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Responding to Rueda’s questions, this essay explains the political-strategic approach (PSA) to populism and highlights its analytical strengths, which have become even more important with the emergence of populist governments across the world. PSA identifies populism’s core by emphasizing the central role of personalistic leaders who tend to operate in opportunistic ways, rather than consistently pursuing programmatic or ideological orientations. PSA is especially useful nowadays, when scholars’ most urgent task is to elucidate the political strategies of populist chief executives and their problematic repercussions, especially populism’s threat to democracy.

The physical sciences discarded the method of Cartesian rationalism in the 18th century, but much of contemporary political theory continues to adhere to this outdated method, following the famous ...

The political-strategic approach is one of the most employed frameworks within the methodologically heterogeneous subfield of populism studies. In the last two decades, it has contributed to the analysis of populism both in Latin America and the United States and, more recently, in Western and Eastern Europe. That being said, a close inspection of its axioms and its conceptualization of the phenomenon shows that it is built on ill-conceived premises. This article intends to be a comprehensive critique of the approach that can contribute to the methodological progress of the field. It criticizes the three main dysfunctions of the approach: selective rationalism, leader-centrism, and normative bias.

Due especially to the work of Friedrich Hayek, “spontaneous order” has become an influential concept in social theory. It seeks to explain how human practices and institutions emerge as unintended consequences of myriad individual actions, and points to the limits of rationalism and conscious design in social life. The political implications of spontaneous order theory explain both the enthusiasm and the skepticism it has elicited, but its basic mechanisms remain elusive and underexamined. This article teases out the internal logic of the concept, arguing that it can be taken to mean several different things. Some are forward-looking (defining it in terms of present-day functioning), whereas others are backward-looking (defining it in terms of historical origins). Yet none of these possibilities prove fully coherent or satisfactory, suggesting that spontaneous order cannot bear the analytical weight that has been placed on it.

Rationalism refers to a mode of theorizing that sees in universal reason the right tool to apprehend politics. It affirms that everything needs to be grounded in reason and it is optimistic that re...

The modern system of global marketing communications is not ideal, that is why management of international enterprises needs to use creativity in their attempts to predict the results of the marketing activities. They often fail in forecasting, because specialists do not have necessary practical models and data. The article deals with the questions of developing a model of the “rational” system of global marketing communications, which will be ready for the implementation into managerial processes of the Ukrainian firms. The model in the research is based on one-factor and multi-factor equations with calculations on the example of the well-known American company Nike, which works in the segment of apparel and footwear industry and can be a bright example of building a strong marketing communication strategy. Methods of linear and polynomial trends, smoothing average and exponential smoothing were used for the development of the proposed model. The examination of the correlation between global income, costs on marketing communication activities of the international company and index of satisfaction by this enterprise on the market in the frames of the econometric model’s work showed the dependency, which can become a basis for future analysis. The invented model of the “rational” system of global marketing communications shows how managers can calculate the resultativity of specific marketing instruments, which they plan to accept as appropriate. Different indicators can be used in forecasting the effects of global marketing communications on the performance of international enterprises. The article shows that the more indicators are used in the model, the more accurate is the result.

In recent decades, architectural historians, preservationists, and the general public have shown a growing interest in Fascist-era buildings. Many of the most high-profile examples are those associated with the monumental excesses of the regime. However, new attention has also been focused on more modest buildings that are significant examples of interwar Italian modernism or Rationalism, including former party headquarters (case del fascio). Taking as primary examples works by Giuseppe Terragni, the architect most often associated with Rationalism, as well by Luigi Carlo Danieri and Luigi Vietti, whose interwar contributions to Italian modernism have been less often the focus of scholarly attention, this article traces the postwar histories of case del fascio with the aim of better understanding the ways in which architecture and politics intersect and some of the consequences of this for the contemporary Italian architectural landscape.

In this essay, I propose an alternative to Critical Cultural Studies that I term Creative Cultural Studies. In so doing, I explore important shifts scholars are making away from critique, moralism, humanism and rationalism to creativity, becomings, assemblages and affective forces. I look to International Fund for Animal Welfare’s (IFAW) ivory campaign to trace how their networked approach to an international problem disrupted connections and shifted affective valences. Beginning with a poster from IFAW’s ivory campaign, I trace lines that crisscross among continents, environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs), ivory vendors, flora, fauna, social media and subway riders. To get a feel for what is happening involves less judgment and more encounters with the pandemonium of things.

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek to understand threats to personal and enterprise freedom, arising from public health governance. Whereas public choice theory examines the incentives these institutions provide to agents, the analysis here understands those incentives as framed by discursive social constructions that affect the identity, power, and positionality of different actors. It shows how overlapping discourses of scientific rationalism may generate a ‘road to serfdom’ narrowing freedom of action and expression across an expanding terrain. As such, the paper contributes to the growing literature emphasising the importance of narratives, stories and metaphors as shaping political economic action in ways feeding through to outcomes and institutions.

Since the end of the twentieth-century majority of humankind is allegedly living under conditions of modernity. This all-embracing shift has resulted in different effects and different phenomena. In some cases, the government-led modernization of traditional societies led to the destabilization of some institutions. However, it would be a mistake to assert that modernization became a denominator for the unfavorable processes. The result of the large-scale transformations brought about an emergence of compensatory reactions. Specifically, irrational aspirations became active in society. In recent years, once tabooed occultism has become popular, which entailed intense yet expected attention from academia. Despite transition to modern forms of social structure, such as the strengthening of rationalism, technologization, the advancement of science, a certain layer in society is inclined to believe in the “miraculous powers of occultism” or takes it quite seriously as a science. Observed interest in society for the irrational is analyzed in the context of the chosen path of the country’s development. It is also assessed as concurrently transpiring multicomponent and contradictory trends in the global arena. The study examines the question of the significance of the statement “collective neurosis” in modern society. It argues that whether revitalization, if any, of occultism reflects societal tensions related to dissatisfaction with reality and distrust towards certain state institutions.

This paper explores UK public sector outsourcing to offer a critique of the theory of liberal institutional convergence. The latter argues that NPM is a case of empiricist scientific rationalism but the neoclassical economics that justifies public sector outsourcing operates with a closed-system ontology of the economy that has more affinities with Stalinist central planning than to empirical political economic science, and this has real institutional consequences. The argument sets out the neoclassical logic behind outsourcing, the unanticipated risks in its conception and the deepening problems with its intensification as practice. It shows how, when we put the market rhetoric of NMP to one side, outsourcing necessitates the central planning of private actors, and the success of this venture hinges on the viability of the outsourcing contract as an effective junction of instruction and control. If there is institutional convergence in New Public Management it is with Soviet enterprise planning. It follows that it is not simply ‘second-best-world’ neoclassical theories that can shed light on outsourcing's chronic failures but also the critiques of Soviet central planning. The latter help explain why incomplete contracts in outsourcing are just the start of bargaining games that the state cannot win.

The notion of metaphor has been broadly discussed during the twentieth century as an essential and necessary part of language and history. This article examines the theoretical dialogue that links ...

This article explores recent scholarship in the area of care ethics and International Relations. The article begins by tracing the journey of care ethics into the realm of the international or ‘the global’, and then moves on to elaborate on recent scholarship in the area of care ethics in International Relations. Through a discussion of three key areas – violence and conflict, the body, and the ‘pluriverse’ – I argue that feminist care ethics has the potential to offer a way forward in the light of growing critiques of moral rationalism in the international ethics/International Political Theory literature.

Focusing on differences in Rainer Forst's and my otherwise similar discourse theoretical approaches to power and reason, I argue that Forst's equating all power with “noumenal” (i.e. reasons-mediat...

The Kemalist leadership of early Republican Turkey attempted to transform the country's Muslim populace with a heavy emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and nationalism. Several studies have examined the effects of this effort, or the “Turkish Revolution,” at the central and more recently provincial levels. This article uses first-hand accounts and statistical data to carry the analysis to the village level. It argues that the Kemalist reforms failed to reach rural Turkey, where more than 80 percent of the population lived. A comparison with sedentary Soviet Central Asia's rural transformation in the same period reveals ideology and the availability of resources as the underlying causes of this failure. Informed by a Marxist–Leninist emphasis on the necessity of transforming the “substructure” for revolutionary change, the Soviet state undermined existing authority structures in Central Asia's villages to facilitate the introduction of communist ideals among their Muslim inhabitants. Turkey's Kemalist leadership, on the other hand, preserved existing authority structures in villages and attempted to change culture first. However, they lacked and could not create the resources to implement this change.

This article examines behavioral ethics propositions, cognitive distortions, and bias reduction techniques. This is followed by the practitioner and academician response of the public administratio...

This essay offers an interpretation of Alfarabi's Book of Religion, in which the tenth-century philosopher addresses more directly than in any of his other works the relationship between human and divine wisdom. I argue that, despite his apparent silence about the orthodox view of divine law, Alfarabi's primary purpose in the work is to challenge precisely that view, along with the theological opinions on which it depends. To this end, the Book of Religion encourages the examination, by political science, of religion's claim to lead men to happiness. Previous scholarly work has not explored the extent to which the Book of Religion contains a confrontation with orthodoxy and is therefore unable to explain how Alfarabi justifies his thoroughly rational account of religion. Based on the interpretation presented here, Alfarabi comes to light as a philosopher open to the most fundamental alternatives, rather than a dogmatic rationalist.

This article reflects on the real world relevance of rational approaches to grantmaking. The characteristics and environment of foundation work are outlined, then both traditional and newer funding practices are analysed. Unpacking implicit assumptions of a rational approach, eight costs to foundations and their grantees are identified. The final sections of the paper consider what grantmaking for a complex and disorderly world might encompass. In conclusion, while rational approaches to grantmaking provide a comfortable aura of certainty, funders need to adapt to a little discomfort.

This paper discusses ways out of an approach adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I refer to as instrumental rationalism (pl. racjonalizm instrumentalny). It was to determine, inter alia, the place occupied by humans within an organization construed as a machine in the self-proclaimed modern era. It is one in which the substance of what we refer to as “here and now” is determined by rationality, functionality, utility, usability, effectiveness and effciency. This approach was best captured by Max Weber’s metaphor of the “iron cage” (German “Stahlhartes Gehause”, translated as “iron cage” by Talcott Parsons), although Weber himself refers to “like a light cloak, which can be thrown away any moment [...] shell as hard as steel” (Weber, 1994, p. 181).

Between the 18th and the 20th centuries, modernity was built on rationalism, individualism (the individual seen as a unit) and on the social contract of the Republic, united and indivisible. The mo...

Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent provide us much to admire, as authors and as men, and much to ponder. They can be seen as collaborators in the defense of the nation-state against the empty universalism of “human rights,” and, more generally, in exposing the boundless arrogance and blindness of modern rationalism insofar as it denies its inheritance from premodern sources. This defense of the nation-state and critique of secular rationalism are of vital interest to moral and political conservatives, and Scruton, for his part, has explicitly taken on the cause and the label of conservatism. But conservatives face an imposing and, I propose here, critically instructive obstacle in appropriating the teachings of these two contemporary giants. For, as soon as we begin to examine the foundations of their respective projects, Scruton's and Manent's approaches appear to be, not only quite different (and therefore, one might hope, complementary) but in an important sense directly opposed to one another. Th...

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

This contribution assesses the shift in the mission of microfinance from providing small loans for entrepreneurship to the broader agenda of financial inclusion. Three leading organisations' publications inform a discourse analysis, which allows the strategic shift to be analysed using two theoretical frames from organisational sociology: instrumental rationalism and sociological institutionalism. The proclaimed shift in strategy is found to consist less of rational innovation towards the aim of poverty alleviation than of “myth and ceremony” for the sake of organisational self-preservation.

Countries often seek to resolve their disputes through negotiations. However, diplomats meeting face to face are under the incentives both to cooperate by revealing one’s preferences and to compete by misrepresenting them. How, then, do they express and assess each other’s intentions? Theories of International Relations that have studied communication in diplomacy — structural realism, rationalism, and the theory of communicative action — offer insufficient answers. To break through, I highlight the communicative function of emotions, leveraging insights from the latest research on negotiations in social and experimental psychology. I argue that when diplomats negotiate, they pay attention not only to what others say, but also to their emotional cues. One’s choice of words, tone of speech, and hand and body gestures carry emotive information that reflects how one appraises a situation. Diplomacy is therefore unique as a conduit between states because it enables practitioners to exchange individual-level expressions of intentions — and, by extension, the intentions of the government they represent — that are otherwise lost, attenuated, or distorted if communications were to occur through other impersonal and irregular channels. To illustrate my argument, I discuss episodes of face-to-face diplomacy during the Fashoda Crisis (1898), July Crisis (1914), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and US–Syria negotiations on the Middle East (1991).

Beyond the initial infatuation with his work, Kuhn’sStructure of Scientific Revolutionshas had a lasting impact on the field of International Relations. The article analyses the reception of Kuhn in IR and suggests that it contributed to overcoming the ‘second debate’ by making science and realism fully compatible. More importantly, Kuhn offered a vision of science in which scientific communities operated on the basis of realist principles. This not only consolidated the academic hold of neorealism, but transformed realism into a theory of knowledge, which its critics have failed to acknowledge. This lasting transformation is analysed by looking at Kuhn’s influence on the classic studies of strategic decision-making by Graham Allison and Robert Jervis.

El presente artículo propone la hermenéutica, más concretamente la hermenéutica analógica de Beuchot, como camino para hallar la verdad. Con este fin, se realiza un recorrido a través del racionalismo occidental y el equivocismo contemporáneo, para proponer una interpretación de la realidad equilibrada y prudente. Es en este punto intermedio donde radica un panorama amplio de verdad, que evita ver esta como un corresponder unívocamente a un estado de cosas o a un hecho, sino como apertura a un mundo multívoco. La experiencia hermenéutica nos lleva así a una comprensión más clara, tanto en las ciencias humanas como en las exactas.

In this paper, we will analyze how anthropological thinking, in the last twenty years, has put the conceptual categories of Culture and Nature into radical questioning. Nature was “denaturalized” and deemed as a social construction that was specific to the history of Western world. But to avoid the alternative between nature and culture one should develop a “non-dualist” approach and, in this sense, we will then consider Tim Ingold's works. According to the British anthropologist, the nature and culture divide is usually the outcome of an assumption recurrent in anthropology, that according to which our cultural frames determine our perception of outside world. For Ingold, phenomenological thinking reversed the ontological priorities of Western rationalism. Santrauka Straipsnyje analizuojama, kaip per pastaruosius dvidešimt metų antropologinis mąstymas iš esmės sukvestionavo konceptualias kultūros ir gamtos kategorijas. Gamta buvo „denaturalizuota“ ir laikyta socialine konstrukcija, būdinga Vakarų pasaulio istorijai. Siekiant išvengti alternatyvos tarp gamtos ir kultūros, turėtų būti išplėtotas „nedualistinis“ požiūris. Todėl apžvelgiami Timo Ingoldo darbai. Remiantis britų antropologu, gamtos ir kultūros takoskyra paprastai yra antropologijoje pasikartojančios prielaidos rezultatas, pagal kurį kultūriniai rėmai apibrėžia mūsų išorinio pasaulio suvokimą. Ingoldo manymu, fenomenologinis mąstymas apvertė Vakarų racionalizmo ontologinius prioritetus. Reikšminiai žodžiai:konstrukcionizmas,kultūra,Ingoldas,gamta,fenomenologija First published online: 03 Jan 2014

Efforts to fight international money laundering, corruption, and terrorist financing depend crucially on the prohibition barring the formation of anonymous shell companies. To study the effectiveness of this prohibition, we perform the first international relations (IR) field experiment on a global scale. With university institutional review board (IRB) clearance, we posed as consultants requesting confidential incorporation from 1,264 firms in 182 countries. Testing arguments drawn from IR theory, we probe the treatment effects of specifying (1) the international standards (managerialism), (2) penalties for noncompliance with these standards (rationalism), (3) the desire to follow norms through complying with international standards (constructivism), and (4) status as a U.S. customer. We find that firms prompted about possible legal penalties for violating standards (rationalism) were significantly less likely to respond to inquiries and less likely to comply with international law compared to the placebo condition. Some evidence also suggests that the constructivist condition caused significantly greater rates of noncompliance. The U.S. origin condition and the managerial condition had no significant effects on compliance rates. These results present anomalies for leading theories and underscore the importance of determining causal effects in IR research.

This article examines the origins of China's vocational education system and the restructuring of the system since 1980, finding that this thirty-year systemic restructuring was based on a framework of instrumental rationalism, but did not connect effectively with the building of a modern enterprise system. During this critical period in upgrading China's industrial workforce, vocational education has therefore not been able to play its rightful role in social integration and political empowerment.

The enduring legacy of Emma Goldman may be more of a factor in American Jewish politics and identity, especially among women, than is typically assumed. In order to gain a better sense of her positive resonance it may help to revisit Goldman's origins and intellectual development from under-exploited vantage points. An immense body of historiography is devoted to Goldman. Yet her birthplace, Kovno [Kaunas], Lithuania, and her initial United States residence, Rochester, New York, are unduly minimized. Kovno's Jews were famed for their revolutionary politics and ardent rationalism; Rochester was (supposedly) exemplary of a new industrial order. Goldman perceived, however, that the Jews' plight in Upstate New York was far from hopeful. She narrated, and even distorted, her autobiography to underscore Rochester as a crucible of her radicalism and the setting of a dramatic challenge to her loyalties, while her “Litvak” legacy and connections were vital throughout her life. Moreover, she was able to maintain a ...

Since its establishment in 2001, The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has gradually increased its influence and importance while becoming an independent venue for the Central Asian states to manage regional and national security. The SCO focuses on a new type of (non-traditional) security, and its diverse membership differentiates it from other security institutions. In particular, and uniquely, the SCO has impacted the national security identities of its members. The processes examined in this paper are not easily reconciled with traditional state-centric security paradigms or the dominant strategic discourse. Thus, recourse must be had to analytical tools provided by social constructivism and, to a lesser extent, English School rationalism. The paper proposes a revised model of socialization with acculturation as a central mechanism and applies it to the security identity formulation of four Central Asian Republics in order to explain the shifts in the security discourses at both the national and regional levels.

I begin by offering a brief definition of the term “rationalism”, first in its strictly philosophical sense as denoting preference for the use of reason over other means of acquiring knowledge, and then in its broader sense as a term denoting patient reasoning, scepticism and reappraisal of received opinions. In this latter sense rationalism informed the critical movement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thought which challenged dogmatic theology, weakened ecclesiastical power and secularized culture. Next, I briefly examine the currency and characteristics of Russian rationalism, particularly as the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s understood the concept (which they often described as “realism”). I then turn to the work of Petr Tkachev, who is chiefly remembered as an emigre revolutionary strategist of the 1870s, an advocate of seizure of political power by a conspiratorial minority and therefore a possible forerunner of Lenin, but who was also a prolific writer on social and philosophical matters before he was arrested and imprisoned in 1869 in connection with the Nechaev affair. I focus on an article, “Essays from the History of Rationalism” and associated fragments, which were seized by the police in 1866 and which were not published in Tkachev's lifetime. Tkachev's article describes and discusses the history of religious dogmatism and persecution in medieval and early-modern Europe. Scholars have often taken it to be a significant original work. In fact, I claim, it is heavily dependent on a contemporaneous book, the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism written by the Irish historian William Lecky. Tkachev did acknowledge his debt to Lecky, but not the extent or nature of the debt; indeed he distanced himself from Lecky. And yet he not only plagiarized the greater part of his article from Lecky (who wrote far more elegantly than Tkachev himself) but also drew from Lecky, no less than from Marx, his thesis that economic considerations underlie ideas and values, as well as the dense factual information for which he admitted Lecky was his source. In this respect Tkachev's article illustrates the derivative nature of Russian rationalism and also indicates the extent to which British influence was overtaking French and German influence in the radical intelligentsia in the 1860s. At the same time, Tkachev's “rationalism” lacks the broad humanism and toleration that infuses the spirit of rationalism as Lecky conceives of it. His article thus reveals the transformation and impoverishment of a European body of thought when it was transplanted to Russian soil and exemplifies features of the cast of mind of the pre-revolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia on which Sergei Bulgakov remarked in a passage in his contribution to the Landmarks volume that I have taken as my starting point.

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world. This article is my attempt to mount that challenge. I first revisit Weber’s conception of patrimonialism and discuss how gendered and elitist studies of early modern Europe require a reevaluation of patrimonialism’s dynamics and resilience. I then present an overview of evidence for the return of patrimonialism and of ideological justifications for its legitimacy, focusing on the United States. Since Weber and his successors all see patrimonialism and bureaucracy as incompatible, it is necessary to develop a theory of how the dynamics of elite conflict within bureaucratic, capitalist societies can generate patrimonialism. I do so in the penultimate section of this article, and I then explore the implications of that theory for predicting the future course of patrimonialism in the twenty-first century.

Cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) has been a central plank in the mental health policies of many Anglophone countries in recent years. This emphasis reflects the triumph of modern rationalism in two senses. First, the appeal of CBT to policy makers rests largely on its claims of being evidenced-based and quickly effective. Second, it is committed to a view of eudemonia (the good life) in which rationality predominates over non-rationality to generate the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Both aspects, which appeal to policy makers, warrant sociological interrogation. This article provides a brief history of CBT to highlight the rhetoric of rationalism it has espoused successfully. Then, using the UK Depression Report as a point of departure, it compares this success of CBT with the criticisms it has encountered. Both positions of advocacy and critique are examined in relation to disciplinary knowledge and professional interest work. These orientations from poststructuralist accounts of the modern episteme, on the one hand, and neo-Weberian sociology of the professions, on the other, help us understand the current controversy surrounding CBT.

In the modernist context that frames contemporary world affairs, questions about the pursuit of world peace are typically answered in terms that prioritize the use of reason as an end in itself. Modernist rationalism is not the only way in which questions about the pursuit of peace can be asked and answered, however. There are sacralist alternatives to it and there are cosmopious alternatives to both modernism and sacralism. Cosmopiety is the heart of every global religion. Since in this article the sacral focus is placed upon Islam, it is therefore placed upon the Sufi teachings that articulate Islamic mysticism. To show what such teachings entail, those of Bawa Muhaiyadden, a Sufi saint and sage, are briefly outlined.

This article discusses German and European climate policy, inquiring mainly whether the ambitious goals the EU has set itself can be achieved via the instruments presently employed for the purpose and whether these instruments are efficient. In particular we discuss shortcomings of the European emission trading system, we further level criticism at energy policy measures, notably subsidization for renewable energy sources and the overlap with emissions trading. Further we argue that while 20% reduction of CO2 is feasible at a reasonable cost, derived targets such as a share of 20% of renewable energy and 20% efficiency increase is expensive and not necessary. Finally, we scrutinize the latest climate-protection package proposed by Germany’s environment minister.