About scholar-engagé

I created this site to explore my scholarly ideas and work on global inequality and the way this inequality, in general, is reproduced by the global capitalist division of labour, that which Adam Smith explained in the following manner:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. … it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.

This inequality was explained by David Ricardo in the context of class divisions in the following passage:

The produce of the earth – all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes … the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital … and the labourers … But in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes, under the names of rent, profit, and wages, will be essentially different.

I am especially interested in how inequality between rich and poor countries, most especially European and African, has become permissible and how it is justified by a veritable (and unquestioned) loyalty to “the market” – and in particular, how this absolute loyalty and blind faith has steered global public policy-making since the end of the Second World War.

This permissibility and justification of inequality is the mainstay of liberal scholarship. For instance, the pre-eminent liberal international relations scholar, Robert Gilpin would insist that the institutions of global capitalism remain in place – as if there were no alternatives, not even conceivably – and acknowledge that they (the institutions) reproduce inequality between rich and poor countries in the world. The following passage, referring specifically to the World Trade Organisation and the global trade regime, is a typical expression of the permissibility of inequality:

[l]iberal trade theory does not argue that everyone will gain equally even if they do follow the proper policies… The argument for free trade is based not on grounds of equity and equal distribution, but on increased efficiency and the maximisation of world wealth.

Global public policy makers, those associated with the World Bank or think tanks in Washington would, themselves, legitimise inequality with expressions like the following, by a former high-ranking official of the World Bank, Nancy Birdsall:

…constructive inequality is the hallmark of the equal opportunity society, the US symbolises. Increases in this constructive inequality may simply reflect faster growth in income for the rich than the poor – but with all sharing in some growth…

Besides the fact that this rendering of inequality as permissable and even legitimate, Birdsall’s statement is also an arrogant expression of the way in which intellectuals and scholars from the United States – from George W Bush’s personal advisors, to officials at the World Bank – have for most of the post-war period, in highly moral tones of “liberal internationalism” and “democracy promotion, forged orthodoxy around the belief that what is good for the US was good for the world.

As such, while inequality as a state of affairs is my main concern, I am also concerned with what Brian Barry explained as ‘the ideology’ which justifies this condition. My research and teaching interests include, therefore, the orthodoxy that shores up (global) liberal capitalist hegemony; from the Economics orthodoxy promoted by the World Bank to the dominance of Neo-realism/Realism in International Relations scholarship – and in particular, the self-righteousness and lack of humility on the part of Western scholars and intellectuals who seem to have no compunction in telling people in dark-skinned countries in Asia and Africa, how they should run their lives.

I am reminded of a recent conversation with one such scholar who would proclaim that critical theorists (like myself) and postcolonial theorists have no idea about decision-making and ignore the way in which India, for example, steered its own economic policies, uninfluenced by the orthodoxy that underpins liberal capitalist hegemony, as if India’s policies emerged from the ether. This scholar also conveniently ignored the role that the International Finance Corporation (of the World Bank) has played in India since the mid-1950s, and the way in which private corporations and private investment often get a green light from the World Bank Group before they invest in an African and Asian country.

On this basis, then, this site will host my ideas, as a junior scholar (not to be confused with a privileged Western intellectual who went directly from high-school to university and now proclaims to the dark-skinned world how they should run their lives) and some of my scholarly and (more serious) popular writing and teaching-related issues.

For more information about Ismail Lagardien, click on the picture