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This paper sets out an approach to the analysis of political power in terms of problematics of government. It argues against an overvaluation of the 'problem of the State' in political debate and social theory. A number of conceptual tools are suggested for the analysis of the many and varied alliances between political and other authorities that seek to govern economic activity, social life and individual conduct. Modern political rationalities and governmental technologies are shown to be intrinsically linked to developments in knowledge and to the powers of expertise. The characteristics of liberal problematics of government are investigated, and it is argued that they are dependent upon technologies for 'governing at a distance', seeking to create locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy. The analysis is exemplified through an investigation of welfarism as a mode of 'social' government. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of neo-liberalism which demonstrates that the analytical language structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nations of the industrialized capitalist world are characterized by a tendency to reduce the length of time employees normally spend at work. Through capitalism's long history mercantilists, classicalists, Marxists and marginalists have devoted a great deal of effort to attempting to explain why it is that standard times should tend to change. This paper overviews the major contributions to the debate. Various theories are examined and their emergence and fates placed in an historical context. Marginalism's preference argument which presently dominates the debate is challenged by showing that within Marxism there exists an alternative explanation for this phenomenon which is not based on income but on the innate limitations of human beings. Until the 1950s, it is argued, the human limits approach dominated the whole issue of worktime and the essence of this contribution has never been refuted but has been simply deleted from the discussion. Consequently the whole contemporary debate is being conducted on the basis of unjustified assumptions and this is rendering discussion increasingly sterile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable amount has been written recently on the concept of exploitation, which has extended its meaning beyond Marx's original usage. While the concept has lost its association with the theory of surplus value and ideas about the right of workers to their product, there is still no agreement on how exploitation should be conceptualized. It is in the context of such conceptual debate that this paper brings a historical perspective by focusing on how Adam Ferguson, two and a half centuries ago, anticipated much of the modern reformulation of the concept. Methodologically, this anticipation is not shown by finding vaguely matching quotations from modern and classic works, but follows Foucault and examines the similarity in the meaning of the vocabulary in the context of the different problematics within which they occur. In this regard Ferguson's work has three characteristics which are also to be found in many modern works: exploitation is understood as economic exploitation; it is approached through the notion of human agency; and the discussion of exploitation is integrally linked to an ethical concern about its injustice. Such a historical interest is useful for a number of reasons. First, it augments the conceptual analysis which has so far dominated the debate about the term. Second, it demonstrates part of the origins of some of the modern reformulations of exploitation. Ferguson's work anticipates those writers who perceive exploitation to involve inequality of power and control in the labour process, and to involve situations where skills are not the determinant of economic reward and where workers are denuded, diminished and impoverished. In this respect Ferguson follows those modern writers who tend to merge exploitation with alienation. Finally, a discussion of these particular antecedents of the concept is useful to illustrate the distinctiveness of Ferguson's social thought and to define his major contribution to the development of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic achievements of medieval monasticism have evoked the paradoxical connection between religious asceticism and capitalism central to Weber's famous analysis of the 'Protestant ethic'. It will be argued, however, that focusing on the resemblances to the 'Protestant Ethic' and/or capitalism makes for a partial and distorted picture of the monastic economy and does not render the full impact of monasticism upon the economic sphere of activity in the medieval West. The first section of this paper examines Weber's own perception of the monastic economy: recognizing its achievements and relative rationality, yet also refusing to see in these any real similitude to the 'Protestant ethic' or the announcement of the capitalistic breakthrough. The second section partly confirms Weber's perception by expanding upon ideological and institutional foundations of the monastic economy which further invalidate the analogy to either capitalism and/or the 'Protestant Ethic', albeit for reasons very different from those advanced by Weber. Shifting away from the overriding concern with economic rationality characteristic of previous discussions -- and incidentally offering an altered perspective on the 'Protestant Ethic' itself -- the third section focuses on monasticism's unintended and indirect contribution to the nascent autonomization of the economic sphere of activity, through the analysis of two ideological processes essentially: depersonification on the one hand, symbolic intensification on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at analysing a case of state/economy relationships in a Western capitalist country, with reference to the particular problem of the public enterprise, and at pointing out some of the characteristics of the Italian situation. The analysis, through an examination of the Fascist period and of the events of the 1950s, tries to identify different patterns of direct state intervention in the productive sphere and to relate them to some significant changes in the class structure and in the political system of the country. The casestudy is intended as a contribution to the debate concerning the construction of a ‘theory of the state’, for which it provides some empirical material about an example of state intervention in economic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trademark that Weber imprints on Calvinism -- specifically a crisis of proof in the creed and the pastoral peculiarity of this-worldly -- now corrected, I here examined his fruitless attempts to sustain them. His dilapidated efforts in this direction are marked by the misunderstanding of theological terminology; the unenlightened use of this terminology to subvert his own cause; inconsistency and contradiction in the argument arising from these defects; and, less excusably, the use of legerdemain when countervailing evidence is encountered. Calculated evasion is unmistakable in Weber's defence of the seventeenth-century hegemony of Calvin's sola fide. Scattered across several footnotes, Weber admits that Baxter is non-predestinarian and at one point even correctly records him as an 'opponent' of sheer grace. Yet in the text Weber adroitly conveys the impression that Baxter is a disciple of the double decree, thereby cloaking information whose greater visibility would challenge the foundation of his thesis. No less convincing are Weber's attempts to maintain his workaday conception of works which he does so against all considerations of their dubious fallout. Notwithstanding their avowed deference to Aristotelian rigour, Weber none the less imputes to Calvinist and Catholic theologians contradictions so blatant and glaring that a precipitous leap of faith is demanded from the reader. Scarcely credible under these circumstances, are Reformed and Catholic scholars of the period so readily succumbing to the myopia that Weber directs their way. Irrespective of this improbability, and unlike his equivocation on sola fide, Weber remains convinced to the end that works are temporally framed. By contrast I show that the temporal calling and thus earthly toil -- like Catholic and Lutheran accounts -- are cast as religiously... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]