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Central bank independence: A social economic and democratic critique
- Jocelyn Pixley, Sam Whimster, Shaun Wilson
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- Journal:
- The Economic and Labour Relations Review / Volume 24 / Issue 1 / March 2013
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2023, pp. 32-50
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- Article
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The advent of quantitative easing by the world’s major central banks invites renewed questions about the meaning and role of central bank independence in an age of economic crisis. This article draws together insights from economic sociology, history and democratic theory to engage in further discussion about the proper role of central banks in democratic society. We stress some related themes. Our brief history of central banks aims to show how these banks have always been embedded in economic and political coalitions and conflicts, therefore qualifying the term independence; our study also aims to show that in satisficing between conflicting tasks, central banks need to maintain a balance between cognitive competences and normative expectations. Independence is better understood as a form of dependence on the coalition of interests that supported the financial climate prevailing before the global crisis of 2008, one of low wage-price inflation, high borrowing and debt, and loss of prudential control. We argue that independence amounts to a form of re-privatisation of central banks, and that they are increasingly suborned to the pressures of financial markets. At the same time, asset price inflation has sacrificed growth and employment and therefore prolongs the crisis. The economic measures now demanded by the financial crisis prompt new doubts about the independent central bank experiment, potentially in favour of the ex ante model of governmental oversight of central banks.
8 - Lagoon Immobility
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- By Sam Whimster
- Edited by Jocelyn Pixley, Macquarie University, Sydney, Helena Flam, Universität Leipzig
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- Book:
- Critical Junctures in Mobile Capital
- Published online:
- 26 February 2018
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2018, pp 182-199
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Summary
Mobile capital is contextualized within different settings. The Venetian Republic is used as a case study on the limits of mobile capital, which turns out to be a highly-constrained form of mercantile capitalism - though also adventurous in its use of credit money. These constraints, theorized in a very original way by the German jurist Carl Schmitt as a lagooned civilization, prompted economic historians notably Fernand Braudel in contrast, to place Venetian mercantile capitalism as the springboard to the transition from medieval to modern capitalism. Max Weber’s doctoral thesis on medieval trading companies restricted the Italian city states to the relatively closed stage of mercantile capitalism. The shift of financial centres to Northern Europe, Antwerp and Amsterdam and on to London in Braudel, to Weber becomes the true site of mobile capital. For Weber, it is not the shift of economic gravity to North-West Europe, but the transition of colonial fiscal states to territorial states competing for funds in colonizing the world. Mobile capital turns out to be a relational concept, and when it relates only to itself - as appears to be the tendency in global financial capital today - then the future of capitalism itself lacks assurance
18 - Empires and Bureaucracy: Means of Appropriation and Media of Communication
- from Part V - Afterword
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- By Sam Whimster, London Metropolitan University
- Edited by Peter Crooks, Trinity College, Dublin, Timothy H. Parsons, Washington University, St Louis
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- Book:
- Empires and Bureaucracy in World History
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 03 August 2016, pp 437-456
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Summary
Weber's Ideal Types of Bureaucracy
The sociological writings of Max Weber (1864–1920) are an immediate starting point for analyzing bureaucracy. He offers two ideal types: his classic account of rationally organized bureaucracy of the modern state and modern organizations, and his far denser account of administration and officialdom in the premodern patrimonial state. In the index of these writings, ‘empire’ hardly appears at all, although the adjective ‘imperial’ crops up frequently, usually in descriptive passages exemplifying cases of bureaucracy and administration. This is somewhat surprising since Weber stands for wide-ranging comparative historical sociology and, in a work as comprehensive as his Economy and society, the reader might well expect to find a separate treatment of empire as a structure of power. In part, this absence of ‘empire’ may be explained by the fact that Economy and society remained unfinished at the time of Weber's death. He had hoped to complete a sociology of the state, so ‘empire’ might have appeared there, although recent scholarship suggests that it was the modern state in which he was interested. An early draft chapter on political communities has a section on the ‘Economic foundations of “imperialism” ’, but this provides only a starting point for further work. We have to conclude, therefore, that Weber did not treat ‘empire’ as a concept (G. Begriff).
‘Bureaucracy’, by contrast, is a concept for Weber – and within his methodology this matters. As noted in Chapter 1, Susan Reynolds urges historians to distinguish between words, concepts and phenomena. ‘Empire’ is a word with a bewildering number of usages. Placing ‘empire’ within a theory and providing it with a corresponding definition turns a word into a concept. In Weber's methodological writings, phenomena are considered infinite in terms of the dimension of time. For historians, especially of ancient empires and societies, evidence is all too scarce, but Weber's point remains valid in a logical sense: at any one point in history, an infinity of things were happening – being said, being done, being thought about it. The empirical world is dense with endless phenomena. The social scientist and historian are forced, maybe not always consciously, into being selective in what they choose to study and how they go about their investigation. The concept is the theoretical tool that represents those selection decisions.