Future Forward

According to Vázquez-Arroyo, C.L.R. James’s seminal work, The Black Jacobins, “defends a dialectical account of the Enlightenment as a singular transatlantic historical process whose content and critical import changes across space and time.” In this highly original reinterpretation of James’s great book, Vázquez-Arroyo considers the Enlightenment in a new light, which has consequences for how to think about colonialism, the spread of ideas, and nature of that singular era.

“James acknowledges the centrality of the ideology of rights, citizenship, and emancipation emanating from Paris, and already present among the planter class, including both whites and free-colored, prior to the slave uprising that triggered the revolution in Haiti. Even so, he understands the abstract nature of that universal and how it finally become actualized as a concrete universality already foreshadowed in Toussaint’s invocation of liberty and equality, free labor, and end to “the age of fanaticism,” while deploying citizen as the category of interpellation conjoining rights and duties. James noted that, in Haiti, universal equality had to be formulated in terms of recognition of citizens as Black in the 1804 declaration of independence and the 1805 constitution. Hence, Black Jacobins. But James was too fine a dialectician for him not to intuit the limits of the concrete universal or arrest the universal to this moment. Built in this formulation are also the limits of this actualization of the Enlightenment in a colonial situation that is best captured by highlighting the second term: Black Jacobins.” 

Isaiah Berlin and Edward Said were both immigrants to the Anglophone world, but in vastly differing circumstances: the first a celebrated philosopher in the corridors of power, the second the preeminent voice of the Palestinian diaspora, uncertain where he belonged. But their shared appreciation for the work of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, known today as the father of historicism, brought together this unlikely pair – even if they were often at odds.

“At a time when the natural sciences and rationality triumphed over divine providence, the Italian philosopher represented to both a man who insisted on placing human subjectivity at the forefront of knowledge creation. Language, text, and symbolism still played a central role in the making and interpreting of reality. ‘One of the true founders of the social sciences,‘ Berlin and Said’s appreciation for Vico’s humanist impulses reflected their own.” 

Eurocentrism persists in international relations studies in the Global South despite efforts to pluralize the field. In Pakistan, Western intellectual dominance and realist ideas emphasizing state security and interests prevail. This conditions research agendas and results in an international relations scholarship that predominantly aligns with state security agendas – to the detriment of a more contextually relevant and diverse approach to the field.

“Our examination has revealed the dissemination of elite narratives and ideologies within Pakistani academia, illustrating the presence of a top-down approach that predominates in the country’s IR thinking. As this approach is incentivized institutionally, it considerably diminishes the prospects of theoretical contextualization, let alone the production of alternative or indigenous thinking in the Pakistani IR academy. Resultantly, an enormous amount of ‘borrowed’ knowledge is reproduced, which is, in essence, dissociated from the local realities of Pakistan.” 

Ideas that once formed a core part of environmentalism are increasingly entering the far-right ecosystem. But “para-environmentalism,” as Buck calls it, should not be dismissed as mere misinformation, nor its proponents brushed off as ignorant. Indeed, para-environmentalism’s broad appeal points to what has gone wrong with climate politics. Digital discourse rewards extreme positions rather than moderate ones: as climate influencers try to rally the troops, they create content that para-environmentalists use as evidence for their conspiracy theories.

“An effective strategy for climate politics would address para-environmental concerns, recognizing the valid reasons people have for distrusting elites and experts. It would avoid using science to score partisan points. This isn’t what the prominent voices in the climate movement are doing—and to an unfortunate extent, they can’t. The climate movement can’t stop following these counterproductive messengers and put forth more broadly appealing leaders because of the perverse incentives described previously.” 

The use of behavioral insight in public policy has become widespread over the past 15 years, to the point that “nudge methods” are now a standard part of the professional economists’ toolkit. The authors argue that, in the UK, the rise of behavioral economics’ influence on policy should be understood in the context of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis that challenged the authority of dominant academic and professional economists, in particular the narrative that the crisis was caused by their unrealistic assumptions about human behavior.

“This article contributes an alternative narrative for the rise of nudging and behavioural insights. It also contributes an interesting case study to the broader study of economic ideas. The study of how economic ideas are used has many relevant insights for economics. Popular ideas push financial and human resources towards different aspects of economic policy, shaping the resources available in other areas, the dominant methodologies with which practitioners become familiar, and ultimately, one’s outlook on economic events which feeds back into the study and interrogation of the economy itself.”