Mutualist Microfinance

Small mutual funds once flourished in nineteenth century Europe and North America. They still abound in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In recent years they have come back to European and North American cities with the immigrants from the global South. Some of the small mutual savings funds use the accumulated sums to provide financial assistance to members in distress and thus fulfil an insurance function. Others make loans regardless of their members' individual needs, in which case it is the savings or credit function that predominates. In this volume, five authors describe and analyse the results of their fieldwork among mutual fund members in Hyderabad, Yogyakarta, Ayelitsa (a township near Cape Town), among Surinamese in both Paramaribo (Suriname) and Amsterdam, as well as among Senegalese Peul who migrate from Thilonge to Dakar and on to Paris. The studies are based on field observations and personal interviews. The two editors, Abram de Swaan and Marcel van der Linden, provide a common comparative approach, and a shared historical and theoretical perspective. The essays explore the varieties and the logic of mutual funds, emphasizing the importance of peer pressures as a 'social constraint' to increase 'self constraint' on spending. Cooperation in a mutual fund, whether for insurance or saving purposes, can proffer the participants advantages which they cannot realize on their own

A cosmopolitan temptation

For some, the transnationalization of political action and communicative space in the European Union heralds an emergent cosmopolitan order. Need that be so? There are supranational institutions in the EU as well as transnational political and cultural spaces and cross-border communicative flows. However, the Union's member states remain key controllers of citizenship rights and purveyors of collective identities. And for many purposes they still maintain strongly bounded national public spheres. Because the EU's overall character as a polity remains unresolved, this has consequences for the organization of communicative spaces. The EU is a field of tensions and contradictions that is inescapably rooted in institutional realities. Wishful thinking about cosmopolitanism can get in the way of clear analysis

The Global Coordination Problem: Collective Action among Unequal States

The most pressing problems facing mankind today require for their solution some form of worldwide collective action at the level of states. In order to combat the global threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy countries must cooperate to provide vaccines for people in low-income countries, if only to prevent these populations from becoming breeding grounds for new strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that will also endanger the richer nations. Another, even more pertinent case is the campaign against global warming, which requires concerted action by committed state regimes to curtail the worldwide emission of greenhouse gases. Such figurations give rise to the classic dilemmas of collective action. Throughout human history, with ups and downs, the scale of collective action has extended. This is a corollary of the gradual increase in the scale of governance, from villages to small kingdoms to nation states. National economies, too, have expanded with the increasing control and consumption of fossil energy, as Johan Goudsblom has demonstrated. By the end of the 19th century, nation states were the largest units of effective coordination, each one comprising between one and a hundred million citizens. In the course of the 20th century, a few entities have evolved to the next higher order of magnitude with hundreds of millions, or more than a billion citizens and with a gross national product exceeding in most cases 10 trillion US dollars: these "gigants" are China, the USA, India, and the EU. They are at present the initiators and managers of global collective action. The recent COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent coordination problem. The enduring climate crisis evokes very similar dilemmas of collective action. The Russian invasion of Ukraine quite suddenly compelled the USA and the EU to join in antagonistic collaboration and overcome challenges that were much the same. State actors resort to a limited set of strategies and practices in order to overcome the pitfalls of collective action and the gigants have a leading role in coordinating them

De mens is de mens een zorg : Opstellen 1971-1981

De samenleving wordt gevormd door strevingen van mensen, individueel en groepsgewijs, zonder dat de samenleving die zij aldus vormen overeenkomt met hun bedoelingen. Ziedaar het grondthema van de bundel De mens is de mens een zorg, die bestaat uit een keuze uit de sociologische opstellen die Abram de Swaan tussen 1971 en 1981 publiceerde. Tezamen bieden deze stukken zowel een tijdsbeeld als een staalkaart van de onderwerpen waar De Swaan zich in die periode mee bezighield: arbeid, hulpbehoevendheid, de psychoanalytische praktijk, uitgaansangst, marteling, fanatisme, het concentratiekampsyndroom, ziekte en ziekenhuizen. Onderwerpen die hem in staat stellen het evenwicht - en veelal de onbalans - te onderzoeken tussen de machtsuitoefenening van de ene mens en de afhankelijkheid van de andere

La dyscivilisation, l’extermination de masse et l’état

Les analyses de la culture politique occidentale sont implicitement ou explicitement hantées par le spectre de la mutation de la démocratie en tyrannie, de la civilisation en barbarie. De tels développements se sont produits par le passé. Peuvent-ils se produire de nouveau, et si oui, dans quelles conditions ? Depuis la Première Guerre mondiale au moins, deux conceptions se sont opposées dans ce débat. D’un côté, la tyrannie et la barbarie sont vues comme un revirement par rapport au progrès ..