Tarak Barkawi and George Lawson
This article introduces the main themes that animate this special issue: the necessary entanglement of theory and history, the cortical relationship between theory and practice…
Abstract
This article introduces the main themes that animate this special issue: the necessary entanglement of theory and history, the cortical relationship between theory and practice, and the transboundary (i.e., international) relations that help to constitute systems of both thought and practice. We integrate the contributions to the special issue within these overarching themes and identify their main contributions. We make three core arguments: first, all theory is situated knowledge, derived in and through historical context; second, theory-practice is a single field in which theory arises out of and acts upon historical experience; and third, both social and political theory have international origins, arising from transboundary encounters.
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The attempt to recover the international origins of social and political thought is motivated by the unsatisfactory fragmentation of modern knowledge – by its failure to account…
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The attempt to recover the international origins of social and political thought is motivated by the unsatisfactory fragmentation of modern knowledge – by its failure to account for the intimate connections between theory and history in general and its international dimension in particular – and seeks to overcome these divides. This article provides an analysis of the theory/history divide and its role for the fragmentation of modern knowledge. Theoretically, it shows, this divide is rooted in, and reproduced by, the epistemic foundations of modern knowledge. Historically, the modern episteme arises from a crisis of imperial politics in the 18th century. This analysis suggests that theory, history, and the international are products rather than origins of modern social and political thought. These historical origins thus do not provide the basis for more integrated forms of knowledge. They do, however, reveal how the fragmentation of knowledge itself simultaneously serves and obscures the imperialist dimension of modern politics.
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This article explores the role of history and historical memory in the formation of early Zionist/Israeli national security doctrine. To that end, it makes three moves. First, it…
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This article explores the role of history and historical memory in the formation of early Zionist/Israeli national security doctrine. To that end, it makes three moves. First, it explores a series of public addresses made by Zalman Rubashov (Shazar) in 1942–1943. A key public intellectual in the Jewish community of preindependent Palestine (the Yishuv), Rubashov means to help his listeners make sense of, and respond collectively to, the unfolding destruction of European Jewry. Second, it draws cautious parallels between those public intellectual pronouncements and the postwar work of Friedrich Meinecke, a prominent German historian and public intellectual and a sometime teacher of Rubashov. In both cases, I suggest, history does more than make sense of a moment of political transition: It seeks to reframe the self-understandings of citizens and their collective political relations. Third, drawing on a recent memoir by Noam Chayut, a prominent Israeli antioccupation activist, I explore how those self-understandings can be lost when the historical claims upon which they are predicated lose their sense of immediacy, naturalness, or coherence.
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The labor theory of value (LTV) offers a lucid and forceful example of a “theory” thought to stand outside “history.” Considered as an “objective” form of theorizing, the LTV…
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The labor theory of value (LTV) offers a lucid and forceful example of a “theory” thought to stand outside “history.” Considered as an “objective” form of theorizing, the LTV seeks transhistorical truths about the relationship between humans and nature – whereby, as everyone knows, value in the world is produced by the fundamental force of human labor power. Marx is typically taken to have subscribed to some form of the LTV, and thus to have signed on to this form of theorizing. This article refuses to treat Marx as an analytic, ahistorical theorist who would either affirm or deny the LTV. Rather, I read Marx as a genealogist who excavates the story of labor and value within the specific historical context of an emerging capitalist social formation. This genealogical approach to Marx, and particularly to his less-often-discussed, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, shows plainly that Marx never subscribed to the LTV, but more importantly that he eschewed the form of theory that the LTV presumes. Rather than seeking to make transhistorical theoretical claims about the relation between labor and value, Marx meant to demonstrate to his readers something about the way in which a definite and concrete (historically situated) capitalist social formation establishes value. A capitalist social formation establishes its own specific value relations, by first constituting, and then dissimulating, a link between labor and value.