A little wordy and sometimes repetitive but Stoler is the legend of new imperial history, grasps and analyzes Foucault and implications for historicalA little wordy and sometimes repetitive but Stoler is the legend of new imperial history, grasps and analyzes Foucault and implications for historical analysis far better than any postcolonial theorist or even many Marxists....more
Kenneth M. Cuno’s Modernizing Marriage investigates the development of family law and ideology in modern day Egypt, concluding with reference to IslamKenneth M. Cuno’s Modernizing Marriage investigates the development of family law and ideology in modern day Egypt, concluding with reference to Islamic law and intellectual networks that the modern conceptions of domesticity and the importance of the “conjugal family� in Egyptian society originates not with traditional Islamic family law (as its conservative supporters attest), but instead with the influence of French Enlightenment understandings of the family, marriage, child rearing, and the role of the wife in the home. These developments, encouraged by reform-minded Egyptian government officials and liberal intellectuals, constituted a form of dubious social “modernization,� as well as methods of expansion of state political and social control.
Praised as a modernization and shift towards Western ideas at the time, the Egyptian khedivate’s shift from polygynous marriage to monogamy constituted not an “end-in-itself, but a consequence of contingent development, the most important of which had to do with dynastic politics� (20-21). Pursuing the abolition of the harem system and royal endogamy as a method of political consolidation, Khedive Ismail simultaneously sought to portray “monogamy as a sign of enlightenment� and a concession to the European social norms (22/36-37). Reform-minded intellectuals, seeking to “modernize� Egypt, sought changes in the arranged marriage system by opposing the conservative custom of not meeting before marriage, raising the average age of marriage, and eliminating polygyny and concubinage among rural elites in favour of companionate marriage (46-76).
Modernist ideology, in adopting the European understanding of the organization of the family, focused on women’s education in child rearing, maintaining the home environment, proper perceptions of domesticity, and a society-wide commitment to monogamy (77-80). Using the customary “maintenance-obedience� relationship between husband and wife common in customary Egyptian Islamic law, modernist ideologues maintained a dialogue with pre-colonial thought to “indigenize European domestic ideology…� (81-95). This transnational flow of ideas, imported to Egypt from Algeria, which in turn imported from France, resulted in a restriction of women’s rights through the loss of the precolonial exemption of women from household labor, weakening their position relative to the husband’s , though these changes were generally embraced by Egyptian feminists as a method to carve out an independent “domestic sphere� for middle to upper-class women (93-121).
These changes were put into effect by the reorganization of sharia courts from the mid-19th century onwards, ending with the post-WWI codification of family law (123). In the premodern legal system, despite the domination of Hanafi interpretations, “forum-shopping� in different schools of Islamic law and the use of customs in the courts allowed for a flexibility which advantaged women in otherwise difficult situations (125-136). However, as modernist ideology became the dominant discourse of Egyptian reforms and “the conjugal family was identified as the elemental unit in society and the fate of the nation was tied to it, discussion of the family was not longer just about the family,� but society at large (150). This resulted in the codification of Hanafi law as a strict code, which eliminated the precolonial nature of Islamic as a diverse set of opinions which establish precedence rather than hard-and-fast rules. Whereas “historical Muslim jurisprudence presented an open-ended discussion, code closed off discussion� (161-180)....more
ٳܳ徱’s War Time, drawing on World War II, the Cold War and the War on Terror, ponders the meaning of war in an era where for the last 7 decades, thٳܳ徱’s War Time, drawing on World War II, the Cold War and the War on Terror, ponders the meaning of war in an era where for the last 7 decades, the United States has been in a state of perpetual war. Pondering “war-time� as a socially constructed phenomenon, Dudziak examines the evolution of the American legal system and how the Courts utilized the supposedly “exceptional� nature of war to both expand and limit civil liberties and the powers of the Presidency.
A very short work, Dudziak concludes that WWII led to the reinterpretation of the idea of an “attack� itself, allowing the Roosevelt Presidency to pursue military build-up and war preparations while restrained by a populace and Congress largely in favour of isolationism (40-52). The Cold War, an inherently ambiguous merging of peace and wartime, did not led to significant change in terms of civil liberties or the courts. Instead, “rights restrictions during [the Cold War] were driven more by domestic developments� than anything else (81).
The War on Terror, linked by George W. Bush as a war on ideology like that of the Cold War, “laid the basis for invoking [presidential] war powers,� legimitized by Congressional accomplices in the AUMF and the PATRIOT Act (100-112). Legal scholarship in the 2000s became dominated by the Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt, whose work legitimized the concepts of exceptional emergency powers (115-119). Finally, in a series of decisions allowing torture and detention of non-US citizens at the occupied Cuban shores of Guantanamo Bay, �...the Supreme Court appeared to accede to a security crisis with no visible end-point…a peaceless era,� the legal structure of the United States itself bending before the pursuit of endless war (120-127)....more
Hoston’s attempt to deal with the alleged “contradictions� of the state and national liberation within Marxism, despite my own disagreement with the fHoston’s attempt to deal with the alleged “contradictions� of the state and national liberation within Marxism, despite my own disagreement with the framing as one of Marxism’s inability to grapple with the questions, is perhaps one of the best historical discussions of the nature of the state not only in China and Japan, but in comprehending Marxist theories of the state outside of the theoretical pages of Marx and Lenin into their historical realities.
Hoston finds that the national question in China and Japan took a “new form� that it had not yet taken in Marxist historical materialism: the application of Marxism as a theory of national development in non-European context, and the embracing of a system of thought which disowned the state while being used by Marxists in China and Japan as a method of strengthening the nation (8).
The first two chapters are largely explorations of the historiography and pre-Soviet Marxist theories of the nation and state. There are some interesting tidbits regarding the nation: a brief analysis of Otto Bauer and Austro-Marxism’s insistence on the “enduring character� of national difference into socialism and the Lenin-Stalin critique of Austro-Marxism, wherein Hoston notes Lenin’s view of the nation was more fluid than Stalin, who drew directly from his Austrian opponents in ceding some ground to geography, etc. (22-24). Also interesting is Hoston’s discussion of the Lenin-Stalin split regarding the national question in Georgia and Caucasus, where Lenin accused Stalin and others of holding chauvinistic views in seeking their incorporation into the RSFSR (29). As for the state, Hoston splits Marxism into two conceptions: the “critical� or instrumentalist view of the state held by figures like Miliband, and the “scientific� or structuralist view put forward by Althusser and Poulantzas (48-54). Correctly noting that both of these views existed within the work of Marx and Engels, the instrumentalist view holds the state as a method of class domination through control by individuals, while the structuralist view sees the state more as an institution with greater potential for autonomy regarding the imposition of its will onto classes, particularly important for later-industrializing nations like China (57). Among the Bolsheviks, Lenin held to a more instrumentalist, “narrow class conception of the state,� whilst Bukharin and Stalin held more structuralist views regarding the potential for autonomy for the capitalist and socialist state respectively (58-66).
Chapter 3 reviews the early history of the concept of the state and socialism in Japan and China. Marxism came to be embraced easily by many Chinese and Japanese intellectual not only because it explained the “backwardness� of their own societies through a Western scientific framework, but also because it was Western-critical itself (105). Hoston notes interestingly that Bukharin’s work was much more influential in 1920s Japan than Lenin, particularly his more mechanical and under-developed theory in The ABC of Communism and Historical Materialism (110-112). There was some challenge to Sino-Japanese intellectuals in accepting the idea of a withering state in Marxism, often stemming from the traditional conception of the state as a moral institution which could keep society in check (countered only by the Daoist theory of the state as a repressive organ) (100, 120).
In both Japan and China, anarchism was initially much more influential than Marxism. Anarcho-syndicalism was largely dominant in Japan from 1911 to 1917. In China, “Western anarchism was imbued with a powerful positive dimension of self-assertion (which Daoism lacked), promising to consolidate the power of the Chinese nation without oppressive authoritarian institutions� (136). Anarchism was particularly attractive in Japan for its nationalist potential; Japanese anarchists like Osugi Sakae idolized traditional Japanese society and its supposed virtues (137-148). Chinese anarchism was more nuanced: the Chinese anarchists of the Work-Study Group in France held to cultural iconoclaism, Kropotkinite scientism, and social revolution, while Chinese anarchists in Tokyo rejected Western egoism and appealed to traditional Chinese philosophy (148-171). This manifested in political difficulties. Franco-anarchist Wu Zhihui remained a republican anti-Manchu racist who advocated a sort of three-stage revolution: nationalist, republican, and then a future anarchism to realize the Great Harmony (154-155). Tokyo anarchists instead were anti-nationalist, anti-republican, and anti-anti-imperialism (160-161). Both Chinese and Japanese anarchists held significant influence in rising Marxist circles (171-174).
The Bolshevik Revolution reassessed traditional Marxist views towards nationalism; Lenin’s turn towards the East and support for national liberation as a tool for protecting the socialist revolution in Russia helped ease the Soviet Union into supporting the Guomindang in China (177-178).”Meiji socialism� in Japan was closely tied to Japanese nationalism and traditional visions of the kokutai, one of the earliest leaders of national socialism in Japan being the pro-Imperial national Yamaji Aizan (182-186). Both China and Japan had significant debates within the radical spheres regarding Marxism and anarchism, the “ana-boru debate� in Japan and the sidelining of the anarchists in China (190-204). There were also socialist challenges to communism: Takabatake Motoyuki’s Lasallean “functional statism� allowed him to use Marxian language and a view of the state as suprahistorical historical to justify Japanese expansionism, while Dai Jitao’s Sun-influenced nationalist socialism combined Confucian essentialism with nationalist cooperativism to theorize a state of the whole people for China (204-216).
Japanese Marxism was cleaved in two by the continual shifting of Comintern positions on Japan caused by the Zinoviev-Bukharin-Stalin struggles for leadership. The most common position was one which, despite its economic development, described Japan as a semi-feudal entity which required the two-stage revolution to abolish the monarchy in cooperation with the bourgeoisie (235-242). This split the JCP into two groups: the instrumentalist, anti-Comintern Rono-ha and the historical-structuralist JCP Koza-ha. The Rono-ha saw Japan as a bourgeois state hindered by by feudal absolutism linked to the bourgeoisie and imperialist competition over China (242-256). The Koza-ha analyzed the “Emperor system� as an absolutism feature, a remnant of the incomplete Meiji Restoration able to stay in power because of the transitory feudal to capitalist relationships of agrarian Japan; the Koza-ha recognized the militarism and political feudalism of Japan more clearly than the Rono-ha (242-270). The truth I find to be somewhere in the middle. The Comintern clearly mislabelled Japan in not recognizing its industrial development, but there were clear feudal remnants in both superstructure and agrarian relations.
Chapter 7 is a discussion of the Chinese Social History Controversy, which is the subject of Arif Dirlik’s Revolution and History, already reviewed. Chapter 8 reviews the phenomenon of tenko in 1930s Japan, in which JCP Marxists abandoned the party in droves for either religious or “national socialist� visions of society. This was spurred by the notion of the Japanese kokutai, which “combined racialism, mysticism, and familism to produce a concept of a patriarchal Japanese state viewed as an organic entity� with the Emperor as head of the Japanese ethnic nation state (338-342). The most eloquent of the tenko theorists was Sano Manabu and his “Oriental Socialism,� who saw the superiority of the Japanese minzoku as the basis for a pan-Asian socialist revolution (342-357).
Chapter 9 discusses “Mao and the Chinese synthesis of nationalism, stateness, and Marxism.� This chapter was interesting, but seriously flawed. Hoston vastly overstates the presence of Confucianism and traditional Chinese philosophy in Mao’s thought, in my view. He conflates the Maoist “continuous revolution� with the Trotskyist “permanent revolution� constantly, while acknowledging some differences (as well as claiming Lenin “adopted� the latter, pure historical speculative fantasy). The most interesting parts are Hoston’s location of the Mao-Liu Shaoqi split in one of different views on the desirability of Western conceptions of modernity, Liu pro and Mao con (365), the uniqueness of Mao’s call for mass mobilization as a new development in Chinese political theory (379), Mao’s criticism of intellectuals as a “return to Marx’s pronouncement that consciousness emerged out of participation, or praxis, in the production process and in the revolution itself� (386), and a concept of the “mass line� as differing from bourgeois democracy in eschewing institutions for “process� democracy (390-391)....more
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