The article examines the history of British private investigators. Historians and criminologists have shown how the police have never monopolized security or protection. The same can be said about investigation, although this is much less well understood. Private investigators have a key place in the social distribution of investigation, widely portrayed as both heroic uncoverers of the truth and as invasive "snoops." Their work therefore opens wider questions about who should be able to know what about whom. This article focuses on the period between 1965 and 1975, which saw a range of criminal investigations, public inquiries, and press reports around private investigators, against the background of shifts in data technologies and cultures of "transparency." This article asks why "invasions of privacy" by private investigators caused so much public concern in this period, but the attempts to restrict their activities largely petered out. It argues that the answer lies in uncertainties of the category of privacy and, more specifically, the unresolved role of the British state. In the context of changing relationships between the state, market, and the wider distribution of investigation, privacy protections did not meaningfully distinguish between who was accessing information and the reasons they were doing so. The article draws on sources including the evidence submitted to the 1972 Younger Committee on Privacy, the papers of the Director of Public Prosecutions, published memoirs, and local and national newspapers.
Abstract Four recent monographs have inspired me to reflect on studying friendship across contexts and disciplines. I write from the perspective of an anthropologist, however, whose discipline has long had trouble being truly interested in friendship. Part of the problem comes from relative perceptions of friendship’s universality: friendship has been seen as either not universal, too universal, or not universal(ly important) enough to merit much sustained attention. The works under consideration here show that even beyond anthropology, scholarship on friendship and other topics is always affected by questions of universalism. Specifically, these works indicate that relatively unreflective positions on universalist modes of description (including the reaction to them, what it means to seek particulars) can curtail understandings. This is not a blanket rejection of universalizing orientations. Rather, I argue that, instead of ignoring the problem of the universal—simply assuming that universalizing is not what particularists do—we need to understand how universalism appears in our scholarship, which means understanding what the limits of particularism are, too. Ultimately, if we can admit that elements of universalism always shadow how scholars think, we can then also concede that what some scholars have called generics can sometimes help us to be better, more measured particularists. To this end, I offer the generic of friendship’s mystic affordances, to improve our empirical studies of friendship and even our coming politics. And with regard to our politics, I note in conclusion that we might also consider embracing “a” (though not “the”) mystic of friendship.
Lauren Benton reminds us that to write about piracy as historians (and anthropologists) is to engage in projects of “myth-making and myth-busting.” As she notes, pirates are either imagined as “colorful rogues…inherently anti-authoritarian actors who possessed a penchant for experimenting with alternative forms of political solidarity,” or they are depicted in a less renegade fashion, one that shows “their integration in established, if fluid, networks of patronage and power.” Instead of colorful outlaws, Benton (2014) argues that pirates are more akin to lawyers engaged in “legal posturing,” converting “booty into property.” As political actors, their politics are often far from revolutionary. Benton’s scholarship has been at the forefront of this latter school of myth-busting, and her work has been inspirational in rethinking the relationship between piracy, politics, and maritime space in order to tell a different kind of sea yarn. As she wrote in her 2005 CSSH essay, “[i]n my sea yarn, the oceans have a quality of lumpiness about them, pirates strain not to break the law, and international norms take shape not at Westphalia but at the edges of the Indian Ocean” (Benton 2005: 701–2).
Abstract This article examines Ibn Khaldûn not as a stable, timeless precursor of modern social science but as a figure constituted through colonial translation and reception. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English translations of the Muqaddimah , it argues that Ibn Khaldûn emerged in modern scholarship as a colonial archive—a site where translation, race, and epistemic authority intersected to produce new forms of historical and sociological knowledge. Through close comparison of Arabic originals and their European translations, the article shows how colonial epistemologies reconfigured Ibn Khaldûn’s analytical categories—particularly those concerning tribe, generation, civilization, and climate—into racialized frameworks foreign to his medieval context. It further demonstrates how this translated Ibn Khaldûn became selectively relevant to European social science while remaining excluded from its canonical genealogies. Finally, the article critically reassesses the enduring claim that Ibn Khaldûn articulated racist views about Black populations, showing that this attribution itself belongs to the colonial archive generated through translation rather than to the epistemic logic of the original text. The article thus contributes to comparative histories of knowledge, colonial epistemology, and the global formation of the social sciences.
Abstract When Francis Fukuyama described the collapse of state socialism as marking the “end of history,” he captured the imagination of the post-Cold War moment, rendering the fall of the Berlin Wall a metonym for the definitive eclipse of communism and the advent of a new era of liberal capitalist hegemony. For Europe’s Left, the term became associated with a moment of profound demoralization. Fukuyama’s end of history, however, was only one moment of a longer and more expansive crisis in the socialist order of time. This crisis can be traced back to the global economic upheavals of the 1970s that impacted both social democracy in the West and state socialism in the East. A decade before crowds forced their way across a divided Berlin, socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain had entered an existential decline. This article argues that the sovereign debt crises that beset European states in the final decade of the Cold War disrupted socialism’s regime of historicity. It develops this argument with reference to late-socialist Yugoslavia and demonstrates how the temporal conditions of sovereign indebtedness shaped popular culture. Through a reading of the films Balkanski špijun (1984) and Već viđeno (1987), the article argues that the erosion of socialism’s horizons of expectation fostered a new experience of historical time in which the past returned in uncanny, troubling, and ultimately destructive ways.
