OER 1ac

Advantage 1: Global Education

Open source regulations produce high-quality educational resources and agency
experimentation--further action is needed
Tepe 15. Lindsey Tepe--reporting for Slate. <APY> “The Department of Education’s Plan to Go Open—
Open Educational Resources, That Is,” November 12, 2015.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/11/12/the_department_of_education_embraces_open
_educational_resources.html

With little more than a year left in the Obama administration, the
Department of Education is taking steps to make sure these kinds
of educationalmaterials, developed through public investment, don’t only benefit their grant recipients.
The department has proposed that, for its competitive grant programs at least, all grantees would be required to openly
license the educational materials they develop. By changing the default to open, the department is
betting that it can increase the supply of high-quality open educational resources so that other
educators can use and improve upon them. O pen e ducational r esources, commonly defined as “resources that
reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others,” have gained
traction over the past decade in the field of education, with federal agencies , states, and colleges already exploring the possibilities
of open licensing. It makes sense that resources created with public money should be free for the public to use. And the department sees the potential impact as
threefold. First, an open-licensing requirement would allow for more strategic investment, potentially reducing the need to fund duplicative projects. Second,
experts in the field would have the ability to improve upon the resources created through its initial investment. Most importantly, the department emphasized that

this move could help level the playing field for low-income districts, “promoting equity and especially benefiting resource-poor stakeholders.” The
announcement comes with a few caveats , however. While the D epartment o f E ducation doles out
about $67 billion annually, the vast majority of those dollars are dedicated to formula grants to states
and direct grants to individuals—two types of funding that are not covered by the newly proposed rule.
Competitive grant funding accounts for just a fraction of that spending—a bit less than $3 billion
annually. (The department does not maintain a comprehensive list of annual competitive funding; this estimate was calculated by New America, where I work,
based on the latest Department of Education budget information. New America is a partner with Slate and Arizona State in Future Tense.)

DeVos decks those regulations--they are indefinitely delayed and awarded blanket
exceptions
Ortega 17. Jennifer Ortega--outside consultant for Ulman Public Policy & Federal Regulations,
EdCause. <APY> “Devos, Trump Delay Implementation of Obama-Era Open Licensing Rule,” March 30,
2017. https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2017/3/devos-trump-delay-implementation-of-obama-era-open-
licensing-rule

(March 29, 2017) On March 21, the Department of Education ( ED ) announced in the Federal Register that the effective date
of the final regulations entitled “ Open Licensing Requirement for Competitive Grant Program s” would be delayed until

May 22, 2017. The rule was originally intended to go into effect on March 21, but as the Department explained in its announcement, the additional time
is meant to provide ED with the opportunity needed for “additional consideration” of the regulation.
The final rule, which was issued on January 19 in the final hours of the Obama presidency, would have required recipients of ED competitive grants to openly license
copyrightable works produced in whole or in part with those funds. As a result, most educational resources created with funds from such grants would be freely
available for public use, including adaptation for new uses, incorporation into new materials, and general dissemination, tha t traditional copyright restrictions would
otherwise limit or prohibit. In December 2015, when the rule was originally proposed, EDUCAUSE and the American Council on Education (ACE) submitted
comments to ED about concerns with the process and its outcome. While expressing strong support for the principle of openness animating the Department’s
efforts, ACE and EDUCAUSE noted that the higher education research community has raised valid concerns that the draft regulation did not effectively address.
EDUCAUSE and ACE offered to work with ED and relevant research groups to identify how best to resolve the problems the rule might pose for higher education
research while advancing the contributions of ED competitive grants to open educational resources. ED
did incorporate into the final rule
some of the suggestions for improvement based on the points highlighted by research groups,
including a blanket exception to the open licensing requirement in cases where open licensing of
copyrightable grant materials would conflict with intellectual property rights derived from other
sources. The final rule also allows for grantees to receive individual exceptions to the open licensing requirement for
special circumstances. In a subsequent letter to ED, though, higher education research associations asked ED to further revise the rule given the need for greater
specificity on how the exceptions process in particular would work efficiently and effectively. More information on the final rule and EDUCAUSE’s input can be
found here.

The departments of Education and State are the heart of global OER--sustaining and
expanding the resource capacity of current programs is key to reforming global
education
Culatta et al 15. Richard Culatta is Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S.
Department of Education; Sunshine Ison is Director of the ECA Collaboratory at the U.S. Department of
State; Nancy Weiss is Senior Advisor to the Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy. <APY> “Openly Licensed Educational Resources: Providing Equitable
Access to Education for All Learners,” October 19, 2017.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/10/19/openly-licensed-educational-resources-
providing-equitable-access-education-all

Access to quality education is an essential component of addressing many of our biggest global and
societal challenges . Last year, the United Nations surveyed youth around the world about their priorities—what
opportunities they want to be offered. More than improvements in electricity and infrastructure, healthcare, and better
jobs, what young people asked for was a good education. It’s no surprise that young people value education. World Bank
economists estimate that for every year of study, individual income increases by 10-15 percent. These
increases don’t just affect individuals; they often generate a “ripple effect” of benefits to families and
entire communities. Openly licensed learning resources, also known as open educational resources ( OER ), can increase
access to high-quality education opportunities and reduce the cost of education around the world.
On September 28, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, U.S. D epartment o f E ducation, and U.S. D epartment o f S tate co-
hosted an International Open Education Workshop, bringing together 40 civil society and foreign government
participants from eight countries to examine existing open education efforts and identify
opportunities for future collaboration between government and civil society. This workshop is one of several open education commitments

made as part of the second U.S. Open Government Partnership National Action Plan. At the workshop, participants shared examples of ways that
openly licensed educational materials are being used to solve local education challenges around the
world. For example, one participant shared open-source tools that enable offline access to openly licensed educational videos -- technology that has

supported education for Syrian refugees, inmates in U.S. correctional facilities, and over 2 million other learners from around the world. Open
licenses
grant anyone the rights to revise, remix, and redistribute these educational materials, so investments in
content or tools made by one organization or government can be leveraged by other institutions and
used in new ways. Another participant, drawing on her recent experience serving as a Foreign Service Officer in the Balkans, noted the potential for
openly licensed educational materials to honor local knowledge and information needs. In particular, she described how an open-source model
could empower educators to collaborate on and adapt textbooks across local and international
borders, retaining fundamental content while tailoring certain features, like names in math word
problems, to reflect students’ ethnic diversity and culture. Empowering local communities to adapt,
translate, and create collections of learning materials that meet their information, learning, or language
needs helps side-step assumptions and honor learners’ lived experiences. Open education advances key
national priorities, including supporting shared economic prosperity , strengthening civil society , and
investing in human development. Over the next year, the U.S. Government will continue efforts to expand
and accelerate the use and availability of openly licensed educational materials worldwide. In addition, we will begin to
model the transition to openly licensed educational materials at scale in U.S. K-12 schools. We look forward to
engaging with the national and global community to identify opportunities for open licensing to accelerate educational equity for all learners regardless of their
financial situations or geographic locations.

OER is key – it leads to tailored solutions globally but DOS is key

Leasor 15. Katie Leasor serves as a Program Designer in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
at the U.S. Department of State, Department of State Blog. <APY> “Open Educational Resources,
Customizing for the Classroom,” March 12, 2015. http://2007-2017-
blogs.state.gov/stories/2015/03/12/open-educational-resources-customizing-classroom.html

In celebration of Open Education Week, I’d like to discuss how with

Open Educational Resources (OER), teachers are able to
intimately design how they use educational content that is best to use in their own classrooms for their
students. OER are educational materials produced by one party licensed to be used free of charge, and
possibly altered, by others. These resources come in many forms --from curricula to homework
assignments, to textbooks, and are available for all levels of education, from kindergarten through college. There’s an important link
between educational content adapted by teachers for their classroom and their students’ academic success. When teachers are more
closely involved in the preparation and customization of learning materials, students and school systems across all cultures and subjects routinely perform better.
Professor of Education at Stanford Linda Darling Hammond studies high-performing school systems around the world such as those in Singapore, Sweden, and
South Korea. One of the key conclusions she made about such high-performing
systems is characterized by, “teacher involvement in
curriculum and assessment development and decision making.” By producing high-quality educational
content tailored to a specific classroom, OER also accelerates student learning. What are some other best practices for
using OER in classrooms across the globe? Through our exchange program focused on OER, education leaders from the

Middle East and North Africa last year strengthened their own institutional capacities and began to form a
network of OER organizations and individuals aiming to increase access to education in their communities. One
alumnus of this exchange, Dr. Fawzi Baroud from Lebanon, created a program to spur civic participation and tackle environmental sustainability in Beirut and
worked with other partners he met during the exchange throughout the region. But we at the U.S. Department
of State recognize that
there are additional best OER practices, and want to uncover them with you in order to advise our policies
in open education. That’s why as part of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), we’re working with the U.S. Department of
Education and the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to jointly host workshops that aim to uncover challenges

and opportunities in open education around the world. By bringing together stakeholders from academia, industry, and government,
we will put our heads together to find the best methods that inform good policies in open education. Our Collaboratory unit will also launch a series of pilot
programs starting in December 2015 that use open educational resources to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts. The results about these
meetings and pilots will be made publicly available for educators. We know that OER
is revolutionizing how people across the world
can access educational content. Now we need, in essence, The Ways to Use OER, to learn how teachers can best use, transform, and
customize OER to suit their classroom and students’ needs. I can’t wait to see what they cook up.
Its key to cohesive curriculums – access and time pressures prove
Tyler Auer, 8-26-2016, (Teacher at the Fay School in Massachusetts, "Responding to Matt Larson's
"Curricular Coherence in the Age of Open Educational Resources" NCTM,
http://www.mathfireworks.com/2016/08/responding-to-larsons-post-on-curriculum//)MBA HBJ

Collaboration is great, but I worry that it is not enough to overcome the issues with self-curated curricula. Developing cohesive curricula takes too much time and care to
be done while also teaching and grading and meeting with parents and supervising recess and doing all of the other millions of things that teachers need to do. But, even if you agree with me, there
is still the issue that many many teachers are building their own curricula . One reason that is happening (I think) is that teachers are not getting what

they want from the curricula they have to work with at their school. So, how can curricula be more appealing to teachers so they get used more. I

have some ideas: Digital - I have yet to see a curriculum that really embraces the digital world. Many now offer digital portals , practice problems, and pdf copies of the texts, but those resources are
clearly built AFTER the curriculum is designed. They are not integrated into the actual designs. A modern curricula would be
designed from the ground up to be a digital medium . Videos would be integrated into the lessons. Students would be using resources like Desmos, Google Docs, and GeoGebra as part of the

actual lessons. Teachers are driven to use their own materials because they see the benefits of these digital tools and do not want them to be slapped on to the textbook lessons. Better Hooks/Launches/Act 1s - The hook is the question or situation that sets up a lesson. It creates the need
to investigate and learn some mathematics. Much of the appeal of the teacher designed online resources is that they have great hooks. Most traditional curricula have unengaging set-ups. They say things like "Two students in Mr. Schwartz's class are arguing about whether..." or
"Sometimes business owners need to calculate tax..." These are hardly inspiring. Include More Open Problems - Many curricula lack open questions. Every problem or prompt has an obvious answer and strategy for solving. They especially lack open-beginning and open-ended questions.

Teachers know how valuable these types of questions are -- especially for engaging with the standards of mathematical practice -- so they have to work them in on their own. Access - In an ideal world, a great
curriculum would be free to download. Is there no model for which this can happen? Couldn't a group of designers self-publish? Could we give grants to pay
for the development so that the end result could be free for every teacher in every school ? I do not know enough about

curriculum design to answer these questions. But I suspect it is possible and that the publishing companies would REALLY dislike it.

SQ laws for open licensing cover 10% of curriculum grants AND corporations get
decide whether to take an exemption
- 15 U.S.C. 1051 = the general trademark definition for USCO – literally anyone with license on the
material gets an exemption

DOE, 1-19-2017, "Open Licensing Requirement for Competitive Grant Programs," Federal Register,
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/19/2017-00910/open-licensing-requirement-for-
competitive-grant-programs//)MBA HBJ

The approach the Department is taking with this rule is limited in scope . It will apply only to grantees
receiving Department competitive grant funds, which constitutes approximately 10 percent of the
Department's total discretionary funding . Within that category of grants, we anticipate approximately 60 percent
would potentially be subject to the rule. The rule will not apply to grants that provide funding for general operating expenses; grants that provide supports to individuals (e.g., scholarships,

fellowships); grant deliverables that are jointly funded by the Department and another Federal agency if the other Federal agency does not require the open licensing of its grant deliverables for the relevant grant program; Start
Printed Page 7377copyrightable works created by the grantee or subgrantee that are not created with Department funds; any copyrightable work incorporated in the grant deliverable that is owned by a party other than the
grantee or subgrantee, unless the grantee or subgrantee has acquired the right to provide such a license in that work; peer-reviewed scholarly publications that arise from any scientific research funded, either fully or partially, from

grants awarded by the Department; or grants under the Department's Ready to Learn Television Program. Grantees receiving funds under the Department's formula grant programs will not be subject to the rule. Further, the
rule will not apply to a grantee for which compliance with the rule would conflict with, or materially
undermine the ability to protect or enforce, other intellectual property rights or obligations of the
grantee or subgrantee , in existence or under development, including those rights provided under 15 U.S.C. 1051, et seq., 18 U.S.C. 1831-1839, and 35 U.S.C. 200, et seq.
Similarly, the rule does not alter any applicable rights in the grant deliverable available under 17 U.S.C. 106A, 203 or 1202, 15 U.S.C. 1051, et seq., or State law.
That’s necessary to avert the collapse of developing economies
Rathi 17. Sanjana Rathi is a student on the MSc Management of Information Systems and Digital
Innovation in the Department of Management at LSE; this article is quoting Julia Gillard, former Prime
Minister of Australia and chair of the Board of Directors of the Global Partnership for Education. <APY>
“Why education is the key to global peace and prosperity,” June 7, 2017.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/management/2017/06/07/why-education-is-the-key-to-global-peace-and-
prosperity/

On 22 May 2017 Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia and chair of the Board of Directors of the Global Partnership for Education
(GPE), delivered a speech at LSE to gather support for the cause of education and solving the learning crisis that
exists around the globe. At the start of the event, I wondered about what she would speak to us about. Everyone knows that education
is important for the progress of the society, and we all need to invest in it. I assumed that the governments were
equally concerned with the cause and are working to deliver the best possible quality in education. But
the statistics presented at this event left us baffled by the dire reality in the field of education. If you are reading this

then you are probably among the fortunate few to receive education. Statistics show that across the world, 263 million children of primary
and secondary school age are out of school , 130 million children can barely read or write even
though they are attending primary school, and 75 million children aged 3 to 18 live in countries facing
war and violence and are in dire need of educational support. While there are rising problems of
poverty, climate change, terrorism, violation of basic human rights and unemployment, it is appalling to
note that governments’ investment in primary and secondary education has lowered in recent years.
Donor aid to basic education has dropped by 6% between 2010 and 2015, even though during the same time the total official

development aid increased by 25%. UNESCO estimates that there is an annual external financing gap of US $ 39
billion to give quality pre-primary, primary and secondary education to all children by 2030. These
statistics give us reason enough to take action. Julia Gillard’s message is that education is an investment in
economic prosperity , the empowerment of women , and a solution to many of the world’s most
pressing problems. “Education reduces poverty , improves health , increases gender equality , and
boosts economic growth. Education is an investment that pays dividends for many generations” ~ Julia
Gillard Although education is a fundamental right of every citizen irrespective of which nation, religion,
ethnicity or culture they belong to, many remain deprived of this right. Thus, delivering quality education
to all and supporting this cause in every way possible must be accepted as a universal fundamental duty.
It is a duty of every citizen in this world to make sure that those around them get a basic quality
education. If education is given to every child, there is more chance for that child to make better decisions and get a good quality job. These decisions
include the choice to take the right actions to reduce the problems that we all face around the world today. “As Nelson Mandela said, education is the most
powerful weapon you can use to change the world” ~ Julia Gillard Nations
around the world are being influenced by forces that
are leading to unpredictable outcomes, such as, rising inequality within nations, reshaping of work by
new technologies, digital disruption, more efficient transport technologies. This change is tinged with
anxiety. The risk of terrorism , fake news that spread lies and confusion in society, the fear of jobs
being lost as a result of technological advancement are all problems that go with this rapid change.
But the state of education seems stagnant and in the face of this increasing need for change arises.
According to statistics presented in this event, 825 million out of 1.6 billion people who will be alive in 2030 will not be equipped to work and thrive in the 21st

century. In developing countries, one 1 out of 10 will acquire basic secondary education skills and around 2
million jobs will be lost. If these predictions are allowed to become a reality, this will create a huge
injustice and violation of basic human rights , as well as posing a significant risk for humanity’s
future. The World Economic Forum has cited inequality and joblessness as the top risk factor for the world, reflecting the urgency for investing more in quality
education that will equip every child today to deal with the challenges of tomorrow. “Education is an investment in peace, security and economic prosperity, and we

should tell all the world leaders this.” ~ Julia Gillard What can we take away from these lessons? We as citizens and voters must make it
known to our governments that delivering good quality education is important to us. If we all support this
cause, we can pave the way to a happy, stable and sustainable tomorrow.

Collapse of developing economies spills up

Lagarde 16. Christine Lagarde – Managing Director for the IMF. February 4, 2016. <APY> “The Role of
Emerging Markets in a New Global Partnership for Growth by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.”
http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp020416
As you contemplate these first minutes of your day, you realize that the center of economic gravity has been slowly shifting. Yes, the United States is still the most
important economy in the world, but New York, Chicago, and L.A. have gotten company, from Beijing to Brasilia, from Moscow to Mumbai, and from Jakarta to

Johannesburg. Emerging and developing economies are home to 85 percent of the world’s population —6 billion
people. These 85 percent matter to the global economy more than ever, and they matter to you more than
ever—because of strong linkages through trade, finance, economics, geopolitics , and personal connections that you
experience every day. A New Partnership for Growth As a group, emerging and developing economies now account for almost
60 percent of global GDP , up from just under half only a decade ago.1 They contributed more than 80 percent of
global growth since the 20 08 financial crisis , helping to save many jobs in advanced economies, too. And
they have been the main driver behind the significant reduction in global poverty.2 China alone has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty over the past

three decades. After years of success, however, emerging markets—as a group—are now facing a new, harsh reality. Growth
rates are down, capital flows have reversed, and medium-term prospects have deteriorated sharply. Last
year, for example, emerging markets saw an estimated $531 billion in net capital outflows , compared with $48 billion in
net inflows in 2014.3 In the short term, the softening of growth , the scale of capital outflows , as well as the recent
stock market declines are cause for concern. Furthermore, on current IMF forecasts, emerging and developing
economies will converge to advanced economy income levels at less than two-thirds the pace we had
predicted just a decade ago. This means that millions of poor people are finding it more difficult to get ahead. And members of the newly created
middle classes are finding their expectations unfulfilled. This is bad not only for emerging markets themselves, but also for the advanced world

that has come to rely on emerging markets as destinations for investment and as customers for its
products. It also carries with it the risk of rising inequality , protectionism , and populism.

Nuclear war
Tønnesson 15 (Stein, Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace
program, Uppsala University, 2015, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International
Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311)
Several recent
works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current
understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic
interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the
review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right.

Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and
negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states
that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the
interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China
and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into
confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South
Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014;
Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis
of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the
value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either

side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on
external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or
credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or
prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly , i.e. under the
instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party.

Best Statistical Analysis goes aff – economic downturns increase the risk of conflict
Royal 10 (Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction – U.S. Department of Defense, “Economic
Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises?”, Economics of War and Peace:
Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, pg. 213-215)

Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict . Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to
the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the

rhythms in the global economy are associated with

systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that

the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a
redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin, 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalc ulation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively,

even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a

declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small
powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations

interdependent states are likely to gain pacific

suggests that 'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that

benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations
of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases , as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources.
Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and
external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between

Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns

internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing.

the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external
conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002, p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase
in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the
popularity of a sitting government. 'Diversionary theory' suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic

decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag'
effect . Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995), and Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and
Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being

removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak
Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an
increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and
armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the
likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the
occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views.

Trade expectations key---stats and empirics

Massimo Morelli and Tommaso Sonno 17, ∗Bocconi University and Dondena Research Center AND
†Universite Catholique de Louvain and London School of Economics, January 26, 2017, “On Economic
Interdependence and War,” http://www.tommasosonno.com/docs/JEL2016MMTS6.pdf

The main question addressed in Copeland (2015) is whether economic interdependence between great powers has a significant effect
on the probability of conflict between them . In this article we will review the insights of this book on the entire literature and we will provide a critical analysis, pointing out in
which direction the qualitative analysis could be integrated or replaced by appropriate quantitative studies. In the international relations literature there are two main opposite views: the liberal view, where economic ties play the
role of opportunity costs of conflict, and the realist view, according to which trade dependence implies uncertain future security, hence increasing incentives to avoid such dependence with force. The book proposes an alternative

trade expectations theory: a positive outlook on future trade and investments reduces the incentives to go to war,
while negative expectations imply, given standard commitment problems, a potential preventive or
preemptive war incentive . When two countries are highly interdependent today but one of them feels
vulnerable in the future due to whatever source of negative future shocks, the war incentives may
exist, while the liberal theory would typically focus exclusively on the opportunity cost value of the current level of interdependence. Given the difficulty to evaluate quantitatively the role of expectations, Copeland (2015)
focuses on 40 conflict events among major powers from 1790 to 1991 and tries to evaluate qualitatively the role of expectations. A red thread that connects the qualitative
findings in almost all these cases is the connection between fear and decline in commercial power . Hence the realist
focus on military power may be misleading: security studies should focus also on commercial power dynamics . In Copeland (2015) States
are seen as security maximizers, like in the realist perspective, but security comes primarily from
commercial power , which is the liberal component of the theory. We consider this insight a very important one. However, we will argue that the qualitative studies yield results that are biased against liberal theory. A quantitative study of bilateral dependence interacted with geographic and resource asymmetry can yield a

complementary indirect measure of the role of expectations without such a bias. The analysis that we propose maintains the key role of commercial power and security maximization while eliminating the selection bias of the qualitative studies. 2 Economic Interdependence and War: a Synthesis The plan of this section is straightforward: we first describe in our own terms the
interesting view of the previous literature endorsed in Copeland’s book; then we move to describe the book’s main conceptual points and methodological decisions, opening some questions that will be then addressed in section 3. 2.1 Conceptual frameworks The useful description of the main schools of thought on interdependence and war offered in Copeland (2015) can be
summarized with the following table: Welfare Security Commercial Power Liberal Theory Trade Expectations Military Power Neo Marxist Realist Theory – Liberal Theory: A dependent state, in the liberal welfare maximization logic, has no interest in starting a war with its trade partner, given the goal of welfare maximization. Even the less dependent state has no interest in war
because commercial power is viewed as main instrument for welfare maximization. Hence security in the liberal thinking is a byproduct of the fact that both traders restraint from war for welfare reasons. Hence the location top left in the matrix. 2 – Realist Theory: For a realist scholar, on the other hand, leaders focus on maximizing the security of their own state, and with this
primary concern in mind, interdependence is basically a risk factor for war, as it makes the state vulnerable. The main instrument for reducing vulnerability is military power, hence the objective/instrument combination is the bottom right cell. – Neomarxist: Neo-Marxist theorists draw from both liberal and realist scholars. They assume that capitalist trading states are more likely to
start a war in a peripheral state to find raw materials at a cheap price, an export market for their own goods, and a place where to invest their surplus capital. If neo-Marxists agree with liberal scholars when they say that capitalistic sectors are driven by the material gains, they also implicitly agree with realism affirming that the need for secure trade and investment ties makes
groups worry about their future control over their economic partners for security reasons, hence the location in the bottom left cell. – Trade Expectation theory: States are primarily concerned about security, like in realism theory, but the main driver of security is the expectation of safe commercial power. Like realist scholars such as Robert Gilpin (1977, 1981, 1987) and Klaus Knorr
(1975), Copeland makes the case that trade has always been consistent with the security concern. Growing economic systems do not only need to trade with peripheral states in order to get access to raw materials, but also need a big market where to sell their mass-produced goods to make profit. Great powers surely have labour and capital to foster their economic development,
but they usually have either land or market expansion needs. Excluding a radical change of technology, adding more capital and labour without the adequate materials will add to production rates but at increasingly slower rates of growth. Therefore, and considering the uneven geographical distribution of raw materials, it is apparent the fact that (either by necessity or willingness)
great powers do trade a lot, and not just with each other. 2.2 Trade Expectations Theory Copeland (2015) aims to bridge the gap between the liberal and the realist approach with a more dynamic and comprehensive stance. Both States i and j in each dyad are assumed to benefit from trade, but let’s assume without loss of generality that j gains marginally more from the exchange.
Should this exchange finish, than both i and j will suffer the consequences, but j will receive a greater damage. We could then call j a more dependent State. In choosing between an aggressive or a peaceful stance, j must take into account the overall expected benefit it will receive from trade versus the value of possible conflict. Trade expectations can of course be endogenous: i may
send signals that help j understand the will to pursue a peaceful free trade forever, and j has all the interest to keep a non-aggressive stance towards i to continue along the path of peaceful trade and confirming i’s willingness to trade. All these considerations bring to a trade-security dilemma that States must resolve. In other words, part of forming expectations involves
expectations about the ability and willingness 3 of the other actors to keep the cooperative promises versus temptations to defect, and hence commitment problems arise. Copeland introduces six primary factors that can change i’s calculations of the trade-off between being a reliable trade partner versus reducing or ending trade with j: – (1) j’s relations with other great powers; –
(2) domestic instability in other small states that both i and j need, causing intervention; – (3) another great power acting against a third party, forcing i to intervene; – (4) i’s fear of j’s economic growth, either because of the gains made through trade or economic dynamism; – (5) i’s depletion of raw materials and need to look for them elsewhere; – (6) economic decisions of i’s
executive branch are not welcomed by the legislature. This is a (non exhaustive) list of external shocks or commitment problems, internal to i or related to expected strengthening of j, all things that j needs to take into account when forming expectations about the future relationship with i in case of no aggression today. Given the high degree of endogeneity of such considerations
and the multidimensionality of these concerns, there is obviously no measure of such expectations that could be used to directly test the theory. The methodology proposed in Copeland (2015) is then to consider all the major conflicts involving great powers, offering a qualitative analysis of the state of expectations prior to each of those events. What we will argue instead in section
3 is that good progress can be made on the quantitative evaluation of at least half of these factors, namely (1), (4) and (5). 2.3 Qualitative analysis The goal of the qualitative analysis is to analyze each major great power conflict event using the different competing theories, to then see how often a theory works better than its rivals. Each case is constituted by a period, marked by a
particularly salient event; a clear set of great powers; and a geographical focus.1 Copeland finds that a quarter of cases have almost nothing to do with economic interdependence; half of the cases have a moderate to strong incidence of economic interdependence; and one quarter display a clearly relevant role of economic interdependence. Considering the 30 cases in which
economic interdependence was important, the trade expectations theory is found to be consistent with the observations in almost all, whereas the realist theory is consistent with roughly one third of the cases, and the liberal theory is, according to Copeland, consistent with the observations in only 1/10 of cases. The problem, in our opinion, is that qualitative studies suffer from
selection biases and low generalizability. In fact, even if the book considers all the major conflict events between great 1 If a dramatic event involves new great powers or has a clear different geographic focus, it is treated as a distinct case period by the author. 4 powers, obviously it cannot consider all the similar situations where conflict did not occur. This selection bias is
particularly relevant vis a vis liberal theory: given that such a theory views trade as mainly an opportunity cost of war, the cases where one find a war event in conjunction with economic interdependence must indicate that other factors were crucial, but in the universe of non-conflict events one could imagine that economic interdependence was crucial for reducing the incentives to
go to war. Thus, only looking at conflict events cannot possibly be an adequate study of the relevance of liberal theory. 2.4 Quantitative Evidence in the Literature Liberals and realists disagree not only about theory but also about empirical analysis. Liberals such as Oneal and Russett (1997, 1999, 2001) showed that increased interdependence is associated to a reduction of likelihood
of militarized conflict between states, while realists like Barbieri (1996, 2002) demonstrated that with a different conceptualization of the independent variable (i.e., considering also the vulnerability component of interdependence), interdependence had no effect on conflict. The primary reason for these different results is the choice of variables: Oneal and Russett use the ratio of
trade to GDP as indicator of interdependence, whereas Barbieri focuses on three indices: salience, symmetry and interdependence. i’s trade share with j is calculated as T radeSharei = DyadicT radeij T otalT radei , and with this intermediate measure the three Barbieri’s variables are constructed as follows: dyadic salience (Salienceij = p T radeSharei ∗ T radeSharej ) measures the
extent to which trade partners are dependent on a given trading relationship; symmetry (Symmetryij = 1 − |T radeSharei − T radeSharej |) indicates the equality of dependence; Interdependenceij = Salienceij ∗Symmetryij . They find that symmetry acts as a war risk reducing factor, while salience and interdependence, in various econometric specifications, are conflict risk increase
factors.2 Gelpi and Grieco (2003) show that interdependence effects switch sign or become insignificant when interacted with democracy.3 Hegre (2000) and Mousseau (2003, 2009) found that trade dependence helps to reduce the probability of armed conflict when both powers are highly developed, and contract enforcement institutions further increase the opportunity cost
effect. The positive conflict risk reduction effects of symmetry, democracy, development and contract enforcement highlighted in the above mentioned papers can indeed constitute an indirect evidence that trade expectations matter. For example, contract enforcement capabilities give rise to expectations about the future commercial environment in which they will operate. They
will have less reasons to start a (preventive) war and less interested in exercising pressure on their trading partners. Another work that proposed quantitative analysis broadly in line with Copeland’s argument is McDonald (2009): low trade barriers and the fact that the state-owned firms are a 2We will elaborate more in section 3 on how to push further on a rich quantitative analysis
of the role of different types of asymmetries. 3A trade expectations theory proponent would read the results of Gelpi and Grieco as follows: two democratic states with high trade are likely to have positive expectations about long-term commerce. 5 small part of the entire economy constitute a source of positive expectations and peace (capitalist peace). In this scenario, a state
cannot afford to start a military conflict both because it will lack the economic resources and because private business interests will oppose such a decision. On the contrary, the likelihood of an armed conflict is higher with a protectionist system and a large scale of the economy in the hands of the State. In a nutshell, the existent empirical quantitative studies that relate (though
indirectly) to trade expectations theory are the works that confirm that economic interdependence plays a positive role when the institutions and markets generate commitment to cooperation and trust that the other is interested in the same game. In the next section we aim to integrate this indirect evidence found already in the quantitative political science literature with some
recent insights from international economics and economics of conflict, showing that a fruitful empirical methodology and interesting results can be obtained by taking into account the composition of trade and its interaction with geography and natural resources. 3 Bilateral versus multilateral Trade and the role of Geography An important distinction (not emphasized enough in
Copeland’s book) is the distinction between bilateral trade and global trade: an increase in bilateral trade between two countries, everything else constant, has potentially both the liberal and realist vulnerability effects discussed in the book, whereas an increase in trades outside the pair (multilateral openness) actually reduces the salience of the bilateral trades, hence inducing
potential effects of opposite sign – a consideration connected with factor (1) in the list given in section 2.2. In the next subsection we describe the importance of this distinction using a recent and influential article by Martin et al (2008), and we will argue, introducing a new ratio variable, that what really matters is the ratio of bilateral over multilateral openness. Next, in subsection
3.2, we will show that the explicit consideration of geographic and resource asymmetries can further qualify the correlation between economic dependence and conflict – a direct consideration of factor (5) in the list of factors mentioned in section 2.2. In subsection 3.3 we propose an additional value-added analysis that could also help to disentangle the various effects discussed for
aggregate variables in the literature – in connection with factor (4) in the list of factors mentioned in section 2.2. 3.1 Bilateral Dependence Martin et al (2008) analyse theoretically and empirically the distinction between bilateral and multilateral openness. They obtain the prediction that the probability of escalation should be 6 lower for countries that trade more bilaterally, because
of the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains. Countries more open to global trade have a higher probability of war because multilateral trade openness decreases bilateral dependence to any given country and the cost of a bilateral conflict.4 They define bilateral openness between country i and country j as m j i yi + mi j yj , where m j i denotes the imports of i from
j and yk is the total GDP of country k; they define instead multilateral openness as P k6=j,i mk i yi + mk j yj . They focus on the opposite sign of the impact that these two variables have on the probability of war onset (negative the first and positive the second). In our view these two variables can be usefully combined in a unique variable: define bilateral dependence as BDij ≡ m j i +
mi P j k mk i + P k mk j . In this way bilateral dependence is a number in [0, 1], and bilateral independence is 1 minus that. The two effects studied (theoretically and empirically) by Martin et al (2008) affect bilateral dependence in the same way, since the effects being of opposite sign push in the same direction if one is on the numerator and the other on the denominator. Greater
bilateral dependence reduces war, or, greater bilateral independence increases war (especially for contiguous countries). Martin et al (2008) specification can be simplified with the following logit model: P r(Conflictij,t) = γ0 + γ1 BOij,t−4 + γ2 MOij,t−4 + γ3 Distance + γ4 (BO × Distance)ij,t−4 + γ5 (MO × Distance)ij,t−4 + Zij where BO represents the bilateral openness, MO indicates
multilateral openness, both lagged of 4 periods, and Z is a set of country-pair controls, some of them simultaneous at time t and some other lagged at t−4 as well.5 First, the probability of escalation turns out to be lower for countries that have higher level of bilateral trade, because of the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains (γ1 < 0). Secondly, countries more open
to multilateral trade have a higher probability of war, because this global trade reduces the cost of a bilateral conflict (γ2 > 0). Finally, both effects turn out to be mediated by distance (γ4 > 0 and γ5 < 0). Borrowing data of national and bilateral trade from Barbieri et al (2009, 2012), we are able to compute our measure of bilateral dependence and to replicate the Martin et al (2008)
analysis. 4These two testable implications rely on the assumption (about which they provide empirical support) that the opportunity cost of war is much higher for countries where at least one of them is heavily dependent on the other in terms of imports or exports, with respect to the case in which most trade activities are outside the pair. The work by Martin et al (2008) is also
interesting in terms of the role of expectations, although in an opposite way with respect to Copeland: they study the effect of expectations of conflict on the trade relationship between two countries. 5For a detailed description of the control variables please refer to the Martin et al (2008) paper. 7 The resulting specification is the following logit: P r(Conflictij,t) = η0 + η1 BDij,t−4 +
η2 Distance + η3 (BD × Distance)ij,t−4 + Zij . Table 1 replicates the first four columns of the benchmark results of the Martin et al (2008) paper, strictly following their empirical setting, but altering the trade variables. In the first three columns, we present very simple estimates of the direction of the bilateral dependence variable on the probability of militarize interstate dispute. In
column (1), we restrict our sample to contiguous pairs of countries. In column (2), the sample is further restricted to contiguous pairs with a bilateral weighted distance below 1000 km. In column (3), we use the full sample of country pairs, adding as in the original paper an interaction term between distance and our measure of bilateral dependence. In column (4), which is identified
as the preferred pooled regression by the authors, a comprehensive list of controls which could potentially affect both trade and conflicts is included.6 Time dummies, together with a set of 20 different dummies equal to 1 when the dyad was in war in previous periods (in order to control for the overall potential co-evolution of conflicts and international trade over time) are
included. In all these specifications the coefficient of bilateral dependence is negative and strongly significant. For the first three columns its significance is at the 1% level, and 5% for the last column. These results provide evidence in support of the significant role of our variable, in line with the liberal view. The role of our variable of interest is mediated by distance as in the original
paper (η3 > 0), showing a positive and significant effect at the 1% and 5% level respectively for the interaction term between bilateral dependence and distance in columns (3) and (4). In summary, these results on the peace-inducing effects of bilateral dependence give more support to liberal theory than what is suggested by Copeland’s qualitative analysis, but warning that it is
important to define it correctly, taking into account the opposite effects of global trade. In what follows we merge this insight with other data that can be used to proxy the likelihood of negative versus positive expectations. 3.2 The role of geographic and resource asymmetry Recent literature shows how resources endowments and their geographic location play a key role in
interstate conflicts. In particular, Caselli, Morelli and Rohner (2015), studying all contiguous country pairs in the years 1946-2001, outlines how conflicts are more likely when at least one 6Additional controls (see the Martin et al (2008) paper for a detailed description): a dummy for dyads showing zero trade by the IMF (see it as a control for the trade costs interpreted as fixed costs);
index of similarity in language; existence of a potential trade area; number of GATT/WTO members in the dyad; colonial relationship; common colonizer; sum of the areas of the two countries (in log); political regime; UN vote correlation (lagged by 4 years); dummy for military alliance; distance to the nearest current war which does not include a country of the dyad; total number of
MIDs (excluding their potential bilateral MID) which the countries in the dyad are involved at time t. 8 Table 1: Replication of Martin, Mayer and Thoenig (2008) using bilateral dependence (1) (2) (3) (4) Bil. Dependence -0.265*** -0.423*** -2.544*** -0.918** (0.103) (0.123) (0.362) (0.386) Distance -0.0820 0.143 -0.527*** -0.828*** (0.131) (0.255) (0.103) (0.0911) Bil. Dependence
× Distance 0.354*** 0.128** (0.0459) (0.0529) Obs. 6,596 3,649 219,697 219,697 Pseudo R-squared 0.171 0.184 0.317 0.556 Sample Contigous pairs Contigous pairs and <1000 km Full Full Time dummies No No No Yes Dyadic war lags No No No Yes Additional controls No No No Yes Notes. Dependent variable: MID (Militarized Interstate Dispute), defined the occurrence in a specific
country pair of ”display of force”, ”use of force” or ”war” (see Correlate Of War project for further details). Method: logit with robust standard errors clustered a the country-pair level. See note 6 for additional controls. Significance levels ∗∗∗ p < .01, ∗∗ p < .05, ∗ p < .1. country in the dyad has natural resources, when the latter are closer to the border, and in case of resource
endowment for both countries in the dyad, when they are located asymmetrically with respect to the border. The analysis proposed by Caselli et al (2015) can be described with a linear probability model that takes the form: P r(Conflictij,t+1) = δ0 + δ1 Oneij,t + δ2 (One × Dist)ij,t + δ3 Bothij,t + δ4(Both × M inDist)ij,t + δ5(Both × M axDist)ij,t + Zij + uij,t where One is a dummy variable
taking value 1 if one country in the dyad has oil, Both takes value 1 if both countries in the dyad have oil, Dist is the distance of the oil from the border, M inDist is the minimum of the distances of the oil from the border in the two countries, and, intuitively, M axDist is the oil distance from the border in the country of the dyad whose oil is further from the border. In Caselli et al
(2015) framework, bilateral trade (over the sum of the GDP of the countries in the pair) is one of the additional control variables in the vector of controls Z. 7 Interestingly, 7All specifications control for the average and the absolute difference of land areas in the dyad, intercept, and annual time dummies. Additional controls (see the Caselli et al (2015) paper for a detailed
description): average and absolute difference of GDP per capita; average and absolute difference of population; average and absolute difference of fighting capabilities; average and absolute difference of democracy scores; dummy for one country having civil war; dummy for both countries having civil war; bilateral trade over GDP; dummy or country being OPEC member; dummy
for both countries being OPEC member; genetic distance between the populations of the two countries; dummy for membership of the same defensive alliance; dummy for historical inclusion in the same country, kingdom, or empire; dummy for having been in a colonial relationship; and years singe the la st hostility 9 Table 2: Replication of Caselli, Morelli and Rohner (2015) using
bilateral dependence (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) One 0.0344 0.0886*** 0.0809** 0.126*** 0.0726* 0.150*** (0.0283) (0.0315) (0.0391) (0.0347) (0.0393) (0.0457) One × Dist -0.0512* -0.0973*** -0.0884** -0.123*** (0.0407) (0.0432) (0.0285) (0.0281) (0.0426) (0.0340) -0.0846** -0.154*** Both 0.0297 0.0497* 0.0566** 0.0771** 0.0249 0.0538* (0.0205) (0.0271) (0.0267) (0.0301)
(0.0207) (0.0317) Both × MinDist -0.0436 -0.0906*** -0.0184 -0.0630** -0.0959** -0.124*** (0.0349) (0.0288) (0.0350) (0.0319) (0.0425) (0.0354) Both × MaxDist -0.0165 0.00217 -0.0676 -0.0210 0.0396 0.0397 (0.0364) (0.0289) (0.0490) (0.0436) (0.0451) (0.0377) Bil. Dependence -0.0040*** -0.0043*** -0.0036** -0.0035** -0.0041*** -0.0045*** (0.0015) (0.0015) (0.0014)
(0.0014) (0.0015) (0.0016) Obs. 11,076 11,076 11,076 11,076 11,076 11,076 R-squared 0.094 0.164 0.095 0.161 0.098 0.166 Type oil All All Offshore Offshore Onshore Onshore Country FE No Yes No Yes No Yes Add. controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Notes. Dependent variable: MID (Militarized Interstate Dispute), defined the occurrence in a specific country pair of ”use of force” or
”war” (see Correlate Of War project for further details). Method: OLS with robust standard errors clustered a the country-pair level. See note 7 for controls and additional controls. Significance levels ∗∗∗ p < .01, ∗∗ p < .05, ∗ p < .1. this variable turns out to be not significant in any of the specification where it is used (as simple control) by the authors. If we substitute this variable with
our measure of bilateral dependence, we can perfectly replicate all results of Caselli et al (2015), but obtaining a strongly significant role for bilateral dependence in all specifications.8 Table 2 replicates columns (2), (4), (6), (8), (10), (12) of the original paper, namely all specifi- cations for their baseline results where the full set of controls (and, therefore, also bilateral trade) are
embedded in the estimation equation. The bilateral dependence variable displays a negative and significant coefficient (significant at the 1% level) for the regression considering all sources of oil and onshore, while for offshore type of oil the significance is at the 5% level.9 So far we have shown that bilateral dependence and asymmetry in resources (both in terms of endowments
and geographic location) play opposite roles with respect to the probability of hostility, with bilateral dependence decreasing the probability of conflict and asymmetry in resources increasing it.10 One implication of these results actually lends support, in our view, to the trade expectations view in Copeland (2015): if one restricts attention to dyads with high asymmetry, in the dyad.
8Capitalizing again on the Barbieri et al (2009, 2012) data, we compute our measure of bilateral dependence in the Caselli et al (2015) sample. 9Note that all R-squared increase with respect to the original paper when including our variable. 10Barbieri (1996) already had the intuition that symmetry must matter, but could only consider symmetry in terms of aggregate trade variables,
whereas we have used multiple sources of heterogeneity. We are able to take into account not only trade, but also resources. In so doing, we create a proxy of fear and expectations of adjacent States that relates to factor (5) in Copeland’s list. 10 one country in the dyad is expected to have more incentive (if the occasion could come) to alter the peaceful status quo that has such a
country at a disadvantage, and this induces potential fear in the advantaged country, hence reducing the peace keeping potential advantages of bilateral dependence. Studying under what conditions the asymmetry effect can dominate the bilateral dependence effect or vice versa seems to be an important research agenda. 3.3 Value Added Analysis An important development in
international trade that could be useful for a quantitative analysis of the relationship between economic interdependence and war is the study of global value chains. Surplus production processes are broken into ever finer activities and tasks, and data now exist on the international dispersion of these activities and tasks across borders. UNCTAD (2013) estimates that nowadays 75
percent of world trade flows are somehow correlated to the international production networks set up by multinational business groups (MBGs), either in the form of it intra-group flows (30% of world trade flows approximately), international outsourcing between a multinational enterprise and another company (15%), or arm’s length international transactions involving a MBG
affiliate (30%). Given the key role of MBG, there is scope for further research on trade expectations quantitative analysis based on the expectations of just a few relevant players. The increasing importance of multinational production networks implies that a large part of tradable goods consists of intermediate goods, crossing borders multiple times before being absorbed into the
generation of domestic goods or being incorporated in the production of exports. This change in paradigm, from countries and sectors specializing in the production of final goods and services to the international fragmentation of production processes, has important consequences. Traditional measures of gross exports and openness are outdated in a world dominated by trade in
intermediates.11 With a rising integration in international production and, as a consequence, an increasing share of foreign intermediate goods incorporated in exports, value added measures should be preferred in order to correctly measure the contribution of foreign and domestic production factors to a country’s exports and the true contribution of exporting activities to GDP.
The UNCTAD/Eora Trade in Value Added dataset is the multi-region input-output (MRIO) 11Gross exports statistics account multiple times for intermediate goods that cross international borders more than once, overestimating total exports, which incorrectly include double counting caused by repeated export at different production stages. Koopman et al. (2014) were among the
first to identify the ”double counting” problem embedded in gross exports statistics due to the emergence of global value chains and international production integration. The authors developed a theoretical framework to isolate different value added components in gross exports statistics. Due to reduced data availability, they improved the existing inter-country input-output tables
in order to perform the theoretical value added decomposition and disentangle value added contributions to exports originated from different sources. They estimate that in their sample approximately 25% of gross exports is constituted by foreign inputs or domestically produced inputs that return home after exporting, providing a first measure of double counting in gross exports
statistics. 11 table at the world level that can be used to estimate value added in trade.12 In particular, the innovation with respect to national input-output tables is that the MRIO tables break down the use of products according to their origin: first, splitting the flows of products between domestically produced or imported; second, distinguishing intermediate and final use; third,
indicating the origin of every imported product. Therefore, using a MRIO table can allow us to see the relationship between all producers and consumers in all regions covered. This dataset is the only one covering all countries of the world. There are three key country-variables we can derive, for each year, from this dataset: DVA, FVA and DVX. The sum of them, for each country-
year, gives the country’s total export. A very simplified explanation of these three variables can be:13 – Domestic Value Added (DVA) over total export indicates how autonomous a country is in the production of the intermediates needed for producing its export; – Foreign Value Added (FVA) over total export measures a country’s upstream dependence, meaning how much
dependent the country is from imports of other countries (or, said in other words, how much the export of a country is dependent on foreign input); – Indirect Value Added Exports (DVX) over total export is a measure of the level of downstream dependence of a specific country, meaning how much other countries depend on the country’s input for the production of their exports.
There is no theoretical nor empirical study yet using these data in relation to conflict incentives, thus the goal of the following considerations is to convince the readers that this possibility is very promising for future research. The analysis below is therefore preliminary and simply meant to illustrate another possibility to proxy expectations with structural data on different types of
asymmetry. We believe that the relative weight of bilateral dependence and geographic asymmetry effects mentioned in the previous section can also depend on this production structure. The first step is to create, for each country-year, the three indeces mentioned above. Considering that the UNCTAD/Eora dataset covers the period from 1990 onward, the number of observations
of our previous sample from Caselli et al (2015), which covers the period 1956-2001, will decrease significantly, from around 24 thousands observations to roughly 10 thousands. For this reason, and to ease the interpretation of results, we choose to create a comprehensive index of resource asymmetry, taking value 1 when only one country in the dyad has oil and the resource is
located close to the border.14 The corresponding set of situations displays the highest level of asymmetry in terms of resources. We can then replicate the results of Table 2, but restricting our sample to those observations for which we have data also on the value added trade, and using this 12See Lenzen et al (2012, 2013) and UNCTAD (2013) for further details. 13For further
details, see the Technical Annex of ”Global Value Chains and Development - Investment and Value Added Trade in the Global Economy”, United Nations Publications, 2013. 14More precisely, this variable is 1 if only one country has oil and its distance from the border is below the median of the distribution of the distance of resources from the border in the whole sample. 12 Table 3:
Full and Restricted sample with Value Added Trade data (1) (2) Resource Asymmetry 0.076*** 0.142*** (0.0202) (0.0465) Bil. Dependence -0.0031** -0.0078*** (0.0014) (0.0024) Obs. 11,076 3,648 R-squared 0.157 0.255 Sample All sample Subsample with VAT data Type oil All All Country FE Yes Yes Add. controls Yes Yes Notes. Dependent variable: MID (Militarized Interstate
Dispute), defined the occurrence in a specific country pair of ”use of force” or ”war” (see Correlate Of War project for further details). Method: OLS with robust standard errors clustered a the country-pair level. See note 7 for controls and additional controls. Significance levels ∗∗∗ p < .01, ∗∗ p < .05, ∗ p < .1. more synthetic variable for resource asymmetry: P r(Conflictij,t+1) = β0 + β1
ReAij,t + β2 BDij,t + Zij + uij,t where ReA is the dummy variable for resource asymmetries just described, BD is the bilateral dependence and Z is the same vector of controls proposed by Caselli et al (2015), but replacing the bilateral trade one. In the first column of Table 3 we show that our two measures of interest push in opposite directions with respect to the probability of conflict
in the complete sample, showing a positive and significant at the 1% level coefficient for the Resource Asymmetry variable and a negative and significant at the 5% level for the Bilateral Dependence one. In the second column we restrict to the subsample for which we have also information of value added trade data, and we confirm the significance and directions of our variables, in
particular observing that in this restricted sample both of them are significant at the 1% level. An interesting preliminary way to exploit the value added trade data is to study a measure of FVA asymmetry, computed as |F V Ai−F V Aj | T otalExporti+T otalExportj . This measure captures the level of asymmetry in terms of FVA between the countries in the dyad, for each year.
Replicating column (2) of Table 3, but this time dividing the sample in dyads characterized by a particularly high level (low level) of FVA asymmetry (respectively above and below the median of the FVA asymmetry distribution), we can observe in Table 4 that for dyads characterized by a particularly high level of asymmetry in FVA between the countries, the positive and significant
role of the asymmetry in resources dominates with respect to the bilateral dependence one, which turns out to be not significant. The situation is completely reversed, showing a negative and significant (at the 1% 13 Table 4: FVA Asymmetry (1) (2) Resource Asymmetry 0.0636 0.266*** (0.0401) (0.0761) Bil. Dependence -0.0117*** -0.0049 (0.00397) (0.0038) Observations 2,089
1,559 R-squared 0.299 0.401 Sample Low FVA Asymmetry High FVA Asymmetry Type oil All All Country FE Yes Yes Add. controls Yes Yes Notes. Dependent variable: MID (Militarized Interstate Dispute), defined the occurrence in a specific country pair of ”use of force” or ”war” (see Correlate Of War project for further details). Method: OLS with robust standard errors clustered a the
countrypair level. See note 7 for controls and additional controls. Significance levels ∗∗∗ p < .01, ∗∗ p < .05, ∗ p < .1. level) role of the bilateral dependence and a non significant role for resource asymmetry, for dyads where the FVA asymmetry is particularly low. This is again a set of results that suggest the great sensitivity of the sign of interdependence effects on war probability
when the fear of asymmetries varies, in line with the intuition in Copeland (2015) book. In future research we plan to build on these preliminary observations and to construct theoretical models and instruments for a precise study of the causality channels, but for the purpose of this article the above table should suffice to see the potential richness of the implications of considering

all these structural and geographic data together. 4 Conclusions In economics as well as in political science, the relationship between economic interdependence and conflict has been extensively discussed. Copeland (2015) is a refreshing book on this subject, most of all because it offers a
possibility to reconcile and balance the traditional realist and liberal insights at the level of broad
intuitions. Precisely because we believe that many insights in the book are correct, we have offered in this article a critical evaluation of the existing qualitative and quantitative studies on the subject, proposing a
number of fruitful ways to exploit new data for the same balancing and reconciling goal that inspired the book. Geographic asymmetries , asymmetries in natural
resource endowments , asymmetries in the structure of production , are observable types of asymmetries that
all reduce the peace effects of bilateral dependence . The intuition for these findings is, we believe, in line with the discussion in 14 Copeland about the role of vulnerability.

Diversionary pressures prove

Gene Healy 17, vice president at the Cato Institute and author of “The Cult of the Presidency: America’s
Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.”, 4-28-2017, "100 Days in, Trump Has Already Learned the
Seductions of Foreign War," Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/100-days-
trump-has-already-learned-seductions-foreign-war

There’s a good deal of political-science evidence suggesting that the “ temptation ” Madison warned about is real.
The “rally effect, “for “ rally round the flag ,” describes the popularity boost presidents derive from
international conflict: “Scholars have repeatedly found short-lived spikes in US presidential approval following US uses of military force.” The
“diversionary war” hypothesis—the scholarly moniker for “Wag the Dog”—proposes that beleaguered presidents may
seek to distract the public by waging war abroad . Here, the evidence is more mixed. But various studies have found
that presidents are more likely to use force during periods of economic stagnation , or high
unemployment , and that “presidents resort to the sword more quickly when their approval ratings decline.” Some presidents

may be particularly susceptible to temptation: “More conceptually simple leaders —particularly when high in distrust, a trait linked to more
hawkish policy inclinations—are significantly more likely to engage in diversion.” The Media Love War. Middle America, Not So Much
Whatever motivated Trump’s Syria strike, it seems to have given his dismal approval ratings a nudge. Moreover, judging by the chorus of approval from American
“opinion leaders,” the president may have to rethink his view that the press is the “enemy of the American people.” On Syria, media elites proved themselves far
more likely to “rally round the flag” than will guys in trucker hats. The “failing New York Times” greeted the airstrikes with the headline “On Syria Attack, Trump’s
Heart Came First.” He “did the right thing” was the common refrain from former critics, like the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, the humanitarian hawk Anne-Marie
Slaughter, and neoconservative #NeverTrump-er Bret Stephens. It’s no surprise that, as a senior White House official told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius,

“The decision to strike a Syrian air base was a confidence builder for an inexperienced and sometimes fractious White

House.” After all, “Trump couldn’t be sure when he launched the attack that a Russian wouldn’t be killed, or that some other freak mishap
wouldn’t arise.” We managed to dodge the worst-case scenarios, but new dangers lie ahead . As Madison
warned: in war, “laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human
breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”
Reducing inequality through technological advancement is the best for of
sustainability policy---alternatives fail.
Marco Rosaire Rossi 15, writer and activist in Olympia, Washington. He is the author of the book, A
Politics for the 99%. His previous works have been published in Z Magazine, the Peace and Conflict
Monitor, Counterpunch.org, New Compass, and the Humanist magazine., 9-29-2015, "Ecological
Modernity versus Capitalist Modernity," New Compass, http://new-compass.net/articles/ecological-
modernity-versus-capitalist-modernity

In this provocative essay, Marco Rosaire Rossi challenges Murray Bookchin's fundamental claim that
capitalism's lifeblood is unfettered growth. Contrary to radical wisdom, Rossi writes, if we are to build an ecological
society we will need more growth, not less . De-growth in a time of austerity is morally reprehensible
and material prosperity must be increased; the Industrial Revolution must be rapidly advanced. Without
this progress, humanity will only remain at the threshold of an ecological society and no more. It has become
almost cliché to remark that human civilization is facing an existential crisis unparalleled in history. It is almost cliché, but not quite, because to refer to it as cliché does a disservice to the
extensiveness of the problem; and yet, calling it a cliché somehow speaks to the banality of the apocalyptic cries. From across the political spectrum, there is a sense that “The End Is Nigh,”
and after “Nigh” has lasted many years—for some, even decades—a sense of apathetic dread sinks in. The world is going to die, it has been dying for years, and apparently there is nothing
anyone can do about it. This acedia of apathetic dread is based both in reality and in ideology. The reality is that the planet is experiencing a major threat in the form of global warming. Our
global economic system has put itself in violent opposition to any ecological parameters. The major disruptions of global warming still loom over the horizon; yet, their immanence means that

we need to consider the consequences of increasing humanity’s material prosperity. Billions of people need to be pulled out of poverty, but if
doing so ends up sending the planet off a cliff then it makes little sense to do just that. At the same time,
billions of people are living in abject poverty. Chilling ourselves to their plight out of ecological concern
requires a dimming of our sense of humanity. In halting material prosperity we may save the planet but
in the process we kill our humanity. Development or Sustainability? The ideological source of this apathetic dread is the Morton’s Fork between material security
and ecological sustainability to begin with. Ideologically, there appears to be an inability to imagine a society that is

materially secure, even prosperous, and ecologically sustainable. Finding a loving marriage between technology and ecology is at the
center of many of our ecological and social problems. New technologies must allow ecosystems to become more diverse and

stable, and that environmental diversity and stability must be used in such a way that it allows humans
the time and leisure to engage in even more sophisticated technological pursuits. What environmentalists have failed to
cultivate when it comes to nature is the same sense of progress that seems instinctual to a modernist understanding of technology, thus their opposition. Since the birth of

the environmental movement the entire approach to the natural world has been one of conservation. A
pristine, romantic, and often spiritual approach to the natural world has meant that environmentalists have adopted a savior psychology to their activism. Nature, in its innocence, cannot be

polluted with civilization. It must be saved from the inherent capriciousness of humanity through prohibitions and austerity. This one-sided approach to
environmentalism not only ignores the vitality and resilience of the natural world, but also
establishes an “otherness” between humanity and nature that reinforces humanity’s alienation to
the natural world . In the hopes of bringing the “arrogance of man” down to the level of nature,
environmentalists have duplicated the very dichotomy that they oppose but with one important twist:
Nature is supposed to reign over society, and it should reign even if the supremacy of nature means that certain people in society must be made desolate.
Ecology should not, and cannot, be a synonym for misanthropy . Civilization does have the potential to
destroy nature, but it also has the potential to restore and complement it. The modern world has endowed us with both
unprecedented destructive capacities and liberating potentialities. Moreover, modern technology has shown us the means to not only

liberate humans from the harsh conditions of the natural world, but also to liberate the natural world
from a harsh and myopic civilization. Before the use of coal fed the Industrial Revolution, the main
source of energy in the world was wood. Wood is an extraordinarily inefficient source of energy that releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. If the
European need for wood had not transferred to coal—and there was no reason to suspect that it would
have slowed down—then all of Europe would have been deforested, and we would still be dealing with
the problem of climate change. The fossil fuel economy saved humanity from this travesty. Fossil fuels, though problematic in our own time, are far denser forms of
energy. They do not require a massive project of deforestation to extract. The movement beyond fossil fuels continues along the same lines as the movement beyond wood, that is, the search
for denser and more efficient forms of energy. This project can only come about through the advancement of technological and scientific progress, a furthering of the Industrial Revolution, not

its retraction. Similarly, our economy is potentially going through a subtle process of dematerialization that is
forcing a reassessment of the relationship between industrial and postindustrial societies. We are able
to generate more wealth, with less stuff, more efficiently . In the developing world, many countries are still experiencing materializing
economies, but—as the developed nations dematerializes—there appears to be a point when economic development reaches past material security and into intellectual and cultural

achievements. Consumerism is to be feared when it becomes a substitute for social creativity. Consumption,
in contrast, is not just metabolically necessary, but socially desirable. The sociability of a farmers’
market or craft fair indicates that there is an innate participatory aspect to consumption that goes
beyond avaricious conceptions of humanity as automaton pigs with bottomless stomachs. People
consume the most when they are in groups, and yet our consumption is the least material when it is the
most communal. The greatest ecological transformation that the modern world has brought is the migration of people from villages to cities and the bifurcation of rural and
urban life. From an ecological perspective, cities, with their geographical density and tightly interwoven

economies, create an ideal situation for harmonizing the social and the natural world. Cities enable rich
cultural lives and they do so at a minimum of ecological consequences. Stacking homes in apartment buildings and concentrating
human activity within a walkable distance requires an intense alteration of an ecological landscape, but that landscape is extremely small, and uses a fraction of the resources used by
sprawling suburbs. In turn, the movement to the cities has been matched and encouraged by startling technological innovations in agriculture. The sustainable intensification that has
happened through the creation of the modern city is also happening on the modern farm. Food production has reached heights undreamed of a hundred years ago, and it has done so with a
fraction of the labor power and a slowing down of the need for more land. The ability to produce more with less has meant that a feral nature has been able to bounce back. The social and the

These important trends give hope to

natural world are cobbling together a lasting peace within a strategic division between urban, rural, and feral landscapes.

reconciling technology and ecology but they are not inevitable. Apathetic dread should not be replaced
by euphoric naiveté. These trends have only developed through an effort to modernize civilization. This
includes pursuing a secular and scientific worldview that values innovation and technological
achievements, but it also includes expanding democratic governance, ensuring social and economic
equality, and encouraging cosmopolitan perspectives. Dealing with our current ecological crisis means
that we must recognize that our inability to move from fossil fuels to other sources of energy is rooted
in stubborn institutional arrangements that do not respond more to the imperatives hierarchical
management and market competition than human and ecological needs do. Capitalism: No friend of growth Global warming is a
market failure of potentially catastrophic proportions. The carbon released into the earth’s atmosphere is externalized from the transactions within our economy, and this externalization
means that the cost of this pollution is placed on future generations and the environment. The pursuit of developing nations to have a living standard on par with that of developed nations is
thought to be at the heart of this market failure, but that is a misplaced analysis. Free market libertarians and Luddite eco-socialists alike have thought that economic development was a
byproduct of capitalism. This assumption ignores the reality that the areas of the world that have been forced to deal with the fiercest free-market conditions are the areas of the world that
have been the most chronically underdeveloped. Developing nations have only been able to shake off the yoke of imperialism through establishing planned economies, industrial policies, and

For decades, pioneering social ecologists such as Murray

social safety nets that prevent the self-destructive tendencies of markets.

Bookchin warned environmentalists and political radicals of a coming ecological collapse initiated by
capitalist modes of production. For Bookchin it was capitalism’s “grow-or-die” ethos that inexorably
linked the market economy to the simplification and eventual destruction of complex life, including
humanity. Bookchin got the problem right, but the causal mechanism wrong. Indeed, capitalist modes
of production are at the heart of much of our current ecological problems, but it is not because
capitalism inherently promotes economic growth. If there is one major lesson that should be drawn from post-World War II economic history, especially from
our own globalized neoliberal era, it is that the economic growth unleashed by unfettered free markets is quite limited. Free market capitalism does not seem

to operate along the lines of “grow-or-die,” but instead along the lines of “grow-then-die,” meaning that
macroeconomic growth under capitalism is hindered by the same anarchic market forces that lead to its
initial paroxysm. And it is the periods of economic destruction—where there are continual recessions
and extreme social volatility—that pose the greatest threats to our ecology . It is in those periods
when it is the most difficult for people to understand that the fate of humanity is intimately tied to the
fate of the natural world, and when people are least inclined to use additional resources to explore
newer, more environmentally sustainable technologies. Capitalism is at the heart of our ecological crisis not because it develops economies, but
for the very fact that it does the opposite. Joseph Schumpeter’s plucking of the term “creative destruction” from Marxists has both enlightened and obfuscated our conceptual understanding
of economic development and its relation to technology. For Schumpeter, largely drawing on Marxist writings on capitalism, creative destruction referred to periods of economic development
where an old world was destroyed to make way for the prosperity of a new one. His meaning is more akin to the Hegelian notion Aufhebung, a concept that is always underneath Marx’s work,
than to the mechanistic repetition of collapse and regeneration of the business cycle that free-market apologists have emphasized. The exogenous factor for these economic upheavals was the
introduction of new technologies, ones that were able to internalize externalities, create efficiencies, and thus undermine all previous forms of competition, even monopolistic forms.
Schumpeter was correct in recognizing the inherent developmental nature within economies and the important role of technological progress as in usurping a given economic order, but his
willingness to attribute this progress to capitalists, specifically large corporations and monopolistic entities, clouds the actual nature of this economic development. The increasing complexity
of economic transactions and technological innovation demand that those periods of creative destruction become less driven by lone inventors and more the result of collective institutions

and mass social cooperation. The belief that capitalism, as an ethical framework, can save itself by its own innovation
ignores the stark reality that to produce such innovation in complex modern societies capitalist ethics
must be violated, sometimes violently so. Marx and Engels were correct: there is a disjunction between
modes of production that require increasingly cooperative institutions and an economic system that
promotes an extreme individualistic ethos above all else. But, their focus on the birth of factory labor
out of feudal artisanship was myopic. Capitalism’s inconsistencies arise not only within the factory,
where the cooperation of workers to produce goods is at odds with the individual ownership of the
factory by capitalists, but also in society at large, where the demands for modern technological
innovation require huge economies of scale and cooperation between workers in entire industries. In
this way, economies have developed despite private ownership and hierarchical forms of management,
not because of them. As the Solow-Swan growth model has shown, the main engine for economic growth in developed nations, at least since World War II, has been the
introduction of technological innovation. In this same period, the primer for this engine has been public sector spending. It is the public sector that has played

the most critical role in economic development through planning economies and allocating resources
toward research and development. Unfortunately, the public, disengaged from their political institutions
by a sprawling hierarchical class of bureaucrats and professional politicians, have allowed a parasitic
private sector to profit from this innovation and to direct this allocation in a manner that best serves
them. Regardless though, modern capitalist prosperity has only been able to occur through shadow socialism. The irony of all modern entrepreneurs is that none of them would have been
able to innovate without the aid of the state. Socialism, democracy and equality The question then beckons: why should socialism remain
in the shadows? What is needed to deal with the crisis of global warming is not policies of planned
economic de-growth that mimic rightwing austerity under a socialists facade, but rapid and
sustainable economic growth through embracing technological innovations that reconcile the tension
between society and nature . A great confusion has overcome both the acolytes and adversaries of capitalism. “Capitalism” as a particular mode of production has
In actuality,
become so synonymous with economics in general that any economic growth is seen as capitalist economic growth, regardless of its context or results.

capitalism is an example of an alienated economy where the vast majority of its participants—that is to
say, workers and consumers—are unaware of their true economic potential. The ultimate form of
“creative destruction” regarding capitalism is the technological and economic development out of
capitalism itself. The humanist desire for continuous and sustainable economic development, the
constant pursuit for ecologically sound and cooperative forms of production and consumption is a threat
to capitalism, not the apex of its expression. Polemical calls for economic de-growth in a world where
the majority of people still live in abject poverty are worse than strategically inept; they are morally
reprehensible and politically asphyxiating. Democracy, especially sophisticated forms of direct democracy, cannot advance without increasing material
prosperity. Since the time of Aristotle, it has been recognized that for democracy to function there must be a degree of leisure time spent among the population. No robust public life can be
established in a society where material scarcity causes people to devote the majority of their time to securing the fundamental means of subsistence. Further, a society where technologies
have reduced, and in some cases eliminated, odious tasks liberates people to engage in higher cultural functions, including their own self-management and governance. This is especially the
case for those who have been traditionally denied access to the public sphere. Despite its necessity for its time, the eighteenth-century cry that “we are all born equal” has become an ossified
platitude. The reality is that we are not all born equal. Nature produces grave inequalities between us in ability. Morality demands that we rectify these inequalities by creating new

opportunities, both socially and materially, for all. There is a dialectical relation between social equality and technological
innovation. Modern feminism would have an entirely different meaning if breakthroughs in
contraceptive technologies were not established by the mid-twentieth century. The case is similar for
the elderly, for transgender individuals, for people with disabilities, children, and nations established in
areas of the world with a dearth of natural resources. In each situation, the interaction between social
struggles and technological innovations has led to greater social inclusion . People are not born equal,
rather, they are perpetually made and remade equal by continuous efforts at social uplift and
prosperity. Conclusion There is no reason to doubt that such “equalizing” efforts could not only continue but be advanced into the ecological realm. Modern
technologies and the growth of material prosperity have within them the potential to “uplift” the
environment. Far from being a matter of mere conservation, environmental sustainability in the modern world is a twin-cousin to development economics. Influenced by the work
of soft deep ecologists such as Bill McKibben, many environmentalists have lamented the “end of nature” and arrival of the Anthropocene, fearing that it signifies the beginning of the end for

No doubt, the Anthropocene has this potential, but it also has another potential. Through
biodiversity.

modeling its environment to ensure human prosperity while at the same time organizing its social
institutions to guarantee environmental stewardship, humanity has a historical opportunity that is
unprecedented among any species on that planet. Humanity can escape its Malthusian traps through
continually enriching, rather than simplifying, it surrounding environment. Its flourishing as a species
could be a boon for biodiversity rather than its dwindling. There needs to be a conscious social
reconfiguration that utilizes denser forms of energy, dematerializes economies, and geographically
decouples humanity from nature within a triad of urban, rural, and feral development. If such a
reconfiguration where to occur it would mean a massive expansion of economic growth through the
unleashing of humanity’s technological and scientific potential . The complexity of such a project can only happen through the type of
All capitalists have a vested interest in protecting their
large participatory planned economy that socialists have always advocated for.

business model, even if such a model is based on an obsolete technology that is destroying the planet.
The only way societal development can avoid getting bogged down in the obstinateinterests of
capitalists is if economic interests become the general interest of all. That is only possible in a
democratic economic system that values the participation and perspective of each individual, in
community, instead of the will of one class over another
But this doesn’t necessitate infinite growth – the aff allows stabilization that prevents
crisis in those market failures
Harry Saunders 16, Senior Fellow at Breakthrough Institute and the managing director of Decision
Processes Incorporated, Summer, " Does Capitalism Require Endless Growth? ," Breakthrough Institute,
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-6/does-capitalism-require-endless-
growth

For a capitalist economy to flourish without economic growth, population stabilization is a necessary
condition. This condition is, of course, not limited to the capitalist model. It is implausible that any
alternative to the capitalist model could deliver zero economic growth with a persistently growing global
population. The second critical precondition for a steady state capitalist economy is that everyone must
achieve a satisfactory level of consumption. This second precondition, in contrast to the first, is arguably unique to the capitalist model.
The fundamental characteristic of capitalist economies, that which sets them apart from centrally
managed socialist economies, is that capitalism, formally defined, is the economic system where the
means of production resides in the hands of households. By households, of course, I mean private
individuals. Some households own more capital than others, but most households in capitalist
economies own some capital, whether as shareholders in public corporations, owners or investors in privately held businesses, beneficiaries of
pension funds, or holders of corporate bonds. Irrespective
of which particular households own it, all capital formation in
a capitalist economy originates from households, be it directly or indirectly. In a capitalist economy,
households run the show, both as producers and — as we shall see next — consumers. All else being equal,
households decide how much they spend and how much they save, how much they work, and how much leisure time they wish to have. So long as there remains
significant pent-up demand for work and consumption, those choices are limited. Households that don’t earn enough to consume all the goods they need don’t
have a choice of whether or not to save or whether or not to work. But once
those needs are met, work, consumption, savings,
and leisure become a matter of choice. Households will work as much as they need to consume and
save as much as they need or want. In an economy wherein households have globally realized a level of physical consumption they deem
“satisficing,” aggregate consumption will precisely match individual household preferences among consumption, savings, and leisure time. For this reason, a steady
state economy cannot be achieved in a capitalist economy until such time as households in the aggregate have deemed themselves to have achieved sufficient
goods and services consumption. This is an outcome that in many parts of the world may not be so far away. In the rich Scandinavian countries, households today
already forfeit significant added earnings in favor of increased leisure time. According to the OECD, the number of annual hours worked per employed worker has
declined substantially in the 14-year period from 1999 to 2013 (0.2%–0.3%/year in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and the US; 0.5%/year in Germany) while
real wages in these countries have increased by about 1.3%/year over the same period.29 So long as consumption is unsaturated, labor is in surplus, and capital is
scarce globally, growth will be required to meet pent-up demand for goods and services. Once that demand is met, however, either because wages have risen
sufficiently to achieve satisficing levels of consumption, or the cost of goods and services has declined sufficiently to achieve the same outcome, continuing
aggregate growth is no longer required, or likely. 4. If there is a problem with this picture, it is the issue raised by Mason and the post-capitalists. Why
would
anyone continue to invest in capital when returns have fallen to zero? The answer brings us back to the
central role of households in capitalist economies. Given the means to do so, most households in
capitalist economies forgo some consumption in order to save, allowing some of the economy’s
production to be directed toward the creation of new physical capital to replace or grow the existing
capital in place instead of consuming all production in the present period. Savings behavior by
households, it turns out, is not driven by the returns that households expect, but rather by their desire
to save for retirement. As demonstrated by Franco Modigliani and colleagues30 (work, not incidentally, that won Modigliani a Nobel Prize), households
working toward retirement want made available to them financial resources to carry them through their post-retirement life without working, so they save for this.

Even if they receive no positive return on the savings they have set aside, they will nonetheless be able to draw on them. Why invest rather than
just stuffing savings under a mattress? Because even in a zero-growth economy, returns to capital are
not always zero . When the supply of physical capital supported by household savings declines, returns
to capital rise, inducing households to raid their mattresses and invest their savings in the hope of
getting more back for retirement than they put in. Eventually, the system adjusts itself and capital
returns again fall to zero (on average, economy wide). The result, then, is that in a zero-growth economy,
households provide all the new capital needed for producers to replace capital stock that has
deteriorated (depreciated) out of the system, but no more. There is no need to grow the capital stock
in a zero-growth economy, just to sustain and refresh it. Household savings for retirement accomplish
exactly this. But what about producers? Why continue to build replacement capital if the expected
returns are zero? Again, because expected returns to replacement capital will not always be zero, even
when average returns are . When investment in new capital falls, capital stock in the production
economy falls as well, and with that employment falls, because the productive capacity of the economy
shrinks. Lower output and lower wages in turn create new opportunities for profitable investment in
new capital stock and increased employment. In a zero-growth economy, household savings invested match replacement capital needs,
economy-wide capital returns on average approach zero, and production and consumption continue apace, neither growing nor declining. Theoretically,
then, there is no particular reason that capitalist economies must collapse without growth.
Empirically, a range of trends suggest that growth rates slow as societies become wealthier, not
because labor becomes immiserated but rather for the opposite reason, because demand for goods
and services saturates.

Thus the plan: The United States federal government should implement an open
licensing regulation for a substantial amount of elementary and secondary education
curriculum resources that receive federal funding
 Advantage 2: Framing
Scenario analysis is pedagogically valuable – enhances creativity and self-reflexivity,
deconstructs cognitive biases and flawed ontological assumptions, and enables the
imagination and creation of alternative futures.
Barma et al., UC Berkeley political science PhD, 2016 (Naazneen, “Imagine a World in Which’:
Using Scenarios in Political Science”, International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19,
http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp
_2015.pdf

Over the past decade, the “cult of irrelevance” in political science scholarship has been lamented by a growing
chorus (Putnam 2003; Nye 2009; Walt 2009). Prominent scholars of international affairs have diagnosed the roots of the gap between academia and policymaking,
made the case for why political science research is valuable for policymaking, and offered a number of ideas for enhancing the policy
relevance of scholarship in international relations and comparative politics (Walt 2005,2011; Mead 2010; Van Evera 2010; Jentleson and Ratner 2011; Gallucci 2012; Avey and Desch 2014). Building on these insights, several

initiatives have been formed in the attempt to “bridge the gap.”2 Many of the specific efforts put in place by these projects focus on providing scholars
with the skills, platforms, and networks to better communicate the findings and implications of their research to the
policymaking community, a necessary and worthwhile objective for a field in which theoretical debates, methodological training, and publishing norms tend more and more toward the abstract and
esoteric. Yet enhancing communication between scholars and policymakers is only one component of bridging the gap between international affairs theory and

practice. Another crucial component of this bridge is the generation of substantive research programs that are actually policy
relevant —a challenge to which less concerted attention has been paid. The dual challenges of bridging the gap are especially acute for graduate students, a particular irony since many enter the discipline with the
explicit hope of informing policy. In a field that has an admirable devotion to pedagogical self-reflection, strikingly little
attention is paid to techniques for generating policy-relevant ideas for dissertation and other research topics. Although
numerous articles and conference workshops are devoted to the importance of experiential and problem-based learning, especially through techniques of simulation that emulate policymaking processes (Loggins 2009; Butcher

This article outlines an

2012; Glasgow 2012; Rothman 2012; DiCicco 2014), little has been written about the use of such techniques for generating and developing innovative research ideas.

experiential and problem-based approach to developing a political science research program using scenario analysis. It
focuses especially on illuminating the research generation and pedagogical benefits of this technique by describing the use of scenarios in the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference (NEFPC), which brings together doctoral
students of international and comparative affairs who share a demonstrated interest in policy-relevant scholarship.3 In the introductory section, the article outlines the practice of scenario analysis and considers the utility of the
technique in political science. We argue that scenario analysis should be viewed as a tool to stimulate problem-based learning for doctoral students and discuss the broader scholarly benefits of using scenarios to help generate
research ideas. The second section details the manner in which NEFPC deploys scenario analysis. The third section reflects upon some of the concrete scholarly benefits that have been realized from the scenario format. The fourth
section offers insights on the pedagogical potential associated with using scenarios in the classroom across levels of study. A brief conclusion reflects on the importance of developing specific techniques to aid those who wish to

Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining

generate political science scholarship of relevance to the policy world. What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science?

the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations

of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect
themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if”
questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate
planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently
limited to these uses . This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for
the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis
We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in
order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures , often referred to as “alternative worlds.”
Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary
patterns , and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions . Nor should they be equated with
simulations , which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making
processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world , offered together with a
 narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures . Good scenarios thus rely on explicit
causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of
2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular
trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the
Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with
the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-
line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future
will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the
global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the
disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found
in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds”
approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate
scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the

Several features make

German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013).

scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of
different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen
challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is
constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known
cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of
scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and
analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives
about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables
policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known
present . Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-
Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how
relevant research programs.

the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a
known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer
competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious
disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of
specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so

Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-
prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself.

overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios
thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this
objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured
experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal
forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading
globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus,
the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts
of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however,
is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the

The use of scenarios is

analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005).

similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to
analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events
that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore
potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and
thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-

We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in

grained historical knowledge.

international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for
NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth
investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the
research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a
framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to

The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some
the articulation of new research agendas.

guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by
which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking
(Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by
looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base
their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of
 The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in
any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance.

the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be
of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research
programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds
that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues
scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin
thinking critically about them now . This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as
to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In
imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for
overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding
the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.
Including the state in analysis is necessary for effective scholarship – the historical
dominance of “state-centrism” is an argument for, not against, its relevance.
Booth, Aberystwyth international politics professor, 2014
(Ken, International Relations: All That Matters, 7/25, google books)

Scholars love to debate the definition of their discipline. This is hardly surprising, as there is always a great deal riding on where one draws the line between what is in or out. In this book,

‘international relations’ is defined simply as the international level of world politics. By ‘international level’ I mean the interactions largely (but not
exclusively) of sovereign states; by ‘world politics’ I mean ‘who gets what, when and how across the world’, to stretch Harold Lasswell’s classical definition of ‘politics’. The

reason for accentuating the international level of world politics is twofold. First, as already mentioned, the international is a level with enormous ‘causal weight’. Second, to engage

with ‘who gets what, when and how across the world’ without a coherent focus such as ‘the
international level’ is to invite bewilderment in the face of information overload. This problem is evident in many of the doorstep-sized textbooks

about ‘world’ or ‘global’ politics: what in the world is not a matter of ‘world politics’? The formulation proposed offers a distinct focus (‘the
international’ ), while being empirically open (‘the world’). I owe this way of thinking largely to C.A.W. Manning, an early doyen of IR, who described
academic international relations as having ‘a focus but not a periphery’. By focusing on the international, critics will say
that I have succumbed to a ‘ state-centric’ view of the world. This is the idea that states are the fundamental reality of world politics. Such a view is

sometimes also described as being ‘statist’, meaning endorsing the idea that the state is and should be the highest level of both political decision-making and loyalty. My position is
more complicated: I want to recognize the empirical significance of states and their relations without
being statist politically or ethically . This is like an atheist arguing about ‘religion’. An atheist cannot for long discuss religion without talking about God, but this
does not make the atheist ‘God-centric’; it only means that the atheist is aware of the significance of God when talking about religion. The book will argue that the international
level of world politics is state-dominated in an empirical sense (some states are the most powerful ‘actors’ in the world) without
succumbing to state-centrism in a normative sense (believing that the contemporary states-system represents the best of all possible worlds).

Later chapters will underline that states are not the only actors at the international level: some multinational corporations have more clout than some states. Nonetheless , it would
be foolish to play down the continuing significance of especially the most powerful states in determining
‘who gets what’ across the world, or the continuing ‘causal weight’ of state interactions in shaping the ‘when and how’ of things happening. Recognizing these
empirical realities is perfectly consistent with accepting that one of the aims of studying IR is to challenge what
is done, and why, and consider whether different worlds are possible and desirable. Matters of continuity and change are always present in international relations. According to the
‘realist’ tradition (explained later), the international level or system has had, again in Waltz’s term, a distinct ‘texture ’ (a persisting set of
characteristics) over the centuries. This continuity allows us to have a time-transcending understanding of the situations, dilemmas and crises faced
by leaders and peoples in other places in other eras. Critics of this view - those dazzled by what’s new - tend to argue that talk of ‘texture’ exaggerates
continuity. This is mistaken. There can be no doubt that we live in a new era when it comes to technology and its potential, for example, but have
relations between political units fundamentally changed? We cannot, and should not, assume that everything will always be the same, but it
would be foolish to underestimate the stubborn continuities of state interactions.

Understanding the state as a fixed yet flexible node of power is the only model that
avoids cooption – locating the state as a key variable of analysis is key to create
actionable knowledge and organize collective action
Bayat, Sociology Prof @ University of Illinois, 13
(Asef, Life As Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, pp. 41-45)

The dearth of conventional collective action— in par tic u lar, contentious protests among the subaltern groups (the poor, peasants, and
women) in the developing countries, together with a disillusionment with dominant socialist parties, pushed many radical observers to “discover”

and highlight different types of activism, however small- scale, local, or even individualistic. Such a quest, meanwhile, both contributed to and
benefi ted from the upsurge of theoretical perspectives, during the 1980s, associated with poststructuralism that made micropolitics and
“everyday resistance” a popular idea. James Scott’s departure, during the 1980s, from a structuralist position in studying the behavior of the
peasantry in Asia to a more ethnographic method of focusing on individual reactions of peasants contributed considerably to this paradigm shift .27 In the
meantime, Foucault’s “decentered” notion of power, together with a revival of neo- Gramscian politics of culture (hegemony), served as a key theoretical backing
for micropolitics, and thus the “re sis tance” perspective. The notion of “re sis tance” came to stress that power and counterpower were not in binary opposition,
but in a decoupled, complex, ambivalent, and perpetual “dance of control.”28 It based itself on the Foucauldian idea that “wherever there is power there is re sis
tance,” although the latter consisted largely of small- scale, everyday, tiny activities that the agents could aff ord to articulate given their po liti cal constraints. Such
a perception of re sis tance penetrated not only peasant studies, but a variety of fi elds, including labor studies, identity politics, ethnicity, women’s studies,
education, and studies of the urban subaltern. Thus, multiple researchers discussed how relating stories about miracles “gives voice to pop u lar re sis tance”29;
how disenfranchised women resisted patriarchy by relating folktales and songs or by pretending to be possessed or crazy;30 how reviving extended family among
the urban pop u lar classes represented an “avenue of po liti cal participation.”31 The relationships between the Filipino bar girls and western men were discussed
not simply in terms of total domination, but in a complex and contingent fashion;32 and the veiling of the Muslim working woman has been represented not in
simple terms of submission, but in ambivalent terms of protest and co- optation— hence, an “accommodating protest.”33 Indeed, on occasions, both veiling and
unveiling were simultaneously considered as a symbol of re sis tance. Undoubtedly, such an attempt to grant agency to the subjects that until then were depicted as
“passive poor,” “submissive women,” “apo liti cal peasant,” and “oppressed worker” was a positive development. The re sis tance paradigm helps to uncover the
complexity of power relations in society in general, and the politics of the subaltern in par tic u lar. It tells us that we may not expect a universalized form of
struggle; that totalizing pictures oft en distort variations in people’s perceptions about change; that local should be recognized as a signifi cant site of struggle as
well as a unit of analysis; that or ga nized collective action may not be possible everywhere, and thus alternative forms of struggles must be discovered and
acknowledged; that or ganized protest as such may not necessarily be privileged in the situations where suppression rules. The value of a more fl exible, small-
scale, and unbureaucratic activism should, therefore, be acknowledged.34 These are some of the issues that critiques of poststructuralist advocates of “re sis tance”

ignore.35 Yet a number of conceptual and political problems also emerge from this paradigm. The immediate trouble
is how to conceptualize re sis tance, and its relation to power, domination, and submission. James Scott seems to be clear about what he means by the term: Class
re sis tance includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige)
made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect)

vis-à- vis these superordinate classes.36 [emphasis added] However, the phrase “any act” blocks delineating between
qualitatively diverse forms of activities that Scott lists. Are we not to distinguish between large- scale
collective action and individual acts, say, of tax dodging? Do reciting poetry in private, however subversive-
sounding, and engaging in armed struggle have identical value? Should we not expect unequal aff ectivity and implications from such
diff erent acts? Scott was aware of this, and so agreed with those who had made distinctions between diff erent types of resistance— for example, “real re sis
tance” refers to “or ga nized, systematic, pre- planned or selfl ess practices with revolutionary consequences,” and “token re sis tance” points to unor ga nized
incidental acts without any revolutionary consequences, and which are accommodated in the power structure.37 Yet he insisted that the “token re sis tance” is no
less real than the “real re sis tance.” Scott’s followers, however, continued to make further distinctions. Nathan Brown, in studying peasant politics in Egypt, for
instance, identifi es three forms of politics: atomistic (politics of individuals and small groups with obscure content), communal (a group eff ort to disrupt the
system, by slowing down production and the like), and revolt ( just short of revolution to negate the system).38 Beyond this, many resistance writers
tend to confuse an awareness about oppression with acts of resistance against it . The fact that poor women sing
songs about their plight or ridicule men in their private gatherings indicates their understanding of gender dynamics. This
does not mean, however, that
they are involved in acts of resistance; neither are the miracle stories of the poor urbanites who imagine
the saints to come and punish the strong. Such an understanding of “resistance” fails to capture the
extremely complex interplay of conflict and consent, and ideas and action, operating within

systems of power . Indeed, the link between consciousness and action remains a major sociological
dilemma .39 Scott makes it clear that re sis tance is an intentional act. In Weberian tradition, he takes the meaning of action as a crucial element. This
intentionality, while signifi cant in itself, obviously leaves out many types of individual and collective practices whose intended and unintended consequences do not
correspond. In Cairo or Tehran, for example, many poor families illegally tap into electricity and running water from the municipality despite their awareness of their
behavior’s illegality. Yet they do not steal urban ser vices in order to express their defi ance vis-à- vis the authorities. Rather, they do it because they feel the
necessity of those ser vices for a decent life, because they fi nd no other way to acquire them. But these very mundane acts when continued lead to signifi cant
changes in the urban structure, in social policy, and in the actors’ own lives. Hence, the signifi cance of the unintended consequences of agents’ daily activities. In
fact, many authors in the re sis tance paradigm have simply abandoned intent and meaning, focusing instead eclectically on both intended and unintended practices
as manifestations of “re sis tance.” There is still a further question. Does re sis tance mean defending an already achieved gain (in Scott’s terms, denying claims
made by dominant groups over the subordinate ones) or making fresh demands (to “advance its own claims”), what I like to call “encroachment”? In much of the re
sis tance literature, this distinction is missing. Although one might imagine moments of overlap, the two strategies, however, lead to diff erent po liti cal
consequences; this is so in par tic u lar when we view them in relation to the strategies of dominant power. The issue was so crucial that Lenin devoted his entire
What Is to Be Done? to discussing the implications of these two strategies, albeit in diff erent terms of “economism/trade unionism” vs. “social demo cratic/party
politics.” What ever one may think about a Leninist/vanguardist paradigm, it was one that corresponded to a par tic u lar theory of the state and power (a capitalist
state to be seized by a mass movement led by the working- class party); in addition, it was clear where this strategy wanted to take the working class (to establish a

socialist state). Now, what is the perception of the state in the “resistance” paradigm? What is the
strategic aim in this perspective? Where does the resistance paradigm want to take its agents/subjects,
beyond “prevent[ing] the worst and promis[ing] something better ”?40 Much of the literature of re sis tance is based upon
a notion of power that Foucault has articulated, that power is everywhere, that it “circulates” and is never “localized here and there, never in anybody’s hands.” 41
Such a formulation is surely instructive in transcending the myth of the powerlessness of the ordinary and in recognizing their agency. Yet this

“decentered” notion of power, shared by many poststructuralist “re sis tance” writers, underestimates state power ,
notably its class dimension, since it fails to see that although power circulates , it does so unevenly — in some places it is
far weightier , more concentrated, and “thicker,” so to speak, than in others. In other words, like it or not, the state does

matter , and one needs to take that into account when discussing the potential of urban subaltern
activism. Although Foucault insists that re sis tance is real when it occurs outside of and in de pen dent of the systems of power, the perception of
power that informs the “re sis tance” literature leaves little room for an analysis of the state as a
system of power . It is, therefore, not accidental that a theory of the state and, therefore, an analysis of the
possibility of co- optation, are absent in almost all accounts of “resistance.” Consequently, the cherished acts of
resistance float around aimlessly in an unknown , uncertain , and ambivalent universe of power
relations, with the end result an unsettled, tense accommodation with the existing power

arrangement . Lack of a clear concept of resistance , moreover, often leads writers in this genre to
overestimate and read too much into the acts of the agents . The result is that almost
any act of the subjects potentially becomes one of “resistance.” Determined to discover the
“inevitable” acts of resistance, many poststructuralist writers often come to “replace their subject.”42
While they attempt to challenge the essentialism of such perspectives as “passive poor,” “submissive Muslim women,” and “inactive masses,” they tend, however,
to fall into the trap of essentialism in reverse— by reading too much into ordinary behaviors, interpreting them as necessarily conscious or contentious acts of defi
ance. This is so because they overlook the crucial fact that these practices occur mostly within the prevailing systems of power. For example, some of the lower
class’s activities in the Middle East that some authors read as “re sis tance,” “intimate politics” of defi ance, or “avenues of participation” may actually contribute to
the stability and legitimacy of the state.43 The fact that people are able to help themselves and extend their networks surely shows their daily activism and

struggles. However, by doing so the actors may hardly win any space from the state ( or other sources of
power, like capital and patriarchy )— they are not necessarily challenging domination . In fact,
governments often encourage self- help and local initiatives so long as they do not turn oppositional. They do so in order to shift
some of their burdens of social welfare provision and responsibilities onto the individual citizens. The proliferation of many NGOs in the global South is a good
indicator of this. In short, much of the re sis tance literature confuses what one might consider coping strategies (when the survival of the
agents is secured at the cost of themselves or that of fellow humans) and effective participation or subversion of domination . There is a
last question. If the poor are always able to resist in many ways (by discourse or actions, individual or collective, overt or covert) the
systems of domination, then what is the need to assist them? If they are already po litically able citizens, why should we expect

the state or any other agency to empower them? Misreading the behavior of the poor may, in fact, frustrate our moral
responsibility toward the vulnerable. As Michael Brown rightly notes, when you “elevate the small injuries of childhood to the same moral
status as suff ering of truly oppressed,” you are committing “a savage leveling that diminishes rather than intensifi es our sensitivities to injustice.” 44

Any theorization of society as a totalizing abstraction divorced from the lived

experience of precarity fails— discursive reversals and refusals don’t do anything
because agency is constrained materially.
McNay, Somerville theory of politics professor, 2014
(Lois, The Misguided Search for the Political, pg 17-20)

Ideas of language play a significant role in this move away from power because linguistic dynamics are
seen as a particularly fruitful way of modelling foundational political relations. It is easy to see the
attraction of language for thinking through progressive models of democracy: it provides an inclusive
and universal framework for political participation whilst being sufficiently 'thin' to accommodate
problems of deep difference. The difficulty is, however, that the modelling of democratic relations as
linguistic ones may result in an occlusion of certain forms of power and inequality that do not
conform to the logic of signification. Thus, a major cause of socially weightless thinking in radical
democratic theory is what might be called, following Bourdieu (2000), the tendency to linguistic
universalism, where the more entrenched and pathological effects of social asymmetries are
neglected by being assimilated to relations of meaning . Agonist formulations of democratic agency, for
instance, often take their cue from a relational linguistic perspective and are construed around open-
ended dynamics of indeterminacy, contestation and becoming. There is a mismatch between this
valorization of agency as an open and mutable demeanor towards the world and others and a
demeanour, say, of vulnerability and entrapment that might accompany the experience of chronic
deprivation. It is not clear how the former speaks to the latter ; indeed, such an agonistic ethos may be
profoundly alienating for those disempowered individuals who do not necessarily have the material
and symbolic resources to negotiate such a modus operandi with confidence . It is not of course that
there is no value to agonistic accounts of agency, but in order for them to sustain their avowed concern
with the unmasking of domination, they need to be accompanied by a fuller understanding of certain
crucial dynamics of oppression and inequality. Another type of socially weightless thought emanates not
from the attempt to conceptualize political relations through a linguistic paradigm but rather from the
deployment of ontologies of plenitude and abundance to think through the limitless plurality and
dynamism of social existence. On this view, the countless, unremarked-upon practices and 'games of
freedom' that make up the daily lives of ordinary citizens provide the grounds for thinking about radical
democratic agency. In principle, such a bottom-up approach pays more attention to the diverse and 'thick' logic of embodied existence, in both its negative and

positive aspects, than the etiolated and determinist linguistic constructivism that characterizes other types of democratic agonism. Yet, ultimately

because the foundational notion of social plurality and flux is not sufficiently anchored within an
account of structural inequality, it also results in a one-sided, glamorized account of mobile agency that
downplays the fixity and stultification - both objective and dispositional - that may accompany
persistent deprivation and inequality . To overcome such tendencies to social weightlessness, agency
needs to be understood according to a logic of embodiment and power, and I draw primarily on
Bourdieu's notion of habitus to do this. Bourdieu shares with radical democratic theory the insight that
the unmasking and challenging of arbitrary social hierarchies is the fundamental task of progressive
critique. He would reject, however, the abstraction of much of this theory as a form of scholastic naivety that retreats from an examination of the way in which
power hierarchies are inscribed upon the bodies of individuals and lived as a multiplicity of 'ordinary' violences that distort social existence. The idea of
habitus offers, above all, a powerful account of the depoliticizing effects of symbolic violence,
understood as the internalization of domination in such a way that individuals may feel that their
suffering is inevitable or unavoidable and that nothing can be done to change it . In this respect,
Bourdieu’s work stands as a challenge to the pressure-cooker or 'big bang' models of agency that often
tacitly inform radical democratic theory and where the assumption is that if repression is strong enough,
the oppressed will eventually resist (e.g. Lazzeri 2012). From a Bourdieusian perspective, resistance is far from inevitable .
The internalization of domination may affect the ability of individuals to construe their problems as
political in the first place and, even when they do, their willingness to participate in corrective political
action is far from assured. There are significant differences between recognizing injustice, identifying
systemic domination and common interests, devising strategies for action and finally feeling able to
mobilize and act collectively. One does not follow inevitably from another. Consequently, a phenomenological interrogation of embodied agency -
or lack of agency- should include, inter alia, an interpretative element: it must explore individuals' own understanding of their situation in the world and hence their
reasons for acting or not acting in the way that they do. Focusing
on the embodied register of social experience in this way
potentially highlights mundane types of social injustice and domination that have significance for the
individual but are often overlooked by political theorists. A focus on embodied experience sheds light
not only on the said, but also on the unsaid, on negative social experiences which may remain
unarticulated as a distinct claim about injustice even though their pathological effects may be
widespread. In short, an interpretative perspective may deliver a deeper understanding of the reasons
why individuals might be unwilling or unable to participate politically in the manner that radical
democratic theorists prescribe for them. These arguments are intended not as a wholesale refusal of
theories of radical democracy, but rather as a way of extending and deepening some of their important,
but conceptually under-developed insights. They do undoubtedly question, however, whether the tum
to ontology is the most conducive way of thinking about transformative agency and change and suggest
instead that a phenomenally oriented disclosing critique might be a more fruitful approach.
2ac
 Framing
Clearly search for truth is elusive
Jones 04 – (August 2004, Branwen Gruffydd, PhD in Development Studies from the University of Sussex,
Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Goldsmiths University of London, “From
Eurocentrism to Epistemological Internationalism: power, knowledge and objectivity in International
Relations,” Paper presented at Theorising Ontology, Annual Conference of the International Association
for Critical Realism, University of Cambridge, http://www.csog.group.cam.ac.uk/iacr/papers/Jones.pdf)

The rejection of positivism which is a central element of recent critiques of mainstream IR has tended to extend to rejection of the notion and
possibility of science itself. Science, often written in quotation marks ‘science’, is seen as inherently part of the project of
Enlightenment-modernity, a mode of technical instrumental knowledge which is necessarily a means of
control and domination of both society and nature 22 . An important component of the critique of the positivist orthodoxy is exposure of its
coincidence with the interests of the powerful. Dominant ideas and methods which rest on claims of value-free scientificity and neutrality are
shown to mask or legitimise the interests of the powerful and the exercise of power and domination. The very claim to be able to produce value-free,
neutral scientific truth is rejected in a world of inherently conflicting interests. Instead, the ‘illusion of objectivism must be replaced with the recognition that knowledge is always constituted in reflection of interests’ (Ashley 1981:

207). There are two kinds of conflation which are embedded within this critical stance. The first conflates the contents of
natural scientific knowledge with the uses to which it is put in society. Much scientific knowledge, in both natural
and social sciences, has indeed been produced by and in the explicit interests of the powerful, an integral part of the construction and maintenance of

unequal and oppressive social orders, and the administration of accumulation and imperialism. But it is important not to conflate the contents of
knowledge with its social conditions of production and use . When scientific knowledge is developed for and utilised in the service
oppression or commercial profit as opposed to the increased satisfaction of human needs, the oppression
of

results from social forces, not from the cognitive properties of scientific knowledge 23: Even assuming all the results of a research
project are objectively true, the area chosen for investigation may be determined by contentious ideological assumptions or practical interests. Thus it is likely that drug companies have concentrated on artificially synthesized

In a world
drugs to the detriment of research into those occurring naturally in plants; and it is certain that military might and commercial profit are the chief determinants of which secrets of nature get uncovered.

where science was funded with a view to satisfying human needs and conserving planetary resources,
quite different discoveries might be made – neither more or less objective than the findings of modern
science, but useful for different purposes. (Collier 1994: 180; see also Collier 1979). The second conflation reduces scientific
method to a positivist approach, equating positivist social science with social science per se with technical instrumentality. It is often asserted that the
problem with positivist IR is that it applies the method of natural sciences or ‘the scientific method’ to the study of
social phenomena 24 . This is a mischaracterisation of the real nature of the problem, which is that positivism first
misunderstands the method of natural science, and then applies these misunderstood methodological principles to the study of social phenomena (Bhaskar 1997). Recognition of this enables us
to retrieve the possibility of a particular form of social inquiry which can be called scientific or objective from abandonment along with positivism 25 . A positivist understanding of scientific inquiry

rests on a Humean notion of cause as constant conjunction between empirical variables or events, and
explanation as the discovery of empirical regularities and correlations. When such empirical regularities are discovered they can be used to make predictions. This assumes an empiricist ontology and epistemology: the world

Critiques of positivism are correct to question these

consists only of that which is available to direct experience, and the only source of knowledge is through direct sensory experience.

assumptions about knowledge and the world, but they are not correct in equating this with scientific method. Positivism consists of philosophers’ misunderstanding of

the actual practice of natural science. The practice of experiment is central to the method of some natural sciences. A scientific experiment involves establishing closure: creating an

artificial environment where the external and internal conditions are controlled so as to isolate particular features and mechanisms. This enables scientists to discover about aspects of reality which are not empirical : the

causal properties and necessary ways-of-operating of specific mechanisms in nature which are real because they have the capacity to bring about change, given appropriate conditions and inputs,

but are not empirical – they cannot be seen, only the effects of their operation can be seen. This non-
positivist, philosophical realist theory of science , epistemology and ontology is very different from the positivist misunderstanding of scientific
method and explanation. Scientific theories and the discovery of natural laws refer to real properties and causal powers of structured entities, not empirical
events and regularities (Bhaskar 1997). What are the implications of this non-positivist theory of science for social inquiry? The fact of human
reflexivity rules out the possibility of experiment and prediction in social inquiry, because it is impossible to establish closure in the
social world 26 . Ideas are causally efficacious: through informing social action ideas have causal efficacy in codetermining or influencing what actually happens, including (usually as an unintended

outcome) the reproduction of social relations. This means that ideas are part of the object of social inquiry, as is fore-grounded by

all variants of so-called reflexive approaches in International Relations (Keohane 1988). When we study society part of what we study includes the
ideas that are held in that society. But we also study other aspects of society which are irreducible to ideas or individuals – real but non-empirical structures of social relations, historically-specific socially-produced material
conditions, and so on. This non-positivist theory of knowledge and the world gives rise to a notion of objectivity which does not entail the positivist commitment to value-free neutrality. Philosophical realism holds that the world
consists of natural and social objects or entities which exist and have particular properties and causal powers independently of what, if anything, is known about them 27 . Knowledge about different aspects of the material and

The
social world can be non-existent, partial, more or less adequate, more or less right or wrong. This informs a notion of objectivity which refers to what is the case, regardless of what is thought or believed to be the case:

first and central use of the word “objectivity” is to refer to what is true independently of any subject
judging it to be true. To say that it is an objective fact that the Earth is the third planet from the Sun is to
say that this is so whether or not anyone knows or believes it, or even is able to formulate the
statement. To say that kindness is an objective value is to say that it is a value, whether or not anyone judges it to be a value; it would be a value even if the whole of society regarded it as a culpable weakness and it
was only practised shamefacedly as a private foible. (Collier 2003: 134-5). This notion of objectivity does not entail a belief that human beings can acquire absolute truth and certain knowledge about either social or natural

It is possible to acknowledge that knowledge is always inherently fallible and socially constructed
phenomena.

while retaining a notion of the objective reality which ideas are about. This allows commitment to judgemental rationality – the possibility of
judging between different ideas on the basis of their relative adequacy, in terms of their relation to objective reality 28 . In social inquiry objectivity does not imply some form of external position of independence ‘outside’ society

The ‘common-
29 . All knowledge is socially produced; but all knowledge is also about something which exists independently of the knowledge about it. (This is the case even for knowledge about ideas).

sense’ view pervading recent discussions of epistemology, ontology and methodology in IR asserts that objectivity implies value-free neutrality.
However, objective social inquiry has an inherent tendency to be critical , in various senses. To the extent that
objective knowledge provides a better and more adequate account of reality than other ideas, such
knowledge is inherently critical (implicitly or explicitly) of those ideas . 30 In other words critical social inquiry
does not (or not only) manifest its ‘criticalness’ through self-claimed labels of being critical or siding
with the oppressed, but through the substantive critique of prevailing ideas . Objective social
knowledge constitutes a specific form of criticism: explanatory critique . The critique of dominant ideas or
ideologies is elaborated through providing a more adequate explanation of aspects of the world, and in so
doing exposing what is wrong with the dominant ideology . This may also entail revealing the social conditions which give rise to ideologies, thus exposing
the necessary and causal relation between particular social relations and particular ideological conceptions. In societies which are constituted by unequal structures of social relations giving rise to unequal power and conflicting

interests, the reproduction of those structured relations is in the interests of the powerful, whereas
transformation of existing structured relations is in the interests of the weak. Because ideas inform social action they are
casually efficacious either in securing the reproduction of existing social relations (usually as an unintended consequence of social practice),
or in informing social action aimed at transforming social relations. This is why ideas cannot be ‘neutral’ . Ideas which provide a misrepresentation of the
nature of society, the causes of unequal social conditions, and the conflicting interests of the weak and powerful, will tend to help secure the reproduction of prevailing social relations. Ideas which provide a more adequate

ideas
account of the way society is structured and how structured social relations produce concrete conditions of inequality and exploitation can potentially inform efforts to change those social relations. In this sense,

which are false are ideological and, in serving to promote the reproduction of the status quo and avoid attempts at radical
change, are in the interests of the powerful. An account which is objective will contradict ideological ideas, implicitly or explicitly criticising them for their false or flawed accounts
of reality. The criticism here arises not, or not only, from pointing out the coincidence between ideologies and the interests of the powerful, nor from a prior normative

stance of solidarity with the oppressed, but from exposing the flaws in dominant ideologies through a
more adequate account of the nature and causes of social conditions 31 . A normative commitment to
the oppressed must entail a commitment to truth and objectivity, because true ideas are in the
interest of the oppressed, false ideas are in the interest of the oppressors . In other words, the best way to
declare solidarity with the oppressed is to declare one’s commitment to objective inquiry 32 . As
Nzongola-Ntalaja (1986: 10) has put it: It is a question of whether one analyses society from the standpoint of
the dominant groups , who have a vested interest in mystifying the way society works, or from the
standpoint of ordinary people, who have nothing to lose from truthful analyses of their predicament. The
philosophical realist theory of science , objectivity and explanatory critique thus provides an alternative
response to the relationship between knowledge and power . Instead of choosing perspectives on
the basis of our ethical commitment to the cause of the oppressed and to emancipatory social
change, we should choose between contending ideas on the basis of which provides a better account
of objective social reality . This will inherently provide a critique of the ideologies which, by virtue of their flawed account of
the social world, serve the interests of the powerful. Exemplars of explanatory critique in International Relations are provided in the work of scholars such as Siba Grovogui, James Gathii,
Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Jacques Depelchin, Hilbourne Watson, Robert Vitalis, Sankaran Krishna, Michel-Rolph Trouillot 33 . Their work provides critiques of central categories, theories and discourses in the theory and
practice of IR and narratives of world history, including assumptions about sovereignty, international society, international law, global governance, the nature of the state. They expose the ideological and racialised nature of central
aspects of IR through a critical examination of both the long historical trajectory of imperial ideologies regarding colonized peoples, and the actual practices of colonialism and decolonisation in the constitution of international
orders and local social conditions. Their work identifies the flaws in current ideas by revealing how they systematically misrepresent or ignore the actual history of social change in Africa, the Caribbean and other regions of the
Third World, both past and present – during both colonial and neo-colonial periods of the imperial world order. Their work reveals how racism, violence, exploitation and dispossession, colonialism and neo-colonialism have been
central to the making of contemporary international order and contemporary doctrines of international law, sovereignty and rights, and how such themes are glaring in their absence from histories and theories of international

relations and international history. Objective social knowledge which accurately depicts and explains social reality has these
qualities by virtue of its relation to its object, not its subject . As Collier argues, “The science/ideology distinction is an epistemological one, not a social
for example, in the work of Grovogui, Gathii and Depelchin, the general perspective and knowledge
one.” (Collier 1979: 60). So,

of conditions in and the history of Africa might be due largely to the African social origins of the authors. However the
judgement that their accounts are superior to those of mainstream IR rests not on the fact that the authors are African,
but on the greater adequacy of their accounts with respect to the actual historical and contemporary
production of conditions and change in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. The criteria for choosing their accounts over others derives from the relation
between the ideas and their objects (what they are about), not from the relation between the ideas and their subjects (who produced them). It is vital to retain explicitly some commitment to objectivity in social inquiry, to the

A fundamental problem which underlies the origin

notion that the proper criterion for judging ideas about the world lies in what they say about the world, not whose ideas they are.

and reproduction of IR’s eurocentricity is the overwhelming dominance of ideas produced in and by the west, and the

wilful and determined silencing of the voices and histories of the colonised . But the result of this fundamental
problem is flawed knowledge about the world . Eurocentricity is therefore a dual problem concerning
both the authors and the content of knowledge, and cannot be resolved through normative
commitments alone . It is not only the voices of the colonised, but the histories of colonialism, which have been glaring in their absence from the discipline of International Relations.
Overcoming eurocentricity therefore requires not only concerted effort from the centre to create space
and listen to hitherto marginalised voices, but also commitment to correcting the flaws in prevailing
knowledge – and it is not only ‘the Other’ who can and should elaborate this critique . A vitally important implication of
objectivity is that it is the responsibility of European and American, just as much as non-American or non-
European scholars, to decolonise IR . The importance of objectivity in social inquiry defended here can perhaps be seen as a
form of epistemological internationalism . It is not necessary to be African to attempt to tell a more
accurate account of the history of Europe’s role in the making of the contemporary Africa and the rest of the world,
or to write counter-histories of ‘the expansion of international society’ which detail the systematic barbarity of so-called Western
for example,

civilisation. It is not necessary to have been colonised to recognise and document the violence, racism, genocide and dispossession which have characterised European expansion over five hundred years.
 Fiat Double Bind
Their pessimistic view of access to the political reinforces their impacts – first step has
to be political debate
Claudio 16—Assistant Professor of Development Studies and Southeast Asian studies at the Ateneo de
Manila University [“Intellectuals have ushered the world into a dangerous age of political nihilism,
qz.com/721914/intellectuals-have-ushered-the-world-into-a-dangerous-age-of-political-nihilism/]

On the surface, it would seem intellectuals have nothing to do with the rise of global illiberalism
that . The

movements powering Brexit, Trump and strongmen like Philippine president Duterte all
Donald Third-World Rodrigo

gleefully reject books, history and education in favor of railing against common enemies like outsiders
higher

and globalization. you’ll find few Trump supporters among the largely left-wing American
And

professoriate. Yet intellectuals are accountable for the rise of these movements indirectly. Professors —albeit

offered stringent criticisms

have But failed to offer the public viable alt s they promoted
of neoliberal society. they have ernative . In this way, have

apolitical nihilism that set the stage for new movements that reject liberal
has principles of tolerance democratic

and institutional reform. Intellectuals have a long history of critiquing liberalism, which relies on a “philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets.” Beginning in the 19th century, according to historian Francois Furet, left-wing

thinkers began to arrive at a consensus “that modern liberal democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it atomized individuals, made them indifferent to public interest, weakened authority, and encouraged class hatred.” For most of the 20th century, anti-liberal
intellectuals were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defended the Soviet Union even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. French, American, Indian, and Filipino university radicals were hopelessly enamored of Mao Zedong’s Cultural

Some leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small revolutionary guerrillas

Revolution in the 1970s. The collapse of Communism changed all this. in the

Others fell back on pure critique. Academics are now mostly gadflies who rarely offer
Third World, like Mexico’s Subcomandante Marcos.

strategies for political change. Those who do forward alternatives propose ones so vague or divorced
from reality that they might as well be proposing nothing . (The Duke University professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks the evils of modern globalization are so

Such thinking promotes political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change as cosmetic,

pernicious that only worldwide love is the answer.)

while patronizing those who think otherwise. This nihilism easily spreads from the classroom and academic

journals to op-ed pages to Zuccotti Park, and the public at large. eventually to For academic nihilists, the shorthand for the world’s evils is “neoliberalism.” The term is used to

refer to a free market ideology that forced globalization on people by reducing the power of governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a vague designation for all global drudgery. Democratic politics in the age of neoliberalism, according to Harvard

They argue our belief we can use laws to

anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, is “something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is required.” that that and constitutional processes

defend our rights is a form of “fetishism” that is ultimately “chimerical.” For Berlant the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren , the

nothing but “cruel optimism.” The materialist things that people desire are “actually
democratic pursuit of happiness amid neoliberalism is

an obstacle to your flourishing, According to this logic, we are trapped by our own ideologies. It is
” she writes.

this logic that allows left-wing thinkers to implicitly side with British nativists in condemnation of the their

EU. The radical website Counterpunch describes the EU as a “neoliberal prison.” It views liberals , for example, also

seeking to reform the EU as “coopted by the right wing and its goals—from the subversion of progressive economic ideals to neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative doctrine.”

Trump supporters are singing a similar tune. Speaking to a black, gay, college-educated Trump
Across the Atlantic,

supporter Bee was told: “We’ve had disasters in neoconservatism and neoliberalism and
, Samantha these I think that he

Trump is an alternative
[ ] academic nihilists and Trumpists are in agreement about a key issue:
to both those paths.” The the

The system is fundamentally broken liberals who believe in working patiently toward change are weak. , and
For the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “indifference” is the “the hallmark of political liberalism.” Since liberals balance different interests and rights, Santos writes, they have no permanent friends or foes. He proposes that the world needs to “revive t he friend/foe

dichotomy.” And in a profane way, it has: modern political movements pit Americans against Muslims, Britain against Europe, a dictatorial government against criminals. Unfortunately, academic anti-liberalism is not
confined to the West . The Cornell political scientist Benedict Anderson once described liberal democracy in the Philippines as a “Cacique Democracy,” dominated by feudal landlords and capitalist families. In this system, meaningful reform is difficult,

Having a nihilist streak myself, I echoed Anderson when I

since the country’s political system is like a “well-run casino,” where tables are rigged in favor of oligarch bosses. once

chastised Filipino nationalists for projecting “hope onto spaces within an elite democracy.” Like
Anderson, I offered no alt The alt arrived in Duterte, the new president of the Philippines.
ernative. ernative recently the guise of the

Like Anderson and me, Duterte complained about the impossibility of real change in a democracy
dominated by elites and oligarchs unlike us, he proposed a way out: a strong political leader who was
. But

willing to kill to save the country spread of global illiberalism is unlikely to end soon. As
from criminals and corrupt politicians. The

this crisis unfolds, we need intellectuals who use their intellects for more than simple negation
will —professors like the
 Failing that, we need academics who acknowledge liberal
late New York University historian Tony Judt, who argued that European-style social democracy could save global democracy. that

democracy, though slow and imperfect, enables a bare minimum of tolerance in a world beset by
xenophobia and hatred. For although academics have the luxury of imagining a completely different
world, the rest of us have to figure out what to do with the one we have.
 K
Simulations are real and even if they aren’t a 100% objective the alternative is worse.
Mattson, Rhodes College German politics and culture professor, 2012
(Michelle, “Rebels Without Causes: Contemporary German Authors Not in Search of Meaning”,
Monatshefte, 104.2, Summer, project muse)

I shall not venture to judge whether Baudrillard’s diagnosis of postmodern society is accurate, although
it appears that many of Germany’s current writers agree with him or were influenced by postmodern
theories of late 20th-century consumerist societies. I can, however, say in conclusion that it is not
helpful or productive on either an individual or social level in imagining ways of living in today’s
world. As Steven Best points out:

Baudrillard’s radical rejection of referentiality is premised upon a one-dimensional, No-Exit world of

self-referring simulacra. But, however, reified and self-referential postmodern semiotics is, signs do not
simply move in their own signifying orbit . They are historically produced and circulated and while
they may not translucently refer to some originating world, they none the less can be socio-
historically contextualized, interpreted, and critiqued.(57) In other words, human beings generate the
simulacra in specific historical contexts that are subject to interpretation and challenge. Regardless
of how pervasively the media spin our reality , real people suffer and—occasionally [End Page 259]
prosper —because of political decisions made at the local, national, and international level. Media
images may overpower us, but they shouldn’t make us lose sight of the real ramifications of political
and economic development . Many critics have suggested that Baudrillard’s chief accomplishment was
to serve as an agent provocateur. In an interview with Mike Gane, Baudrillard himself saw his method of
reflection as “provocative, reversible, [ . . . ] a way of raising things to the ‘N’th power [ . . . ] It’s a bit
like a theory-fiction” (Poster 331). One could argue that this is precisely the function of such novels
and short stories as the ones examined here: to provoke us. But to what end? Naters, Regener, and
Hermann all write very readable literature, and they challenge us to understand the world of the insipid,
self-centered, and myopic characters that they have created. It would indeed be a disservice to the
authors to imply that they do not view their own characters with critical distance . Thus, I am not
suggesting that they believe their readers should emulate the characters they have created. They have
not, however, successfully demonstrated either why we should care about them or—more
importantly—what we can learn from them.

Information is persuasive and the alt fails

Robinson 04 [Andrew, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/baudrillard-zizek-and-
laclau-on-common.html]

Baudrillard 's claim that the masses are "dumb", silent and conduct any and all beliefs (SSM 28) and "the reversion of any social" (SSM 49) is problematised by the persistence of subcultures and countercultures, while his claim that any remark could be attributed to the

masses (SSM 29) hardly proves that it lacks its own demands or beliefs. He is leaping far too quickly from the confused and contradictory nature of mass
beliefs to the idea that the masses lack - or even reject - meaning per se. He wants to portray the masses as disinterested in meaning, instinctual and "above and beyond all meaning" (SSM 11),

lacking even conformist beliefs (87-8) and without a language of their own (22). This is contradicted by extensive evidence on the construction of meaning
in everyday life the evidence from research on audiences
, from Hoggart on working class culture to Becker, Lemert, Goffman and others on deviance. Even in the sphere of media effects, ,

such as Ang on Dallas viewers and Morley on the Nationwide audience, suggests an active construction of meaning by members of the masses,
negotiating with or even opposing dominant codes of meaning. This may well show a decline of that kind of meaning promoted by the status quo - but it hardly shows a rejection of meaning per se. When the
masses act stupid, it may well be due to what radical education theorists term "reactive stupidity" - an adaptive response to avoid being falsified and "beaten" by acting stupid. Baudrillard again wrongly conflates the dominant system with meaning as such. Indeed, Baudrillard seems to
have changed his mind AGAIN by the time of the Gulf War essays, when he refers to the MEDIA, not the masses, as in control (GW 75), and to stupidity as a result of "mental deterrence" (GW 67-8), which produces a "suffocating atmosphere of deception and stupidity" (GW 68) and a
control through the violence of consensus (GW 84). Baudrillard's view that the masses respond to official surveys and the like in a tautological way (SSM 28) may well be true, without proving what Baudrillard claims it does about the absence of meaning in the masses. The attitudes of
subaltern groups towards dominant beliefs has often taken such forms throughout history, but this does not preclude the parallel existence of what Jim Scott terms "hidden transcripts" - a parallel set of beliefs with a separate structure of meaning which are not compromised by power.

Baudrillard does not dig deep enough into evidence on mass culture to assess whether such transcripts exist or not. He simply assumes the omnipotence of the official, "public"
system of meaning. Further, his claim that what passes through the masses leaves no trace (SSM 2) is very problematic, as his claim that the masses are the negation of all dominant meanings (SSM 49). There are some very strange 'proofs' in Baudrillard's
work: for instance, the claim that people don't believe the myths they adopt rests on the statement that to claim the opposite is to accuse the masses of being stupid and naive (SSM 99-100). He does not explain why we should not believe this - especially since he elsewhere calls them
"dumb like beasts"! Occasionally, Baudrillard acknowledges evidence against his approach: namely, the research of the "two-step flow" theorists on audience effects, and also the kind of syncretic resistances analysed by Scott, which resist the dominant social system and reinterpret or
"recycled" its messages towards different codes and ends, often linked to earlier social forms (SSM 42-3). However, he does not dwell on such evidence. This, he says, is simply a different issue, unrelated to the question of the MASSES as "an innumerable, unnameable and anonymous
group" operating through inertia and fascination (SSM 43-4). Attempts to recreate meaning at the periphery are a "secondary" matter (SSM 103-4). Similarly, at times, Baudrillard admits both the unsatisfactory nature of the society of the spectacle for many of its participants, and the
existence of spheres of belief and discourse beyond its borders. For instance, people don't fully believe the hyperreality which substitutes for reality (SSM 99); some groups, so-called "savages" such as the Arab masses, are not submerged in simulation and can still become passionately
involved in, for instance, war (GW 32); the real still exists underground (GW 63). Indeed, although his analysis of the Gulf War suggests that the WEST is trapped in simulacra, his account of the rest of the world suggests it follows a different logic (eg GW 65). Wars or non-wars today are
waged by the west against symbolic logics which break with the dominant system, such as Islam (GW 85-6), to absorb everything which is singular and irreducible (GW 86). Also, though he thinks the risk of it is low, he admits that an accident, an irruption of Otherness, or an event which

breaks the control exerted by information can disrupt the "celibate machine" of media control (GW 36, 48). If this is the cas e, however, there is no basis for assuming its totality, and it is still
meaningful to try to win people over to alternatives. In SSM Baudrillard retreats from this analysis, suggesting the reduction of society to a rat race is a result of the masses' resistance to 'objective' economic management
(SSM 45) - the system benefits as a result but that is not the main issue. This contrasts with Baudrillard's earlier analyses and also those of others such as Illich, who see the destructive social effects of such competition. However, Baudrillard does attack "the social", which he identifies

with control through information, simulation, security and deterrence (SSM 50-1) - though how it can be resisted since he thinks it "produces" us is never explained . Baudrillard tends to conflate existing
dominant beliefs with thought and meaning per se. As a result, he leaves it impossible to critique
dominant ideas in a meaningful way. For instance, he poses political problems in terms of "resistance to the
social", with the social in general being conflated with the EXISTING social system (SSM 41); ditto on the existing sign system, which Baudrillard

Baudrillard misses the whole question of countercultural practices and the creation of
identifies with meaning per se. In such cases,

alternative hegemonies. Baudrillard's conflation of meaning per se with dominant beliefs leads to a
refusal to countenance the possibility of transforming mass beliefs. Baudrillard claims Raising the cultural level of the masses, , is

the masses
"Nonsense" because are resistant to "rational communication"
, who want spectacle rather than meaning, (SSM 10). An "autonomous change in consciousness" by the masses,

Baudrillard tells us, is a "glaring impossibility" (SSM 30) - though he never tells us how he deduces this . Furthermore, he claims that people who try to
also

raise consciousness are acting in accordance with the system" This

, liberate the unconscious or promote subjectivity " (SSM 109).

anathematisation is a result of Baudrillard's strange claim that the system's logic is based on total
inclusion and speech! It is on this basis that Baudrillard rejects argument based on empirical claims and locates truth outside such claims (SSM 121-2). From the second pole of his contradictory argument about the masses, which portrays them as de

facto agents engaging in resistance, defiance and so on, Baudrillard wants to draw a politics starting from the refusal of meaning (SSM 15), and from the contradictory combination of the two he draws his model of hyperconformity as annulling control (SSM 30-3). He can't deal with the
contradiction, especially since he uses terms which imply consciousness - such as ruse and offensive practice - when he admits the object of such terms is acting unknowingly (SSM 43). Indeed, he actually writes as if one can UNKNOWINGLY carry out a CONSCIOUS act (SSM 42). This is

it is not clear from where he is deducing his idea

sinister, reproducing the Stalinist idea of objective alignment - especially when used against Baudrillard's theoretical rivals (SSM 123). Further,

that one can destroy a system by pushing its logic to the extreme (SSM 46), which he sees as a resistance to demands to participate (SSM 106-8). There are a few cases of the

letter of the law being used to subvert its implementation, such as go-slows at work; these, however, are rooted in concrete practices elsewhere. There are also a few cases of hyperconformity disrupting official projects - for instance, the disastrous effects of Chinese peasants' literal

These did not actually LIBERATE anyone or DESTROY the system; and most
reading of Maoist imperatives to (eg.) kill all birds. , however, hyperconformity

simply produces a more oppressive variant on the system - for instance, hyperconformist racism
produces genocide. He also never sets out the stakes of the conflict between the masses and society or the effects of the masses' victories, though he vaguely links these to the (unspecified) goals of radical critics (SSM 49). Indeed, he uses the opt-out

that our present epistemology prevents us knowing what possibilities would be offered by the system's destruction (SSM 52). Furthermore, to be a resistance, there would have to be an AGENT CHOOSING to be an object. Baudrillard's sectarianism is clearly shown by his belief that
popular rethinking of ideas is always a "misappropriation" or "radical distortion" rather than an improvement (SSM 8). He also engages in a highly essentialist attack on popular ethics, representing the stress on real practices and small images in popular religion as "degraded", banal and
profane, a way of "refusing the categorical imperative of morality and faith", as well as of meaning, because it stresses immediacy in the world (SSM 7-8). Popular ethics, as Hoggart, Scott and others show, is far more than a mere refusal, and its rejection of the transcendentalism of the
intellectual allies of dominant strata is hardly evidence that they are degraded, banal or anti-ethical. Furthermore, on an empirical level, fatalism DOES occur in popular ethics, contrary to Baudrillard's claims. The problem is further complicated by Baudrillard's vague claim that something
passes between the masses and terrorism (SSM 52-3), which seems to imply that isolated terrorist acts can somehow transform overnight the entire structure of meaning by rendering representation impossible and meanings reversible (SSM 54, 116), and which is also based on a

His politics results directly

definition of terrorism which is so restricted that it rules out virtually all actual "terrorists" and which Baudrillard admits (116) does not fit the identities of the Baader-Meinhof group, the one example he gives.

from the artificial grimness of his analysis of popular beliefs, since it involves a radical subjectlessness
and a random blow against victims who are punished for being nothing (SSM 56-7). Like Zizek, he calls for the suicidal destruction of one's own perspective (SSM

his model of social change, which rests on the inevitability of

69-70), and denounces everything short of this as strengthening the system (SSM 72). Furthermore,

implosive catastrophe has no room for any human intervention. It simply assumes that another
(SSM 61),

reality lies beyond our own perspective which can be reached in this way, but which is presently blocked by our way of thinking (SSM 104). Baudrillard substitutes "logical exacerbation" and "catastrophic revolution" for

The lack of alternatives seriously

alternatives (SSM 106), and locates the frontier of struggle at the level of "production of truth" (SSM 123). The progressive side of this struggle seems to involve unknowability and fascination.

blunts Baudrillard's critical force, and can even lead to conservative positions , such as portraying
manipulation of the media as better than pursuing truth (GW 46).
Their critique of life death binaries is super reductive and wrong
Dollimore 98 – Sociology – U Sussex, (Jonathan, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, pg. 221)

Jean Baudrillard presents the argument for the existence of a denial of death in its most extreme form. For
him, this denial is not only deeply symptomatic of contemporary reality, but represents an insidious and pervasive form of ideological control.
His account depends heavily upon a familiar critique of the Enlightenment's intellectual, cultural and political legacy. This critique has become
influential in recent cultural theory, though Baudrillard's
version of it is characteristically uncompromising and
sweeping, and more reductive than most. The main claim is that Enlightenment rationality is an instrument not of freedom and
democratic empowerment but, on the contrary, of repression and violence. Likewise with the Enlightenment's secular emphasis upon a
common humanity; for Baudrillard this resulted in what he calls 'the cancer of the Human' - far from being an inclusive category of
emancipation, the idea of a universal humanity made possible the demonizing of difference and the repressive privileging of the normal: the
'Human' is from the outset the institution of its structural double, the 'Inhuman*. This is all it is: the progress of Humanity and Culture are
simply the chain of discriminations with which to brand 'Others' with inhumanity, and therefore with nullity, {p. 125) Baudrillard acknowledges
here the influence of Michel Foucault, but goes on to identify something more fundamental and determining than anything identified by
Foucault: at the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion
of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death, (p.
12.6) So total is this exclusion that, 'today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as
offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy' (p. 126). He insists that the attempt to abolish death
(especially through capitalist accumulation), to separate it from life, leads only to a culture permeated by death - 'quite simply,
ours is a culture of death' (p. 127). Moreover, it is the repression of death which facilitates 'the repressive socialization of life'; all existing
agencies of repression and control take root in the disastrous separation of death from life (p. 130). And, as
if that were not enough, our very concept of reality has its origin in the same separation or disjunction (pp.
130-33). Modern culture is contrasted with that of the primitive and the savage, in which, allegedly, life
and death were not separated; also with that of the Middle Ages, where, allegedly, there was still a
collectivist, 'folkloric and joyous' conception of death. This and many other aspects of the argument are
questionable, but perhaps the main objection to Baudrillard's case is his view of culture as a macro-
conspiracy conducted by an insidious ideological prime-mover whose agency is always invisibly at work
(rather like God). Thus (from just one page), the political economy supposedly ^intends* to eliminate death through accumulation; and
'our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death' {p. 147; my emphases). What those like Baudrillard find interesting about
death is not the old conception of it as a pre-cultural constant which diminishes the significance of all cultural achievement, but, on the
contrary, its function as a culturally relative - which is to say culturally formative - construct. And, if cultural relativism is on the one hand about
relinquishing the comfort of the absolute, for those like Baudrillard it is also about the new strategies of intellectual mastery made possible by
the very disappearance of the absolute. Such modern accounts of how death is allegedly denied, of how death is the
supreme ideological fix, entail a new intensity and complexity of interpretation and decipherment, a kind of hermeneutics of
death. To reinterpret death as a deep effect of ideology, even to the extent of regarding it as the most
fundamental ideological adhesive of modern political repression and social control, is simultaneously to
denounce it as in some sense a deception or an illusion, and to bring it within the domain of knowledge and
analysis as never before. Death, for so long regarded as the ultimate reality - that which disempowers the human and obliterates all
human achievement, including the achievements of knowledge - now becomes the object of a hugely empowering knowledge. Like
omniscient seers, intellectuals like Baudrillard and Bauman relentlessly anatomize and diagnose the modern
(or post-modern) human condition in relation to an ideology of death which becomes the key with which to
unlock the secret workings of Western culture in all its insidiousness. Baudrillard in particular applies his
theory relentlessly, steamrollering across the cultural significance of the quotidian and the contingent.
His is an imperialist, omniscient analytic, a perpetual act of reductive generalization, a self-empowering
intellectual performance which proceeds without qualification and without any sense that something
might be mysterious or inexplicable. As such it constitutes a kind of interpretative, theoretical violence, an
extreme but still representative instance of how the relentless anatomizing and diagnosis of death in the
modern world has become a struggle for empowerment through masterful -i.e. reductive - critique. Occasionally
one wonders if the advocates of the denial-of-death argument are not themselves in denial. They speak
about death endlessly yet indirectly, analysing not death so much as our culture's attitude towards it. To that extent it is not the truth
of death but the truth of our culture that they seek. But, even as they make death signify in this indirect way, it is still death
that is compelling them to speak. And those like Baudrillard and Bauman speak urgently, performing
intellectually a desperate mimicry of the omniscience which death denies.

Modernity has disrupted the production of social meaning by atomizing,

individualizing and privatizing its production through the eradication of meta-
narratives---this makes death denial a necessary part of social and individual
coherence – don’t stop running on the treadmill
Mellor, Leeds Professor of Religion and Social Theory Head of School, 1992
(Phillip, “Death in high modernity: the contemporary presence and absence of death”, The Sociological
Review, May, ebsco, ldg)

The term 'ontological security' is central to the recent sociological theory of Anthony Giddens.2 It refers
to persons having a sense of order and continuity in relation to the events in which they participate, and
the experiences they have, in their day-today lives (Giddens, 1990, 1991). Ontological security therefore depends upon persons being

able to find meaning in their Iives.3 Drawing upon Garfinkel (1963) and Heritage (1984), though there are also observable continuities with
certain aspects of the work of Gehlen (1956, 1957), Giddens argues that feelings of ontological security find their emotional

and cognitive anchors in a 'practical consciousness' of the meaningfulness of our day-today actions (1991
:36). This meaningfulness , however, is always shadowed by the threat of disorder or chaos . This chaos signals the
irreality of everyday conventions, since a person's sense of what is real is intimately associated with their sense of what is meaningful. Drawing upon Kierkegaard's
(1944) concept of 'dread', Giddens
argues human beings face an ever-present danger of being overwhelmed by
anxieties concerning the ultimate reality and meaningfulness of day-to-day life. Society strives to keep
this dread at bay by 'bracketing' out of everyday life those questions which might be raised about the social
frameworks which contain human existence (1991:37-8). This bracketing process is not always successful, however, since although it is
continual it is contingent upon societies being able to control factors which arise which offer particularly potent threats to ontological security, a level of control
which varies from society to society. Death
is a potent challenge to this bracketing process in all societies. The
existential confrontation with death, one's own or the death of others, has the potential to open
individuals up to dread, because it can cause them to call into question the meaningfulness and reality
of the social frameworks in which they participate, shattering their ontological security . Death is therefore
always a problem for all societies, since every social system must in some ways accept death, because human beings inevitably die, but at the same
time social systems must to a certain extent deny death to allow people to go on in day-to-day life with some sense of commitment (Dumont and Foss, 1972).

Nevertheless, as Giddens notes, 'death remains the great extrinsic factor of human existence', something which is
ultimately resistant to social containment and control, making any social acceptance of it
problematic (1991: 162). It is for this reason that Giddens associates death above all else with those 'fateful moments' where individuals have to confront
problems which societies have kept away from public consciousness. Here we can draw a clear parallel with Peter Berger's concept of 'marginal situations', which is
an expression of broadly the same phenomenon. Again, death is the most significant factor individuals can encounter in marginal situations because it has the
potential radically to undermine their sense of the meaningfulness and reality of social life, calling into question even the most fundamental assumptions upon
which social life is constructed (Berger, 1967:23). The similarity between Giddens's work and that of Berger on the significance of death for the social construction,
and maintenance, of reality and meaning is a strong one. As Turner (1991) has noted, Berger's The Sacred Canopy is exceptional for the number of its references to
death, in comparison with other major books in the sociology of religion over the last few decades. Nevertheless, it is also important for the fact that it is a highly
significant, though largely ignored, attempt to place the consideration of death at the heart of the sociological enterprise. Although the book is subtitled 'Elements
of a Sociological Theory of Religion', his theory of religion is actually based on a theory of the social significance of death. Expanding upon his sociology of knowledge
perspective, developed with Thomas Luckman (1967), Berger argues that all human societies are enterprises in world-building, the 'world' being the meaningful
structure persons inhabit, and which gives a sense of what is meaningful and real (1967:3). This world-building enterprise is an ongoing process whereby a
relationship with the world is established, giving persons a sense of identity, purpose and place. The power of society is therefore not manifest primarily in
'machineries of social control', but in its representation of what is real, its ability to 'constitute and to impose itself as reality' (1967:12). The
plausibility of
this enterprise of world-building is, however, inherently precarious, particularly in crisis (or 'marginal')
situations when factors such as death can call into question the socially constructed picture of reality. At
these points, the social shield against anomie (the terror of meaninglessness) can collapse, causing what
Giddens calls the breakdown of ontological security. Since even an individual's biography is the imposition of a socially constructed
framework upon personal experiences in order to make them meaningful, the anomie potentiality of death reaches into the innermost depths of people's self-
identities. All human beings must inevitably face death at some point, which means that it is always a potential threat to the individual and to the social order as a
whole, explaining Berger's point that 'Every human society is, in the last resort, men [and women] banded together in the face of death' (1967:51). The social
significance of religion, with which Berger is ostensibly concerned, rests largely on its legitimation of marginal situations through the relation of them to sacred
orders, a socially-produced attempt to keep phenomena such as death within the bounds of a socially-produced reality (1967:45). For Berger, death is a
fundamental and unavoidable feature of what it is to be a human being, and one with which societies have therefore inevitably to deal. If particular societies fail to
deal with death adequately, then not only will individuals have to face extreme terrors of personal meaninglessness, but the social order as a whole becomes
vulnerable to a collapse into chaos with a more widespread attendent loss of meaning and order. In a generally positive assessment of Berger's contribution to the
sociology of religion, Beckford has criticised the 'Manichaean phenomenology' which he believes underpins Berger's vision of the socially constructed nomos
shielding persons against the terrors of meaninglessness lurking in the marginal situations of life. This echoes the many criticisms of assumptions both Berger and
Luckmann make about human beings' intrinsic desire for meaning (Beckford, 1989:93). Berger and Luckmann work from an anthropological presupposition that
human beings crave meaning (Berger, 1967:22, Hamnett, 1974), and argue that human beings are incapable of sustaining a meaningful existence apart from the
nomic constructions of society (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 119). The 'transcending potency' of the symbolic universes of meaning which societies create is
especially apparent, they suggest, in the ability of a social order 'to enable the individual to go on living in society after the death of significant others and to
anticipate their own death with, at the very least, terror sufficiently mitigated so as not to paralyse the continued performance of the routines of everyday life.'
(1967: 119). A difficulty apparent with such an analysis is that if we question the fundamental assumption that human beings crave meaning, then the whole
theoretical framework looks highly questionable. The analysis is meant to apply to all societies, and this is reinforced by their introduction of examples from a wide
spectrum of historical periods and diverse cultures. Although they are particularly interested in modernity, especially in the individual works developed from their
collaborations (Berger, 1967; Luckmann, 1967), they are concerned primarily with the secularisation of modern societies and the implications this process has for
the continued legitimations of socially constructed realities. In other words, they explore the potential deficiencies of modern mechanisms for the social
construction of reality, but see no essential difference in these mechanisms from those of premodern societies. I suggest that, despite the obvious similarities
between Berger and Luckmann's theoretical framework and that of Giddens, a major difference is discernible here. Beckford argues that Berger and Luckmann's
idea that human beings need to construct meaning indicates a psychological functionalism in their approach, but that 'their joint and separate writings contain no
suggestion that modem societies are systems with imperative needs for order.' (Beckford, 1989:87). This second point is untrue: it is clear that for Berger and
Luckmann all societies, including modem ones, are essentially ordering systems, as their discussions of death make abundantly clear. Nevertheless, it is true that
their analysis of social systems is based on what is essentially a psychological requirement of human beings. A more general problem with Berger and Luckmann's
theories is also of relevance to us here: ultimately social life seems to exist merely to keep social life ordered, leaving us without anything that could count as the
counterfactual (Abercrombie, 1986:27). As Abercrombie notes, human beings can tolerate a good deal of uncertainty, and can even benefit from a measure of
uncertainty and risk (1986:28). Giddens is saying something rather different to Berger and Luckmann. He makes no assumptions about essential, transcultural,
transhistorical psychological needs. On
the contrary, he is interested primarily in the distinctiveness of modem
societies, arguing that modernity is characterised by a wholly unprecedented series of mechanisms
which remove problems of meaning from public space, relocating them in the privatised realm of
individual life and experience, thereby creating historically unique threats of personal meaninglessness.
Furthermore, he is able to analyse both pre-modem and modem societies with reference to a
framework of trust-risk relations, but notes that the elements of trust and risk in each context are
largely different, that the risks in modernity are humanly created, and that risk is often experienced as
enabling and even empowering (Giddens, 1990: 102ff.). Consequently, Giddens's discussions of death, despite the many elements shared with
Berger and Luckmann, offer us something distinctive and are, I suggest, more valuable for assisting us in our attempts to understand contemporary attitudes
towards death. Giddens's discussions of ontological security are located within his analysis of what he terms 'high modernity'. He believes that we are still living in a
culture which can be termed 'modem', despite the arguments of the postmodernists. Postmodernism is characterised by the assumption that western societies
have experienced a 'crisis in modernity', involving the loss of the 'metanarratives', such as the idea of historical progress, which have shaped these cultures since the
Enlightenment (Foster, 1989). Giddens
acknowledges the collapse of many of these metanarra-tives, but argues
that this indicates not the abandonment of the post-Enlightenment modern project, but a further stage
in its development. Modernity was characterised initially by a skeptical deconstruction of the
metanarratives of religious tradition and their replacement by the metanarratives of modernity. In high
modernity, a more advanced stage in the modern project, the 'discontinuist' impulse of modernity
 has undermined even its own overarching storylines , just as it deconstructed those associated with religion. This produces a sense
of disorientation, apparent in the theorists of postmodernity, since we are aware of the inadequacy of our attempts to develop systematic knowledge about the
universe of events we are caught up in, but which seem in large part to be out of our control (Giddens, 1990:2-3). Trust
and risk are therefore part
of the internal referentiality of modernity: we place our trust in the modern belief that 'risks can in
principle be assessed in terms of generalisable knowledge about potential dangers' (Giddens, 1990:111). It is for this
reason, rather than for any inherent psychological requirement, that personal meaninglessness becomes
a 'fundamental psychic problem' in high modernity, since the moral questions and existential problems
posed in day-to-day life are denied answers where answers cannot be found within the internal
referentiality of modernity (Giddens, 1991:9). The finitude of human life is paramount amongst these
problems, and is the one left most conspicuously unanswered, so that in a cultural milieu which
offers unprecedently extreme dangers to the maintenance of ontological security, death is especially
hard to deal with.

Political organization is life affirming – turns their framework and link arguments
May 05. Todd, Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, “To change the world, to celebrate life,”
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 31(5-6), p. 527-529
And what happens from there? From the meetings, from the rallies, from the petitions and the teach-ins? What happens next? There is, after all, always a next. If you win this time – end aid to the contras, divest from apartheid South Africa, force debt-forgiveness by technologically
advanced countries – there is always more to do. There is the de-unionization of workers, there are gay rights, there is Burma, there are the Palestinians, the Tibetans. There will always be Tibetans, even if they aren’t in Tibet, even if they aren’t Asian. But is that the only question: Next?

engaging in political organizing

Or is that just the question we focus on? What’s the next move in this campaign, what’s the next campaign? Isn’t there more going on than that? After all, is a practice, or a group of practices. It

contributes to making you who you are. It’s where the power is, and where your life is , and where the intersection of your life and

This moment when you are seeking to change the

those of others (many of whom you will never meet, even if it’s for their sake that you’re involved) and the buildings and streets of your town is.

world by making a suggestion

, whether , is not a moment in which you don’t
in a meeting or singing at a rally or marching in silence or asking for a signature on a petition

exist . It’s not a moment of yours that you sacrifice for others so that it no longer belongs to you. It remains a moment of your life, sedimenting in you to make you what you will become, emerging out of a past that is yours as well. What will you make of it, this moment? How will

You’ve made a decision to

you be with others, those others around you who also do not cease to exist when they begin to organize or to protest or to resist? The illusion is to think that this has nothing to do with you.

participate in world-changing . Will that be all there is to it? Will it seem to you a simple sacrifice, for this small period of time, of who you are for the sake of others? Are you, for this moment, a political ascetic? Asceticism like that is

Freedom lies not in our distance from the world but in the historically fragile and contingent
dangerous. X

ways we are folded into it , just as we ourselves are folds of it. If we take Merleau-Ponty’s Being not as a rigid foundation or a truth behind appearances but as the historical folding and refolding of a univocity, then our freedom lies in the

possibility of other foldings. Merleau-Ponty is not insensitive to this point. His elusive concept of the invisible seems to gesture in this direction. Of painting, he writes: the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain
absence . . . There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below . . . and that which reaches it from above . . . where it no longer participates in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments.9
Elsewhere, in The Visible and the Invisible, he says: if . . . the surface of the visible, is doubled up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve; and if, finally, in our flesh as the flesh of things, the actual, empirical, ontic visible, by a sort of folding back, invagination, or padding, exhibits
a visibility, a possibility that is not the shadow of the actual but its principle . . . an interior horizon and an exterior horizon between which the actual visible is a partitioning and which, nonetheless, open indefinitely only upon other visibles . . . What are we to make of these references?

There is an ontology of freedom at work

We can, to be sure, see the hand of Heidegger in them. But we may also, and for present purposes more relevantly, see an intersection with Foucault’s work on freedom.

here that situates freedom not in the private reserve of an individual but in the unfinished character
, one

of any historical situation . There is more to our historical juncture, as there is to a painting, than appears to us on the surface of its visibility. The trick is to recognize this, and to take advantage of it, not only with our thoughts but with our

lives. And that is why, in the end, there can be no such thing as a sad revolutionary. To seek to change the world is to offer a new form of life celebration. It
is to articulate a fresh way of being, which is at once a way of seeing, thinking, acting, and being acted
upon . It is to fold Being once again upon itself, this time at a new point, to see what that might yield. There is, as Foucault often reminds us, no guarantee tha t this fold will not itself turn out to contain the intolerable. In a complex world with which we are inescapably entwined,

to refuse to experiment
a world we cannot view from above or outside, there is no certainty about the results of our experiments. Our politics are constructed from the same vulnerability that is the stuff of our art and our daily practices. But

is to resign oneself to the intolerable; it is to abandon both the struggle to change the world and the
opportunity to celebrate living within it to seek life-celebration without world-changing, . And one aspect without the other –

is to refuse to acknowledge the chiasm of body and world that is the wellspring of both
world-changing without life-celebration – .
If we are to celebrate our lives, if we are to change our world, then perhaps the best place to begin to think is our bodies, which are the openings to celebration and to change, and perhaps the point at which the war within us that I spoke of earlier can be both waged and resolved. That is
the fragile beauty that, in their different ways, both Merleau- Ponty and Foucault have placed before us. The question before us is whether, in our lives and in our politics, we can be worthy of it.
No empirical basis for applying psychology to state action
Epstein, Sydney IR senior lecturer, 2010
(Charolotte, “Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics,”
European Journal of International Relations 20.10, ebsco, ldg)

One key advantage of the Wendtian move, granted even by his critics (see Flockhart, 2006), is that it simply does away with the level-of-analysis problem
altogether. If states really are persons, then we can apply everything we know about people to understand how they behave. The study of individual identity is not
only theoretically justified but it is warranted. This cohesive self borrowed from social psychology is what allows Wendt to
bridge the different levels of analysis and travel between the self of the individual and that of the state,
by way of a third term, ‘group self’, which is simply an aggregate of individual selves. Thus for Wendt (1999: 225) ‘the state is simply a
“group Self” capable of group level cognition’. Yet that the individual possesses a self does not logically entail that the state possesses one too. It is in

this leap, from the individual to the state, that IR’s fallacy of composition surfaces most clearly. Moving beyond Wendt but maintaining the psychological
self as the basis for theorizing the state Wendt’s bold ontological claim is far from having attracted unanimous support (see notably, Flockhart, 2006; Jackson, 2004;
Neumann, 2004; Schiff, 2008; Wight, 2004). One
line of critique of the states-as-persons thesis has taken shape around
the resort to psychological theories, specifically, around the respective merits of Identity Theory (Wendt) and SIT (Flockhart, 2006; Greenhill,

2008; Mercer, 2005) for understanding state behaviour.9 Importantly for my argument, that the state has a self, and that this self is pre-social,
remains unquestioned in this further entrenching of the psychological turn. Instead questions have revolved around how this pre-social self (Wendt’s ‘Ego’) behaves
once it encounters the other (Alter): whether, at that point (and not before), it takes on roles prescribed by pre-existing cultures (whether Hobbessian, Lockean or
Kantian) or whether instead other, less culturally specific, dynamics rooted in more universally human characteristics better explain state interactions. SIT in
particular emphasizes the individual’s basic need to belong, and it highlights the dynamics of in-/out-group categorizations as a key determinant of behaviour (Billig,
2004). SIT seems to have attracted increasing interest from IR scholars, interestingly, for both critiquing (Greenhill, 2008; Mercer, 1995) and rescuing constructivism
(Flockhart, 2006). For Trine Flockart (2006: 89–91), SIT can provide constructivism with a different basis for developing a theory of agency that steers clear of the
states-as-persons thesis while filling an important gap in the socialization literature, which has tended to focus on norms rather than the actors adopting them. She
shows that a state’s adherence to a new norm is best understood as the act of joining a group that shares a set of norms and values, for example the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO). What SIT draws out are the benefits that accrue to the actor from belonging to a group, namely increased self-esteem and a clear
cognitive map for categorizing other states as ‘in-’ or ‘out-group’ members and, from there, for orientating states’ self–other relationships. Whilst coming at it from
a stance explicitly critical of constructivism, for Jonathan Mercer (2005: 1995) the use of psychology remains key to correcting the systematic evacuation of the role
of emotion and other ‘non-rational’ phenomena in rational choice and behaviourist analyses, which has significantly impaired the understanding of international
politics. SIT serves to draw out the emotional component of some of the key drivers of international politics, such as trust, reputation and even choice (Mercer,
2005: 90–95; see also Mercer, 1995). Brian Greenhill (2008) for his part uses SIT amongst a broader array of psychological theories to analyse the phenomenon of
self–other recognition and, from there, to take issue with the late Wendtian assumption that mutual recognition can provide an adequate basis for the formation of
a collective identity amongst states. The
main problem with this psychological turn is the very utilitarian, almost mechanistic,
approach to non-rational phenomena it proposes, which tends to evacuate the role of meaning. In other words, it further shores up
the pre-social dimension of the concept of self/// that is at issue here. Indeed norms (Flockhart, 2006), emotions (Mercer, 2005) and
recognition (Greenhill, 2008) are hardly appraised as symbolic phenomena. In fact, in the dynamics of in- versus out-group categorization emphasized by SIT,
language counts for very little. Significantly, in the design of the original experiments upon which this approach was founded (Tajfel, 1978), whether two group
members communicate at all, let alone share the same language, is non-pertinent. It is enough that two individuals should know (say because they have been told
so in their respective languages for the purposes of the experiment) that they belong to the same group for them to favour one another over a third individual.
The primary determinant of individual behaviour thus emphasized is a pre-verbal, primordial desire to belong, which
seems closer to pack animal behaviour than to anything distinctly human. What the group stands for, what specific set of meanings

and values binds it together, is unimportant. What matters primarily is that the group is valued
positively, since positive valuation is what returns accrued self-esteem to the individual. In IR Jonathan Mercer’s (2005) account of the relationship between
identity, emotion and behaviour reads more like a series of buttons mechanically pushed in a sequence of the sort: positive identification produces emotion (such as
trust), which in turn generates specific patterns of in-/out-group discrimination. Similarly, Trine Flockhart (2006: 96) approaches the socializee’s ‘desire to belong’ in
terms of the psychological (and ultimately social) benefits and the feel-good factor that accrues from increased self-esteem. At the far opposite of Lacan, the
concept of desire here is reduced to a Benthamite type of pleasure- or utility-maximization where meaning is nowhere to be seen. More telling still is the need to
downplay the role of the Other in justifying her initial resort to SIT. For Flockhart (2006: 94), in a post-Cold War context, ‘identities cannot be constructed purely in
relation to the “Other”’. Perhaps so; but not if what ‘the other’ refers to is the generic, dynamic scheme undergirding the very concept of identity. At issue here is
the confusion between the reference to a specific other, for which Lacan coined the concept of le petit autre, and the reference to l’Autre, or Other, which is that
symbolic instance that is essential to the making of all selves. As such it is not clear what meaning Flockhart’s (2006: 94) capitalization of the ‘Other’ actually holds.
The individual self as a proxy for the state’s self Another way in which the
concept of self has been centrally involved in circumventing the
level-of-analysis problem in IR has been to treat the self of the individual as a proxy for the self of the state. The literature on norms in particular has
highlighted the role of individuals in orchestrating norm shifts, in both the positions of socializer (norm entrepreneurs) and socializee. It has shown for example how
some state leaders are more susceptible than others to concerns about reputation and legitimacy and thus more amenable to being convinced of the need to adopt
a new norm, of human rights or democratization, for example (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Risse, 2001). It is these specific
psychological qualities pertaining to their selves (for example, those of Gorbachev; Risse, 2001) that ultimately enable the norm shift to
occur. Once again the individual self ultimately remains the basis for explaining the change in state behaviour. To
summarize the points made so far, whether the state is literally considered as a person by ontological overreach, whether so only

by analogy, or whether the person stands as a proxy for the state, the ‘self’ of that person has been consistently
taken as the reference point for studying state identities. Both in Wendt’s states-as-persons thesis, and in the broader psychological
turn within constructivism and beyond, the debate has consistently revolved around the need to evaluate which of the essentialist assumptions about human
nature are the most useful for explaining state behaviour. It
has never questioned the validity of starting from these
assumptions in the first place. That is, what is left unexamined is this assumption is that what works for
individuals will work for states too. This is IR’s central fallacy of composition, by which it has persistently
eschewed rather than resolved the level-of-analysis problem. Indeed, in the absence of a clear demonstration of a
logical identity (of the type A=A) between states and individuals, the assumption that individual interactions
will explain what states do rests on little more than a leap of faith, or indeed an analogy.

Voting aff doesn’t create a will to institutionality and the alternative is net worse at
stopping violence they isolate
Klare, George J. & Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor, 2011
(Karl, “Teaching Local 1330—Reflections on Critical Legal Pedagogy”,
http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002528)

Most students have found themselves in

By now it has begun to dawn that one of the subjects of this class session is how lawyers translate their moral intuitions and sense of justice into legal arguments. beginning

the situation of wanting to express their moral intuitions in the form of legal arguments but of feeling
powerless to do so A common attitude of students is that a lawyer cannot turn moral and political
. Northeastern

convictions into legal arguments If you are interested in pursuing a moral and/or political
in the context of case-litigation. directly

agenda you need to take up legislative and policy work and more likely you need to leave the law
, at a minimum ,

altogether and take up grass roots organizing instead. I insist that we keep the focus on litigation for this class period. After the straw poll, I ask the students to simulate the role of Staughton Lynd‟s legal
assistants and to assume that the court has just definitively rejected the claims based on contract, promissory estoppel, and the notion of a community property right. However, they should also assume, counter-factually, that Judge Lambros stayed dismissal of the suit for ten days to give
plaintiffs one last opportunity to come up with a theory. I charge the students with the task of making a convincing common law argument, supported by respectable legal authority, that the plaintiffs were entitled to substantial relief. Put another way, I ask the students to prove that
Judge Lambros was mistaken—that he was legally wrong—when he concluded that there was no basis in existing law to vindicate the workers‟ and community‟s rights. In some classroom exercises, I permit students to select the side for which they wish to argue, but I do not allow that in

this session. All students are asked to simulate the role of plaintiffs‟ counsel and make the best arguments they can either
to —

because they actually believe such arguments and/or because in their simulated role they are fulfilling their
ethical duty to provide zealous representation . A recurring, instant reflex is to say: “it‟s simple—the workers‟ human rights were violated in the Youngstown case.” I remind the class that the challenge I set was to come up with a

common law theory. The great appeal of human rights discourse for today‟s students is that it seems to provide a technical basis upon which their fervent moral and political commitments appear to be legally required. “What human rights?” I ask. The usual answers are (1) “they had a
right to be treated like human beings” or (2) “surely there is some human right on which they can base their case.” To the first argument I respond: “well, how they are entitled t o be treated is exactly what the court is called upon in this case to decide. Counsel may not use a re-statement
of the conclusion you wish the court to reach as the legal basis supporting that conclusion.” To the second response I reply: “it would be nice if some recognized human right applied, but we are in the Northern District of Ohio in 1980. Can you cite a pertinent human r ights instrument?”
(Answer: “no.”) The students then throw other ideas on the table. Someone always proposes that U.S. Steel‟s actions toward the community were “unconscionable.” I point out that unconscionability is a defense to contract enforcement whereas the plaintiffs were seeking to enforce a
contract (the alleged promise not to close the plant if it were rendered profitable). In any case, we have assumed that the j udge has already ruled that there was no contract. Another suggestion is that plaintiffs go for restitution. A restitution claim arises when plaintiff gives or entrusts
something of value to the defendant, and the defendant wrongfully refuses to pay for or return it. But here we are assuming that Judge Lambros has already ruled that the workers did not endow U.S. Steel with any property or value other than their labor power for which they were
already compensated under the applicable collective bargaining agreements. If the community provided U.S. Steel with value in the nature of tax breaks or infrastructure development, the effect of Judge Lambros‟ ruling on the property claim is to say that these were not investments by
the community but no-strings-attached gifts given in the hope of attracting or retaining the company‟s business. At this point I usually give a hint by saying, “if we‟ve ruled out contract claims, and we‟ve ruled property claims, what does that leave?” Aha, torts! A student then usually
suggests that U.S. Steel committed the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED).15 I point out that, even if it were successful, this theory would provide plaintiffs relief only for their emotional inj uries, but not their economic or other losses, and most likely would not provide
a basis for an injunction to keep the plant open. In any event, IIED is an intentional tort. What, I ask, is the evidence that U.S. Steel intends the plant shutdown to cause distress? The response that “they should know that emotional distress will result” is usually not good enough to make
out an intentional tort. An astute student will point out that in some jurisdictions it is enough to prove that the defendant acted with reckless disregard for the likelihood that severe emotional distress would result. I allow that maybe there‟s something to that, but then shift ground by
pointing out that a prima facie requirement of IIED is that the distress suffered go beyond what an “ordinary person” may be expected to endure or beyond the bounds of “civilized behavior.”16 Everyone knows that plants close all the time and that the distress accompanying job-loss is a
normal feature of American life. A student halfheartedly throws out negligent infliction of emotional distress, to which my reply is: “In what way is U.S. Steel‟s proposed conduct negligent? The problem we are up against here is precisely that the corporation is acting as a rational profit-
maximizer.” A student always proposes that plaintiffs should allege that what U.S. Steel did was “against public policy.” First of all, I say, “public policy” is not a cause of action; it is a backdrop against which conduct or contract terms are assessed. Moreover, what public policy was violated
in this case? The student will respond by saying “it is against public policy for U.S. Steel to leave the community devastated.” I point out once again that that is the very conclusion for which we are contending—it is circular argument to assert a statement of our intended conclusion as the

rationale for that conclusion. This dialogue continues for awhile. One ineffective theory after another is put on the table Only once or twice in the .

decades I have taught this exercise have the students gotten close to a viable legal theory But this is .

not wasted time —lear n occurs in

ing this phase of the exercise The point conveyed is while law and morals/politics
. that

are inextricably intertwined they are not the same , . For one thing, lawyers have a distinct way of talking about and
analyzing problems legal reasoning is actually a repertoire of conventional
that is characteristic of the legal culture of a given time and place. So-called “ ” ,

culturally approved rhetorical moves and counter-moves deployed by lawyers create an appearance of to

the legal necessity of the results for which they contend. In addition, good lawyers actually possess useful , specialized knowledge not generally
absorbed by political theorists or movement activists . Legal training sensitizes us to the many
complexities that arise whenever general norms and principles are implemented in the form of rules of

decision or case applications Lawyers know . , for example, that large stakes may turn on precisely how a right is defined ,

who has standing what remedies it provides, how the right is enforced
to vindicate it, We are not and in what venue(s), and so on.

doing our jobs if we argue, what the defendant did was unjust and the plaintiff deserves relief
properly simply, “ .” No

If “what the
one needs a lawyer to make the “what the defendant did was unjust” argument. As Lynd‟s account shows, the workers of Youngstown did make that argument in their own, eloquent words and through their collective resistance to the shut-downs.

defendant did was unjust” is all we have to offer, lawyers bring no added value to the table.
Progressive students tell themselves law is gobbledygook sometimes that basically , but that you can assist movements for social change if you learn how to spout the right gobbledygook. In

a social justice
this view of legal practice, “creativity” consists in identifying an appropriate technicality that helps your client. But in the Youngstown situation, we are way past that naïve view. There is no “technicality” that can win the case. In this setting,

lawyer must use the bits and pieces lying around to generate new legal knowledge and new legal
theories these new theories must say something more than my client deserves to win
. And “ ” (although it is fine to commence one‟s

research on the basis of that moral intuition). The class is beginning to get frustrated, and around now someone says “well, what do you expect? This is capitalism. There‟s no way the workers were going to win.” The “this-is-capitalism” (“TIC”) statement sometimes comes from the right,
sometimes from the left, and usually from both ends of the spectrum but in different ways. The TIC statement precipitates another teachable moment. I begin by saying that we need to tease out exactly what the student means by TIC, as several interpretations are possible. For example,
TIC might be a prediction of what contemporary courts are most likely to do. That is, TIC might be equivalent to saying that “it doesn‟t matter what theory you come up with; 999 US judges out of 1,000 would rule for U. S. Steel.”17 I allow that this is probably true, but not very revealing.

The workers knew what the odds were before they launched the case. Even if doomed to fail a legal case may still make a contribution to social
,

justice the litigation creates a focal point of energy around which a community can mobilize,
if

articulate moral and political claims, educate the wider public, and conduct political consciousness-
raising . And if there is political value in pursuing a case, we might as well make good legal arguments. On an alternative reading, the TIC observation is more ambitious than a mere prediction. It might be a claim that a capitalist society requires a legal structure of a certain

kind, and that therefore professionally acceptable legal reasoning within capitalist legal regimes cannot produce a theory that interrogates the status quo beyond a certain point. Put another way, some outcomes are so foreign to the bedrock assumptions of private ownership that they

This reading of the TIC

cannot be reached by respectable legal reasoning. A good example of an outcome that is incompatible with capitalism, so the argument goes, is a court order interfering with U.S. Steel‟s decision to leave Youngstown.

comment embodies the idea legal discourse encased within a deeper structure given by
that is , extra-legal

requirements of capitalism so that within professionally responsible legal argument the best
the social order ( ),

lawyers in the world could not state a winning theory the left and the right in the class often in Local 1330. Ironically,

share this belief. the claim our law is constrained by a rigid meta-logic of
I take both conservative and progressive students on about this. I insist that that

capitalism —which curiously parallels the notion that legal outcomes are tightly constrained by legal reasoning— is just plain wrong Capitalist societies recognize sorts
. all

of limitations on the rights of property owners . Professor Singer‟s classic article catalogues a multitude of them.18 The claim is not only false it is a ,

dangerous falsehood To believe TIC in this sense is to limit in advance our aspirations for what social
.

justice lawyering can accomplish . Now the class begins to sense that I am not just playing law professor and asking rhetorical questions to which there are no answers. The students realize that I actually think that I have a theory
up my sleeve that shows that Judge Lambros was wrong on the law. If things are going well, the students begin to feel an emotional stake in the exercise. Many who voted in the straw poll that the plaintiffs deserved to win are anxious to see whether I can pull it off. Other students
probably engage emotionally for a different reason—the ones who have been skeptical or derisive of my approach all term hope that my “theory,” when I eventually reveal it, is so implausible that I will fall flat on my face. I begin to feed the students more hints. One year I gave the hint,
“What do straying livestock, leaking reservoirs, dynamite blasting, and unsafe products have in common?”—but that made it too easy. Usually my hints are more oblique, as in “does anything you learned about accident law ring a bell ?” Whatever the form, the students take the hints, and
some start cooking with gas. Over the next few minutes, the pieces usually fall into place. The legal theory toward which I have been steering the students is that U.S. Steel is strictly liable in tort for the negative social effects of its decision to disinvest in Youngstown. I contend that that is
what the law provided in Ohio in 1980, and therefore a mechanism was available for the District Court to order substantial relief. A basic, albeit contested theme of modern tort law, which all students learn in first year, is that society allows numerous risky and predictably harmful
activities to proceed because we deem those activities, on balance, to be worthwhile or necessary. In such cases, the law often imposes liability rules designed to make the activity pay for the injuries or accidents it inevitably causes. For more than a century, tort rules have been fashioned
to force actors to take account of all consequences proximately attributable to their actions, so that they will internalize the relevant costs and price their products accordingly. The expectation is that in the ordinary course of business planning, the actor will perform a cost/benefit
analysis to make sure that the positive values generated by the activity justify its costs. Here, I remind the students of the famous Learned Hand Carroll Towing formula19 comparing B vs. PL, where B represents the costs of accident avoidance (or of refraining from the activity when
avoidance is impossible or too costly); and P x L (probability of the harm multiplied by the gravity of the harm) reflects foreseeable accident costs.20 The tort theory that evolved from this and similar cost/benefit approaches is called “market deterrence.” The notion is that liability rules
should be designed to induce the actor who is in the best position to conduct this kind of cost/benefit analysis with respect to a given activity to actually conduct it. Such actors will have incentives to make their products and activities safer and/ or to develop safer substitute products and
activities.21 Actors will then pass each activity‟s residual accident costs on to consumers by “fractionating” and “spreading” such costs through their pricing decisions. As a result, prices will give consumers an accurate picture of the true social costs of the activity, including its accident
costs. Consumers are thus enabled to make rational decisions about whether to continue purchasing the product or activity in light of its accident as well as its production costs. In principle, if a particular actor produces an unduly risky product (in the sense that its accident costs are
above “market level”), that actor‟s products will be priced above market, and he/she will be driven out of business.22 Tort rules have long been crafted with an eye toward compelling risky but socially valuable activities or enterprises to internalize their external costs. My examples—to
which the students were exposed in first year—are the ancient rule imposing strict liability for crop damage caused by escaping livestock;23 strict liability under the doctrine of Rylands v. Fletcher for the escape of dangerous things brought onto one‟s property;24 strict liability under
Restatement (Second) § 519 for damage caused by “abnormally dangerous activities” such as dynamite blasting;25 and most recently, strict products liability.26 Of course, there are many exceptions to this approach. For example, “unavoidably unsafe” or “Comment k products” are
deemed non-defective and therefore do not carry strict liability. And of course the U.S. largely rejected Rylands. Why was that? Because, as was memorably stated in Losee v. Buc hanan: “We must have factories, machinery, dams, canals and railroads. They are demanded by the manifold
wants of mankind, and lay at the basis of all our civilization.”27 In assuming that entrepreneurial capitalism would be stymied if enterprises were obliged to pay for the harms they cause, the Losee court accepted a strong version of TIC. Time permitting, I touch briefly on the debate about
whether the flourishing of the negligence principle in the U.S. subsidized 19th century entrepreneurial capitalism,28 the pos sible implications of the Coase Theorem for our discussion of Local 1330,29 and the debate about whether it is appropriate for courts to fashion common law rules
with an eye toward their distributive as well as efficiency consequences.30 With this as background, I argue that the District Court should have treated capital mobility—investors‟ circulation of capital in search of the highest rate of return—as a risky but socially valuable activity
warranting the same legal treatment as straying cattle and dynamite blasting. Capital mobility is socially valuable. It is indispensable for economic growth and flexibility. Capital mobility generates important positive externalities for “winners,” such as economic development and job-
creation at the new site of investment. However, capital mobility also predictably causes negative external effects on “bysta nders” (the ones economists quaintly label “the losers”). We discussed some of these externalities at the outset of the class—the trauma associated with income
interruption and pre-mature retirement, waste or destruction of human capital, multiplier effects on the local economy, and social pathologies and community decline of the kind experienced in Youngstown. The plaintiffs should have argued that capital mobility must internalize its social
dislocation costs for reasons of economic efficiency, and that this can be accomplished by making investors strictly liable in tort for the social dislocation costs proximately caused by their capital mobility decisions. An investor considering shifting capital from one use to another will
compare their respective rates of return. In theory, the investment with the higher return is socially optimal (as well as more profitable for the individual investor). The higher-return investment enlarges the proverbial pie. But investors must perform accurate comparisons of competing
investment opportunities in order for the magic hand of the market to perform its magic. A rational investor bases her analysis primarily on price signals reflecting estimated rates of return on alternative investment options. This comparison will yield an irrational judgment l eading to a
socially suboptimal investment decision unless the estimated rate of return on the new investment reflects its external effects, both positive and negative. Investors often have public-relations incentives to tout the positive economic consequences promised at the new location. To
guarantee rational decision making, the law must force investors contemplating withdrawal of capital from an enterprise to also carefully consider the negative social dislocation costs properly attributable to the activity of disinvestment. This can be achieved by making capital mobility
strictly liable for its proximately caused social dislocation costs.31 This approach erects no inefficient barriers to capital mobility, nor does it bar all disinvestment decisions that may cause disruption and loss in the exit community. Other things being equal, if the new investment
discounted by the social dislocation costs of exit will generate a higher rate of return than the current use of the capital, the capital should be disinvested from the old use and transferred to the new use. However, if investors are not forced by liability rules to take into account the social
dislocation costs of disinvestment, the new investment opportunity will appear more attractive than it really is in a social sense. The situation involves a classic form of market failure. The market is imperfect because investors are not obliged to take into account the negative social
dislocation costs proximately caused by their decisions. Inaccurate price signals lead to the overproduction of capital movement and therefore to a suboptimal allocation of resources. Apart from any severance and unemployment benefits received by workers at the old plant, the social
dislocation costs of disinvestment are almost entirely externalized onto the workers and the surrounding community. Strict tort liability will induce investors and their downstream customers to fractionate and spread the dislocation costs of capital mobility when pricing the products of
the new activity. This will provide those who use or benefit from the new activity at the destination community more accurate signals as to its true social costs and oblige them to fractionally share in the misfortunes afflicting the departure community. Suppose, for example, that U.S.
Steel invested the money it took out of Youngstown toward construction of a modern, high-tech steel mill in a Sunbelt state. The price of steel produced at the new mill should fractionally reflect social dislocation costs in Youngstown. According to legal “common sense” and mainstream
economic theory, the movement of capital from a lesser to a more profitable investment is an unambiguous social good. Allowing capital to migrate to its highest rate of return guarantees that society‟s resources are devoted to their most productive uses. Society as a whole is better off if
capital is permitted freely to migrate to the new investment and there to grow the pie. In short, the free mobility of capital maximizes aggregate welfare. We are all “winners” in the long run, even if some unfortunate “losers” might get hurt along the way. It follows as an article of faith
that any legal inhibition on the mobility of capital is inefficient and socially wasteful. This is why mainstream legal thinking refuses to accord long-term workers or surrounding communities any sort of “property interest” in the enterprise which a departing investor is obliged to buy out
before removal.32 An unwritten, bed-rock assumption of US law is that capital is not and should not be legally responsible for the social dislocation costs occasioned by its mobility.33 Such costs are mostly externalized onto employees and the surrounding community, even if the exit
community had subsidized the old investment with tax breaks and similar forms of corporate welfare. The legal common sense about capital mobility is mistaken. It is not a priori true that the movement of capital toward the greatest rate of return unambiguously enhances aggregate
social welfare. Free capital mobility maximizes aggregate welfare and allocates resources to their most productive uses only in a perfect market; that is, only in the absence of market failure. The claim that free capital mobility is efficient is sometimes true, and sometimes it is not. It all
depends on the particular facts and circumstances on the ground. Voilà. Judge Lambros was wrong. In 1980, a mechanism did exist in our law to recognize the plaintiffs‟ claims and afford them substantial relief for economic, emotional, and other losses.34 All that was required was a
logical extension of familiar torts thinking. Had Judge Lambros correctly applied well-known and time-honored torts principles, he would have treated the social dislocation costs of the plant closure as an externality that must be embedded in U.S. Steel‟s calculations regarding the relative
profitability of the old and new uses to which it might put its capital. This would close the gap between private and social costs, thereby tending to perfect the market. Notice an important rhetorical advantage of this theory—its core value is economic efficiency. The plaintiffs can get this
far along in their argument without mentioning “fairness,” “equity,” or “justice,” let alone “human rights,” values that are often fatal to legal argument in U.S. courts today.35 I now brace myself for the “you gotta be kidding me” phase of the discussion. Objections cascade in. The
progressive students want to be convinced that this is really happening. The mainstream students want to poke holes and debunk. A few of them are grateful at last for an opportunity to show how misguided they always knew my teaching was. Always, students assert that my summary
discussion of the cost/benefit analysis omitted various costs and benefits. For example, one year I omitted to say that the social dislocation costs in the exit community must be discounted by ameliorative public expenditures such as unemployment insurance benefits. My response to this
type of objection is always the same: “you are absolutely right, that cost or benefit should be included in the analysis. And here are a few more considerations we would need to address to perfect the cost/benefit analysis which I left out only in the interest of time.” But I learn from this
discussion; not infrequently, students contribute something I had not previously considered. A frequent objection is that the task of quantifying the social dislocation costs associated with capital mobility is just too complicated and difficult. I concede that it is a complex task and that
conservative estimates might be required in place of absolute precision. I ask, however, whether it is preferable to allow investors to proceed on the basis of price-signals we know to be wrong or to induce them to use best efforts to arrive at fair estimates. Separation of powers always
comes up, as it should. I go through the usual riffs. Yes, I concede, these problems cry out for a comprehensive legislative solution rather than case-by-case adjudication. But standard, well-known counter-arguments suggest that Judge Lambros should nevertheless have imposed tort
liability in this case. For one thing, determining the rules of tort liability has always been within the province of courts. Deferring to the status quo (that those who move capital are not legally responsible for negative externalities) is every bit as much a choice, every bit as much “activism”
or “social engineering,” as altering the status quo. Legal history is filled with cases in which the legislature was only prompted to address an important public policy concern by the shock value of a court decision. Particularly is this so in cases involving the rights and interests of
marginalized, insular, and under-represented groups like aging industrial workers. I note that Congress eventually responded to the plant closing problem with the WARN Act, a modest but not unimportant effort to internalize to enterprises some of the social dislocation cos ts of capital
disinvestment. The statute liquidates these costs into a sum equal to sixty days‟ pay after an employer orders a plant closing or mass layoff without giving proper notice.36 I call the students‟ attention to the provision of WARN barring federal courts from enjoining plant closings37 and
ask why Congress might have included that restriction. Another common objection concerns causation. A student will say: “The closedown of the mills, let alone the shutdown of any particular plant, could not have caused all of the suicides, heart failures, domestic violence, and so on, in
Youngstown. Surely many such tragedies would have occurred anyway, even if U.S. Steel had remained. It isn‟t fair to impose liability on U.S. Steel for everything bad that happened in Youngstown during the statute-of-limitations period.” I immediately say that this is a terrific point, and
that I was hoping someone would raise it. I compliment the student by saying that the question shows that he/she is now tapping legal knowledge. Typically, the class is concerned with causation-in-fact or “but for” causation. Their question is, how do we know that a plant shutdown
caused any particular case of heart failure or suicide in Youngstown? Problems of causal uncertainty are a familiar issue, and I remind students that they were exposed to several well-known responses in Torts. A time-honored, if simplistic device is to shift the burden of proof regarding
causationinfact to the defendant, when everyone knows full well that the defendant has no more information than the plaintiff with which to resolve the problem of causal uncertainty.38 In recent decades, courts have developed more sophisticated responses to problems of causal
uncertainty as, for example, in the DES cases. As the court stated in Sindell:39 In our contemporary complex industrialized society, advances in science and technology create fungible goods which may harm consumers and which cannot be traced to any specific producer. The response of
the courts can be either to adhere rigidly to prior doctrine, denying recovery to those injured by such products, or to fashion remedies to meet these changing needs. Just as Justice Traynor in his landmark concurring opinion in Escola . . . recognized that in an era of mass production and
complex marketing methods the traditional standard of negligence was insufficient to govern the obligations of manufacturer to consumer, so should we acknowledge that some adaptation of the rules of causation and liability may be appropriate in these rec urring circumstances . . . .40
At this point, some of the progressive students are beginning to salivate. They came to law school with the hope that legal reasoning would provide them a highly refined and politically neutral technology for speaking truth to power. The first semester disabuses most of them of that crazy
idea. They have learned that they will not find certainty or answers in legal discourse, and that legal texts are minefields of gaps, conflicts, and ambiguities with moral and political implications. I can tell from the glint in their eyes that they are beginning to ask themselves whether this
economics stuff, which they formerly shunned like the plague, might provide a substitute toolbox of neutral technologies with which to demonstrate that redress for workers and other subordinated and marginalized groups is legally required. I cannot allow them to think that. Therefore,
unless an alert student has spotted it, I now reveal my Achilles‟ heel. The weak link in my argument is the age-old question of proximate causation. Assume we solve the causation-in-fact problem. For example, assume that by analogy to the Sindell theory of market-share liability, the
court arrives at a fair method of attributing to the plant shutdown some portion of the social trauma and injuries occurring in the wake of U.S. Steel‟s departure from Youngstown. How do we know whether the plant closing proximately caused these harms? What do we mean by
“proximate causation” anyway, and why does it matter? These questions present another exciting, teachable moment. Naturally, the students haven‟t thought about proximate cause since first year. They barely remember what it is and how it differs from causation-in-fact. Some 3Ls
shuffle uncomfortably knowing that the Bar examination looms, and they are soon going to need to know about this. I provide a quick review of proximate causation which addresses the question, how far down the chain of causation should liability reach? I illustrate my points by
referring to Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R,41 which all law students remember. Perhaps U.S. Steel might fairly be held accountable for the suicide of steelworkers within ninety days of the plant closing, but we might draw the line before holding U.S. Steel liable for a stroke suffered by a
steelworker‟s spouse five years later. Now keyed in to what proximate cause doctrine is about, the students eagerly wait for me to tell them what the “answer” is, that is, where proximate causation doctrine would draw the line in the Youngstown case. That‟s when I give them the bad
news. I explain that proximate causation doctrine does not provide a determinate analytical method for measuring the scope of liability. We pretend that buzzwords like “reasonable foreseeability” or “scope-of-the-risk” give us answers, but ultimately decisions made under the rubric of
proximate causation are always value judgments.42 The conclusion that “X proximately caused Y” is a statement about the type of society we want to live in. At this juncture, the 3Ls grumpily realize that I am not going to be much help in preparing them for their bar review course. I now
distribute a one-page hand-out on proximate causation prepared in advance. The handout reprints Justice Andrews‟ remarkable observation in his Palsgraf dissent: What we . . . mean by the word „proximate‟ is, that because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice,
the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics . . . . It is all a question of expediency. There are no fixed rules to govern our judgment. There are simply matters of which we may take account.43 I point out that causation-
in-fact analysis, too, always involves perspective and value judgments.44 Why assume that water escaping the reservoir diminished the value of the neighboring coal mining company‟s land? Why not assume that the coal company‟s decision to dig close to the border diminished the
value of the manufacturer‟s land (by increasing the cost of using the type of reservoir needed in its production process)? For that matter, why assume that the cattle trample on the neighbors‟ crops? Why not assume that the crops get in the way of the cattle? My handout also contains
my variation on Robert Keeton‟s famous definition of proximate cause45: When a court states that „the defendant‟s conduct was the proximate cause of (some portion of) the plaintiff‟s injuries,‟ what the court means is that (1) the defendant‟s conduct was a cause-in-fact of that
portion of plaintiff‟s injuries; and (2) the defendant‟s conduct and the plaintiff‟s specified injuries are so related that it is appropriate, from the moral and social-policy points of view, to hold the defendant legally responsible for that portion of the plaintiff‟s injuries. What we mean when
we ask whether the social dislocation costs associated with the shutdown of the steel plant were proximately caused by capital mobility is whether these costs are, in whole or in part, properly attributable from a moral/political point of view to U.S. Steel‟s decision to disinvest. Economic
“science” does not and cannot establish in a value-neutral manner that the social dislocation costs of the plant shutdown are a negative externality of capital mobility. A conclusion of that kind requires a value judgment that we disguise under the rubric of “proximate causation,” a value

in legal reasoning there is no escape from moral and political

judgment about whom it is appropriate to ask to bear what costs related to what injuries. The lesson is that

choice Legal education

. If things have gone according to plan, time conveniently runs out, and the class is dismissed on that note. What am I trying to accomplish in a class like this? What are the objectives of critical legal pedagogy?

should empower students It should put them in touch with their own capacity to take control over their
.

lives and professional education and development. It should enable them to participat as experience the possibility of ing,

lawyers, in transformative social movements . But all too often classroom legal education is deadening. The law student‟s job, mastering doctrine, appears utterly unconnected to any process of learning

Classroom legal education tends to reinforce a sense of powerlessness

about oneself or developing one‟s moral, political, or professional identity.

about our capacity to change social institutions it often induces students to feel they are powerless . Indeed, that

to shape and alter their own legal education Much of legal education induces in students a pervasive .

and exaggerated sense of the constraint of legal rules and roles and the students‟ inability to do much about
it. the goals of critical legal pedagogy are to disrupt the socialization process
In capsule form, to —• that occurs during legal education; •

unfreeze entrenched habits of mind and deconstruct the false claims of necessity to which constitute so-called “legal reasoning”; •

urge students to see their life‟s work ahead as an opportunity to unearth and challenge law‟s dominant
ideas about society, justice, and human possibility and infuse legal rules and practices with to

emancipatory and egalitarian content ; • to persuade students that legal discourses and practices comprise a
medium neither infinitely plastic nor inalterably rigid, in which they can pursue moral and political
,

projects and articulate alternative visions of social organization and social justice to train them to ;•

argue for the utopian and the impossible to alert them legal cases potentially provide a
professionally and respectably ;• that

forum for intense public consciousness-raising about social justice to encourage them to view legal issues of ;•

representation as an opportunity to work within the

to challenge, push, and relocate the boundaries between intra-systemic and extra-systemic activity, that is, an opportunity

system in a way that reconstitutes it and show t the existing social order is not immutable but is ; • to hat “

merely possible and people have the freedom and power to act upon it.” The most important point
, that 46 of the

is social justice lawyers never give up. The appropriate response when you think you have a
class that

hopeless case is to go back and do more work in the legal medium .

1ar
 K
The Oberg evidence’s assertion that will to transparency is violent is fundamentally
wrong
Holowchak 12 Andrew, teaches Philosophy at Rider University. When Freud (Almost) Met Chaplin:
The Science behind Freud's "Especially Simple, Transparent Case" Project Muse

The problem is that psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., "super-ego," "Oedipus complex," and "death drive"30 ), unlike them of
say physics ("electron," [End Page 67] "muon," and "quark"), are logical constructs that have not been corroborated by

precise observations and replicable tests . Hence Freud's logical constructs as proto-concepts are not even adequate as
working hypotheses. As early as 1934, J. F. Brown, who claimed he was in sympathy with Freud's new science, urged, "But, and here almost all
critics of psychoanalysis are in agreement, the theory has never been precise enough to allow
formulation of working hypotheses for which adequate experimental situations could be found" (1933, p.
333). He went on to acknowledge, perhaps somewhat prophetically, given the amount of attention Freud gets today in philosophy of mind,
"Freud's discoveries probably are the most striking and original contributions made to the science of mind in our time." He added, in a manner
that vitiates the compliment, that Freud is more prophet than scientist—more Bruno than Galileo (1933, p. 226).

Freud was aware of that. His own view of the concepts of psychoanalysis is ambivalent. At times, he shows impatience and becomes intolerant
of his critics. "Only in psychology [is obscurity not tolerated]; here the constitutional incapacity of men for scientific research comes into full
view. It looks as though people did not expect from psychology progress in knowledge, but some other kind of satisfaction; every unsolved
problem, every acknowledged uncertainty is turned into a ground of complaint against it" (1916–7, S.E., XXII: 6). At other times, Freud
seems to agree with his critics. In "Autobiographical Study," when he mentions difficulties with "compulsion to repeat," he adds:

Although it arose from a desire to fix some of the most important theoretical ideas of psycho-analysis, it
goes far beyond psychoanalysis . I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to
take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and
of drive in psychoanalysis.

(1925, S.E., XX: 57)

In "Why War?," Freud writes to Einstein in a manner to explain his ambivalence: "It may perhaps seem to you [Einstein] as though our theories
are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology
like this?" (1933, S.E., XXII: 211)

In sum, the bedrock concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis are conceptually indeterminate. That means that the
fundamental principles of Freudian psychoanalysis are conceptually indeterminate and, thus, obscure or meaningless .
Unfortunately, as we have seen, Freud was evasive when it [End Page 68] came to the question of the status of the bedrock concepts of
psychoanalysis and even said that psychoanalysis, with the exception of "repression" and "unconscious," could do just as well without them31
(1914, S.E., XIV: 16; 1925, S.E., XX: 32–3). Without referents to the concepts he employs so significantly, Freud is
writing gobbledygook.

A related difficulty is conceptual change. Freud, as a scientist, was committed to conceptual flexibility,
insofar as his postulates were avowedly data-driven. Nonetheless, many of the conceptual changes he
made—e.g., his rejection of his Seduction theory and his adoption of the death drive and structural model—were
prompted more by theoretical difficulties than they were driven by observational data. In addition, Freud
surrounded himself with lackeys , albeit intelligent lackeys, that allowed him, as founder of
psychoanalysis, the privilege of being final arbiter on issues of conceptual change within
psychoanalysis.32