![cultural politics definition cultural politics definition](https://cdn.openpublishing.com/grin-paper/110500_0.jpg)
Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and Joseph Schumpeter are some of these theorists. In addition, my training as a social theorist exposed me early on to the work of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century scholars who also worked on big problems but were never exposed to the sort of disciplinary pressures that the scholars of the last 30 years or so experience.
![cultural politics definition cultural politics definition](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Right_to_ed_handbook_Fig_1.2.svg/220px-Right_to_ed_handbook_Fig_1.2.svg.png)
![cultural politics definition cultural politics definition](https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/Journals/CUP_14_2_pr.jpg)
I believe that having a real-world problem is a key part of the answer here – it can (and must) be approached from different angles and it provides a check against eclecticism and dispersion.
#Cultural politics definition how to#
This poses, as you rightly note, the problem of how to link different disciplines, to integrate a broad range of theoretical stances, and to address a wide range of problems without falling into eclecticism or, conversely, resorting to a compartmentalized approach in which different issues are addressed through different kinds of reasoning, different sets of concepts, and different methods that, were they brought together, would prove incommensurable or logically incoherent. This intellectual project has changed over time, as its referents and relata in the real world have changed and, equally importantly, as the theoretical challenges thrown up by these changes and/or the debates that they have prompted and in which I have been engaged force me to rethink old approaches, examine new ones, and consider how they might be linked. The initial problem continues to fascinate me because my own life-course coincides with this development: I was a beneficiary of the newly instituted welfare state, saw the transition to a flawed Fordism, experienced the attempts to modernize the British economy in the 1970s and, again, in the 1990s, engaged in the opposition to Thatcherite neo-liberalism and New Labour (which I interpreted as neo-liberalism with a Christian socialist face), and have, more recently, been exploring the tensions between finance-dominated accumulation and efforts to build a knowledge-based economy. This is a project that has still not come to fruition and has been interrupted by many diversions and detours. How do you manage to link them and to avoid eclecticism or dispersion?ģ Bob Jessop: My approach to this challenge has emerged over time as I have worked on a long-term intellectual project that I set myself almost 40 years ago, namely, to write a theoretically-informed account of the development of post-war British political economy. And indeed your work encompasses many disciplines (sociology, political science, political economy, geography etc.) and a broad range of theoretical stances. įor further bio- and bibliographical information, please visit the following website: fass/sociology/profiles/Bob-Jessop/ 1. Crossing disciplinary boundaries and intellectual pathsĢ RR: You describe yourself as a “theoretical jack-of-all-trades” in the social sciences. Two new books are scheduled for 2013: Towards Cultural Political Economy (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum) and The State: Past, Present, Future. Recent books include: The Future of the Capitalist State (2002), Beyond the Regulation Approach (co-authored with Ngai-Ling Sum, 2006), and State Power (2007). He currently holds a 3-year professorial research fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) to study the crisis of crisis-management in relation to the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and its broad-ranging repercussions. He has worked for many years on theories of the state and state power, critical political economy (including the régulation theory), critical realism, critical discourse analysis, and questions of governance and governance failure. 1 Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, United Kingdom.