Discussing state action is critical to understanding the function of capitalism in society—it shapes the discourse

Policy focus is key to resisting neoliberalism—discursive theorizing actively contributes to ongoing neoliberalism

What if scholars doubt the authenticity of the 'globalization hypothesis'? The issue then becomes one of whether our present disciplinary arrange ments allow for effective refutation and critical rebuttal of truth claims that are made around the idea of globalization.Arguments about the need to re-think how we acquire knowledge about or in the context of globaliza tion tend to presuppose a climate of transformation rather than stasis. The assumption of most doubters seems to be that solid, rigorous work using the established tools, axioms and norms of political science, economics and economic history (to name but three fields where such work is especially evident) is capable of showing clearly how claims about globalization as either a structural condition or a set of effects amount to mythology.or hyperbole. Sociologists of knowledge and disciplinary historians often re mind us of how the evolution of (a) forms of academic knowledge and (b) the evolution of modernity are co-constitutive. It follows, therefore, that an incautious rush to formulate a 'global(ization) studies' that presumes a priori that its object is globalized may fall into the trap of contributing to the constitution of that globalized reality. Put simply, the very practice of describing a world without borders where power shifts markedly from the public to the private domains, where the authority and autonomy of the state is reduced and where policy possibilities are heavily circumscribed is likely to accelerate the achievement of very reality. This is of particular importance to those scholars of globalization who choose to study this object out of critical motivations and a desire to contribute to the initia tion of a more just, equitable, democratic and redistributive world order than presently prevails (Rosow, 2003). It could be argued that the most effective strategy for retaining such possibilities might, paradoxically, be to do in what much of the political science of globalization already does: engage with the common sense understandings of economic or hyper globalization and produce results that qualify or refute the claims that are routinely made (Rosamond, 2003). Consequently, those who feel uncomfortable discipline-based discus sions of globalization need to find more powerful arguments in favour of overturning epistemological certainty

Their framing is wrong – evaluating capitalism doesn’t come first

Lugo, Ph.D in Anthropology at Stanford, Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008

(Alejandro, “Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” University of Texas at Austin Press, pp 226-228)//SG

The emphasis in this book on war, contestation, and power relations in society and culture along class, gender, and color lines, more than on a faithful commitment to Communist utopias, constitutes a strategy of resistance and opposition to the extreme conservatism permeating Durkheimian thinking, whichdominated academic social thought throughout most of the twentieth century. The latter influential paradigm, however, was tied more to Thomas Hobbes, who wrote for an earlier British monarchy, than to Durkheim himself, who was reacting against late-nineteenth-century labor unrest (Anderson 1998). In as- signing the generalized transformations of societies to specific historical periods-for example, to 1870s historical events or, for that matter, to 1970s political occurrences and outcomes- one runs the danger of reducing the complexity of human relations to socially situated experiences (practice), which are in turn transformed into generalized visions of the world (structure). The problematic trick presents itself when the latter (structure) are confused with the former (practice), not in the recognition that one can lead to the other. The impermanence of either "structure" or "practice" allows for the analysis of the unintended consequences of "culture" and its politics, past and present."Situated knowledges" (Haraway 1986) in themselves are not necessarily, and have not always been, part of the "war of position" that Gramsci promoted. Durkheim's position about the state, morality, and society was situated as well, but relative to the state's need of the times, to restore so-called social order - both from capitalist rapacity (the greedy capitalist) and from worker unrest. Under late capitalism, Durkheim's vision of the sovereign state is in fact being politically challenged by multinational corporations, particularly in Mexico, but more specifically at the U.S.-Mexico border, and by a much-needed border theory that is produced by border subjects who claim citizenships that transcend boundaries (see Anzaldua 1987; Lugo 1997, 2ooob; Morales 1996; R. Rosaldo 1993).Throughout most of the history of social science thinking, and even as early as 1642, Hobbes argued in his Leviathan ([1642]1958), and in Latin (that is, be- fore "the nation"), that the state of nature is inherently about chaos, disorder, and war, and that the only remedy is to impose a sovereign-the king-so that order and harmony will exist. Thus, we must realize that actual social life does not tend to obey "official mandates" or the most recent "theoretical paradigms." Human relations did not necessarily transform themselves from "chaos" to "order" under Hobbes, nor from "order" to "chaos" under Marx, nor (back again) from "chaos" to "order" under Durkheim, nor will they change from pure "order" to pure "dis- order" under Gramscian, postmodernist, and borderland thinking?2 Thus, just as culture changes, so does the state; needless to say, our concepts about them are also transformed according to distinct historical specificities.Social life changes and reproduces itself both through cultural-historical contingencies and through the arbitrary, though still symbolically constituted, im- position of a politically legitimated force. It is our business to study the former and a matter of human integrity not only to scrutinize the latter but, more importantly, to prevent it. It is necessary that we continue our analytic flow from "Culture" to "culture," from the "State" to the "state," from "Order" to "order," from "Patterns" to "patterns," from "Chaos" to "chaos," and from "Border Crossings" to their "border inspections," as well as from "gender studies of women and gender studies of men" to "studies of gender" that comprehensively include both women and men. As Geertz persuasively noted in 1973, the anthropologist still "confronts the same grand realities that others ... confront in more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression ... but he [sic) confronts them in obscure enough [I'd say clear enough) places . .. to take the capital letters off them" (1973a, 21). It seems, after all, that one of postmodernism's major contributions to sociocultural analysis is, as Benitez-Rojo argues in The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, its "lens," which "has the virtue of being the only one to direct itself toward the play of paradoxes and eccentricities, of fluxes and displacements" (1992, 271), that is, toward the simultaneous play of order and disorder, coherence and incoherence, chaos and antichaos, contestation and shareability, practice and structure, culture and history, culture and capitalism, and finally, patterns and borderlands (R. Rosaldo 1993) . We should not privilege a priori one or the other; instead, we must continuously suspend each category in order to analyze the eccentricities of each. It seems to me that only by following these suggestions was I able to juxtapose the analysis of "assembled parts" in maquiladoras with the analysis of the fragmented lives of the maquila workers who assembled them, and I was able as well to examine the everydayness of late industrial capitalism as compared with the encounters of conquest and colonialism in the sixteenth century-all in the larger contexts of history and the present, the global economy and the local strategies of survival, and, finally, in the more intricate, micro-contexts of culture and power, as we saw in the preceding chapters. Ultimately, and without leaving the question of meaning behind, I suggest that we, as social analysts, must face the challenge to truly balance the interpretation of human culture and its borderlands with their respective inspections.

Considering state action is key to understanding capitalism and a discursive approach

Schmidt, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration Department of International Relations, Boston University 07 (Vivien, “Bringing the State Back Into the Varieties of Capitalism And Discourse Back Into the Explanation of Change”, Center for European Studies Working Paper Series 152, 2007, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS

The Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) literature's difficulties in accounting for the full diversity of national capitalisms and in explaining institutional change result at least in part from its tendencyto downplay state action and from its rather static, binary division of capitalism into two overallsystems. This paper argues first of all that by taking state action-used as shorthand for government policy forged by the political interactions of public and private actors in given institutionalcontexts-as a significant factor, national capitalisms can be seen to come in at least three varieties: liberal, coordinated, and state-influenced market economies. But more importantly, by bringing the state back in, we also put the political back into political economy-in terms of policies,political institutional structures, and politics. Secondly, the paper shows that although recent revisions to VOC that account for change by invoking open systems or historical institutionalistincrementalism have gone a long way toward remedying the original problem with regard to stasis, they still fail to explain institutional change fully. It is not enough to turn to rational choice institutionalist explanations focused on the micro-foundations of action, as some do, since this doesnot get at the dynamics behind changing preferences and innovative actions. For this, I argue, itis necessary to add discursive institutionalist explanations focused on the role of ideas and discourse. Bringing the state back into the substantive account of capitalism actually promotes thismethodological approach, since an important part of politics is political communication and deliberation on the choice of policies within given institutional contexts, economic as well as political.

Policy must be the primary consideration—it is how value and discourse are implemented and understood—studies on justice cannot be divorced from policy

Ball, Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of London, 90 (Stephen J, “Politics and Policy Making in Education”, Routledge, 1/1/90, http://books.google.com/books/about/Politics_and_Policy_Making_in_Education.html?id=YkYOAAAAQAAJ)//AS

Policy is clearly a matter of the "˜authoritative allocation of values'; policies are the operational statements of values, "˜statements of prescriptive intent' (Kogan 1975 p.55). But values do not float free of their social context.We need to ask whose values are validated in policy. and whose are not. Thus, "˜The authoritative allocation of values draws our attention to the centrality of power and control in the concept of policy' (Prunty 1985 p.l36). Policies project images of an ideal society (education policies project definitions of what counts as education) and to a great extent I am concerned here to relate contemporary education policy to the ideal of society projected in Thatcherism. (ln terms of social and economic policy l take Thatcherism to be a specific and stable ideological system.) Logically, then, policies cannot be divorced from interests, from conflict, from domination or from justice. All of these aspects of policy analysis are embedded in this study. But l do not intend to attempt to portray education policy simply as a matter of ' the inevitable and unproblematic extension of Thatcherism.

Util

A practical deontological approach is utopian – consequential thinking is inevitable.

Spragens, professor of Political science at Duke, 2000 (Thomas, Political Theory and Partisan Politics, 2000, p. 81-2, PDNSS1796)//CS

My thesis that all three layers/forms of political association areimportant in a well-ordered liberal democracy also implies the untenabilityof Rawls's argument that agreement regarding norms of social justice is apossible and sufficient way to overcome the deficiencies of the modusvivendi approach. In the first place, as I have argued in more detailelsewhere, the fundamental unfairness of life and the presence of gratuitous elements in the moral universe make it impossible to settle rationally upon a single set of distributive principles as demonstrably fair (See also, Spragens 1993). Simply put, the problem is that the contingencies of the world ineluctably allocate assets and sufferings quite unfairly. We can cope with and try to compensate for these "natural injustices," but only at the price of introducing other elements of unfairness or compromising other moral values. The other major problem inthis context is that real world human beings are not deontologists: their moral intuitions about distributive justice are permeated and influenced by their moral intuitions about the good. The empirical consequence of thesetwo difficulties is the falsification of Rawls's hermeneutic claims aboutan overlapping consensus. Rational people of good will with a liberal democratic persuasion will be able to agree that some possible distributive criteria are morally unacceptable. But, as both experience and theliterature attest, hopes for a convergence of opinion on definitiveprinciples of distributive justice are chimerical.

Utilitarianism protects rights without rejecting all policies that infringe on rights.

Harvey, J.D., Yale Law School, ‚2002 (Philip, “Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse: Taking Economic And Social Rights Seriously”, Spring 2002, 33 Colum. Human Rights L. Rev. 363, l/n, PDCL1068)//CS

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this compromise or balancing principle is the distinction drawn in constitutional jurisprudence between the standard of review applied by courts in deciding whether legislative enactments comply with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Laws that do not infringe on certain constitutionally protected rights will pass muster if there is a mere rational basis for their enactment, whereas laws that do infringe on such rights require more compelling justification, with the level of justification varying depending on the right at issue. Human rights claims have bite precisely because they declare that certain actions may be improper, even if those actionsare supported by a majority of the population, indeed, even if the actionsin question would increase the total utility of the population as a whole.But it is not necessary to take the position that rights-based claims should always trump conflicting utility-maximizing purposes. It should be possible to honor multiple goals in public policy decision-making.

No Absolutism

Absolutism fails – we lose ourselves to moral constraints instead of being moved by real concern.

Waldron, professor at the New York University School of Law and Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford University, 1993 (Jeremy, “Liberal Rights,” Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public, March 1993, http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item1143178/?site_locale=en_US)//CS

I have some sympathy with this, but, as I also argue in Chapter 9, the insistence on absolutism does not make the conflicts go away; it doesn't make the situations that appear to call for trade-offs disappear. Thosesituations are not some-thing that consequentialists and their fellowtravelers have perversely invented in order to embarrass moral absolutists.It is not the theorist's fault that there are sometimes several drowning people and only one lifeguard. As I said earlier, the world turns out notto be the sort of place to which absolute moral requirements are an aptresponse. If we insist on the absoluteness of rights, there is a danger that we may end up with no rights at all, or, at least, no rights embodying the idea of real concern for the individuals whose rights they are. Atbest, we will end up with a set of moral constraints whose absoluteness is secured only by the contortions of agent-relativity that is, by their being understood not as concerns focused on those who may be affected byour actions but as concerns focused on ourselves and integrity.

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