Joseph de Maistre and the Reaction Against the Eighteenth Century

1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisha Greifer

It is a commonplace observation of French politics of the past century that men who started out as radicals turned conservative as they grew older, and that party groups launched with radical names and programs, though they kept the names, swung to the Right with the passage of time. In both cases we explain the transformation, in part at least, as evidence of an increasing satisfaction with the status quo, as the political system made room for the newcomer. In Joseph de Maistre we have an example from a somewhat earlier age of a less common phenomenon, the conservative turned reactionary, and impelled, moreover, to develop a systematic justification of his new position. Evidently, no parallel explanation will serve to account for this change, for Maistre, though he found a place for himself in the public life of his time, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the trend of events around him. It will not do, either, to dismiss him—in the manner of the orthodox tradition in the history of political thought—as an authoritarian ogre, or an irrationalist, or simply as a confused man, a split personality with humanitarian impulses and reactionary ideas. There was no inconsistency in this combination. Rather the explanation must be sought in the political situation of his day as he saw it, and in his concern for the perennial problem of political obligation. The positions that concern led him to take, his rationalizations of them, and the difficulties they landed him in, are the subject of this article.

1975 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Kennedy

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.


Populism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-171
Author(s):  
Emre Balıkçı

AbstractThe aim of this article is to reveal the institutional dimensions of populism, which tend to be ignored because of the hegemony of economic analysis of the subject. Whereas many researchers assume that populism is a result of the negative economic effects of neoliberal policies on the middle class, I argue that populism is also a corollary of neoliberal institutions’ effect on the political power of so-called ordinary people. To illustrate this, I focus on the rhetoric of Turkish populists concerning two important economic institutions in Turkey: the Public Procurement Authority and the Central Bank. This examination shows that Turkish populists view the independent institutions of neoliberalism as a barrier against the people’s political will and define themselves as fighters for democracy.


1970 ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Wenche Brun ◽  
Kristine Orestad Sørgaard

Norwegian museums have been the subject of a great deal of public attention in recent years. Unfortunately, this is not because of their interesting, compelling and thought-provoking exhibitions, but because of poor preservation practices and deteriorating collections. Previous reports have highlighted numerous failings in the management of these collections. A large portion of the collections has suffered through decades of poor storage. Some objects have even been damaged as a result of unacceptable storage conditions. Proper management of the collections has been hampered still further by the lack of common management systems. In the past ten to fifteen years, several projects have been launched in order to enhance collection management and to make the collections more accessible to the public. In this paper, we give a brief outline of the history of collections. We also provide a critical review of the projects and offer some suggestions as to what museums can do to further improve access to and the preservation of collections. 


Author(s):  
Laura Brace

This book asks what it means to describe someone as a slave and explores the political dimensions of that question. It argues against the search for a transhistorical and timeless definition of slavery, and offers a critical interrogation of the dominant liberal discourse on slavery from the Enlightenment to the present. It pays particular attention to the meanings of the slavery / freedom binary and to the connections between the past and the present in understanding ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery. The book is about what it means to think about slavery as a historical process and as a political relation, both in the history of political thought and in present debates about trafficking and incarceration. It argues that we need to bring the concept of slavery back into our understandings of freedom, labour and belonging, and unravel the assumptions behind the meanings we ascribe to personhood, sub-personhood and humanity. From Aristotle and the idea of natural slavery, through Locke’s conception of civil society, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and J.S. Mill’s analogy of slavery and marriage to the discourse of modern abolition and the idea of trafficking as slavery, the book interrogates what it means to think about the idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery, and draws attention to the significance of the tensions, ambiguities and silences that surround that conception.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McIntyre

AbstractBecause of the public identification of both Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss as conservative political philosophers, there have been numerous comparisons of their political thought. Whatever similarities or differences that do exist between them, it is certainly true that they shared a keen interest in the history of political thought. However, they understood the character of history in widely divergent ways. In the following paper, I examine the way in which each writer understood the logic of historical explanation, and there are two primary reasons for wanting to do so. First, there have been few examinations of either writer’s arguments concerning historical understanding, despite the stature of both as historians of political theory. Second, the differences between Oakeshott and Strauss on history are central to two fundamentally opposed ways of understanding the past, each of which has manifested itself in the contemporary practice of the history of political thought. I will argue that Strauss’s approach to the past is primarily a practical one and yields a concern with a legendary or mythical past constructed primarily to address contemporary political problems, and that his specific methodological propositions are either irrelevant to a specifically historical understanding of the past or inadequately argued and unconvincing. Conversely, I will suggest that Oakeshott offers a coherent and compelling account of the logic of historical understanding, which involves both a defense of the autonomy of historical explanation and an elaboration of the character of historical contextualism.


2000 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 548-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dickey

A long-lasting and sometimes acrimonious debate over the correct vocative form of second-declension Latin words in -ius began more than 800 years ago. For the past century most classicists have considered the matter to be settled, and little discussion on the subject has taken place. Yet the century-old conclusions we now so unthinkingly accept are based on very little evidence and are internally inconsistent in some of their details. The past hundred years have provided us not only with more Latin to work with, better tools for search and analysis, and a more complete knowledge of the history of the Latin language, but also with a new understanding and respect for the ancient grammarians and their views on the structure of their language. It is time to re-examine the ancient and modern views on the vocative of -ius words, to see whether any viable conclusions can be drawn and whether the ancient grammarians may have more to contribute than our predecessors believed.


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 123-139
Author(s):  
Mamadou Diawara

The dawn of the history of the kingdom of Jaara, during the era of the Jawara dynasty (from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century) is shaped by the story of Daaman Gille and his companions, the most important of whom is Jonpisugo. The lives of these two characters—linked up until their death at Banbagede, where their tombs are only a few hundred meters apart—were the subject of a rich oral literature, all the more noteworthy given the rarity of written documents.In my earlier work (Diawara 1985, 1989, 1990) I discussed the typology of narratives and the specific role of women servants as historians of their social group. The oral sources include family traditions from all social classes, except for recently acquired slaves; the recitals of professional narrators who were by heredity in the service of protector families whose history they proclaimed to the public; the narratives of servants, including the tanbasire, a collection of women's songs from among the royal servants, or the accounts of people who, with their ancestors, had long been slaves (cf. Diawara 1990).Historical chance brings together Daama and Jonpisugo, but their respective social standing differentiates them; just as “friendship” brings together the master and the servant, so the struggle for power leads to the birth of differences in the conception of “the things of the past” among their descendants. How is the past constructed and lived differently by their respective progeny or supposed descendants? What poetic license accrues to the offspring of he who was only a servant, even if he was a royal servant? The response to this question explains the dynamic of a particular servants' oral documentation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Predrag Terzić

The process of creating a modern state and forming political institutions corresponds to the process of transforming the subjects of the past into a community constituted on the principle of citizenship. The citizen becomes the foundation of the political community and the subject, which in interaction with other citizens, forms the public sphere. However, this does not mean that all members of the community have the same rights and obligations contained in the status of a citizen. Excluding certain categories of residents from the principle of citizenship raises a number of issues that delegitimize the existing order by colliding with the ideas of justice, freedom and equality. The aim of this short research is to clarify the principle of citizenship, its main manifestations and excluded subjects, as well as the causes that are at the root of the concept of exclusive citizenship. A brief presentation of the idea of multiculturalism does not intend to fully analytically explain this concept, but only to present in outline one of the ways of overcoming the issue of exclusive citizenship. In order to determine the social significance of the topic, a part of the text is dedicated to the ideas that form the basis of an exclusive understanding of citizenship, the reasons for its application and the far-reaching consequences of social tensions and unrest, which cannot be ignored.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Paweł Kaczorowski

The subject of consideration is the relationship between politics and the political, as it is presented in two dissertations by Carl Schmitt from the 1920s: the famous Der Begriff des Politischen and the most extensive work from this period – Verfassungslehre. The thesis of the article is that, contrary to the fairly widespread interpretation of both these phenomena, that is, politics in the common sense and its special form to which Carl Schmitt referred as the political, should not be treated as explanandum and explanans, but as separate, co-occurring and somewhat complementary phenomena. While politics involves state actions for the public interest, ideologically defined according to classic political categories, the political is a sphere of specific actions in the special space of relations sometimes formed between collective entities, defined by the terms enemy-friend, a space cognitively diagnosed by Carl Schmitt. The political is not a real form of politics, but a form of action in the sphere of collective life other than politics, which is essentially important for building the structure of the state. The disclosure of the political in the activities of individual countries is an important element of analysis in foreign policy, an element of analysis of a situation within international relations. Revealing the political as a kind of arcana imperi of state actions, Carl Schmitt appears not only and not primarily as a neutral theoretician of politics, but as a German national political thinker, analysing primarily the situation of Germany in relation to the Entente countries at a very special moment in the history of twentieth-century Europe.


Muzealnictwo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Redakcja "Muzealnictwo"

If we want to describe the surrounding reality, while at the same time trying to grasp the best key to it, it seems that the word “change” is the most appropriate. Museums rank among that category of culture institutions which, while undergoing changes, and caring for their own institutional and axiological autonomy, attempt at the same time to influence the very changes; this, however, makes them face identity dilemmas, the necessity to find the right balance between the responsibilities that are sometimes referred to as “traditional ones”, namely the ones they have towards the collections, and the obligations commonly regarded to be an attribute of “modernity”, these towards the public in the variety of their impressive turnout growth and the increase of their expectations. The way to stabilize change effects, while at the same to stimulate them, also with respect to the closest editing of the museum Annual, are legislative efforts and bills. One could even be tempted to make the statement, this not fully irony-free, that the history of Polish museology is actually the history of implemented and unimplemented legislative projects (the latter dominating), of the attempts to define the position of museums in the context of the synergically perceived “cultural legacy”, of finding for them the appropriate governance model, without rejecting the above-mentioned identity dilemmas. The goal of the “Muzealnictwo” Annual No. 60 is to present an overview of the past and current trials to amend the “Museum Act”, to identify areas for essential corrections, reasons for negligence, yet first and foremost, difficulties in applying them to the culture domain in which the most frequently applied word next to “change” (and most highly appreciated by museum circles) is the word “specificity”. This overview will hopefully contribute to the reflection on the capacity of institutional operating under the circumstances in which the inadequacy between the letter of the law and its enforcement can be observed. Next to the theme that is key to the present issue of the “Muzealnictwo” Annual, you will find the well established and known sections describing the spheres of museum operations, these occurring regardless of the lapse of time and their legislative creations. Piotr Majewski Professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw Editor-in-Chief


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