Mafia and peasant rebellion as contrasting factors in Sicilian latifundism

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Blok

The origins of the modern Sicilian latifundium go back to the early nineteenth century when feudal land was transformed by law into private property. In what is called the Risorgtmento, a rising rural bourgeoisie gradually replaced the traditional feudal elite by acquiring most of the land that came on the market. Although the peasants had become legally free, they obtained their freedom at the cost of title to the land they held under feudal conditions. The common use rights of gleaning and pasturage, which the peasants exercised on the former fiefs, guaranteed them the fundamental means of living. But arbitrarily excluded by the avid bourgeoisie from a share in the land that should be given out to them as a recompense for the lost use rights, the Sicilian peasants emerged from social servitude only to fall into economic and political dependency. A growing rural proletariat was the necessary concomitant of the partly feudal and partly capitalist enterprise that was the latifundium.

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (S3) ◽  
pp. 19-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc W. Steinberg

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Ooghe

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN DYDE

AbstractThis article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.


2020 ◽  
pp. 67-98
Author(s):  
Daniel Layman

Thomas Hodgskin, an Englishman who wrote widely in political economy during the first half of the nineteenth century, professed almost slavish devotion to Locke. In following in what he took to be Locke’s footsteps, he devoted his scholarly life to a polemic against “idle” capitalists and landowners. But he simultaneously defended an unflinchingly individualist interpretation of the Lockean project. According to Hodgskin, the world is common only in the sense of being originally unowned, and everyone has a right to anything he can create by laboring on it. He argues that the crushing inequality he observed around him in the fields and cities of the industrial revolution was attributable solely to the violence and cupidity of governments and their cronies. In working out this theory, Hodgskin sketched the principle features of a distinctly libertarian resolution of Locke’s property problem. According to this resolution, there is no problem about reconciling the common right to the world with the growth of private property because the common right is simply a liberty for each person to make use of the world as he might see fit. Thus, despite his left-leaning criticisms of capitalism and absentee landownership, Hodgskin planted seeds that would develop, in Spooner’s later work, into the core of the right-libertarianism we know today.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Nicole De Brabandere

This article investigates how Staffordshire figurines and dinnerware, which were popular in early nineteenth-century England and its colonies, were complicit in forging emergent social, aesthetic and subjective consciousness. Staffordshire ware was influenced by diverse technical, economic and aesthetic factors, including the circulation of print media, private property, colonialism and Romanticism. At the same time, the wares both engendered Romantic versions of subjectivity that amplified the importance of the private individual, while generating emergent sites of contestation that exceeded them. The collection of Staffordshire figurines and dinnerware was a media and technical consistency where owners could inhabit the tensions of at times conflicting social, material, affective and performative affinities or antagonisms. This discussion draws from Walter Benjamin to develop a way of thinking with how the material and media specificity of Staffordshire ware could have co-composed heterogeneous knowledges, practices and subjectivities that undermined the Romantic individual. By examining the multifaceted qualities, affects and contexts of Staffordshire ware in detail I aim to develop new terms and practices with which to activate emergent versions of historicity, corporeality and world-making.


Numen ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-286
Author(s):  
Arthur McCalla

AbstractThis article analyzes the histories of religions of Louis de Bonald, Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, Pierre-Simon Ballanche, and Ferdinand d'Eckstein. Rather than offer yet another definition of Romanticism, it seeks to establish a framework by which to render intelligible a set of early nineteenth-century French histories of religions that have been largely ignored in the history of the study of religion. It establishes their mutual affinity by demonstrating that they are built on the common structural elements of an essentialist ontology, an epistemology that eludes Kantian pessimism, and a philosophy of history that depicts development as the unfolding of a preexistent essence according to an a priori pattern. Consequent upon these structural elements we may identify five characteristics of French Romantic histories of religions: organic developmentalism; reductionism; hermeneutic of harmonies; apologetic intent; and reconceptualization of Christian doctrine. Romantic histories of religions, as syntheses of traditional faith and historical-mindedness, are at once a chapter in the history of the study of religion and in the history of religious thought.


2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-320
Author(s):  
Jermo Van Nes

It is generally agreed among contemporary scholars that the modern critique of the authorship claim of the New Testament letters addressed to Timothy and Titus originated in early nineteenth-century Germany with the studies of Schmidt and Schleiermacher on 1 Timothy. However, a late eighteenth-century study by the British clergyman Edward Evanson challenges this consensus as it proves Titus to have been suspect of pseudonymity before. This ‘new’ perspective found in Evanson's neglected source also nuances the common assumption that from its very beginnings the critical campaign against the letters' authenticity was mainly driven by linguistic considerations.


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