Michael Loriaux

The Realists and Saint Augustine: Skepticism, Psychology, and Moral Action in International Relations Thought

The political thought of Saint Augustine contributed, primarily through the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, to the development of political realism in the twentieth century. Augustine and the realist share a fundamental skepticism regarding the prospects of moral and political progress. It is this skepticism that is the characteristic and even definitional attribute of realist thought. But Augustines realism is more radical than that of the modern. Modern realism assumes a certain stylized psychology that allows the realist to portray world politics as an arena of strategic interaction. Augustines more radical skepticism doubts the possibility of rational strategic action. Yet, building on this more radical skepticism, Augustine demonstrates the possibility and the need for moral action in a realist world. Augustine challenges the modern realist to explore more systematically the skeptical foundations of realist thought.

Mythography: No Exit, No Conclusion?

The word ‘myth’ inscribes a line of separation between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘universal’. Can that line be transcended? Can one exit the provincial and attain to the universal? In this conclusion, Loriaux and Lynch address these questions with the help of Ernst Cassirer, who answers in the affirmative; Jens Bartelson, who expresses scepticism; and R. B. J. Walker, who observes that the question itself has the effect of reinscribing the line of separation in agonistic debate. With the aid of Stephen Toulmin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricœur, and Jacques Derrida, the authors then ask if that line of separation can be destabilised, moved, blurred, or otherwise rendered porous, and indicate strategies that can help us pursue that end.

Developmentalism as Political Culture and Liberalization in France

France, once the European representative of state-led ‘developmentalism’, has shown such zeal in liberalizing its political economy that today it looks like the poster child of global capitalism. High public officials, sensitive to national economic interest, carried out sweeping liberalizing reforms and sit today, on leave from their public duties, on the governing boards of dynamic international firms whose capital is largely American. It is true that reform was linked to the construction of an integrated regional market, the EU. But the most significant liberalizing reforms preceded, and indeed enabled, the EU initiatives (notably the Single European Act1 and the single currency) that contributed most to the construction of that regional market. The temporal ordering of French reform and EU initiative suggests that globalization is not some occult force that compels nations to liberalize. Rather, it is the product of political initiative. The United States (USA) has been the source of much of that initiative, but France is responsible for no small part of it.

The Left's Dirty Job: The Politics of Industrial Restructuring in France and Spain By W. Rand Smith. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. 363p.

W. Rand Smith compares socialist policies of industrial retrenchment in France and Spain during the 1980s and 1990s. Both governments sought to adapt their national economy to change in the global market, through investment incentives and labor policies, in a way that would avoid sectoral crisis or even collapse. They sought to achieve an “orderly exit” of labor from redundancy-plagued industrial sectors, notably steel and automobiles, through job retraining, help in establishing small businesses, relocation incentives, and improvements in the job market, not to mention such standard support mechanisms as severance payments and preretirement systems that supported the incomes of unemployed workers. There was a distinct convergence between French and Spanish policy around this kind of adaptive policy. Neither country after 1983 resisted global market trends through price controls or subsidies or trade protection, and neither government embraced market adjustment through more liberal policies of deregulation of capital or labor markets.