MARKET SOCIETY’S MORAL SUBJECTS: INTEREST, SENTIMENT, PROPERTY

My comments address two well-known texts. One is Crawford Macpherson’s portrait of ‘possessive individualism’ in which he suggests that ruthless competition for power through possessions is the distinctive feature of a market society which first took shape in seventeenth century England. The other is Adam Smith’s account of moral sentiment which revolves around a creative tension between human sympathy and ‘betterment’ or ‘self love.’ The significant divergence in their views invites further analysis - especially in the light of recent comparable work on neoliberalism

Race/class : Jamaica's discourse of heritable identity

Argues that Jamaican notions of 'race' and 'class' can be rendered as a discourse of heritable biological and environmental identity. There has been a movement in the meaning of colour categories from an emphasis on biology, to a greater emphasis on environment. This transition has been encouraged by the emergence of class as a 20th-c. idiom

Politics and the redeemer : state and religion as ways of being in Jamaica

Study of the role of Jamaica's popular churches, particularly Baptist and Pentecostal, in their relations with the state and with a wider transnational world. Focuses on the relation between the experience of religion and the experience of race and class. Concludes that Jamaican Pentecostals experience inequality differently both from those who are non-religious and from Rastafarian groups