The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?

This article argues that the biggest challenges facing the post-1945 liberal international order are to genuinely embrace ethno-racial diversity and strategies to reduce class-based inequalities. However, this is problematic because the LIO’s core foundational principles, and principal underpinning “theory” (liberal internationalism), are Eurocentric, elitist, and resistant to change. Those core principles are subliminally racialized, elitist, and imperial, and embedded in post-1945 international institutions, elite mindsets, and in American foreign policy establishment institutions seeking to incorporate emerging powers’ elites, willingly, into the US-led order. As illustration, this article considers examples that bookend the US-led system: wartime elite planning for global leadership, and the role of the UN in Korea, 1945-53, which served as the primary instrument for the creation and incorporation of (South) Korea into the US-led order; and the role of several US-state-linked initiatives in China over the past several decades, including the Ford Foundation. The article compares the contemporary and historical evidence to liberal internationalists’ claims, and those implied by the work on “ultra-imperialism” by Karl Kautsky and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony. The article concludes that elite incorporation – by a combination of coercion, attraction, and socialisation – is the principal goal of the US-led order, not embracing diversity and moving towards genuine change felt at a mass level. Hence, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen

The influence of Lord Kames (Henry Home) on some of the founders of the United States

The jurist, judge, philosopher and legal historian Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) was one of the principal representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. He also shaped considerably the thinking of some of the founders of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson. Franklin exchanged ideas with Kames about art and American affairs. For Adams, Kames was an authority on law and legal history, with a singularly critical stance towards the traditional feudal system. For Jefferson, Kames was an authoritative writer on law and a principal influence in the shaping of Jefferson’s own moral philosophy. Wilson made Kames a role model for young lawyers in a new American spirit. Kames’s thought has influenced these four founders of the United States more substantively than has commonly been assumed

American Steamboat Transportation in the Nineteenth Century

本稿では、アンテ・ベラム期の河川・運河を軸とするアメリカの内陸水路輸送体系を、近代的な大量輸送体系にまで発展させた蒸気船の普及とその影響について、西部河川およびイリー湖とオンタリオ湖を中心にした五大湖の場合に焦点を合わせて概観したものである。蒸気船導入がアメリカ経済とりわけ中西部経済の発展に伴う大量輸送の確保にとって重要であったことを明らかにする

Subterranean Politics Blues

Reviewing: Stephen B. Burbank & Sean Farhang, Rights and Retrenchment: The Counterrevolution Against Federal Litigation; Karen Orren & Stephen Skowronek, The Policy State: An American Predicamen