'Imperial doxa from the Berlin republic' [Review] Herfried Münkler (2005) Imperien: Die Logik der Weltherrschaft—vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten

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IR theory, historical materialism, and the false promise of international historical sociology

The three-decades old call for an inter-disciplinary rapprochement between IR Theory and Historical Sociology, starting in the context of the post-positivist debate in the 1980s, has generated a proliferating repertory of contending paradigms within the field of IR, including Neo-Weberian, Post-Structuralist, and Constructivist approaches. Within the Marxist literature, this project comprises an equally rich and diverse set of theoretical traditions, including World-Systems Theory, Neo-Gramscian IR/IPE, the Amsterdam School, Political Marxism, Neo-Leninism, and Postcolonial Theory. More recently, a “third wave” of approaches has been announced from within the field of IR, suggesting to move the dialogue from inter-disciplinarity towards an integrated super-discipline of International Historical Sociology (IHS). This proposition has been most persistently advanced by advocates of the theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD), claiming to constitute a universal, unitary and sociological theory of IR. This article charts the intellectual trajectory of this ongoing IR/HS dialogue. It moves from a critique of Neo-Weberianism to a critique of UCD against the background of the original promise of the turn in IR to Historical Sociology: the supersession of the prevailing rationalism, structuralism, and positivism in extant mainstream IR approaches through the mobilization of alternative and non-positivistic traditions in the social sciences. This critique will be performed by setting UCD in dialogue with Political Marxism. By anchoring both approaches at opposite ends on the spectrum of Marxist conceptions of social science – respectively the scientistic and the historicist - the argument is that UCD reneges on the promise of Historical Sociology for IR by re-aligning, first by default and now by design, with the meta-theoretical premises of Neo-Realism. This is most visibly expressed in the articulation of a deductive-nomological covering law, leading towards acute conceptual and ontological anachronisms, premised on the radical de-historicisation of the fields of ontology, conceptuality and disciplinarity. This includes the semantic neutering and hyper-abstract re-articulation of the very category, which in IR’s self-perception lends legitimacy to its claim of disciplinary distinctiveness: the international. The article concludes by suggesting that an understanding of Marxism as a historicist social science subverts all calls for the construction of grand theories and, a fortiori, a unitary super-discipline of IHS, premised on a set of universal, space-time indifferent, and abstract categories that hold across the spectrum of world history. In contrast, recovering the historicist credentials of Marxism demands a constant temporalisation and specification of the fields of ontology, agency, conceptuality and disciplinarity. The objective is to lay the foundations for a historicist social science of geopolitics

An abstract disintegration theorem

A Strassen-type disintegration theorem for convex cones with localized order structure is proved. As an example a flow theorem for infinite networks is given

Charm and Beauty Photoproduction at HERA

After the completion of data taking at HERA-2, a large data set is at hand to study the photoproduction of charm and beauty quarks in ep collisions. New measurements of charm production based on D^* meson tagging and beauty production based on muon and electron reconstruction test perturbative QCD calculations with improved accuracy. In general, QCD calculations at NLO describe the data well. The scale uncertainties are, however, large and dominate over the experimental uncertainties, calling for more precise calculations.Comment: Parallel talk at ICHEP08, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 4 pages, LaTeX, 3 eps figure

Subdirect products of groups and the n-(n+1)-(n+2) Conjecture

We analyse the subgroup structure of direct products of groups. Earlier work on this topic has revealed that higher finiteness properties play a crucial role in determining which groups appear as subgroups of direct products of free groups or limit groups. Here, we seek to relate the finiteness properties of a subgroup to the way it is embedded in the ambient product. To this end we formulate a conjecture on finiteness properties of fibre products of groups. We present different approaches to this conjecture, proving a general result on finite generation of homology groups of fibre products and, for certain special cases, results on the stronger finiteness properties F_n and FP_n.Comment: 32 page

The fetish of geopolitics: reply to Gopal Balakrishnan

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Marxism

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Decisions and indecisions: political and intellectual receptions of Carl Schmitt

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Rethinking international relations: an interview with Benno Teschke

In this interview, George Souvlis and Aurélie Andry talk with Benno Teschke, author of The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations, about the relationship between Marxism and international relations theory. As Teschke notes, Karl Marx never completed a book on international relations, and the lack of a coherent Marxist theory of international relations has allowed dangerous assumptions – such as instrumentalist ideas about the state, a stagist conception of history, or a universalizing capitalist world market – to take root within Marxism. Here, Teschke discusses his intellectual trajectory, the main arguments of his work, and ways of understanding capitalist internationalist relations, while also making some observations about Political Marxism, the appropriation of Carl Schmitt, and the future of the European Union