? Thanks in advance for reading.)

This paper puts forward two theses. First, I argue that imperialism is unimportant to explaining the initial take-off in European growth, which was a consequence, instead, of propitious but entirely endogenous transformations of its social structure. Second, it is clear that even through the modern heyday of European empire (ca. 1830 to 1914), none of the arguments highlighting the exceptional benefits of colonial possessions (the import of raw materials and the export of manufactured goods, the export of surplus labour, and the possibility of super-profits on capital exports) are empirically sustainable. Of course, even if imperialism can’t explain take-off, and did not bring exceptional benefits to European populations at-large, this does not mean that it was without economic consequences. Empire did benefit certain segments of the metropolitan population, which helps explain its persistence as policy. Moreover, the impact of imperialism on the periphery was certainly severe.

usmani.pdf

Mark Cohen

Taking the bellicist framework for the analysis of state-formation as a theoretical starting point, this paper develops an account of the origin and dynamics of the political structures of Japan during the Tokugawa Era (1603-1868). The theoretical salience of this period in Japanese history is that whereas before and after it, the state-building cycle of competitive military buildup, fiscal expansion, and administrative consolidation was in full force in Japan, during the Tokugawa era, unlike in Europe during the same time period, the bellicist mechanism jammed up. States stopped making war, and so war could not continue to make states. This is consistent with the bellicist framework insofar as both military conflict and state-building ceased, but that framework lacks the capacity to explain why in this period the state-building cycle ceased operating. In order to do so, this paper revises the bellicist framework with three elements that together represent a theory of the political-economic environment of state formation: 1) the determination of the positions and associated strategies of agents by the structure of social-property relations; 2) the organization-for-conflict and conflict-of- organizations among those positions; and 3) institutional path-dependency produced by the resolution of conflicts.

cohen-eps.pdf

cohen-eps-figures.pdf

Ihsan Ercan Sadi

In this paper, I critically assess the use of game theory for economic historical analysis by scrutinizing knowledge production processes and the shifting of authority in economics. I argue that one can understand the growing literature that utilizes game theoretical approaches in economic history as a product of deliberate efforts to both maintain and reproduce the boundaries and internal hierarchies in economics. In the first section, I examine the institutionalization of boundary-drawing processes within the economics discipline by tracing the lines between neoclassical, original institutional, and neoinstitutional economics, while trying to locate game theoretical approaches to economic history analysis into this picture. I place special emphasis on their comprehensions of time, uncertainty and power. In the second section, I address the relationships between publishing and employment patterns through an examination of the fields of specialization within the discipline. I then move to an analysis of the professional successes of 24 selected prominent economic historians who utilize game theory in their field of research. In this regard, I provide a brief account on their academic backgrounds and professional locations and affiliations. Lastly, I present figures that show their publishing histories in both mainstream and heterodox journals in a comparative perspective.

sadi-eps

Mark Cohen

The dominant historical accounts of the Tokugawa era (1600-1868) in Japan share with prominent theories of the causal interrelation between the two processes of state formation and the transition to capitalism in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the assumption that the expansion of commercial activity represents a force fundamentally contradictory to pre-capitalist political institution, and which challenges rulers to either adapt or be undermined. Using an alternative theoretical account, based on the work of Robert Brenner, that situates commerce within the social property relations characteristic of pre-capitalist societies, this paper argues that the economic trends of the latter half of the Tokugawa era had very little to do with the shogunate’s and domains’ chronic fiscal crises and administrative weakness. Instead, the class of “peasant” landlords succeeded in claiming a portion of the agrarian surplus from poorer peasants and then successfully defended it against a lordly assault in the eighteenth century. The entry of this rural elite into commerce, far from representing a force that in some way contradicted the existing political structures, entailed winning from the traditional urban merchants and artisans a significant share of the relatively fixed market for consumption by daimyo and samurai concentrated in the castle-towns, without challenging the limits of, let alone pushing to transform, those structures.

cohen-eps.pdf

Glen Pine

Short-Term Class Mobility, Class Categories, and Class Operationalizations

This paper presents and analyzes four findings pertaining to short-term class mobility in the US over recent decades. Analysis of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) panel data reveals a high degree of intragenerational class mobility over two-year periods, given six-class versions of Wright and Erikson-Goldthorpe (E-G) schemas. Despite the mobility, the data also reveal highly static class structures over the observed periods, as well as some statistical correlations between present income and class location twenty years earlier. Unlike NLSY79 data, Forbes Richest Americans data shows almost no downward mobility during the relevant periods. The paper draws several conclusions from these findings.

Madhavi Cherian: Economic Policymaking and the Role of the State: A Comparative Study of India and Indonesia

This paper examines the view that the turn to neoliberalism by developing countries is inevitable, due to the structural constraints in the form of fiscal and external account deficits that are inherent in the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) strategy adopted by late late developers. However, an analysis of the specific features of deregulation and liberalization in India and Indonesia reveals that changes in policy regime tend to be responsive to the evolving needs of the domestic bourgeoisie. The dirigiste regime generates its own internal class dynamics, which leads to demands for changes in the macroeconomic policy regime. While multilateral institutions exercise tremendous leverage due to their control over international currency, the imposition of structural reforms is limited by the class constellation in the host country. The selective nature of reforms, wherein only parts of the neoliberal policy prescriptions of the IMF and The World Bank are implemented, testifies to the importance of domestic class constellations and limitations of the multilateral institutions’ ability to impose structuralreforms. This in turn questions the idea of neoliberalism as a uniformly applicable set of policy measures that are a rational response by developing states to the shortcomings of the state led developmental paradigm.

Jonah Birch: Communism, Mobilization and the Welfare State

In this paper I want to suggest that there is a gap in the existing social science literature on the welfare state, such that even the most robust models struggle to account for several of the key developments of recent years. The problem is that all of the major perspectives in the sociological literature on the welfare state failure to account for two interrelated factors: first, the divergent effects of national-specific histories of Communist versus social-democratic dominance of the labor movement and left during the post-WWII period; and second, the relative propensity of workers and other aggrieved groups to engage in mass, cross-sectoral, political mobilizations in order to achieve desired goals - an outcome significantly influenced by the specific, contradictory legacies bequeathed by the two core political currents that competed for hegemony over the West European left after the War. These variables, I will argue, help us to understand the increasingly divergent experiences of welfare state reform in France and Germany over the course of the past fifteen years: most importantly, these two traditional “coordinated market economies”, with their Bismarckian welfare states, have been separated by the inability of would-be reformers in France to liberalize state labor market policies, and other parallel policy and institutional arenas of France’s political economy. That failure was not the result of a lack of desire on the part of employers or state actors, but instead reflected the relative breadth and strength of oppositional mobilizations there.

birch-eps.pdf

Nada Matta and Rene Rojas: The Strategic Logic of Hamas’ Suicide Terror During the Second Intifada

After reviewing the dominant theories of suicide bombings and pointing out their shortcomings, this paper will present an alternative rational-strategic model of terrorism. Before doing so, however, some space will be dedicated to discussing and clarifying the assumptions that underpin the existing literature on the subject. Once this is taken care of and our case selection has been justified, the paper will develop our explanation for the use of suicide terror by Hamas during the Al-Aksa Intifada. We then proceed to carefully lay out our model, linking it to our underlying set of assumptions. Next, we offer a presentation of the institutional and political context that promoted the use of this tactic by Hamas. The final empirical section of the paper will present evidence of Hamas’ strategic decision-making within this context. Relying on the public statements of the Hamas leadership during the Intifada, we show that the group’s use of suicide terror, though subject to a complex array of influences and often responding to countervailing pressures, was governed by rational calculations linked to the strategic aim of weakening the occupation. Specifically, we demonstrate that suicide attacks were deployed in order to promote a resistance pole that could challenge the dominance of the Palestinian Authority and therefore generate the capacity to favorably shift the balance of forces vis-à-vis Israel. To make the most persuasive case possible for a rational-strategic use of suicide bombings, we pay close attention to a particular juncture of the Al-Aksa Intifada (2003-2004) during which the logic of the tactic can be most called into question.

mattarojas-eps-suicide-terror.pdf

Neil Brenner and David Wachsmuth: Territorial Competitiveness: Lineages, Practices, Ideologies

Since the 1980s, the notion of territorial competitiveness has become one of the foundations of mainstream, “entrepreneurial” approaches to local economic development. This chapter explores the lineages of territorial competitiveness discourses within and beyond the field of urban planning, their intellectual basis, and their implications for public policies oriented towards promoting local economic development. We argue that, despite its contemporary pervasiveness, the concept of territorial competitiveness is premised upon flawed intellectual assumptions, and serves primarily as a means of ideological mystification in the sphere of local policy development.

Brenner and Wachsmut 2010.pdf