Browsing by Author "Kirsch, Robert Emmanuel"

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    Market Challenges to Democracy: The Political Economy of Hyman P. Minsky
    Kirsch, Robert Emmanuel (Virginia Tech, 2012-07-11)
    This dissertation seeks to reengage the field of political economy to establish a political response to financial crisis, as well as the resulting social crisis of everyday life, using the political economy of Hyman P. Minsky. As an academic field, political economy is in a strange kind of limbo. The separation of politics and economics is easy enough to see, and even within economics, there is another cleavage between economics proper and the history of economics. This yields some very strange conjectures about what it means to be an "economist," and how things can be a matter for either economic "policy" or "political economy" as if these categories were all jumbled up in a grab bag of available methodologies. This dissertation seeks to carve out some intellectual terrain in what can be called political economy by engaging in an interdisciplinary way, inspired by Minsky, in order to offer a cogent political analysis of financial crises. Minsky gives five possible definitions for political economy: the discipline of Economics, a code name for Marxism, rational choice theory of profit maximization, the management of macroeconomic policy, and finally an interdisciplinary view of political economy that works in concert with other social sciences and humanities in order to identify and remedy social ills such as unemployment and poverty. The reading of Minsky in this dissertation is thus in an explicitly political way in order to bridge the gap between various kinds of economics and the various social sciences. By analyzing and critiquing each of these possible definitions of political economy, it becomes clear that a properly social definition of political economy is the final, interdisciplinary one. This dissertation argues that Minsky had a "preanalytic vision" of the kind of society he wished his political economy to yield, and is a first step in fleshing out a political program for that vision.
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    The Terrorizing Totality of the Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consummption
    Kirsch, Robert Emmanuel (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-30)
    As an advanced society of industrialized capitalism has an ever-tighter grip on our everyday lives, I ask if rebellion is possible in the current context. To this end, I formulate a model of rebellion based on my readings of Marcuse and Camus; from Marcuse, the idea that a person can formulate a rebellious subjectivity through the consumption of art in the creation of the aesthetic dimension, and from Camus, an individual placing limits on what oppression he will take from an existing order and at what point she will say "no" to that order and giving a concurrent "yes" by acting in such a way that fosters Camus' human community. I argue after the Cold War especially, the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption closes down spaces for meaningful rebellion. As we have moved from hip consumerism to market populism, the goal of the existing order is for the citizens thereof to legitimate the order. I analyze various groups to see if they are engaging in rebellion, such as Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts, and analyze their methods. I find that instead of labeling as terrorist or rebel, we should let the rebellious subjectivity guide our judgment of their actions. Ultimately, I conclude that rebellion is still a possibility even in the encroaching totality of the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption, and that a preservation of the rebellious subjectivity can provide a basis for formulating a rebellious praxis not yet called into being.