Reconsidering American Power - Pax Americana and the Social Sciences

Reconsidering American Power offers trenchant studies by renowned scholars who reassess the role of the social sciences in the construction and upkeep of the Pax Americana. The thematic image for this enterprise is the 'fiery hunt' for Ahab's whale, which focuses attention on the strange brew of mixed motives for American ventures abroad. The reach of Pax Americana exceeds its grasp, but this verdict requires deeper insight than simply flushing out cultural premises and conceptual limits. The volume's purpose is to understand the USA's 'fiery hunt,' and thereby to help to end it.

List of contents

• List of Abbreviations


• ''Call me Ishmael'': American Epic, American Grotesque, American Sublime and the American Social Sciences


• by John Kelly, Kurt Jacobsen, Marston Morgan


• Part I: Origins: The American Century and its New Sciences in War and Peace, at Home and Abroad


• 01 The Noble American Science of Imperial Relations and Its Laws of Race Development by Robert Vitalis


• 02 American Power and the New Mandarins Redux: Hegemony, Orthodoxy and IR by Kurt Jacobsen


• 03 Seeing Like an Area Specialist by Bruce Cumings


• 04 The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World by Susanne Rudolph


• Part II: Anomalies: The Use and Abuse of Political Economy


• 05 The Misuse of Numbers: Audits, Quantification, and the Obfuscation of Politics by James C. Scott and Matthew Light


• 06 The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Economics by Michael Hudson


• 07 How to Bring Economics into the 3rd Millennium by Edward Fullbrook


• Part III: Predicaments: Some Consequences of Applied Social Science


• 08 Power after Nuclear Weapons by Anne Harrington


• 09 Sociology and the Pax Americana (1945-1975) by George Steinmetz


• 10 Translating Social Science for China: Qu Qiubai and History's Coffin by Tani Barlow


• 11 The Golden Bough at Breton Woods: Anticipating the Decline and Fall of American Anthropology by Marston Morgan


• 12 Beyond National Liberalism: Self-Determination and the World of Pax Americana by John Kelly


• Part IV: Expeditions: After Reality Capsizes Theory


• 13 South Asia and American Power by Lloyd Rudolph


• 14 The Ghosts of Anticommunism and Neoliberalism: East Asian Studies in the 21st Century by Michael Bourdaghs


• 15 Counterfeit COIN, and the State of Nature Effect by Marshall Sahlins


• Conclusion: Starbuck's Dilemma and Academic Expertise by John Kelly, Kurt Jacobsen


• Index


• About the editors and contributors

About the author

John D. Kelly is Christian W. Mackauer Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and is the author of coeditor of eight books.. He does research in Fiji and in India, on topics including ritual in history, knowledge and power, semiotic and military technologies, colonialism and capitalism, decolonization and diasporas. His most recent book, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization, co-written with Martha Kaplan, concerns the constituting of nation-states out of empires. He is currently working on two other books. Laws Like Bullets, also co-authored with Martha Kaplan, concerns colonial lawgiving. Technography: Sciences in the History of Cultures, raises questions for anthropology of knowledge with a focus on the grammarians of ancient India and the engineering of Sanskrit.

Kurt Jacobsen has been a research associate (lately, Associate) in Political Science at the University of Chicago since the mid-1980s. He has taught at the Center for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, University of Chicago and been a visiting scholar many times at the London School of Economics. He is the author or editor of ten other books, including Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic, Technical Fouls: Democratic Dilemmas and Technological Change, Experiencing The State (co-edited with Lloyd Rudolph), Freud's Foes, Pacification and Its Discontents, and International Politics and Inner Worlds. He is book review editor at Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture, coeditor of Free Associations: Psychoanalysis, Groups, Media and Politics (UK), a contributor to many periodicals and newspapers, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

Marston H. Morgan is a member of the United States Foreign Service. He earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Oregon and the University of Guam. His academic research focuses on the French South Pacific, while an applied interest in historic preservation includes work at domestic US locations such as the César E. Chávez National Monument, Timberline Lodge National Landmark, and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. His perspective on American power is founded on a childhood spent in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The views expressed here are the author's own expressed in his personal capacity, and should not be mistaken for those of the U.S. Government.

Summary

Postcolonial studies, postmodern studies, even posthuman studies emerge, and intellectuals demand, that social sciences be remade to address fundamentals of the human condition, from human rights to global environmental crises. But is it easier to reimagine the human and the modern than to properly measure pervasive American influence? American power elevated many social sciences to global prominence: economics, political science, psychology, sociology and anthropology. But even though they, and history and the contemporary humanities, owe so much to American state sponsorship, most scholars have been curiously reluctant to address the American era in unflinching critical terms, beyond stories of neo-colonialism and informal imperialism. This volume seeks to provoke an intellectual confrontation whose time has come, especially for social sciences whose own self-understanding is at stake, and for everyone's future. The scholars assembled here do not claim a subaltern voice, or a view from outside: they ask to be seen as critics from the inside, informed but disjoint. These milestone essays, by leaders in their fields, pursue realities behind their theories, and reconsider the real origins and motives of their fields with an eye to what will deter or repurpose the 'fiery huts' to come.

Additional text

A compelling collection of critical essays that sheds important new light on the nexus between the growth and expansion of the American social sciences and the rise of American power."
- Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies, Bard College, New York

Product details

• Authors: John D. Kelly
• Assisted by: Kurt Jacobsen (Editor), Kurt (Research Associate in Political Science Jacobsen (Editor), John D. Kelly (Editor), John D. (Christian W. Mackauer Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences Kelly (Editor), John D. (Professor Kelly (Editor), Marston Morgan (Editor), Marston H. Morgan (Editor), Marston H. (Member Morgan (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2020
• EAN: 9780199490585
• ISBN: 978-0-19-949058-5
• No. of pages: 540
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 223 mm x 46 mm
• Weight: 730 g
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education