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social life as action, finding social order through the examination of cases where people are observably engaged in carrying out society’s everyday affairs. One can, as synthesisers do, suppose that focusing upon action ultimately provides only an impoverished understanding of social life, but this is because they commonly have an impoverished idea of what ‘action’ is. (The important differences between SI and EM are not of primary concern here, so they will subsequently be treated together). Structure/agency synthesis thus conceives of two different kinds of
McKibbin, most of the reorganised Labour parties were ‘not strikingly different, if they were different at all, from the pre-war delegate parties’. 10 With this in mind, it is not surprising that labourist currents of thought remained active and influential at a local level. As in the pre-war and wartime periods, labourists articulated a vision of the social order and an ideology that set them apart from socialists, liberals and conservatives within and outside the Labour Party. They continued to refer back to historical events in order to present themselves as the
could not ‘remain aloof from the world of the machine’. 9 However, as Oxford 1937 had shown, Christian opinions on the social order varied widely. Conference reports sought a compromise: the Church should not engage directly in politics but could still ‘judge’ society, economics and politics in the light of the gospel. 10 But it was also emphatically stressed that Christians had a ‘duty’ to scrutinise ‘the institutional framework of organized society’ according to the ‘canons of their faith’. 11 Oldham and his companions accepted this
This chapter charts the evolution of development discourse as a gendered discourse. It examines the links between this gendered discourse and the development of the colonial economy and strategies to order, control, manage and discipline African men and women as social and economic change accelerated in the late colonial era. The author demonstrates how representations of African gender identities and relations, domesticity, and sexuality permeated colonial concepts and practices of development. She adopts a dual focus: the implications for practice relating to representations of African women in colonial development discourse, and the contribution European women made to the evolution of such discourse and practice. The author focuses mainly on British colonial concepts and practices but as the major colonial powers differed little in their perceptions of African gender roles and relations the themes she develops have broader relevance.
Gothic Threats argues that eighteenth-century British critics based their judgments of Gothic fictions on the fictions apparent capacity to help or hurt social order. If, like Matthew Lewiss The Monk, a novel seemed to corrupt the young, erode gender norms, encourage heretical belief in the supernatural, or foment revolution, critics condemned it. If, like Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho, a novel that seemed to fight against such threats, critics gave it the highest praise. This politically-determined pattern of “aesthetic” evaluation helped to establish the Gothics place in the hierarchy of high and low culture.
In this essay I argue that Frankenstein‘s monster, as a being constructed, in part, from nonhuman animal remains obtained from slaughterhouses, is literally a bizarre by-product of meat-eating. Frankensteins monster is a ‘monster’ because he is meat that was not consumed and brought back to life. What was intended for the human table comes to life and threatens the social order. The fact that the monster is a vegetarian thus becomes essential for an understanding of Shelley‘s novel. The Gothic narrative of Frankenstein is not one of a supernatural nature; rather the Gothic narrative within the text is the one that confronts the seemingly natural system of carnivorism.
Elizabeth Gaskell used Gothic as a symbolic language to explore the dark side of Unitarian thought. She explores, in rationalist terms, evils origins, effects, and remedy, using Gothic tropes as metaphors for humanly created misery. Gaskell locates the roots of ‘evil’ in an unenlightened social order – in ‘The Crooked Branch’ erroneous parenting, and in ‘The Poor Clare’ wider social structures, both distorted by the ideology of privilege. ‘The Poor Clare’ also engages with the tension between moral determinism and personal responsibility, and defends a Unitarian salvation. This tale also demonstrates Gaskell‘s views on aspects of Roman Catholicism.
This essay is about the figure of the double in Romantic and post-modern Gothic literature and film. Most criticism of the double interprets this figure from the perspective of psychoanalysis. In contrast, this essay embeds the double in cultural history. In discussions of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century discourses of ‘possessive individualism’, nationalism, and sexuality, this essay contends that the eighteenth century and the Romantic Period became dissatisfied with sympathy: with its inability to unify the social order without dissolving the crucial differences that distinguish one person from another. In response, Gothic literature invented the double to represent an extreme moment when two characters think, act, and feel so much alike that they can no longer be distinguished from each other. The essay offers two examples: Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner.
some form of care for the casualties of the wider social order will be necessary. Human rights, by contrast, are incapable of playing this role because they cannot be reconceptualised and constructed on any other basis than liberal order. Humanitarian Performance To ask what function a form of social practice performs is not to ask what it means to those who perform it. The meanings of humanitarianism to humanitarians can be multiple, but do any of these answers explain why we currently have a humanitarian system that spans the
through Technology?’ , Third World Quarterly , 39 : 8 , 1 – 17 . Jasanoff , S. (ed.) ( 2004 ), States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order ( London and New York : Routledge ). Korf , B. et al