A Form of Critical Philosophy of History

Another history of violence? Has violence not been sufficiently and extensively explained? Is it not before our eyes in the countless books, so that we would only have to ‘inform’ ourselves accordingly? What is the point of reconstructing history if we cannot expect something fundamentally new that leads beyond the known abysses of the history of violence?

History is full of dark shades that reach into the present. The past, however, does not stand still but forces each generation to look up and take a close look. Hot and cold procedures of memory bring this history to life. In the centre of the present discussion, these procedures are to be expanded by a special approach. The dark spots of history that are being talked about here are significant – they accompany us in all present actions. In a very generalised form, it is about visualising, perceiving and coping with the violence of past times. Violence has shaped past eras, and war has shown its many faces differently in each age. However, this violence has also been perceived as an evil in the long run and has been fought with serious initiatives.

The attempts to nurture war and make peace possible lead us to a difficult point in history. It is possible that we are at a point where the relations of violence need to be reinterpreted differently. But it is also possible that violence has only changed its face, giving rise to new narratives of violence.

The preconditions of such a history of violence are not simple. First of all, we assume a uniformity and generality that conditions the frivolous talk of a history: an ‘we’ stands in this history as the subject of action and a continuous line is drawn from the past to the present. In this respect alone, the present work exposes itself to various reproaches. Humanity as a collective subject is a mere insinuation – and to the same extent history should not look beyond particular cultures. In order to counter these possible critical objections, several points need to be clarified, which at the same time leads to the methodological premises of what follows.

Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the importance of communication in conflict management

• 2. To describe how negotiation works toward forming the entrepreneurial skills

• 3. To highlight the key tactics of communication for effective negotiation

• 4. To discuss how non-verbal communication plays an important role while negotiating with the other party

• 5. To learn the key aspects of persuasion skills demonstrated by the negotiator in negotiation

• 6. To understand the role of influencing skills in negotiation and conflicts

Communication Skills and Conflict Management

Communication is vital for everyone; it occurs when an individual or a group share, inform, guide, tell, persuade, convey and influence the other individual or group of people to attain one or more objectives and goals. This exchange of thoughts, ideas, feelings and emotions is all part of the process of communication.

The estimated 4,000 Greek-born adoptees are among the oldest group in modern history who were exported, en masse, for adoption. What followed was a tsunami of international adoptions. Children traveling, crisscrossing the globe, having been excised from their country of origin, from the arms of their mothers, from orphanages, to the embrace of strangers in points all over the world.

Korea. China. Romania. Vietnam. Ethiopia. Guatemala. Russia. This is to say nothing, of course, about the millions of domestic adoptions within countries that have been problematic and fraught with ethical and moral questions, not to mention legal scandals, in Ireland and the United States.

Although the practice of adoption has been in the public discourse, it was not until the important book, American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption (Viking, 2021), written by best-selling author and investigative journalist Gabrielle Glaser, aimed a stark spotlight at nefarious adoption practices in the United States, which were widespread and deep. She tells the story of the millions of adoptions in the United States through one single heartbreaking story of a baby whose parents were forced to relinquish him. His birth father had died and he was reunited, just months before his own death, with his mother and sister. His death was one that could have been prevented had he known his medical history years earlier.

Glaser writes, “The United States had little understanding of the possible long-term consequences when it launched a social experiment in which millions of babies were raised by families with whom they had no genetic bond and who knew little or nothing of their inheritance. Closed adoptions of babies born to single women were universally seen as a societal gain, a winwin for the mothers, adoptees, and adoptive couples. Most often they were anything but that.”

Glaser began a national conversation about adoption, which seemed to ignite a firestorm of activity that reverberated around the world— in newspaper articles, on television, in other books, on social media, among legal organizations helping adoptees, and for the adoptees themselves, who raised their voices louder than ever for the right to know who they are.

Introduction

Major interpreters of David Ricardo assess his contribution to political economy in vastly different terms. Karl Marx praises Ricardo's ‘scientific impartiality and love of truth’ (Marx 1954, p. 412) and the ‘honesty which so essentially distinguishes him from the vulgar economists’ (Marx 1959, p. 555; original emphasis). William Stanley Jevons is one in a row of critics who contended that the doctrine of the classical authors and especially Ricardo ‘is radically fallacious; it involves the attempt to determine two unknown quantities from one equation’ (Jevons [1871] 1965, p. 258; see also 258–59): profits and the level of output, given the real wage rate. Léon Walras reiterates the criticism: ‘In the language of mathematics one equation cannot be used to determine two unknowns’ (Walras [1874–77] 1954, §368), while Joseph A. Schumpeter stokes it up: according to him Ricardo's ‘fundamental problem’ was that he ‘wanted to solve in terms of an equation between four variables: net output equals rent plus profits plus wages’ (Schumpeter 1954, p. 569). Schumpeter also accuses Ricardo of ‘piling a heavy load of practical conclusions upon a tenuous groundwork’ (1954, p. 1171). The ‘Ricardian vice’ is said to consist in drawing bold policy conclusions from oversimplified and arbitrarily closed models of the economy. Knut Wicksell instead defends Ricardo against this kind of criticism: ‘the way in which Ricardo develops his argument […] is a model of strictly logical reasoning about a subject which seems, at first glance, to admit of so little precision’. And: ‘Ricardo's theory of value is, one finds, developed with a high degree of consistency and strictness’ (Wicksell [1893] 1954, pp. 34 and 40). He adds

Interestingly, a few years earlier Alfred Marshall dubs Ricardo the head of the ‘brilliant school of deductive reasoning’ (Marshall 1890, p. 629), and explains: ‘His strong constructive originality is the mark of the highest genius in all nations. […] Ricardo's power of threading his way without slip through intricate paths to new and unexpected results has never been surpassed’ (ibid, p. 629, n. 1).

Introduction

If sociologists suggest that Erving Goffman’s legacy is secure, they probably mean that there is a discipline-wide consensus that he was an important figure. The awkward word here is “was.” It might mean that even though his work is well thought of—and perhaps even revered—it is no longer central to the sociological questions and concerns of today. When Goffman was in his prime, he was a major part of American sociology, but perhaps his legacy is about his former status, not his enduring influence on the day-to-day working practices of the current generation of sociologists. The antonym of legacy is exactly this—what is current—and so to the extent that “Goffman” and “legacy” appear in the same sentence, it may be that Goffman is broadly admired but not necessarily still influential.

If people who are not sociologists talk about someone’s legacy, it is far more likely that what they have in mind is the contents of a will. A legacy in this more legal way of thinking refers to the cash that some lucky folks will inherit. Etymologically, the word legacy comes to us from the Latin, legatus. This refers to a “delegated person” precisely in the sense of someone specified to receive something in a will.

There is also an interesting modern use of the word “legacy” from computer science. There a legacy refers to either a software or hardware system that has been superseded but is hard to get rid of because so many end users like it and do not want to give it up. So, a statistician might, referring to the SPSS program, say it has a legacy, just meaning that she wishes that her colleagues would drop it and switch to R.

This chapter is about the consequences of thinking about Goffman’s legacy in different ways. The argument I will make is the following: Goffman was a genius at developing concepts that easily capture our imagination and then securing them with poignant examples. As a result, he is widely cited because a large and diverse group of researchers pick up concepts from Goffman’s books and papers and apply them in their own work.

Introduction

Of the many statements that can be made about modernity, Charles Taylor’s idea stands out: that we live in a normative, value-bound space (Taylor, 1994). Life is, in the simplest terms, not mere physical behaviour, but qualified, location- and culture-mediated life. This very general statement is remarkable because it expresses a sense that in times of war and in the face of violence we have to face the value-bound dimensions. The history and present of war force us to come to an understanding with others about what still sounds very vague and indeterminate here as norm or value.

War has always been a reality in the midst of our everyday lives; some wars, however, receive special attention for obvious reasons, some forms of violence are disturbing and make us think. War is always not only the business of politicians and strategists, but also the subject and occasion for intense discourse. One step further, war is also an object of learning, of course as a ‘subject’, as educational content to be taught. But in an overarching sense, war as a historical phenomenon is even an occasion for implicit pedagogy. This is true even for contemporary wars, whose effects and scope no one can estimate.

Based on the idea that there is an implicit pedagogy of history and that this pedagogy is particularly directed towards the course of wars, the following reflections should be understood as follows. The central motif goes back to a philosophical figure of thought: How is human life, and more precisely its value, to be judged? The question aims at the way we perceive normative and empirical phenomena and how they find their way into our moral grammar. It is by no means trivial and self-evident.

This basic idea can be unfolded in simple sentences with lifeworld seriousness. People suffer from war. The sentence is seemingly trivial; it claims no originality. It could refer to the past, to a situation of the Thirty Years’ War perhaps, or to a war of the present. Its ethical quality can be seen in a linguistic-theoretical perspective. At first glance, we seem to be able to extract a moral statement from the facts.

In these times: the sentence is difficult to digest. It refers to the presence of wars that are disturbing in their presence and irritating in their form. In February 2022, war moved onto the agenda of the international order; unlike other wars, Russia’s attack on Ukrainian territory seemed to mark a turning point of which no one could say what options it opened up and in what direction it would point at all.

The present reflections must now distance themselves from current and time-bound events, if only because the overview of events cannot be assumed. The flood of publications and commentaries alone does not help to do justice to the dynamics of events, and only when this war, like many others before it, has been lost in the depths of history will it be possible to make more substantial statements.

Nevertheless, the fact that war enters the consciousness with all sharpness cannot be ignored. There is a need to deal with the phenomenon of war without being able to advance or influence the course of history. The reflections are thus again comparable to the flight of the eagle; they survey a wide field of violence and probe the violent events from a distance. The proximity to war, that is what affected people in contested zones have to endure, cannot trivially be produced; it cannot even be imagined or virtually generated.

The intrusion of violence into the present is remarkable in several respects. It is accompanied by a feeling of overwhelming and suddenness, as if a previously perfect world had been turned upside down and as if one had fallen back into the past. These are, however, ‘feelings’ that are understandable and plausible with increasing proximity. In view of this, is it necessary to emphasise that this war, too, must be placed in the context of the known history of war, and that the face of war is familiar in so many regions? Of course, this war is disturbing in the European consciousness – and this is probably also true when remembering the violence that was and is an equally oppressive historical fact in Southeastern Europe, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Georgia or Chechnya.

This war is as disturbing as wars are by their nature; there is no need for self-incrimination and accusations in this respect.

Introduction

The aims of this essay are twofold: (i) to understand Ricardo's economics in relation to other classical political economists, especially Smith, Sismondi and Malthus and (ii) to provide an alternative conceptual architecture for better understanding contemporary societies. Thus, it serves as a companion in the above two ways. While the locus of discussion is Ricardo's explanation of relative prices and income distribution (value theory), this shall be complemented by a discussion of his approach to economics and his theory of economic growth.

In Ricardo's index to the Principles, there are five entries on Malthus, one entry on Sismondi, and over 20 entries on Smith. Ricardo writes approvingly of Malthus for presenting ‘to the world … the true doctrine of rent’ and of Smith and Sismondi for having improved the ‘science’ of ‘Political Economy’ but notes that they have not grasped the principles of rent and therefore that of income distribution (Works, I, 5–6).

The essay is organized as follows. Section 2 highlights the role of value theory in Ricardo's political economy and for economics in general. Section 3 provides an overview of Ricardo's method. Section 4 outlines Ricardo's critical engagement with use value and exchange value. Section 5 discusses Ricardo's theory of value and distribution. Section 6 engages with Ricardo's growth theory and the role of demand therein. Section 7 offers a conclusion.

The Raison d’etre of Value Theory

Before stating the raison d’etre of value theory, it is necessary to present the aims or ‘objects’ of political economy as laid out by Smith.

In short, it may be stated that Smith envisioned political economy as a science which has at its core the enrichment of the people. Therefore, the determinants and growth of wages and profits constitute a central part of political economy.

Too many lives. Too many stories. Not enough truth. A lifetime of silent tears. On some days it is completely overwhelming.

I was born in Methoni, Messinia, Greece, in 1955, the second daughter of Evangelia and Emmanuel Diktakis. It is a name well known in Crete for the celebrated Captain Emmanuel Diktakis, known for his bravery, his devotion to family, and love for his homeland. In an epic battle to lead a fight for Cretan land and birthright in 1840, he was slaughtered in the hills and beheaded. His legacy lives on in my birth father’s name; he is my ancestor, and part of who I am.

I was not an orphan.

My birth father was in the Greek army, serving in the prefecture near Ioannina. My birth mother, Evangelia, was from a small village not far from there. Apparently, there were many suitors who might have shared a life with her, but she was paired with my birth father by her brother. He was the one who ultimately made a very important and personal decision for her. It was a proxenia, an arranged marriage. She had no choice in the matter, and so she left her family and returned to Methoni with her new husband.

I was born exactly 14 months after my sister, Sophia. As is traditional, because she was the first daughter, she was named after our father’s mother. I was named for my adoptive mother’s mother, which perhaps is also traditional. I wonder what name my birth parents would have given me. Certainly, I had a name in the first three months prior to my adoptive mother’s arrival in Greece. It is so distressing that no one can tell me what it was.

I find it difficult to believe that Evangelia had six pregnancies after giving birth to me. Knowing this, I cannot even begin to understand the logic in giving me away. Again, I wonder what hold my adoptive mother’s cousin, George, had over them. The story goes that George coerced my birth father, and that he, in turn, coerced my birth mother to give me away. Was her desire to give me a better life greater than the pain of relinquishing her child to a stranger?

In the twenty-first century, the world has witnessed an unprecedented surge in the acceptability of entrepreneurship as a career. It is getting widely popular as a career option for youngsters and middle-aged people to solve societal problems and add significant value to the customers’ experience. Right from an idea to the execution and growth of an enterprise, entrepreneurship entails several steps and processes leading to the desired outcomes. Thus, it calls for unique skillsets by entrepreneurs. However, in each phase of entrepreneurship—from idea to the opportunity, from the opportunity to the business plan, from the business plan to funding the venture, from funding the venture to launching, growing and ending the venture—the entrepreneur needs to connect, communicate and empathize with the counterpart to set up, run and grow the entrepreneurial venture.

Specially, as mentioned, communication has a very crucial role to play in the entrepreneurial success of any venture. The important aspects of communication, such as, influence, persuasion and ability to convince others, are highly essential. The structured and polished approach to understand and apply such an advanced communication skill is recognized as negotiation. Thus, the art of negotiation is pivotal to the success of any entrepreneurial venture.

The book encompasses the entrepreneurs’ specific issues, dilemmas and complex situations in the VUCA environment. Various types and levels of negotiations are conducted between the parties involved to safeguard the mutual interests, goals and long-term relationships. Right from the beginning of startup idea to the exit of the venture involves several negotiation-based planning, strategies, tactics and description of cases in relation to competitors, suppliers, creditors, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, customers, government entities, civil societies, regulatory systems, international agencies and so on. Such varied forms of negotiation led to the venture creation, growth, expansion, diversification and, eventually, the successful exit of the venture in the longer run.

Negotiation skills are a universal requirement. However, the nature of problems differs for the entrepreneurs, unlike senior executives with limited authority and confined area of operations. Entrepreneurs are the highest risk takers in any business context. They are the ones who are going to lose entirely if the entrepreneurial venture fails.

It was another woman who gave me life. Though physically absent, her constant presence came by way of persistent reminders that I was of someone else, from someplace else, an import, brought to the United States to a new, another Greek family.

I was labeled an orphan. An orphan. That was me all my life. But I wasn’t an orphan at all. I had a mother, who knew me, touched me, held me. And I had a father, too, who might be out there somewhere. But I wasn’t an orphan. I was left. Abandoned. And then signed away to other people. Wasn’t I lucky? She loved me so much that she chose for me a better life.

She didn’t want to leave me. She had to leave me. Is that even true?

She.

Whoever she was, she was with me, if only for a few precious, painful days, weeks, months. She was with me. She still is.

With me.

My story achieved folk legend status in Gary, Indiana, where I grew up. Not because it was so important, or that I was so important, but because it had been told and repeated over and over again by someone, anyone, who knew the story or was in our lives when I arrived from Greece. I was “special” because I was adopted and I was the adopted child throughout my life. “A souvenir baby,” one local newspaper article said about me.

I was left in an orphanage in Athens. Dozens and dozens of babies. Overcrowded. Dirty. Two, sometimes three to a crib, they said. I was the only one awake when a Greek couple had come looking for a baby for their American-born daughter and son-in-law, who could not afford the trip themselves.

They were looking for a baby girl. Up and down the cramped aisles of cribs with steel bars, they gingerly stepped, staring at tiny sleeping faces. But every time they passed where I could catch of glimpse of them, I raised myself up on my two, small, stiffened arms and followed them as if to say “what about me?”

During the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, I graduated with a BA in sociology, and I had hoped to continue as a sociologist. I had planned on accepting one of several offered fellowships for a sociology graduate program to either Berkeley or the University of Pennsylvania, but because of the army draft which would have made that impossible, I instead went to study in a yeshiva in Brooklyn, where I would be granted a divinity deferment from the army. As a result, the only way to continue studies in sociology was to simultaneously go to the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where the classes were all in the evening, when the yeshiva was closed. The faculty members there were excellent, and it was there I first encountered Peter Ludwig Berger, whose life and work I wish to recall here. Commuting between the yeshiva and the New School, I moved between a totally Jewish environment and something quite different. I felt this especially when in Berger’s classes, where I learned—among other topics—about modernity and its effect on the changing nature of pluralism, religion, the impact of culture on knowledge and worldview. He seemed to me like a German Jew, with an accent that reminded me of many I’d met but I quickly learned he was Lutheran. His work always struck me as powerfully relevant to my interests (perhaps because one of his teachers, Carl Mayer, was mine too and helped shape my own understanding of sociology).

If where I have come from shaped me, I assume it no less likely than where my teachers came from shaped them. While it would be a mistake to reduce the large themes that Berger explored to projections of his biography, I would like to focus on certain events in his life, in particular, the formative years of his adolescence, which I believe structured and constructed some of the interests that drove him to these subjects. That is my purpose here. It is also an opportunity for me to share a late-in-life discovery I made about him.

Introduction

Erving Goffman’s analyses operate in a constant “what if”-mode. They filter the world through different metaphors, big and small, to show the reader what new insights could be gained if we shifted the understanding of phenomena away from their usual, everyday, expected framing. This is, perhaps, a description of all of sociology (Berger 1971), but Goffman’s metaphorical reorderings take on a special playfulness. They transcend the purely analytical, structured style of much of sociology and opt for an aesthetics of mischievous narration instead. In good narrative fashion, the style is show, don’t tell: Goffman takes us into vignettes, stories, without outlining a strict analytical structure. The metaphorical reordering lies in the retelling, in the story itself, and in a myriad of terms introduced in often unstable ways, to be found by readers. Its analyses are buried deep in what appear, on the surface, to be engaging stories, sprinkled with terms Goffman uses in often unsystematic ways (Manning 1980, 258).

Goffman’s metaphors are usually practical and contextual, not explicated. Three metaphors make prominent, practical appearances in Goffman’s work: the theater, the ritual, and language. Like all of sociology’s reorientation of perspective, these metaphors are ever so slightly unsettling, going against the grain of the quotidian life they analyze. They utilize common juxtapositions: In everyday framing, life is supposed to be looked at as real, not as theater; as mundane, not religious. Out of this phase-shifting reimagination through slightly unsettling metaphors, the “shudder of recognition” (Scheff 2005) arises.

In this chapter, I want to draw attention to a fourth metaphor: the game. In Goffmanian fashion, I want to start with scenes from everyday life to then go through the three main elements that assemble the game metaphor in Goffman’s texts: Strategic Interaction (1969) breaks the world down to moves, plays, and games. The extended essay “Where the Action Is” (from Interaction Ritual, 1967) highlights the fragility of the social order, and the way games serve to create dangers and opportunities for meaning. The essay “Fun in Games” (from Encounters, 1961) focuses on how meanings are highlighted in games, and how facades serve to present the illusion of stability.