Stanford University Press Blog

Engaging Iran and Cuba

When it comes to adversarial states, diplomatic aims are better served by engagement, not isolation.

by GEOFFREY WISEMAN

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the P5+1 Talks with Iran in Geneva, Switzerland.

The current heated, even toxic, debates in the United States about the Iran nuclear deal and President Obama’s agreement with Raul Castro to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba reflect what has long been a core US policy issue: Should the United States directly engage its adversaries? Or should it seek to isolate them.

Other Western democracies place more faith than the United States in diplomacy’s capacity to mitigate bad behavior by recalcitrant states.

For nearly a century this issue has been central to US foreign policy. Isolating an adversarial state can, of course, be expressed through trade embargoes and economic sanctions, but the United States has often also imposed a form of symbolic and formal isolation by refusing to have diplomatic relations with the state. Instead of engaging—typically through recognition and the mutual exchange of embassies and ambassadors—the path of isolation has been taken.

There are many examples of this “traditional” US refusal to establish full formal diplomatic relations with adversarial states: the Soviet Union (1917–33), the People’s Republic of China (1949–79), Cuba (1959–2015), and Vietnam (1975–95); this approach has also been applied to Libya under Qadhafi (1969–2003) and to Iran (1979–present) and North Korea (1948–present)—and more often than not, this policy has frustrated US foreign policy goals.

It's Not About The Donald

Trump’s popularity belies Americans’ desire for an “outsider” voice.

by CEDRIC DE LEON & MANALI DESAI

Donald Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

The pundits say that Donald Trump’s perch atop the Republican primary polls is due to Trump himself: that he’s different from the others, that he talks off-script and tells the truth. But Mr. Trump owes his recent political success to something systemic in American politics, namely, the absence of a coherent political agenda that adequately addresses mounting social inequality in the US. The resulting detachment and alienation experienced by so many people has made an “outsider” spouting extreme and often nonsensical views seem attractive.

Mr. Trump owes his recent political success to something systemic in American politics.

Much has been said of the Trump phenomenon, but we want to question the emphasis on his personal qualities and the notion that he is a charismatic figure. Political observers attributed the August 6th primary debate’s blockbuster ratings to the “Trump show”; we take a different view. To us, his ascendancy suggests that there are considerable swaths of the electorate who are disarticulated from the party system; that is, folks who used to heed the call of their party no longer do. These voters, mainly on the right, are willing to listen to someone who at least sounds different even if that difference lacks substance. 

Partial Citizens

A global perspective on care work.

by RHACEL SALAZAR PARREÑAS

Across the globe families depend on the labor of migrant women to clean their homes and care for their loved ones. They include Salvadoran and Mexican women who clean homes in the United States; Polish and Ukrainian women caring for the elderly in Italy; Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Nepalese women caring for families in East and West Asia; Ethiopian and Kenyan women cleaning homes in West Asia; and Filipino women cleaning and caring for families in more than 160 countries.

Host countries offer domestic workers partial citizenship and few legal protections.

The majority of these migrant workers are from Southeast Asia (an estimated count of 1.8 million Indonesian and 1.4 million Filipino domestic workers are employed outside of their country). Their work varies across nations; those in Israel and Taiwan mostly do elder care work, those in Canada and Denmark primarily provide child care, and workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and countries in West Asia including Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and among others Qatar do what they describe as the “all around work” of cooking, caring and cleaning households. In return, host countries offer these workers partial citizenship and few legal protections.

Litonomics

Economics and literary criticism are far from mutually uncomprehending strangers.

by PAUL CROSTHWAITE

In David Lodge's 1988 campus novel Nice Work, the protagonist, Robyn, comes across her literary theorist boyfriend, Charles, reading a book that appears, on the face of it, to be a far cry from his usual fare of Derrida and Lacan. Spotting the title, The Financial Revolution Robyn expresses surprise that Charles "could ever get interested in business." He replies: "This isn't business … It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon—arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rate. It’s like literary theory”. Charles is planning “an article about what’s going on in the City”; later, he will succumb to the lure of London’s financial district and take a job as a strategist at an investment bank.

A “literarity-inflected” sensibility might be well placed to offer some genuine analytical traction on the world of finance.

Lodge’s novel points, then, to a certain—all-too-ready—affinity between the practice and rhetoric of high finance and the theoretical discourses central to the study of literature. In positing the “seductiveness” of finance for the literary theorist, Nice Work anticipates recent critiques by the likes of Joshua Clover and Annie McClanahan (themselves literary critics and, in Clover’s case, a poet) of what Clover calls “literarity-inflected economics." For Clover, McClanahan, and others, approaches to contemporary finance informed by the concerns of literary studies are liable merely to reproduce the ideology of their object of study, rhapsodizing over the weightlessness, opacity, and abstraction of a new “economy of signs,” and occluding the resolutely material processes that continue to underlie the financial system and place limits on its expansion.

The End of An Illusion

Economic theory is deeply theological; to imagine otherwise makes it a dangerous knowledge.

by JOSEPH VOGL

"In God We Trust." Photo by Kevin Dooley. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Let me begin with a few remarks concerning the figure of Eric Packer in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. In a certain way, he is not only an allegory of contemporary finance capitalism but also the fallen angel of an illusion—of the illusion that markets and especially financial markets tend towards equilibrium, that they assure perfect allocation and the best distribution of information, that they finally create a sort of social order. This illusion represents the kernel of liberal market theories from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” up to the present and still characterizes what economists have named the “efficient market hypothesis.”

This theory—which has been developed since the 1970s and became dominant or hegemonic in the knowledge of financial markets—holds (to put it very briefly) that it is financial markets which depict market activity in their most beautiful purity. Unburdened by transaction costs, unencumbered by transport and by the tribulations of production, they are the ideal stages for pricing mechanisms and perfect competition.

The Economic Imagination

The magical thinking of economists is a pathology of thought with deep historical roots.

by MIKE HILL & WARREN MONTAG 

God's hand from "The Creation of Adam," Michelangelo's world famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

To apply the term “magical” to modern economic thought is to suggest that, despite the extensive formalization of the discipline, above all, its use of econometric models to analyze its data, there remains within it an unassimilated and unexamined residue of irrational thought. Moreover, the irrationality is most evident in its basic assumptions: not only the assumptions about human action, but even more about what is increasingly acknowledged to be the theoretical Achilles heel of economics since its inception in the eighteenth century, the concept of the market itself. It is here that the term “magical,” which allowed us to see the irrationality that is reproduced rather than eliminated by its formal apparatus, may, if we’re not careful, prevent us from seeing how the magical thinking of economists is not simply a pathology of thought, but is historically determined in ways that are so profoundly embedded in economic theory that they have proven to be remarkably resistant to analysis.

The theological underpinnings of economic theory are becoming increasingly obvious.

The physiocrats saw the market as a “second providence,” an extension of God’s design (with or without God) through the unintended consequences of human activity. As Martijn Konings has noted, later critics of this idea saw it as a kind of idolatry: the market could be granted autonomous agency and knowledge only on the basis of a forgetting and a repression of the fact that it was a product of and dependent on human activity. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein explores the fear that such an idol inspires: the idea that a mute and unmoving Golden Calf could become a Golem, that is, come alive, free itself from human control, and destroy its creator.

A Religion of Unbelief

On the rift between mundane money and its mystical financial shadow.

by NOAM YURAN

CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I have always been somewhat suspicious of attempts to theorize money in linguistic terms. Though the symbolic and conventional aspects of money make a parallel with language seem attractive, such attempts usually refrain from considering the consequences of the fact that money belongs to the order of private property, which is strictly opposed to the common sphere of language. Wouldn't conceiving of money as language force us to confront the abhorrent, monstrous possibility of words that can be owned?

That is the big achievement of Martijn Konings's The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, which conceptualizes money as an icon, drawing from the religious meaning of the term, as a symbol that represents through absence what cannot be represented, as well as from its place in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory, as a sign based on a similarity to what it signifies. The full significance of this attempt becomes clear in the last chapter of the book, where Konings addresses the deepest political-economic riddle of our time: the sweeping victory of neoliberalism. Given that the neoliberal order is most harmful to the material prosperity of most people, some writers tend to think it was established "from above" by an alliance of capitalists, politicians, economic think tanks, and the media. Konings confronts the mystery such explanations evade, namely, how neoliberalism was embraced by those people whose prosperity it threatens.

The Paradox of Economism

Modern money and finance is held together by faith, magic, and belief.

by MARTIJN KONINGS

"Money roll." Photo by Zack McCarthy. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Among progressively minded theorists and other commentators, the financial crisis of 2007-08 produced an instant consensus that the days of neoliberalism—which involved above all financial expansion and capital-friendly public policies—were over. As a consequence, the turn to austerity over the past years, which has been extraordinarily effective in making the world a worse place to live, took that community completely by surprise. The unexpected rise of austerity suggests how right Slavoj Žižek was, when at the height of the crisis, he encouraged talking and thinking instead of jumping to conclusions and rushing to action.

For some decades now, progressively minded social scientists have argued that markets are too important to leave to economists—indeed, entire new subfields have formed in response to this concern. But this engagement with economic life has often been somewhat half-hearted. Particularly telling in this respect is the fact that these new fields have organized themselves centrally around the rejection of “economism,” the idea that markets have self-regulatory properties. Scholars in fields such as political economy and economic sociology have devoted a great deal of energy to normative critiques of the market, and they have displayed much less interest in rethinking the core categories and principles of economic life itself.

Money’s Other Worlds

On the magical underpinnings of our ostensibly rational economies.

by AMIN SAMMAN

Since at least the nineteenth century, economists have imagined the market as a profoundly rational way of organizing society. Unlike other modes of economic organization, the market is governed by natural laws that ensure the most efficient possible allocation of resources. Modern financial economists take this logic even further, seeing new financial instruments as a means of efficiently managing risk. These visions betray a mechanical conception of economy. Like a well-oiled machine, buyers and sellers play their part in a larger whole, balancing each other out and enabling practical reason to lead societies to ever-greater levels of prosperity.            

There is something irrational, something supernatural—even magical—about the way global finance operates.

In many ways the contemporary financial economy does look like a machine. Think, for example, of its Bloomberg terminals, its automated trading systems, and its algorithm wars. But if global finance is a machine, then there is something irrational, something supernatural—even magical—about the way it operates. It’s not just the periodic bouts of mania, panic, and crisis; nor is it the apparently endless drive to accumulate, to conjure more and more wealth out of a void. It’s that in these and other processes, a range of psychic investments are at work—curious attachments that bind us to money, to projected futures, to imaginary orders, and ultimately, to the modes of power upon which capitalism depends. The magical parts make and move the mechanical whole. This, at least, is the controversial idea developed in a string of new books to which this forum is dedicated.

Heterodox Economics: A Blog Series

Markets are too important to leave to economists alone.

Economics structure human society so thoroughly and so profoundly that, just as it cannot be expected to remain the sole purview of mainstream economists, it cannot but benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. The tumult of boom-and-busts, the global reach of today’s markets, the inequitable distribution of the economy’s fruits, the increasingly dizzying financial maneuvers that speculate on and simultaneously manufacture our realities, have all coalesced—along with many other pertinent questions—into an increasing demand for a more pluralistic view of this enigma we call “the economy.”

Art Law Pioneer: John Henry Merryman

Stanford University Press remembers a path-breaking legal scholar.

Professor John Henry Merryman, 1920-2015. Photo by Steve Gladfelter, via Stanford Law School's news blog.

On August 3^rd, esteemed Stanford Law Professor John Henry Merryman died at age 95. Merryman lived a long and accomplished life, celebrated by his peers and students; his contributions to comparative law, art law, and property law are internationally recognized and highly venerated.

We at Stanford Press are very proud to list John Henry Merryman among our authors. Merryman’sThe Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Western Europe and Latin America (now in its third edition) is recognized as a major treatise in the field. Originally published in 1970, the book is still regularly cited 45 years later. Merryman is also the author of Stanford Legal Essays (1975) and The Italian Legal System: An Introduction (with Mauro Cappelleti and Joseph M. Perillo, 1967). A second revised edition of the latter—described as a “classic and pioneering work,” by Ugo Mattei of UC Hastings—will be published this fall.

The staff of Stanford University Press extends our sincerest condolences to the family and friends of Professor Merryman. All of us at Stanford Press have long admired him for his many outstanding contributions to the academic community. He will be truly missed.  

Merryman’s excellence in scholarship will live on with his colleagues, his many students over his decades of teaching, and in the past and future readers of his prolific list of books. 

—Michelle Lipinski, Law and Anthropology editor

 

An Unleashed Power

From Japan, to Cuba, to Iran—three snapshots of a world changed by nuclear weapons.

Atomic cloud over Nagasaki, August 9th, 1945. Public domain image.

William J. Perry, who served as Secretary of Defense during President Bill Clinton’s administration, is regarded as one of the five “Cold Warriors”—along with Henry Kissinger, George P. Schultz, Sam Nunn, and Sid Drell—who, together, have formed an influential group whose activism has profoundly impacted nuclear security. From his role in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to his stint as Defense Secretary, to his more recent involvement in Track 2 talks facilitating the recent Iran deal, minimizing the nuclear threat—introduced to the world stage 70 years ago today—has been one of Perry’s chief preoccupations. The following post was adapted from his forthcoming memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. 

I.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

—Albert Einstein; 23 May 1946

My journey at the nuclear brink began well before the Cuban Missile Crisis, on an infamous Sunday in 1941, four years before the first atomic bomb was dropped. These were the first stirrings that would lead me to a life encompassing military service, development of Cold War reconnaissance systems, government service, university teaching, and diplomacy—much of it focused on the goal of reducing the nuclear threat.