Culiacán: Using Photography to Explore the Space between Idyllic Nostalgia and Historical Materialism

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

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Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.4 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-19

Author(s):

Christopher Tomlins

Keyword(s):

Walter Benjamin ◽

Historical Materialism ◽

First Century ◽

Gaston Bachelard ◽

Spatial Justice ◽

Legal Studies ◽

New Materialisms ◽

The World ◽

Prime Elements ◽

Cultural Turn

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

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Engels on women, the family, class and gender

Human Geography ◽

10.1177/19427786211000047 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 194277862110000

Author(s):

Sheila Margaret McGregor

Keyword(s):

Historical Materialism ◽

Human Society ◽

Human Beings ◽

True Nature ◽

Starting Point ◽

Women's Oppression ◽

1960S And 1970S ◽

Socialist Movement ◽

The Impact ◽

The Way

This article looks at Engels’s writings to show that his ideas about the role of labour in the evolution of human beings in a dialectical relationship between human beings and nature is a crucial starting point for understanding human society and is correct in its essentials. It is important for understanding that we developed as a species on the basis of social cooperation. The way human beings produce and reproduce themselves, the method of historical materialism, provides the basis for understanding how class and women’s oppression arose and how that can explain LGBTQ oppression. Although Engels’s analysis was once widely accepted by the socialist movement, it has mainly been ignored or opposed by academic researchers and others, including geographers, and more recently by Marxist feminists. However, anthropological research from the 1960s and 1970s as well as more recent anthropological and archaeological research provide overwhelming evidence for the validity of Engels’s argument that there were egalitarian, pre-class societies without women’s oppression. However, much remains to be explained about the transition to class societies. Engels’s analysis of the impact of industrial capitalism on gender roles shows how society shapes our behaviour. Engels’s method needs to be constantly reasserted against those who would argue that we are a competitive, aggressive species who require rules to suppress our true nature, and that social development is driven by ideas, not by changes in the way we produce and reproduce ourselves.

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Historical materialism and international studies: theorising the politics of struggle in the everyday world

International Relations ◽

10.1177/0047117821991618 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 004711782199161

Author(s):

Cemal Burak Tansel

Keyword(s):

International Relations ◽

International Political Economy ◽

Historical Materialism ◽

Global Capitalism ◽

International Studies ◽

Historical Materialist ◽

The Everyday ◽

Everyday World ◽

Global War ◽

Materialist Feminist

This forum brings together critical engagements with Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton’s Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis to assess the prospects and limits of historical materialism in International Studies. The authors’ call for a ‘necessarily historical materialist moment’ in International Studies is interrogated by scholars working with historical materialist, feminist and decolonial frameworks in and beyond International Relations (IR)/International Political Economy (IPE). This introductory essay situates the book in relation to the wider concerns of historical materialist IR/IPE and outlines how the contributors assess the viability of Bieler and Morton’s historical materialist project.

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