领导权理论与后现代思潮

英国著名教授E·拉克劳以其拓展马克思主义的革命理论而闻名,并成为西方“后马克思主义”的著名代表人物之一。在其代表作《领导权与社会主义策略》(“Hegemony”一词,曾有“文化霸权”等译法;但本文译者认为,在拉克劳的著作中,他主要是在“国家、革命、阶级和革命的领导者”等意义上来谈论这一范畴的,所以在这里把“hegemony”译为“领导权”)一书中,拉克劳把马克思主义的领导权理论与后结构主义等当代“时髦”理论相结合的尝试引人注目,但也备受争议。为此,他在另一本著作《我们时代革命的新反思》一书中,系统地回答了《领导权与社会主义策略》一书中的有关问题。这些问题涉及其领导权理论与社会主义革命在当今社会现实中所面临的理论困境,包括革命的主体、阶级的构成、阶级斗争、对立和认同等等。此外,领导权理论还涉及其与现代西方哲学思潮的内在逻辑联系,如胡塞尔的现象学、维特根斯坦的后分析哲学、德里达的解构主义以及其他的后现代主义理论等。针对这些理论和现实问题,拉克劳一一进行了认真的回答和阐述。英国《新左派评论》编委会的部分成员罗宾(Robin Blackburn)、彼德(Peter Dews)和安娜(Anna-Marie Smith)于1988年5月策划专访拉克劳。以下访谈是从拉克劳《我们时代革命的新反思》一书中选译     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.     

A Bayesian method for classification and discrimination

We discuss Bayesian analyses of traditional normal-mixture models for classification and discrimination. The development involves application of an iterative resampling approach to Monte Carlo inference, commonly called Gibbs sampling, and demonstrates routine application. We stress the benefits of exact analyses over traditional classification and discrimination techniques, including the ease with which such analyses may be performed in a quite general setting, with possibly several normal-mixture components having different covariance matrices, the computation of exact posterior classification probabilities for observed data and for future cases to be classified, and posterior distributions for these probabilities that allow for assessment of second-level uncertainties in classification.     

State of the unions: Assessment by elite American labor leaders

One hundred and sixty-four elite union leaders in the United States completed a survey to assess the condition of the American labor movement and the factors affecting it. The respondents included high-level international union and state federation officers, central labor presidents, and 58 shop stewards. This study compares the responses of these labor officials and finds that they have similar, negative assessments of the condition of the American labor movement. The study also finds that these leaders agree that the most important factors affecting the labor movement are collective bargaining rights, union leadership, union member solidarity, and the NLRB.     

EDITH WHARTON'S SICK ROLE

In this article, we conduct a textual analysis of Edith Wharton's 1911 novel, Ethan Frome . We offer three readings. The first presents Wharton's account of illness through a framework developed foru decades later by Talcott Parsons. Wharton's sick role was less medico-centric than Parsons; it emphasized the importance of class, gender and community in defining and legitimizing the sick role. Our second reading explores the socially constructed nature of roles in illness. The sick role as portrayed by Wharton is not the social fact later conceived by Parsons, but a social construct with no determinate reference beyond that which the local community is willing to grant it. Our third reading examines the social context, particularly the power relations, within which this story of illness has been constructed.