Power: Specific Case Studies Flashcards
Mary Beard, Women and Power
Detail how Homer’s Odyssey excludes the voice of women.
- GENERAL: About Odysseus and the Trojan War.
- SPECIFIC: Odysseyus’s wife, Penelope, is left for many years as Odysseus is at war. She is constantly pursued by other men whilst bringing up her son, Telemachus. When Penelope goes to criticise a bard, she is stopped by Telemachus, who states ‘mother, go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff… speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.”
- Homer suggests a critical part of becoming a man is to silence women.
- First recorded instance of man silencing woman.
Mary Beard, Women and Power
Detail how Aristophanes undermines the capacity for women to have a voice in the fourth century B.C.
- Comedy - fictional situation in which women run the state, but lack the capacity to speak publicly.
- Comedy from being unable to adapt language from private setting (sexually-oriented)
Mary Beard
How did Ovid’s Metamorphosis silence women?
- Epic about changing shape.
- Women transformed through metamorphosis:
- Io transformed into a cow
- Echo (nymph) transformed into an… echo.
- Even whilst stripping of voice, Philomena (who lost her tongue) was able to denounce her rapist by weaving a tapestry
Mary Beard
What are the exceptions which permitted women to speak?
- To testify as victims (Rape, murder)
- To defend their homes, children and husbands. Hortensia was permitted to speak publicly in Rome after being subjected to a special wealth tax to fund a dubious war effort.
Mary Beard
What did Dio Chrysostom ask of his audience in 2 A.D.?
- To imagine a situation where ‘an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male - child or adult - could say anything in a manly way.’
- This emphasised the importance of the deep male voice as a point of authority. In modernity, we can see echos of this in the voice training of Margaret Thatcher
Mary Beard
How were women with voices portrayed historically?
- As freakish androgynes - Elizabeth I “I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.” There is no evidence to suggest this was actually said, nor that she wrote it (no eyewitnesses). This was written 40 years after the event.
- Alt., this voice is constructed by male agents with ulterior motives - Sojourner Truth - “Ain’t I a Woman?” “I have borne 13 chilren, and seen ‘em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman…”. This version was written up a decade later, and the famous line was certainly not hers - her words were translated into a Southern drawl, to match the abolitionist message.
Mary Beard
Provide a synopsis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland
- A land where there exists a nation of solely women, and have a topic state - with sustainable agriculture, delicious food, peace, education - and a state of parthenogenesis (no men, no need for men for reproduction). Three men find Herland, and the narrative looks at how they attempted to impose male mastery and sexual dominance.
Mary Beard
How is Clytemnestra presented in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon?
- 458 BC - antiheroine Clytemnestra embodied the ideology that a woman ceases to be a woman with the application of power. To be a woman is to be weak, vice versa. Aeschylus uses male terms to describe Clytemnestra, “with manly purpose…. thinking like a man”. This illegitimate grab of power is answered for when the children of Clytemnestra kill her.
- Amazonian women - Greek mythology - presented as monstrous.
Mary Beard
What is the story of Medusa?
Medusa was a beautiful woman raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena. For her crime, she was punished (sacrilege) by becoming the hideous creature who can turn all to stone. Beard suggests that the snakes are obviously phallic.
Joseph Nye
Provide evidence for the American Colossus
- “Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others.”
- French foreign minister Hubert Védrin, 1999 that the United States had gone beyond its superpower status of the twentieth century. “U.S. supremacy today extends to the economy, currency, military areas, lifestyle, language and the products of mass culture that inundate the world, forming thought and fascinating even the enemies of the United States.”
Evidence direct power through NATO
- NATO’s military power reversed Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and the promise of economic aid to Serbia’s devastated economy reversed the Serbian government’s initial disinclination to hand Milosevic over to the Hague tribunal.
What has caused a movement away from overt hard power to soft power?
Nuclear arsenals. MAD has reduced the capacity for direct intervention between major powers to be decisive in conflict.
Joseph Nye
What did Hubert Védrine argue about Americans?
Americans are so powerful because they can “inspire the dreams and desires of others, thanks to the mastery of global images through film and television and because, for these same reasons, large numbers of students from other countries come to the United States to finish their studies.”
Nye
What did Nixon state in the 1970s concerning the balance of power?
“the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises.”
Who was the world power in the 16th century, what was their power built upon?
Spain - Gold bullion, colonial trade, mercenary armies, dynastic ties
Who was the world power in the seventeenth century, what was their power premised on?
Netherlands - Trade, capital markets and navy
Who was the world power in the eighteenth century, what was their power premised on?
France - Population, rural industry, public administration, army, culture
Who was the world power in the nineteenth century, what was their power premised on?
Britain - Industry, political cohesion, finance and credit, liberal norms, island location (easy to defend)
Who was the world power in the twentieth century, what was their power premised on?
US - Economic scale, scientific and technical leadership, location, military forces and alliances, universalistic culture an liberal international regimes
Who was the world power in the twenty-first century, what was their power premised on?
US: Technological leadership, military and economic scale, soft power, hub of transnational communications
Nye - what is a failing of Thatcher/ Nixon outlook on power?
Both the Nixon and Thatcher views are too mechanical because they ignore soft power. America is an exception, says Josef Joffe, “because the ‘hyperpower’ is also the most alluring and seductive society in history. Napoleon had to rely on bayonets to spread France’s revolutionary creed.
What does Nye suggest about Iraq/Iran relations?
Iraq and Iran both dislike the United States and might be expected to work together to balance American power in the Persian Gulf, but they worry even more about each other.
This is v reductionist. Both have independent agency, and reason for disliking the West. See Toby Dodge (MEMS)
Why is it wrong to suggest that China is an emerging force in the world economy?
In fact, the “rise of China” is a misnomer. “Reemergence” would be more accurate, since by size and history the Middle Kingdom has long been a major power in East Asia. Technically and economically, China was the world’s leader (though without global reach) from 500 to 1500.
Nye - what fears existed aronud Japan?
Only a decade ago Americans feared being overtaken by the Japanese. A 1989 Newsweek article put it succinctly: “In boardrooms and government bureaus around the world, the uneasy question is whether Japan is about to become a superpower, supplanting America as the colossus of the Pacific and perhaps even the world’s No. 1 nation.”
Describe Japan’s growth experience during the 20th century
On the eve of World War II, Japan had accounted for 5 percent of world industrial production. Devastated by the war, it did not regain that level until 1964. From 1950 to 1974, Japan averaged a remarkable 10 percent annual growth rate, and by the 1980s it had become the world second largest economy, with 15 percent of world product.
Who wrote ‘information is power’?
Francis Bacon, over 400 years ago.
At what rate did the internet grow?
Traffic on the Internet has been doubling every hundred days for the past few years. In 1993, there were about fifty web sites in the world; by the end of decade, that number had surpassed five million.
Nye: What are the 3 dimensions of information?
- Flows of data such as news and statistics.
- Information used for advantage in competitive situations.
- Strategic information - knowledge of your competitor’s game plan.
Nye: What is the paradox of plenty?
A plentitude of information leads to a poverty of attention.
Present a counterfactual which could apply to the utility of media?
Iraq might have found it easier to have won acceptance for its view of the invasion of Kuwait as a postcolonial vindication, analogous to India’s 1975 capture of Goa, if CNN had framed the issue from Baghdad rather than from Atlanta (from which Saddam was portrayed as analogous to Hitler in the 1930s).
What is the oldest form of globalisation?
The oldest form of globalization is environmental interdependence. For example, the first smallpox epidemic is recorded in Egypt in 1350 B.C. The disease reached China in A.D. 49, Europe after 700, the Americas in 1520, and Australia in 1789.
What could be said about economic globalisation?
Economic globalization fell dramatically between 1914 and 1945, while military globalization increased to new heights during the two world wars, as did many aspects of social globalization
What has the proliferation of technology led to?
As technology spreads, less powerful actors become empowered. Terrorism is the recent dramatic example, but consider also the relations between transnational corporations and poor countries.
Clark: Who are the usual writers of accounts of power?
Sociologists, political scientists - no consensus among historians.
What are the three German terms for ‘Power’?
- Macht (the capacity of a powerful individual to achieve an objective)
- Herrschaft (personal dominion exercised by feudal lord, monarch or dictator)
- Gewalt (Violence or force)
What is the paradox of small allies?
Robert Keohane - the capacity of small, insignificant partnerships to block action (entangling alliances)
Arthur Schlesigner: what did LBJ find inconceivable?
“found it viscerally inconceivable that what Walt Rostow kept telling him was the greatest power in the world could not even dispose of a collection of night riders in black pyjamas”
What did Christine Carpenter say about the War of the Roses?
War of the Roses resulted in structural shift in the relationship between gentries and nobilities - refocused authority on the monarchical state + permitted muscular Tudor rule.
What did Samuel Pfuendorf state about states?
- The legitimacy of states derived from the need to forestall disorder through the concentration of authority.
- Rationale for the extension of the power of the state - against the libertas of the estate, Pufendorf asserted the necessitas of the state.
Why was the large Chinese state pervasive through the centuries?
The Chinese state’s resilience was premised on the ruler’s success in forging alliances with landed warrior nobilities across the regions. Control was not static; it fluctuated with time.
How did the Ming dynasty extend its power assertion?
- Until 1720s, state had little control over non-Han people on the southern periphery.
- Ming dynasty -> introduction of ‘native chiefs’ who ruled in the localities and received investiture from the central state.
- Continued under Qing - the native chiefs coordinated the payment of land and labour-service tax, played a key role in borderland defence, and were expected to render tribute to Beijing every three years.
Why did regions like Guangxi rebel against Yongzhen?
Yongzhen wanted to rule unilaterally. The restriction of chieftain agency was met with resistance.
What happened in 8th century Japan?
Centralised polity established; displaced chiefdoms. Law codes of 705 and 757 affirmed the position of the ‘Heavenly Sovereign’ in Kyoto.
What does Clark suggest was the situation by the 15th century in Japan?
Rebellions and inter-clan warfare left the state court an ‘empty shell’
What happened during the Tokugawa shogunate?
- 17,000 officials; collapsed in 1867
- Undermined by the growing independence of daimyo - regional magnates who conceived of their landholdings as ‘autonomous principalities’. They began to act as little shoguns, with own laws and currencies, taxes and administrative systems.
What does Clark suggest about the Tokugawa beneficiaries?
“Here again we may discern the familiar dialectic: the daimyos were in the first instance the beneficiaries Tokugawa supremacy and the instruments of Tokugawa authority in the regions, but with time they began to suck power out of the centre and accrue it to themselves”
Clark: How did power vary within Mexico?
State capacity to wield power varied with the landscape: Hills and mountains were associated with ‘wildness, violence and political freedom’, while the plains carried connotations of ‘docility, pacification and susceptibility to repression’.
- When did population densities in Africa match the population densities of Europe c. 1500?
- What impact did this have?
- 1975
- Barrier to state formation - ‘great but incomplete drama’
- State has insufficient resources to dominate entire region.
- Caused Ibo (Nigeria) to run in a highly decentralised fashion.
What is one argument for the rise of Ethiopia?
High population density. The era of Ethiopian absolutism (1855-1913) saw the rise of a centralised state power.
How are affairs managed in Buganda (20th century)?
- Situated in the resource-rich and densely populated Great Lakes region, Buganda developed from around the turn of the 19th century into a powerful state, in which extensive exploitation of local resoruces was integrated into control of regional trade, buttressed by the military power of the state.
- If Buganda was powerful, it was not necessarily centralised. The Kabaka court set tax levels and oversaw labour on infrastructural projects, but it relied on local clan heads and ssaza chiefs to implement these policies.
- As with Tokugawa Japan, centre was only as powerful as local coopted arrangements permitted.
What did Robert Gellately argue about the Gestapo?
- Numerically small and beyond the ken of most Germans.
- Tip-offs and denunciations from the public were crucial to its day-to-day operation.
- The terroristic side of Hitler’s Germany was ‘socially constructed by what was passed along by word of mouth, by what they read of it in the press or heard on the radio’.
What facilitated the dekulakisation of the USSR?
urban volunteers. Not to diminish the power of the regime, but to signpost that “currents of power flow in more complex patterns than a simple, top-down model would allow.”
What is an effective demonstrator of the fluidity of power?
“No office better demonstrates the fluidity of power and the difficulty of specifying its locations and quantity in democratic political systems than the Presidency of the United States of America.”
Contrast Bagehot to Wilson on the matter of power in US politics
- Bagehot, 1866, saw a system of Presidential Government so overwhelming that it threatened to weaken the legislative power.
- Twenty years later, Woodrow Wilson would recognise it as “congressional government, purely thanks to historical contingency.
- Bagehot pointed to Lincoln, who used the line in the constitution relating to the Commander in Chief to impose a blockade, raise a volunteer army, expand the regular military and naval forces, sweep aside civil liberties, and impose conscription and issue the two Executive Orders known as the Emancipation Proclamation.
- At the time of Wilson’s writing, Reconstruction was out of the way and the Legislature was dominant. The President was now seen as the ‘unifying force in our complex system’. Foreign policy power of the President was seen as immense however. Think Arthur Schlesinger - Imperial Presidency.
What are some criticisms of Foucault’s position on morality?
- Jürgen Habermas -> As Foucault critiques normativity as socially constructed and contingent, but relies on an implicit norm, Foucault’s thinking is “crypto-normativist”, covertly reliant on the very Enlightenment principles he attempts to argue against.
- Nancy Fraser: “Foucault’s critique encompasses traditional moral systems, he denies himself recourse to concepts such as ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’, and therefore lacks the ability to generate positive alternatives.”
What does Foucault argue about the 17th century body?
- 17th century - King’s body was not a metaphor in the political system, but literally its physical presence was necessary for the functioning of the monarchy.
What is Foucault’s position on Power?
Power is that concrete power which every individual holds, and whose partial or total cession of enables political power or sovereignty to be established.
What is inherent in the Marxist conception of Power?
- The Marxist conception of power focuses on economic functionality. This economic functionality is present to the extent that power is conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations of production and of a class domination which of the development and specific forms of the forces of production have rendered possible. On this view then, the historical raision d’etre of political power is to be found in the economy.
Foucault: What does Foucault suggest about the repressive nature of power?
Power represses nature, the instincts, a class, individuals. First stipulated by Hegel, then Freud, later Reich.
