The International Network of Advanced Political Economy is pleased to announce the publication on CD-ROM of Professor Stokes’s new book A Metatheoretical Discourse. The hypermultimedia CD-ROM edition is an "electronic book." It enables you to read in a conventional manner. However, to take full advantage of hypermultimedia you may advance through the book using its extensive internal and external Internet hyperlinks. You can explore the hyperlinked body text, biographical captions, glossary, index, and bibliography that link you, through the World Wide Web, to centers of research and to related documents around the world. This feature marks a major advance in the presentation of academic material. While the media may be the message, content matters! Without abandoning the particularity of its content, A Metatheoretical Discourse revolutionises the meaning of a text/reference "book."
We shall be adding additional CD-ROM based hypermultimedia titles in coming weeks and months.
Professor Stokes insists that the demands of contemporary globalization for a broad vision requires a deep questioning of the metatheoretical discourse that has undergirded traditional social science. Today the left-right theoretical axis that played such an important part in the history of the Cultural West is of ebbing institutional significance. There is a search for a new world view. While academia’s task is to identify the possible content of the new world view, we are burdened with an intellectuality whose metatheory makes problematic attempts at a deeper understanding of human livelihood. This vaguely suggests that the crisis of the Cultural West is metatheoretical.
The social sciences, in general, and political economy, in particular, are undergoing a period of self-analysis. They are plagued by self-doubt in which the traditionally-prized shibboleths of academic discourse have become the subject of critical reflection. We are concerned with a historic period when old solutions are exhausted and alternatives are formulated and tentatively tried. The outcome of such a trial and error process may, if an ultimate breakdown can be avoided, become merely a modification of the old order. Such an outcome will largely depend on the relative strengths of competing social and political forces. But this will not come about without deep reflection. Indeed, it may be argued that the civilizational crisis of the Cultural West is that it has ceased to put itself into question. Where are we to turn for guidance?
Neither conventional, nor the foppish post-modernist approaches appear equipped to address the substantive problem of human livelihood in the age of technified society. Consequently, the task is at once to throw off the tawdry remnants of economism, and to rehabilitate our awareness of earlier critical reflections; to construct a political economy in the broad sense with which to inform and guide the practice to which democratic technified society must commit itself.
Professor Stokes’s work is rooted in the twisted imperatives of the late twentieth century society. It stands in contrast to a political economy that is attached to a narrow “scientistic” methodology, one that isolates its subject matter from the lived world, and portrays the economy as an ahistorical, asocial, closed self-regulating mechanism. Witness the dominance of an economic debate that not only abridges the dynamics of lived human livelihood as an open system, but is blind to the way in which economic activity is structured by its institutional context. It is then hardly surprising that governments have experienced difficulties with policies based on the heroic presupposition that human livelihood is a self-regulating mechanism. The orthodox perspective is attempting to homogenise a complex and differentiated global space presenting globality as an inevitable universal. Recent global economic events reflect two important principles upon which critical thinking must turn: that the reality of human livelihood is a socio-cultural construct rather than a natural phenomenon, and that the economy is not a closed, automatically self-regulating machine, but a culturally-articulated coevolving dynamic system.
A Metatheoretical Discourse speaks to a conceptual and analytical synthesis between politics and a broadening of economic analysis. This amounts to the development of a metalanguage; a higher ordered language which questions and seeks to transcend the conceptual limitations and disciplinary constraints of mainstream studies.
Professor Stokes concludes that a thoroughgoing Nachkonstruktion of the metatheoretical apparatus that furnishes us with theory work is necessary to conceptualise an economy in the broad sense. This volume addresses itself to a dethinking of the metatheoretical presuppositions long integral to political economy in a melancholy period associated with either a petulant abandonment of metatheoretical discourse, or a credulous embrace of positivism. The author’s intent is not merely to reconstruct political economy on foundations long established, but having once deconstructed the Cartesian intellectual edifice, to engage thereafter a post-Cartesian, post-modern metatheoretical foundation.
A METATHEORETICAL DISCOURSE
INTRODUCTION
POLITICAL ECONOMY'S METATHEORETICAL DISCOURSE
THE POSSIBILITY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE BROAD SENSE
BARKING AT SHADOWS
A PROGRAMATIC THEOLOGY
DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION
CONCLUDING REMARKS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Metatheoretical Discourse is priced at US$40.00. Should you be interested in placing an order for the CD-ROM hypermultimedia edition we invite you to send an e-mail message to the Postmaster of the International Network for Advanced Political Economy.