Professor Jim Livesey

Professor Jim Livesey

Nominated Fellow, March-April 2025

Home Institution: University of Galway

Jim Livesey is Established Professor of History and currently on sabbatical following his role as Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Galway. He is concurrently Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrew and acts as the Irish Representative on the Research Strategy Group of the European University Association. 

Jim works on historical instances of collective action problems and is currently working on a comparative history of transitions in history as a contribution to our understanding of the just transition. His monographs on the origins of social democracy, on civil society and on adaptation to technological change in rural France have been published by Yale and Harvard University Presses. He is currently PI on the Atlantic Futures project, a capacity-building project in the social sciences in the West of Ireland funded by the Higher Education Authority and is Co-I on PACESETTERS, a Horizon Europe project on the contribution of the creative economy to the climate transition.

While at IASH Jim is developing his new project “Global Ireland and the Just Transition”.

Project title: Global Ireland and the Just Transition

In his groundbreaking economic history of West Africa Toby Green focuses on explaining the divergence in experience between societies, states and peoples around the Atlantic littoral in the early-modern period. He articulates the crux of the problem when he addresses the history of the Akan and Fante peoples of the Gold Coast, who had enjoyed a dominant position in the early-modern gold trade. Green offers this example as a particularly illuminating case for a general issue:

Given the centrality of the gold trade here for so many years, this is an important region in which to study the wider features examined in this book. How can such an organized system of trade founded on gold lead to political disorder and the eventual undermining of the capital base of a society, when free-trade theory suggests that trade leads to prosperity? Can, in fact, the trading relationship of gold and other currencies here go some way towards illuminating what has been described by some economists as a ‘reversal of fortune’ where the extent of a region’s economic interaction with European trading empires, on the one hand, is linked in this model to the subsequent economic disadvantage that accrued on the other?[1]

Green’s work, and the allied work in the new history of capitalism, dispels the last traces of modernisation theory that even subtle versions of subaltern studies and the new institutionalism left in place.[2] In Green’s account of capitalist development, the institutional landscape of a society is determined by that society’s relationship to the forms of capital and currency it uses and reproduces. Positions in the totality opened up strategies for elites and subalterns. In consequence extractive institutions were not an indigenous feature of societies unable to innovate, but an outcome of engagement with the emerging global economy. Institutions, crucially Atlantic racial chattel slavery, were the outcome of engagement. The equilibria that were established within and between societies at the turn of the nineteenth century then became determining for the next two.

Green’s work, and that of others, exhausts the possibilities of contingent development pathways within the constitution of capitalist modernity. That is a huge achievement, but it is not enough. The pragmatic criteria that animate communicative action, either successfully or unsuccessfully, can no longer be represented by even the most complex version of political economy. The exigencies of the climate transition render uncertain the criteria of evaluation that animate and have animated “successful” societies. The “principle of utility” identified by Hegel from his reflection on European experience as the master category of modernity, uniting faith and reason, through which “both worlds are reconciled, and heaven is transported to the earth below” cannot be extended to natural capital, which has intrinsic value and resists the key quality of substitutability.[3] That which is priceless has no utility. 

Curiously, as a consequence, the societies which have been most successfully adapted to contemporary cultural order, that exhibit power as sovereignty and can naturalise their deep preferences as maximised utility, are those in which the normative orientations for a just transition are likely hardest to discern. If we are in a genuine moment of transition, if the grounding norms of collective action are in flux, then closest adaptation to the existing order is disabling.[4] As another consequence, a critical theory cannot therefore be usefully postimperial or postcolonial. Subversion, mimicry or queering of the master category is pointless, when the master category has subverted itself. Instead we have to find historical resources, akin to the “double consciousness” attributed to the Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy, which already incarnate alternative normative orientations.[5]

This project will address the position of societies and peoples who enjoyed relative independence in the early period, lost it in the establishment of the capitalist equilibrium, but have now emerged again as political agents. This set is very different from the civilisations, such as Persia, India and China, that were the objects of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. Those, along with Russia, now represented alternative versions of empire, not alternatives to empire. Peoples such as the Akan or the Irish were never competitors for empire, and Ghana and the Republic of Ireland have a very different form of nationhood to India or China. 

If we do not take the nation as simply a natural category then how do we understand the experience of this set of peoples? Post-colonial nationalism obscures this question. As the most insightful thinkers on the nature of post-colonial nationality have explained, the seemingly “natural” claim to self-representation becomes articulated through a mimicry of the cultural forms of empire it aspires to overcome.[6] Indigeneity is another false trail, as migration and cultural exchange have utterly transformed these spaces. The question is genuinely open.

The hypothesis that animates our project is that there are important common features exhibited in the communicative rationality of the nations and peoples that “failed” in the early-modern period, and have now re-emerged. This trajectory is not universal. The first peoples of North America do not enjoy any degree of political independence. The challenge is to move in two directions at once, empirical and theoretical. We need to understand the common early-modern experience of peoples and societies in places such as Ireland, Ghana, Peru, Morocco, Indonesia or Senegal. Within this comparative historical approach lies the difficulty of a strategy of recognising in these very difficult histories a positive core. This may pose ethical challenges of a high order. For example, Ireland had a terrible experience in the last, industrial, transition. Leaving aside political issues, the country deindustrialised, suffered a catastrophic famine leading to population collapse and the near death of the Irish language. That history is a resource when seeking to explain how traumatic transition can be, if it is not just, but writing from Galway it is not acceptable to turn what is still visible trauma into a cautionary tale or the baseline for a comparative history. That comparative project needs to find a voice through which it can be articulated without causing moral offence.

There is an example of this kind of work. Black intellectuals resisted the manner in which the problem of injustice in modern societies was systematically falsified through invoking utility and a shared civil society. They did not deny that a world in common had been made, but even as the world is made, and as a form of communicative rationality is established, its roots in injustice persist and make that world unstable. In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois slows up Hegel’s dialectical relationship between the workers and the lords, dwelling on the moment of labouring in emergent conditions of freedom that Hegel swiftly passes through on his route to resolution. DuBois freezes the Hegelian process precisely at the point where the labouring slave is doubly conscious of the value of their work, and the disdain of the master, to express the “double-aimed struggle of the black artisan- on the one hand to escape the contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other had to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde- could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause”.[7] The agony of being trapped and unable to achieve “the end of his strivings, to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation” is for DuBois the essential experience of racism.[8] He is also highly sensitive to the price, in terms of continued willed ignorance, that has to be paid by those who desire to retain the privileges of mastery, “all in all, we black men seem to the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness”.[9] Coates expresses the same thought from the other shore, “the dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing”.[10] DuBois takes that insight, that racism is based on the willed refusal to allow the conditions of objective freedom to emerge, to ground his view that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”, the cause of global systematic irrationality.[11]

The further hypothesis is that the underlying commonality between these situations is adaptation to insecurity. Successful imperial states satisfied Hobbes’s criterion that they made their citizens secure. In so doing they rendered every other kind of political entity insecure. Of course viewed from the other side, the expectation of security, of control, is and was itself a kind of systemic irrationality. Security for the citizen of the imperial core resulted in the hanging threat of violence for those beyond that core. Every individual, family and society that did not enjoy the security guarantee of the Hobbesian state reconciled itself to insecurity, normally in very creative ways. The experience of restricted or conditioned agency is precisely the situation to which the species will have to adapt itself if it can successfully traverse the green transition. Recognising an absolute other which does not and should not conform to discursive rationality, but which has to be represented and recognised, reflects the situation of non-imperial peoples. A central goal of the project will be to develop the narrative between early-modern experience and contemporary public rationality in this mode. Our hypothesis is that in areas such as economic policy, security, secularisation, creative expression, gender identity, digital engagement and human capital development we will find clear patterns within which a sustained and recognizable form of rationality frames and animates critical rational debate in public.

This is an ambitious project which will demand sustained interdisciplinary collaboration between very different kinds of institutions operating with very different resource bases. The only universities that could aspire to hold these fissiparous elements together are themselves global universities, which does create some tension. Galway feels like a credible transmission or gearing between the global power of large US institutions and the other partners. The strategy of using these kinds of global connections to identify a different globality constitutes a form of the alternative rationality we hypothesise. If we decide to commit to this project, we will need to show originality and imagination in how it is structured and pursued. 

Why is this project articulated around Global Ireland? Why this case rather than any other? The reasons for this preference are tactical rather than strategic. Ireland has not been theorised in this way we propose, but it enjoys a rich and sustained social science and humanities literature as well as a globally significant body of creative practice, across multiple genres. This works as a base for comparison and abstraction, but needs to be advanced significantly it is to serve as an opening for rethinking routes toward a just transition. Unfortunately the organising model for too much of this work remains a deficit analysis against an idealised pattern of “modernisation”. Even though many of the enabling features of a “modernisation narrative”, such as a demographically significant organised industrial working class allied with a liberal middle class to create social democracy, did not exist in Ireland, the interpretative frame of a “normal European country” remains dominant. Irish social science is a wonderful resource for a project of rethinking transitions, but it has to be rescued to be useful.

To take one example. The most important actors driving social change in Ireland since the Second World War, in both jurisdictions, have been women. In consequence, female experience in Ireland has been a focus for social sciences and for literary expression. Empirically, the examination of the relationship between nationality, femininity and religion, through the optic of the carceral state, has been a key focus for research, and that research has offered an inspiration to social and political movements. Literary reflection in many ways anticipated this research, in work by Elizabeth Bowen or Edna O’Brien, and has articulated the meaning and import of the disruption of power structures by women in post-independence Ireland in work by figures such as Ann Enright and Clare Keegan. 

However the original emancipatory potential of this work is being dissipated as it advances. Complex, even contradictory, narratives continue to be written, and the scope of new work has been extended toward long historical reflexions on the female body and the role of indigenous language, in work by Doireann Ní Gríofa. However the dominant voices, such as Sally Rooney’s work, document how that potential can be lost. The radically disturbing capacity of Irish womens’ politics and culture is being lost, and the critical resources for rethinking experience more widely effaced, as that history is cashed in as “modernisation”. 

Toby Green’s observation is rich because it poses such a profound but simple question. Why was engagement in the Atlantic economy so a terrible experience for so many peoples? The question we have to answer if how those peoples made meaning despite rather than because of that experience. That resource is precious as the species faces an unprecedented scale of challenge.