Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present. Edited by Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. viii+329. $55.00 (cloth); $19.00 (paper).

In the interview, Robert Hariman talks about his latest co-authored book The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (University of Chicago Press, 2016), presenting the main argument that they put forward with John Louis Lucaites – that a paradigm shift is needed within the field of photographic theory in order to understand the changing social role of photography in contemporary societies. They argue for a redefinition of the medium’s “burden of representation”, embracing its limitations and treating it as a “small language”, firmly embedded within the notion of the vernacular. This move beyond simple politics of representation, he argues, should however not be apolitical. In fact, the paradigm shift is needed to re-politicise photography and therefore increase its political efficacy in the wake of unsustainability of the dominant neoliberal socio-economic order and the specific catastrophic idea of progress which it promotes. Keywords: capitalism, grimace, modernity, photography theory, progress, Robert Hariman

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Re-reading Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi in the Late-Modern Condition of Fragility

Political Studies Review ◽

10.1177/1478929916644943 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 15 (3) ◽

pp. 391-403 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Taesuh Cha

Keyword(s):

University Of Chicago ◽

Karl Polanyi ◽

Neoliberal Capitalism ◽

Modern Capitalism ◽

The Social ◽

William Connolly ◽

Duke University ◽

Late Modern ◽

University Of Chicago Press

The cardinal role of complexity in Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the market has hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed, there is now a considerable corpus of literature that has established the importance of spontaneity as a central concept around which neoliberal economic theory revolves. However, as William Connolly analyzes, its closed conception of economic processes simplifies real economic volatilities and ignores both modes of self-organization and creativity found in democracy and social movements that periodically irrupt into market processes. This article builds upon this critique of neoliberalism and employs Karl Polanyi’s genealogy of modern capitalism to understand historical imbrications between the market and the social and their contribution to the fragility of capitalism. Polanyi’s notions of “(dis-)embeddedness” and the “double movement” not only show us a more “complex” view of modern political economy but also provide us with important lessons for political responses to the recent crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Connolly WE (2013) The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham: Duke University Press. Hayek F (1973) Rules and Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayek F (1976) The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi K (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

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