Subject: BHA: RE: Social and Historic forces as empirical proof in TR?
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 16:50:25 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Ismail,

I am sceptical about there being "social and historic forces" that operate as causal mechanisms.  There is a real danger of reification of abstractions here.  Take the notion that the "industrial revolution" caused urbanization.  The term "industrial revolution" is a shorthand way of referring to a large number of events taking place in different locations over several centuries.  One kind of event included is that of a man, or a man and his family, moving from the country into a city in the hope of finding work.  The industrial revolution includes urbanization, rather than being some "force" that caused urbanization.

It is not always illegitimat, in my opinion, to try to think of social analogues to gravity or to the movement of air from areas of high atmospheric pressure to low pressure zones, etc.   But such analogies easily slip into reifications.

Best regards,

Dick 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ismail Lagardien [mailto:ilagardien-AT-yahoo.com] 
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 7:01 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: Social and Historic forces as empirical proof in TR?


Hi everyone
 
I am working on inequality as it is embedded into the institutions of global governance (and reproduced in their day-to-day functions - as a state of affairs)... The WTO is my case study.
 
While this chapter (of my PhD thesis) is still under construction - i am, also, still reading and having great difficulty with the obscurantism... my "mechanisms" or "causes" are social and historic forces that shaped the founding process (from the earliest negotiations in teh GATT) through 50 years of negotiations. How am i "showing" this "actual" or "real" is by looking at the structure and compositions of the hundreds of committees sub-committeees, working parties and contracting parties that met over 50 year of Gatt negotiations. From this I am able to show a) under-representation by the poorest 15 countries in teh world - many of whom were not even "independent" when teh process was started and b) that the UK and USA self-selected on almost every-single committeee, or working party. Using some of Robert Cox's work in Anatomy of Influence, i am arguing (as he does) that those who hold their hands on the levers of power, often tend to determine what is important and what is not...  If anyone can help/advise... please feel free. It is a hard task - but, hey, i'm enjoying it.
 
Regards
 
Ismail


There May be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there never must be a time when we fail to protest." Elie Wiesel (1928- ) Writer, Nobel Laureate

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