Time after Time: Narratives of the Longue Durée in the Anthropocene

This article suggests that new potential areas of collaboration between historians and literary scholars have emerged around a nascent but galloping interest in two fields of scholarship, the Anthropocene and the longue durée. Building on the tradition of the Annales school, and in particular the contributions of Fernand Braudel, this article argues that while there is a growing consensus about the necessity of trans-national and trans-temporal history, the critical implications of this enterprise for thinking historical and literary narrative have remained highly unsatisfying. Any return to the longue durée necessitates a deep reconsideration of the social scientific foundations of the longue durée in its previous manifestations, especially its conception of the nature-culture relationship, and an acknowledgement of the limitations of these earlier formulations for thinking about longer time scales and beyond national boundaries today. Following recent work in anthropology that has attempted to break down the nature-culture barrier, this article suggests that the Anthropocene has generated a new arrangement of temporal scales and therefore a poignant rearticulation of the long and short durée as well as the agency that drives action within these two realms.Cet article s’intéresse à de nouveaux domaines de collaboration potentielle entre historiens et spécialistes de la littérature autour d’un intérêt naissant mais pregnant pour l’anthropocène et la longue durée. Prenant pour point de départ la tradition de l’école des Annales, en particulier les contributions de Fernand Braudel, cet article entend montrer que bien que se dégage un consensus sur la nécessité de l’histoire trans-nationale et trans-temporelle, nous ne mesurons que très partiellement les enjeux critiques de cette entreprise et son impact sur la possibilité même du récit historique et littéraire. Tout retour à la longue durée nécessite en effet de reconsidérer les fondements de ce concept dans les sciences sociales, en particulier la conception de la relation nature-culture qui en découle, et de reconnaître les limites de ces formulations antérieures, notamment les difficultés à penser des échelles de temps plus longues et supra-nationales. Suite à de récents travaux en anthropologie qui ont tenté de briser la frontière entre nature et culture, cet article suggère que l’anthropocène entraîne un nouvel agencement des échelles temporelles et donc une réarticulation radicale de la longue et de la courte durée

Epilogue: The Need for a New and Critical Democracy

Democratic critiques of neoliberalism have been comparatively rare, and positive democratic rejoinders to the social and political ruins of neoliberalism have been rarer. The question thus presents itself – what would an overtly democratic critique of neoliberalism look like and, beyond critique, what would a constructive democratic response to neoliberalism entail

Of Rights and Regulation

This chapter explores the development of social provisioning as a matter not of right but of democratic administration in France and the United States in the nineteenth century. The authors take issue with conventional chronologies of rights development, which see civil and political rights being developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with social rights appearing in the twentieth. Such categories and sequencing obscure the ways in which democratic administrations took the problem of social provisioning seriously. A history of socio-economic rights cannot be distinguished from the less formal technologies of socio-economic regulation that were an integral part of the democratic question across the nineteenth century, and, in particular, the modernisation of regulatory governance. The democratisation of administrative powers precluded any sharp distinction among the political, the social and the economic. For better and for worse, this process took place through the building, rescaling and redefining of older, pre-democratic technologies of governance in response to what were perceived as pressing public problems

Time after Time: Narratives of the Longue Durée in the Anthropocene

This article suggests that new potential areas of collaboration between historians and literary scholars have emerged around a nascent but galloping interest in two fields of scholarship, the Anthropocene and the longue durée. Building on the tradition of the Annales school, and in particular the contributions of Fernand Braudel, this article argues that while there is a growing consensus about the necessity of trans-national and trans-temporal history, the critical implications of this enterprise for thinking historical and literary narrative have remained highly unsatisfying. Any return to the longue durée necessitates a deep reconsideration of the social scientific foundations of the longue durée in its previous manifestations, especially its conception of the nature-culture relationship, and an acknowledgement of the limitations of these earlier formulations for thinking about longer time scales and beyond national boundaries today. Following recent work in anthropology that has attempted to break down the nature-culture barrier, this article suggests that the Anthropocene has generated a new arrangement of temporal scales and therefore a poignant rearticulation of the long and short durée as well as the agency that drives action within these two realms.Cet article s’intéresse à de nouveaux domaines de collaboration potentielle entre historiens et spécialistes de la littérature autour d’un intérêt naissant mais pregnant pour l’anthropocène et la longue durée. Prenant pour point de départ la tradition de l’école des Annales, en particulier les contributions de Fernand Braudel, cet article entend montrer que bien que se dégage un consensus sur la nécessité de l’histoire trans-nationale et trans-temporelle, nous ne mesurons que très partiellement les enjeux critiques de cette entreprise et son impact sur la possibilité même du récit historique et littéraire. Tout retour à la longue durée nécessite en effet de reconsidérer les fondements de ce concept dans les sciences sociales, en particulier la conception de la relation nature-culture qui en découle, et de reconnaître les limites de ces formulations antérieures, notamment les difficultés à penser des échelles de temps plus longues et supra-nationales. Suite à de récents travaux en anthropologie qui ont tenté de briser la frontière entre nature et culture, cet article suggère que l’anthropocène entraîne un nouvel agencement des échelles temporelles et donc une réarticulation radicale de la longue et de la courte durée

Beyond Stateless Democracy

Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the state back to the pioneering political treatises of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.1 In direct response to this “optimistic functionalism,” Bourdieu noted the rise of a critical and more “pessimistic” alternative—something of a diametric opposite

Social Freedom, Democracy and the Political: Three Reflections on Axel Honneth\u27s Idea of Socialism

Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an important clarion call for an urgent rethinking of the possibilities of a socialism for the twenty-first century. One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects of Axel Honneth’s timely new book is its recovery of the continued vitality of John Dewey’s pragmatic democratic philosophy. These reflections on Honneth’s use of John Dewey for democratizing social freedom, take stock of and explore the political limits of Honneth’s social reconstruction

Toward a History of the Democratic State

Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of the State in America’ is … a major understatement. There is close to everything to be learned about the State.” In France as late as 1990, Pierre Rosanvallon’s powerful introduction to L’État en France suggested that an ambitious history of the state could not yet be written because of the lack of works focused specifically on the state. As he put it, “L’État comme problème politique, ou comme phénomène bureaucratique, est au coeur des passions partisanes et des débats philosophiques tout en restant une sorte de non-objet historique.” As the essays in this volume attest, much has changed in the historiography of the American and French states in the intervening 25 years. The state has indeed been brought “back in” in Theda Skocpol’s influential words. In fact, the return of the state in history, theory, and the social sciences in both France and the United States has been so strong and successful, that the subject of “the state/l’État” has again itself become an intellectual crossroads—and a contested terrain—for new important debates and controversies concerning the French and American past more generally

Democratic States of Unexception: Towards a New Genealogy of the American Political

This chapter takes issue with the history and theory of exception along these three lines. The first section offers a critique of the idea of law at the heart of the theory of exception. By taking a closer look at the history and theory of law in early nineteenth-century America, it offers an alternative reading of the role of exception in Emerson’s America – a place and time in which the exception in law was anything but exceptional. The second section offers a critique of the idea of state and sovereignty at the heart of the theory of exception in the early twentieth century. In place of Schmitt’s concept of the political, it offers a reconsideration of John Dewey’s more democratic conception of “the public” and its problems, where again the exception is an unexceptional part of an everyday and agonistic democratic politics. The third section moves us further into the twentieth century, challenging the suzerainty of both liberal and neoliberal characterizations of exception and totalitarianism in that ideologically charged period. Here, Charles Merriam’s ideas about new democracy and new despotism provide an alternative reference point for thinking about the exception, its antidemocratic dangers, and its democratic possibilities. In the context of a revitalized theory of the nature of power in democratic states, the exception does not appear so exceptional. Indeed, when viewed from the perspective of democratic state history, the exception may be one of the most common ways that democratic states exercise power every day. Evaluating the state of exception from the critical perspective of the modern democratic state exposes the limits of the notions of formal law, bureaucratic statecraft, and liberal politics that so frequently preoccupy discussions of exception and emergency governance. Those rather profound limitations suggest the need for an alternative genealogy of the political. In the theories of law, state, and politics in the writings of Emerson, Dewey, and Merriam, this essay proposes a tentative new genealogy of the modern American political – where democracy is not a problem but a solution and where the exception is not exceptional but one of the most quotidian ways of exercising power in agonistic modes of self-government

Oxygen Cost of Performing Selected Adult and Child Care Activities

International Journal of Exercise Science 6(1) : 11-19, 2013. Little is known about the oxygen cost of caring for infants and older adults. Many people perform these activities so it is useful to know the energy cost and if the activities are of sufficient intensity to contribute to meeting physical activity recommendations. The purpose of this study was to assess the oxygen cost of four care-related activities in the Compendium of Physical Activities. Nineteen participants (n = 10 women, n = 9 men; Age = 36.4 ± 13.6 y; % Fat = 34.1 ± 10.5; BMI = 28.1 ± 4.5 kg/m2) performed four activities: 1) pushing an infant in a stroller, 2) pushing an adult in a wheelchair, 3) carrying an infant, and 4) bathing and dressing an infant. The oxygen cost was assessed using a portable metabolic unit. Activities were performed in random order for 8 minutes. The oxygen cost and heart rates, respectively, for healthy adults during care related activities were 3.09 METs and 90 ± 8 beats per minute (bpm) for pushing an infant in a stroller, 3.69 METs and 97 ± 9 bpm for pushing an adult in a wheelchair, 2.37 METs and 85 ± 9 bpm for carrying an infant, and 2.00 METs and 87 ± 9 bpm for bathing and dressing an infant. Carrying an infant and bathing an infant are light-intensity physical activities and pushing a wheelchair or a stroller are moderate intensity activities. The latter activities are of sufficient intensity to meet health-related physical activity recommendations