Reviews and Questions

When I read for our class, I could not help thinking about current events and how to link the theoretical discourses to what are happening in the world. I am thinking of genocides in Sudan, Burma, and Rwanda when I read Appadurai’s explanation of violence and small numbers. Kosovo’s declaration of independence and Tibet’s demonstrations occurred to me as I read Dewey’s argument of ‘state.’ Lanier’s pioneering warning on the danger of collective wisdom prefaced the debates on whether to delete minor entries on Wikipedia. (Inclusionist v.s. Exclusionist) Stern Review on climate change reminds me of China’s economic development and hunger of resource and the consequences that could bring to the world’s environment.

As Appadurai described, we have entered an era of new war—prevailing internal wars in civilian zones and ideological external wars between the U.S. and Islamic world.

1. a. Globalization, to Appadurai, is not a buzzword of prosperity but could be a nightmare to some countries and groups. What are the dark sides on globalization?

1. b. Why are the minorities often been put as target in elections and genocide, but neglected in politics and in economies?

“At the other limit there are social groups so separated by rivers, seas, and mountains, by strange languages and gods, that what one of them does—save in war—has no appreciable consequences for another,” said Dewey. “The plurality of states is such a universal and notorious phenomenon that it is taken for granted” (p.42)

Dewey went on to discuss state:

Railways, travel and transportation, commerce, the mails, telegraph, and telephone, newspapers, create enough similarity of ideas and sentiments to keep the things going as a whole, for they create interaction and interdependence. The unprecedented thing is that states, as distinguished from military empires, can exist over such a wide area. The notion of maintaining a unified state, even minimally self-governing, over a country as extended as the United States and consisting of a large and racially diversified population would once have seemed the wildest of fancies….Our modern state-unity is due to the consequences of technology employed so as to facilitate the rapid and easy circulation of opinions and information, and so as to generate constant and intricate far beyond the limits of face-to face communities. (p.114)


2. In Dewey’s sense, a state to be a state seems not necessarily to have unified codes of languages, gods, and geographies. What makes a state? Why do some minority groups fight to become a state like the Karen group in Burma, Albanians in Serbia, and Tibetans and Mongolians in China? What makes them recognized themselves as different from their original nationalities?

3. Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” tried to tell a different story to criticize that market itself is perfect. Can market regulate itself? If market is perfect, why do we have Federal Reserve to monitor inflation and to set the interest rate? If market is perfect, what kind of story the Bear Spears case will tell? According to Polanyi, how do we see the subprime crisis flame across the United States? How do we see Ben Bernake constantly cut the interest rate?

I like very much about Mill’s explanation of “The Power Elite.”Mills thought that most of the power elites are born as power elites, educated in the similar environment, and shared similar values. Their status as power elites and their source of power came from their assets, their abilities in making decisions, and the reinforcement of mass media. Their power came from the contexts the power elites were in, but not necessarily originated from themselves. Mills said:

If we took one hundred most powerful men in America, the one hundred wealthiest, and the one hundred most celebrated away from the institutional positions they now occupy, away from their resources of men and women and money, away from the media of mass communication that are now focused upon them—then they would be powerless and poor and uncelebrated. For power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chances to have and to hold these valued experiences. (p.10, 11)

4. Professor Moretti proposed a central point to disclose Mill’s text that if communists or peasants are going to penetrate the power elites, they are to become the power elite. What makes power elites control the power to make decisions? What makes power elites have power? What makes power elites to be celebrated, and to be wealthy? What makes Clinton Clinton and Bush Bush?