No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
... In 1669, the Paris Opera, which was established by Louis XIV, managed to be the main center of dance throughout the 18 th Century although the monarchy which negatively affected the ballet, prevailed in all European countries (Sadie, 1992). ...
... With the power of the capitalist bourgeoisie, which is trying to gain political power, the influence of the monarchy started to disappear gradually. After the French Revolution, the classical period started with Napoleon's throne (Schama, 1989;Kassing, 2007). ...
Ballet History, Dramatic Ballet, Noverre, French Court
... Silver and Slater point at several instances where political alliances and ideologies of junior groups went through such transformations during previous hegemonic crises. For instance, in the beginning of the 1780s, Dutch Patriots claimed that the earlier stability of the Republic is threatened by "nepotism and oligarchy", and demanded radical democratic reforms to reestablish its earlier glory (Schama, 1989, 148-150, quoted by Silver & Slater, 1999. In the same period, revolutionaries in Europe and North America also contested new forms of wealth distribution as extremely unequal, and criticized financial speculation for bringing about a crisis of commerce. ...
... Prior to the success of a heavier-than-air flight achieved in 1903, a lighter-than-air flight was successfully demonstrated by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783 [1]. Similar to the hot air balloon of the Montgolfier brothers in which the air inside the balloon is heated up by the fire to lift off the balloon, different types of balloons emerged after their invention are usually maneuvered through the manipulation of the thermal properties inside a balloon. ...
... " 110 Moreover, the study of more recent periods for which more data are available does not seem to support the idea that the success of romantic works can be explained solely by the rise of a female or bourgeois readership. For instance, the taste for romantic works in late eighteenth-century France seems to have been shared by all elites, whether bourgeois or aristocratic 111 . Obviously, more data are needed to rule out these alternative explanations. ...
Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love’). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fiction for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3,800 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fiction over the past millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioural ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-in-difference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development.
... Eric Hobsbawm observed that the Terror 'killed only modest numbers: perhaps a few tens of thousands' (Hobsbawm 1990, p. 5). Other estimates put it somewhat higher-usually at around 40,000 plus many more imprisoned but not executed (see works by Tackett 2015;Mathiez 1922;Furet 1981; and the comments of Schama 1989, especially referring to the Vendee, pp. 791-792). ...
What are the links between tragedy, politics and modernity? Diverse currents in social and critical theory have tackled this question; some arguing that modernity has itself a tragic structure insofar as its promises are undermined by their own realisation, others that the diversity of worldviews (the ‘warring Gods’ referred to by Max Weber) has tragic—because un-reconcilable—form. After briefly reviewing some of these issues, the paper looks more specifically at tragic structure in relation to (European) modernity and political reason. The French Terror has unique significance in this context, signalling as it does the failure of any kind of political rationality that seeks to take unmediated, universal form. The consequences of this failure are also, in a way, tragic in so far as they involve contradictions and irresolvable dilemmas of ongoing, everyday political existence. As a result—and perhaps this should itself be seen as much in terms of tragedy as triumphalism—our modernity condemns us to liberalism.
... Silver and Slater point at several instances where political alliances and ideologies of junior groups went through such transformations during previous hegemonic crises. For instance, in the beginning of the 1780's, Dutch Patriots claimed that the earlier stability of the Republic is threatened by "nepotism and oligarchy", and demanded radical democratic reforms to reestablish its earlier glory (Schama, 1989, 148-150, quoted by Silver & Slater 1999. In the same period, revolutionaries in Europe and North America also contested new forms of wealth distribution as extremely unequal, and criticized financial speculation for bringing about a crisis of commerce. ...
This chapter points out a time–space bias in mainstream Social Movement Studies, arguing that both the types of movements and their political, social, and economic context it considered through its development as a discipline were based in postwar Western contexts. This perspective tends to obscure class conflicts within welfare societies, the broader relationships between Western welfare democracies and the rest of the global economy within the postwar global accumulation cycle, and the continuity between the boom and bust phases of the same cycle. The chapter goes on to show how two key concepts through which post-socialist East European movements have been understood, “civil society” and “democratic capitalism”, are affected by that bias. Joining a new wave of debates that ask how movements in different parts of the world connect to the same global crisis, the chapter brings back insights from traditions of Marxist, world-systems and critical political economy research, to propose a framework for understanding social movements as part of the cyclical transformations of the integrated but differentiated system of global capitalism.
... This notion of history, later incorporated into the Marxist understanding of history as a class conflict major narrative, 156 has shifted the historiographic research from examining the actions of individual partakers to the analyses and definitions of peculiar social groups that were reported to have steadily escalated opposition throughout history. 157 In such research, the object of study will no longer be the actions of individual partakers -who have been inspired by or have followed ideas from the scientific, philosophical (or non-scientific and non-philosophical) books written by other individual partakers, i.e. particular and identifiable people with their own will -but the social and political "structures". The "structural" historiography will, according to Simon Schama, turn into graphs, statistics, microeconomic analyses of different social groups or regions, or macro-analyses of states and their trade balances; in other words, the interest will be redirected to classes, not to statements and formulations, and to bread, not to convictions, beliefs and opinions. ...
What is “race”? We can speak about two main hypotheses: a) Arabic and b) Greek-Latin. The first hypothesis leads to the (“genealogical”) meaning of the word “race” as a common origin, lineage, genealogy; “race” as generation family, language group, up to nation; “race” as a “product of the history”. The second leads to the (“typological”) meaning of the word “race” as type, class, kind; “race” as varietas, genus, species; “race” as a “natural phenomenon”. These two meanings of the word “race” have been mutually intertwined since the first occurrence of the word “race” and, therefore, have not been clearly distinguished in the research of race. So, to speak of a race in the genealogical meaning brings us a different understanding of the concept of race than in the typological meaning.
... It is commonly accepted that the French revolutionaries of 1789 were strongly influenced by the theoretical formulations of a stylish, self-educated literary figure and controversial thinker who was often to be found in avant-garde Parisian salons, and who often found him self at odds with the Bourbon regime. This was, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, called the mentor o f the French revolution by Simon Schama (1989). There are fascinating parallels between the role of these two men in their respective revolutions. ...
This study explicates the political thought of the playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel, who emerged as the most important and visible central European intellectual during the ferment leading up to the revolutions of 1989 and now serves as President of Czechoslovakia. Havel’s political thought is centered in the interaction of three themes: the idea of a pretheoretical anti-politics from below; the phenomenon of the second, or parallel, culture; and the principle of living in truth. His ideas are likely to have great impact on Czechoslovakia and possibly other central and east European nations undertaking democratization.
... The entwinement of cities and citizenship is quintessential to Western modernity in its formative phase. It was in metropolitan Paris, as we learn from the historian Simon Schama (1989), that the citoyens and the citoyennes had found their voice, and the necessary political space from which to launch their campaign for the new order. The battle against the ancient regime, and the un-citizen, 8 had subsequently spread to the rural hinterland. ...
... The Rousseaunian formulation had limited popularity in United State but became the dominant terminology in revolutionary France, although it did share the field with the other two terms, particularly compact, especially in the early years of the revolution. With the triumph of Jacobin ideas, which themselves are an outgrowth of Rousseaunian thought, the term social contract swept the field (Schama, 1989;Tocqueville, 1955).With the adoption of the social contract as the basis for social cohesion, coupled with idea of popular sovereignty alongside the protestant ethic, there was already a consolidation of the capitalism attitude even within political affairs. ...
th The problem of federalism in the post 4 Republican era in Nigeria is still the problem it has had right from its adoption at the inception of the Nigerian state. It is the opinion of this piece that Nigeria's adoption of a 'regimented kind of federalism' is what has resulted in the 'resource curse' that the nation suffers. To establish this point, the research adopts the philosophical tools of exposition, analysis and critique to show that: (1) with the superimposition of the economic over the spiritual as result of the modernity project federalism has been severed from its primal focus, which is the covenanting of wills for a proper social order; (2) its focus is now merely on the distribution of power and resources in multicultural milieu with a heavily capitalist slant; (3) the regime of the gods/spirits which was prevalent in Africa at the time of the Africa's encounter with the West was a fertile avenue of nurturing federalism in its original form; (4) with the smashing of the shrine/alters of these traditional gods, there was also a breaking of the foundation upon which Christianity would stand. Hence, a loss of the sense of the spiritual and the basis for a genuine sense of federalism to thrive; (5) lastly, a revival of this sense of the spiritual over the economic is what will give federalism the boost it so desires in Nigeria.
... The entwinement of cities and citizenship is quintessential to Western modernity in its formative phase. It was in metropolitan Paris, as we learn from the historian Simon Schama (1989), that the citoyens and the citoyennes had found their voice, and the necessary political space from which to launch their campaign for the new order. The battle against the ancient regime, and the un-citizen, 8 had subsequently spread to the rural hinterland. ...
... The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, in 1789, represented a revolutionary break from the Ancien Régime and sought to allow for the free expression of religion as well as to prevent a church from controlling the state and society (Schama, 1990). The Revolutionaries built their new Republic on the principle of laïcité; in the intoxicating days of the revolution, however, they committed all sorts of atrocities against the church and its clergy. ...
The past in France appears to be in constant tension with the present over the question of religious restriction. That tension might be properly be understood as a centuries-long struggle between those favoring traditional, pro-clerical views and those espousing anti-clerical, Enlightenment understandings of church–state relations. This tension has given rise to many inconsistencies in its legislative actions and public policy decisions around religion, as political power has shifted between the opposing sides at different points in history. This tension continues to the present day.
The transformations referred to in the book title are not limited to the geometric transformations of the plane, but also to the institutions in which mathematicians worked and the ways mathematics was communicated. In the late eighteenth century, this transformation was especially pronounced in France. Everything that occurred in France in the late eighteenth century was affected by the French Revolution, but it is wise to see the revolution as just the most startling event in a long period of modernization.
Sic semper tyrannis. Charlotte Corday ersticht Jean Paul Marat. Die tödlichen Attentate auf Präsidenten der USA. Das Politische Attentat in der Kunst (Band 4) Der vierte Band befasst sich mit berühmten Attentaten der Neuzeit. Die Tötung des französischen Revolutionärs Jean Paul Marat durch Charlotte Corday hat eine bis ins 20. Jahrhundert hinein dauernde Verarbeitung in der Kunst ausgelöst. Je nach vorherrschender politischer Stimmung und persönlicher Präferenz wird Marat als Opfer oder Corday als Heldin stilisiert, nur um kurz danach erneut neu bewertet zu werden. Die tödlichen Attentate auf bislang vier amerikanische Präsidenten beleuchten den Umgang der Neuzeit mit diesen einschneidenden Ereignissen. Sie schufen neue Bilder, welche in die Kunst der Gesellschaft eingegangen sind: So die berühmte Phrase Sic semper tyrannis, die erst beim Mord an Lincoln ausgerufen wurde, und das Entstehen einer ganzen Verschwörungstheorie-Industrie nach dem Attentat auf Präsident John F. Kennedy. Dies, weil die offiziellen Erklärungen krass unglaubwürdig erscheinen. Trigger-Warnung: Das Buch enthält forensische Photographien, welche Leser/innen verstören können
ISBN: 978-3818784614
The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 remains the single most emblematic episode in the history of the French Revolution. The infamous fortress had already functioned as an important political symbol well before 1789, however. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, a ‘black legend’ was constructed around the building, propelled by the publication of a succession of (real or fictitious) memoirs by ex-prisoners. The growth of the Bastille myth was favoured by political circumstances (dissatisfaction with absolutism) and a cultural climate (sensibility towards fear and imprisonment; Enlightenment calls for humanity, transparency and reason). No Bastille memoir became more influential than Joseph Marie Brossays du Perray’s Remarques historiques et anecdotes sur le château de la Bastille (1774). Besides being a hit in France, the pamphlet had a huge international career. Its English and German translations contributed to turning the Bastille into a transnational symbol of despotism. The meanings and interpretations of that symbol shifted both in France and abroad on the rhythm of historical events. The various French editions and English translations of Remarques historiques allow us to follow that process closely. Three temporalities in the pamphlet’s history can be distinguished which mark the Bastille’s construction as a political symbol in France and in Britain in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The British reception of the Bastille, which revolved around the idealized British Constitution, shows that transnational exchanges can nevertheless be conducive to the reinforcement of national frames of reference.
Thomas Hobbes started an enduring debate over sovereignty’s right to shape citizens’ minds between his principal heirs, Locke and Rousseau. Locke insisted that sovereigns can grant liberty of conscience yet still enjoy internal and external peace through wisely drawn laws. Rousseau endorsed such toleration in theory but insisted on shaping virtuous citizens who love republican forms and duties. Rousseau’s teaching on the need for “guides’ to recognize and impose the general will inspired ideological regimes ruled by parties claiming republican legitimacy. For the last century, that metaphorical debate between followers of Locke and Rousseau has helped shape intelligence.
Disaster science and scholarship are forever expanding and there are increasing calls to base disaster risk reduction policies on the evidence produced by such work. Using examples and argument, this opinion piece examines the nature of evidence. It defines evidence-based practice and considers how it has developed and become important to disaster risk reduction. A definition of what constitutes evidence is difficult to achieve but it must be made in relation to whether the data and information collected can usefully be interpreted and employed to change things for the better. Case histories from past and present centuries show that evidence can sometimes be argued over endlessly. In other cases it is roundly ignored. In yet other instances, false conclusions derived from evidence can become evidence in their own right. Nevertheless, there are situations in disaster risk reduction in which evidence is sorely needed but is clearly lacking. The effectiveness of counter-terrorism measures is one such area. In conclusion, evidence is valuable, above all if there is willingness to use it to support policy formulation, especially in a simple, transparent manner. Subjective interpretation can never be entirely removed from the use of evidence, and evidence alone will not stimulate the policy formulators to improve their decision making.
The Ottoman Empire was the last great mega power in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans. The Arab regions of Iraq, the Levant, Hijaz, Bahrain, Egypt, as well as the Near and Middle Maghrib formed a major part of it for four hundred years out of six hundred that made up the life of the empire. The Lebanese provinces and emirates, together with the other provinces, emirates and Levantine states, formed an integral part of the Ottoman Empire until its final years (1516-1918), thus they were among the longest connected regions to the empire, as well as among the richest and most diverse, containing various religions and sects, which made them unique among other Ottoman provinces.
The Ottoman-era witnessed the resurgence of Europe from the darkness of the Middle Ages and its advancements in both scientific and cultural fields. The second half of the Ottoman period witnessed the decline of the Islamic civilization in addition to the slow retreat of the Ottoman military power. At this time, the western aspirations in Ottoman lands grew for economic, strategic, and religious reasons, and the west started attempting to divide and conquer the Ottoman lands in various ways, most notably through contact with local rebellious or intractable powers, or those that were likely to cooperate with the west due to certain connections or benefits. Since the end of the Crusades, the Lebanese and other Levantine regions have been a focus and a major target for western European powers; the sectarian richness of these areas allowed European countries to exploit it for their own purposes, as these countries sought to dominate and spread their influence in the Ottoman Arab countries starting from these provinces.
In this dissertation, I endeavoured to codify this period of Ottoman history in general and the Lebanese-Levantine in particular, showing how the Ottoman Empire attempted to counter the foreign violations to its lands, and how it sought to protect the Lebanese provinces and its people against any Western occupation, whether that protection took a martial or administrative form, under the title: «The role of the Ottoman Empire in the protection of the Lebanese states and provinces».
History textbooks (and some academic ones) in most Arab countries, including Lebanon, are – usually - characterized by prejudice to the Ottoman Empire and its history, describing it as a colonial state that occupied the Arab countries for four hundred years and was the reason why the Arabs declined and deteriorated both culturally and scientifically. Some have described it as a racist state that treated Arabs as a lower ethnic group, imposing Turkic ethnic superiority, which is far from reality, except in the last nine years in the life of the empire (1909-1918), which saw the rise of the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti) and its promotion of Turkic nationalism In the Sultanate, and that’s a period beyond the time scale of this study. In addition, many Lebanese historians in the post-independence period (1943 - present) depicted the Ottoman era in the areas that constitute the contemporary Lebanese Republic as an era of occupation and characterized by exploitation of the people and made some figures who confronted the Ottoman Empire heroes and national symbols. Most of the time, the religious affiliation of these figures affect their status according to the historian involved, although what Arab and Ottoman documents and historical references reveal contradicts a lot of what was spread and published. Due to this, the question arises about the validity of what actually happened, or what is close to the truth, since reaching the full historical truth is difficult.
The Ottoman Empire sought to protect the Lebanese emirates and provinces from western intervention, just as it sought to protect other Ottoman provinces, whether Arab or Turkic or something else, from foreign infiltrations and occupations, as these provinces were not colonies or strange territories subjected by another state, but all were a single state, for the Ottoman Empire is not only equivalent to the Turkish territories in Anatolia and Thrace, it united Anatolia, the Balkans, Iraq, the Levant, Egypt, the Near and Middle Maghreb, and the Arabian Peninsula in a single state. The Ottoman Empire cannot be considered synonymous with the contemporary Turkish Republic or considered a power that occupied Arab states that existed at that time, on the contrary, current Turkey and the rest of the Arab Middle Eastern countries are the results of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and they all are its heirs, not just Turkey as many might say.
The problem arises from the fact that some of the local Ottoman rulers never viewed themselves as subjects or citizens of the empire, and never felt belonging to it. Some of their parishioners agreed with this view, often for religious or doctrinal reasons. Sunni Muslims, for example, were mostly loyal to the empire and its Sultans, as the empire embodied the Islamic Caliphate, and each of its Sultans was Amir al-Mu'minin (Commander of the Faithful); Orthodox Christians were loyal to the Sultanate as it presented a protection against the extension of Western Catholic and Protestant influence, although they were also loyal to the Russian Empire, which imposed itself as protector of all the Ottoman Orthodox subjects, while the relationship between the Catholic Christians in the Sultanate was shaky due to the strong relations between the Ottoman Catholics and Western Europe, especially France and the Italian and Papal States. Several historians belonging to certain denominations, or those trying to promote the sense of patriotism in some countries rich in doctrines, often referred to the Ottoman grievances as a reason that led some minorities to look to European powers as saviours, and that the mismanagement of the Sultanate has harmed everyone without exception. This begs the question: Was the intervention of the West or any outside party really benefiting all the people? In that region or territory? How much damage or benefit would the province have had, and was the Ottoman administration and the conduct of the governors actually directed against one group or another? Or are there specific reasons for certain actions? Especially since Ottomans were known for their tolerance of their non-Muslim citizens, and that of some of those became Ministers of Foreign Affairs while others became Ministers of Finance. The millets system of the empire was intended to ensure that each class would govern itself in a way that does not make them feel targeted or conquered, and to ensure the internalization of any internal revolution. This study should identify the main events and attitudes of the Ottoman Empire towards the West's attempts to penetrate the Lebanese Emirates and provinces, which were among the most important areas that Europe sought to occupy, and its attitude towards the rulers and their followers who were essential tools in implementing the policies and objectives of the West within the Sultanate, and whether citizens were treated by the mistakes of their local rulers or not, and the amount of damage done to the Lebanese emirates and provinces if the Ottoman Empire did not act.
The time period of this study begins in 1516 and ends in 1840, starting when the Levant, including the Lebanese emirates provinces, became part of the Ottoman Empire after the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate. This period witnessed the Ottoman Empire reaching the height of its power, then the beginning of its downfall, and finally the exposure of its weakness to the West. This period was marked by important political events, such as the Druze revolt in Mount Lebanon in the late sixteenth century, and that of Emir Fakhruddin II, as well as the Russian-Ottoman War, which reached the Levantine coast, and the French campaign in Egypt, and finally the Egyptian campaign in the Levant. The study also includes some of the events that took place in the Lebanese provinces in the late Mamluk period, before the Ottoman conquest, because of their strong association, and due to the necessity to explain some of the events that occurred later on. The Study also mentions some events that took place during the Crusades for the same reason mentioned earlier.
The location of this study is the Emirates, provinces and lands that fall within the scope of the contemporary Lebanese Republic. Due to the need to link events and talk about the reasons that led to certain facts that had an impact on these provinces and the Emirates and their people and their relation to Bâb-ı Âli (the Sublime Porte), and how the sultanate dealt with the mentioned provinces, it was necessary to talk about some events that took place in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and in some European countries, as well as neighbouring states such as Egypt and Palestine.
Like many countries around the world, Chile is undergoing a political moment when the nature of democracy and its political and legal institutions are being challenged. Senior Chilean legal scholar and constitutional historian Pablo Ruiz-Tagle provides an historical analysis of constitutional change and democratic crisis in the present context focused on Chilean constitutionalism. He offers a comparative analysis of the organization and function of government, the structure of rights and the main political agents that participated in each stage of Chilean constitutional history. Chile is a powerful case study of a Latin American country that has gone through several threats to its democracy, but that has once again followed a moderate path to rebuild its constitutional republican tradition. Not only the first comprehensive study of Chilean constitutional history in the English language from the nineteenth-century to the present day, this book is also a powerful defence of democratic values.
New Zealand is frequently cited as the archetypical example of New Public Management (NPM), having gone ‘further and faster’ than other jurisdictions in radically reforming their public service in the late 1980s. These reforms have been credited with significant gains in efficiency and responsiveness, while introducing new challenges and worsening others. Successive reforms over the past thirty years have tinkered with the model without fundamentally altering the underlying paradigm, such that authors refer to the ‘myth of post-NPM in New Zealand’. In 2019, however, New Zealand began to undertake substantial public service reforms in the NPM- inspired State Sector Act 1988. The government has now repealed and replaced this Act with the Public Service Act 2020. By textually analysing government documents, this paper analyses the different theoretical roots of New Zealand’s ongoing administrative reforms. It debates the extent of their theoretical ‘coherence’ and the way in which the amalgamation of several ‘administrative doctrines’ closely resembles a new administrative paradigm often referred to in the literature as ‘Post-NPM’. We conclude that the Act directly dialogues with and draws inspiration from recent academic debates, drawing from a range of theoretical sources (such as New Public Governance, Digital Era Governance, and the New Public Service).
This chapter strikes a bridge from current-day imaginations to pre-modern concepts of empire. It shows how, on the one hand, modern visions of empire are echoing political and religious notions of an all-encompassing rule that go back to Antiquity. On the other hand, it stresses how such modern conceptualizations tend to fall short on understanding diversity in a world where state penetration and identity articulation were dependent on various intermediaries. This paper shows how pre-modern Habsburg and Ottoman approaches to unity and diversity came into conflict with modernisation projects that tried to reduce the number of intermediaries and thus created a need for narratives of power that connected rulers to subjects in a new way. The emergence of articulate, interconnected and self-aware classes in both empires that tied hopes for political progress to narratives of nation created both challenges and possibilities for the two dynasties. This created the premise for media discourses where the empire was envisioned as a nation of many peoples.
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires struggled not only to implement legal, infrastructural and social reforms aimed at strengthening their own central power but also to legitimise their rule through new frameworks of belonging. In an age of modern communications, and against the backdrop of an evolving public discourse, the creation of new identity narratives became dependent not only on the state but also on the active participation of educated individuals who would show commitment to or rejection of the empire through newspapers, books and other written media. This introductory chapter to the volume proposes ‘Narrated Empires’ as an overarching concept to explore how imperial narratives of multinationalism responded to an increased articulation of national narratives. Even after the downfall of the Habsburg and Ottoman states, these ‘Narrated Empires’ have kept informing discourses of political homogeneity and plurality, of social closedness and openness.
This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. That potentiality rests on a specific characteristic: friendship’s loose institutional anchorage. Beginning with an explanation of friendship’s institutional deficit, the article elaborates Durkheim’s ‘positive solidarity’ juxtaposed with Honneth’s recent take on solidarity. It then discusses the contribution (partial) personal relationships make to (impartial) morality, before turning to the specifics of moral learning in friendship. Finally, the article argues that although undesirable as social organising principle, friendship’s institutional deficit renders it conducive to the relational acquisition of a comprehensive understanding of solidarity.
This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of civics and citizenship education both in Australia and overseas. In providing this summary, I will identify some of the key findings from various studies of civics and citizenship education. I will also recognise and discuss the diversity of views of civics and citizenship education in Australia and around the world (and the different emphasis placed on participatory or direct action in terms of activism and the purpose of civics and citizenship education.
This chapter traces the trajectory of one of the most emblematic events of modern history, the French Revolution of 1789, in Chinese political debates from late Qing to contemporary times. It shows that the French Revolution has been appropriated and used by Chinese actors—intellectuals, politicians, students, and others—in the light of their own historical experiences and for widely varying discursive objectives. It has been referenced in China both for the ideals it espoused and for the bloodshed and instability that it brought about in late 18th century France. Thus, it has not only served as an inspiration and a point of comparison for China’s own revolutions, chiefly the republican revolution of 1911, or as a democratic inspiration for Chinese intellectuals. Representations of the French revolution as an event of chaos and brutality have just as often been used by revolutionists to search for more suitable revolutionary models, as well as by conservative intellectuals and governments to debate reforms designed to prevent instability and political strife. Ultimately, the chapter shows that landmark events such as the French Revolution are far from being exclusive memories of the West. Rather, their diverse Chinese uses have become local refractions of global elements of collective memory.
Social trust is linked to a host of positive societal outcomes, including improved economic performance, lower crime rates and more inclusive institutions. Yet, the origins of trust remain elusive, partly because social trust is difficult to document in time. Building on recent advances in social cognition, we design an algorithm to automatically generate trustworthiness evaluations for the facial action units (smile, eye brows, etc.) of European portraits in large historical databases. Our results show that trustworthiness in portraits increased over the period 1500-2000 paralleling the decline of interpersonal violence and the rise of democratic values observed in Western Europe. Further analyses suggest that this rise of trustworthiness displays is associated with increased living standards.
How Plutarch inspired Charlotte Corday to murder—neo paganism in the French Revolution—revolutionary suicide, and how Montesquieu prepared the way for it—Plutarch in French literature—Montaigne’s admiration—what Shakespeare learned from Plutarch, Montaigne and North—Brutal suicide—Stendhal’s early admiration for Plutarch and for Napoleon—La Vie de Napoléon as a Plutarchian life—Napoleon as a neo-classical biographical subject—the mysterious writings of “H. Stewarton”—Napoleonic biography and the counter-revolution—The Revolutionary Plutarch—Suetonian Bonaparte—Chateaubriand in 1814—his broadside in support of the Bourbons—his later change of mind—Napoleon in Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe—Chateaubriand’s remorse—Napoleon as posthumous saint—Plutarch in successive generations—his necessary politicisation in French culture—the aftermath.
The forced eviction campaign in the wake of a fire in Daxing District in Beijing in November 2017 provides some evidence signalling a shift from a technocratic-utilitarian model to a more assertive, image-conscious and totalist model of spatial control and population governance. Yet, although it was not possible for anyone to mount effective legal or political resistance to the campaign, protests in its wake suggest that faced with even harsher forms of control, citizens might solidarize in novel ways, articulating their legal rights and shared political identity as Chinese citizens across social barriers.
This thesis seeks to analyse Mary Wollstonecraft's post-1790 writings in relation to their immediate contexts, and to their reconstruction by feminist literary history. It is partly a critique of the valuable work put in place by feminist predecessors, and partly a contribution to future feminist understanding. I take as a starting point the hermeneutic loop between feminist appropriations of Wollstonecraft as an originating figure in feminist literary history, and subsequent attempts to address her writings overridingly in relation to that discipline. Chapter 1 establishes the ground work for this study by looking at problems in editing Mary Wollstonecraft, and establishing the compass of her works. Chapter 2 reconsiders the Vindication of the Rights of Men, not as a stage towards the Rights of Woman but as a critique of patriarchal assumptions in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Chapter 3 assesses the complex and shifting relationship between Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and feminist literary history, and restores her controversial claim that women are desiring and reasonable creatures to the context of the works it answers. Chapter 4 looks at Wollstonecraft's most neglected mature work: the Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, and speculates on its relative obscurity in Wollstonecraft studies. In this chapter I offer a psychoanalytically informed discussion, which takes into account Wollstonecraft's first experience of pregnancy at the time of writing. Chapter 5 addresses Wollstonecraft's last two major works: the Short Residence in Sweden and Wrongs of Woman, both of which, I argue, have received critical attention which emphasises the author's failed relationship with Gilbert Imlay, at the expense of the maternal relationship that I suggest is at the heart of these writings.
Sometimes the normal course of events is disrupted by a particularly swift and profound change. Historians have often referred to such changes as “revolutions”, and, though they have identified many of them, they have rarely supported their claims with statistical evidence. Here, we present a method to identify revolutions based on a measure of multivariate rate of change called Foote novelty. We define revolutions as those periods of time when the value of this measure is, by a non-parametric test, shown to significantly exceed the background rate. Our method also identifies conservative periods when the rate of change is unusually low. We apply it to several quantitative data sets that capture long-term political, social and cultural changes and, in some of them, identify revolutions — both well known and not. Our method is general and can be applied to any phenomenon captured by multivariate time series data of sufficient quality.
What makes a revolution possible? The text understands this as the question for the subject that is able to make a revolution. Any attempt to answer this question is faced with an aporia: The subject of the revolution can neither be identified with its historically produced social form, nor can it be the subject “as such,” as the power of negativity prior to history and society. The article suggests to find a way out of this aporia in the idea of a transcendental turn of subjectivity: The revolution is the transcendental usage of the subject’s historically acquired and socially formed capacities. The possibility of the revolution lies in the revolutionizing of possibilities (as abilities).
In 2014, Ubisoft's videogame Assassin's Creed Unity provoked considerable controversy in France for its reconstruction of revolutionary Paris. Critics have accused the game's designers of both historical inaccuracy and bias, and its landscape has been criticized for its many perceived anachronisms. Yet the fact that the city is explored through the Animus (fictional technology that gives access to the past through genetic memory) suggests that a historically accurate reconstruction is in fact not what is attempted. In this article, I will argue instead that the game should be read as a medium of cultural memory that both captures and shapes a collective memory of the eighteenth-century city. Furthermore, by studying its depiction of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents and of the Catacombes, neither of which existed at the time of the game's setting, I will assert that it demonstrates "une certaine dynamique de la mémoire" that Didi-Huberman terms "l'anachronisme" itself, and that encourages us to embrace anachronisms as inevitable in the act of remembrance, rather than as problematic.
Artykuł rozpoczyna krótkie wprowadzenie do historii Trybunału, później zawarto w nim rozważania dotyczące jego roli w systemie Terroru orazwarunki zdobycia przez niego autonomii wobec systemu prawa. Wykorzystana do tego została zaproponowana przez Norberta Eliasa teoria usamodzielniania się instytucji o charakterze politycznym i zdobywania przez nie znaczącej władzy na skutek silnych antagonizmów. Artykuł ma udowodnić, że wzmacnianiu Terroru oraz Trybunału Rewolucyjnego służyła specyficzna sytuacja konfl iktu zewnętrznego, wykorzystywanego do uzasadniania budowy instytucji służących następnie do rozwiązywania sporów wewnątrz elity władzy. Prześledzona została politycznoprawna autonomizacja Trybunału – od momentu, gdy był on silnie zakorzeniony w obrębie systemu prawa, aż do później fazy Terroru, całkowicie administratywizującej proces walki z politycznymi wrogami.
Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine • What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head? • Why are weather maps profoundly ideological? • How do corporations get away with murder? • Who are the scum of the earth? This book explores such questions through a critique of the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Mark Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination-the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.