BURA Collection:
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/207
2024-03-28T15:51:14Z‘A High Brow Scheme to Mess People About’: Missed Opportunities to Reform Staff Training in the British Army, 1919-1939.
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/23173
Title: ‘A High Brow Scheme to Mess People About’: Missed Opportunities to Reform Staff Training in the British Army, 1919-1939.
Authors: Farquharson, Iain Alexander
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2021-01-01T00:00:00ZSir Basil Thomson and the directorate of intelligence: A British experiment in 'high policing’, 1919 -1921
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/19235
Title: Sir Basil Thomson and the directorate of intelligence: A British experiment in 'high policing’, 1919 -1921
Authors: Majothi, Mohamed Hanif
Abstract: Within current British Intelligence literature, there is an absence of any detailed
examination of the Directorate of Intelligence (DoI), led by Sir Basil Thomson, a
policeman. The DoI was created mostly from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch
in 1919 by Cabinet decision, primarily to counter post-Great War Bolshevik inspired
activism. It became the first civilian domestic Intelligence organisation in Britain,
heralding the formalisation of ‘high policing’, despite the natural British dislike of such
‘Continental’ practices.
This research, utilising traditional historical archival methods, is largely underpinned
by Brodeur’s ‘high/low’ policing theory. Firstly, the original English aversion to
‘Continental’ policing practices is explained with reference to the evolution of the
French Police in the early nineteenth century. This is set against the backdrop of
natural liberties enjoyed in England. Specifically, it was the suppressive ‘high policing’
under Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s Minister of Police that was of concern. This was an
important factor in preventing the inclusion of such practices when the Metropolitan
Police and Provincial Forces were formed.
Secondly, in examining the DoI, it is argued that rather than the military, the police
were given the domestic Intelligence function for constitutional reasons. Thomson’s
weekly reports to the Cabinet provide insight into how he organised the DoI to execute
its mandate. Three examples are detailed to show its work: the 1919 Police Strike, the
Nationalist insurgency in Ireland and associated violence on the mainland as well as
counter-Bolshevik propaganda.
Thirdly, negative accepted wisdoms in literature regarding Thomson are challenged,
showing that despite the DoI’s sudden abolition in 1921, it had been efficient and had
provided valuable intelligence to government. An aberrant recommendation by the
1921 Secret Service Committee led to the DoI’s abrupt termination by Prime Minister
Lloyd George. Efficiency was the reason given for his decision, without Cabinet
consultation, when the prevailing view among some Parliamentarians was that that the
organisation was too ‘Continental’ in its work, something that was unacceptable with
the lessening of the post-war crises.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2019-01-01T00:00:00ZMechanicism as science and ideology: Hobbe's epistemological revolution in civil science
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/13800
Title: Mechanicism as science and ideology: Hobbe's epistemological revolution in civil science
Authors: Bardin, Andrea
Abstract: In the seventeenth century a new science of motion emerged that later developed into what we call today classical mechanics. The epistemology of early modern mechanics was split between technical experimentation and mathematical formalisation. ‘Mechanicism’, Cartesianism in primis, was a philosophical project to both preserve the theoretical and technical efficacy of this science and integrate it into a new world picture. In this historical context mechanical philosophy therefore played a double role. On the one hand it was part of a revolutionary event opening new frontiers for materialist thought. On the other hand, as a world picture, it originated a new ideological framework for metaphysical dualism. This thesis uses this historical and philosophical background to radically reconsider the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. During the 1640s Hobbes’s scientia civilis progressively incorporated the dualistic epistemology of Descartes’s mechanicism into materialist philosophy by privileging one of the two structural features of modern science: the tendency towards ‘deduction’ rather than experimentation. This philosophical gesture, simultaneously epistemological and ideological, had considerable political consequences. For this reason Hobbes’s political theory will be read as an ideological response to the non-geometrical and non-mechanical functioning of ‘matter’, including ‘human matter’, evidenced by the threatening experimental practices carried on during the first half of the seventeenth century in both the Galilean science of nature and the English Civil War. My wider hypothesis is that this profoundly idealistic agenda still informs our understanding of nature and of the body politic. It reduces the open method of science to the outdated metaphysical picture of it provided by Descartes, and suffocates politics itself by neutralising the emergence of political conflict and experimentation, labelling them as not only inessential but also dangerous to the body politic. On the contrary, philosophical materialism invites us to understand the self-organising tendency of matter as an undeniable risk implicit in the functioning of all systems, the social system included.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2015-01-01T00:00:00ZMarkets, institutions and the Polanyian challenge: A theoretical study of the new institutionalist economic history of Douglass C. North
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/13579
Title: Markets, institutions and the Polanyian challenge: A theoretical study of the new institutionalist economic history of Douglass C. North
Authors: Krul, Matthijs
Abstract: In this study, I examine the New Institutionalist Economic History (NIEH) of Douglass C. North from a historiographical and philosophical perspective. As a point of departure for this purpose I take North’s critical engagement with the primitivism-modernism debate in premodern economic history, as represented in his early work by the ‘challenge of Karl Polanyi’. This challenge, I argue, has given shape to the development of the NIEH in its various stages of theoretical elaboration. Therefore, understanding its contextual significance is indispensable for making sense of North’s oeuvre as a whole. On my reading, North interpreted the challenge of Polanyi to mean combining two methodological conceptions previously not united in one work. On the one hand, North’s NIEH extends the scope of economic theory to the study of the longue durée of economic history; while on the other hand North seeks to theorize the importance of historical variation in sociocultural institutions for understanding why there are rarely complete or well-functioning markets in most of economic history. North considers neoclassical economics suitable for neither of these purposes. Yet his critique of Polanyi’s substantivist-primitivist approach is primarily based on the absence of an integration of his project with the tools of economic theory. For this purpose, North therefore adopted the theory of transaction cost economics, also called New Institutional Economics (NIE), to this new ambitious end. More than perhaps any other author North has been responsible for extending the scope and sophistication of this economics based approach in the study of economic history.
In the present work, I discuss to what extent this approach has been successful in its own aims, internally consistent, and to what extent it is plausible as a historiographical approach from an ‘external’ point of view. I do this by combining a close reading and interpretation of a variety of North’s writings, focusing in particular on the most contemporary version of his work - which has not been much studied - with a methodological and theoretical discussion of various major themes in or aspects of his work from the viewpoints of historiography, anthropology, and philosophy of social science. These themes include (among others) North’s understanding of the functioning of markets in politics and economics, his approach to choice theory, rationality, and game theory, his use or neglect of evolutionary concepts, the meaning of embeddedness in his work, and North’s contractarian anthropology.
As this work shows, North’s NIEH is situated in a difficult intermediate position within larger debates in economic thought: between primitivism and modernism, between substantivism and formalism (in the anthropological sense), and most significantly, between the ‘new mainstream’ of economic theory and the quest for successive endogenisation of the institutional context of economic behavior. This certainly speaks for the ambition and sophistication of North’s historiographical approach, something which has only increased with the further development of his theory. But in his quest to unite the best insights of choice theory with New Institutionalist economics as well as incorporating the ‘anthropological’ level of fully socialized beliefs, preferences, and how they give rise to institutional variation in history, North frequently seeks to have his cake and eat it. The persistent methodological ambiguities in his work give rise to problems of internal consistency and external plausibility, which are present from the very inauguration of his NIEH research programme. The subsequent development of his work has not, I argue, been able to overcome this fundamental problem. For this reason, while much of North’s toolset and his overarching ambitions are valuable developments in economic historical theory, he does not achieve his aim of overcoming the challenge of Karl Polanyi. Without a more decisive break with his original economic microfoundations, North’s NIEH project cannot ultimately live up to its grand ambitions.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2016-01-01T00:00:00Z