‘Morals can not be drawn from facts but guidance may be’: the early life of W.D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH A. SWENSON
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Inclusive Fitness ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Selfish Gene ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Sociopolitical Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Social Order

AbstractW.D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness saw the evolution of altruism from the point of view of the gene. It was at heart a theory of limits, redefining altruistic behaviours as ultimately selfish. This theory inspired two controversial texts published almost in tandem, E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). When Wilson and Dawkins were attacked for their evolutionary interpretations of human societies, they claimed a distinction between reporting what is and declaring what ought to be. Can the history of sociobiological theories be so easily separated from its sociopolitical context? This paper draws upon unpublished materials from the 1960s and early 1970s and documents some of the ways in which Hamilton saw his research as contributing to contemporary concerns. It pays special attention to the 1969 Man and Beast Smithsonian Institution symposium in order to explore the extent to which Hamilton intended his theory to be merely descriptive versus prescriptive. From this, we may see that Hamilton was deeply concerned about the political chaos he perceived in the world around him, and hoped to arrive at a level of self-understanding through science that could inform a new social order.

State-run celebration of Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia (based on audiovisual sources)

2019 ◽  
pp. 251-268
Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Military

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.

On the Power of the Object

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liubov Vetoshkina ◽  
Yrjö Engeström ◽  
Annalisa Sannino
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Work Activities ◽  
Skilled Performance ◽  
Rich Domain ◽  
Boat Building ◽  
Building Activity ◽  
History Of

By skillfully shaping and producing objects human beings externalize and make real their future-oriented imaginaries and visions. Material objects created by skilled performance make human lifeworlds durable. From the point of view of history making, wooden boat building is a particularly rich domain of skilled performance. This chapter is based on two research sites, one in Finland and the other in Russia. The analysis is divided into four layers or threads of history making, namely personal history, the history of the wooden boat community, the political history of the nations and their relations, and the history of the boats themselves as objects of boat-building activity. The chapter ends by discussing our findings and their implications for the understanding of skilled performance and history making in work activities and organizations.

Scriptural Battlefields: The Old Testament, Legal Culture, and the Polemics of the Spanish New World Empire, 1492–1821

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra ◽  
Adrian Masters
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Order ◽  
New World ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Group Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Social Order

Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.

In Search of Space: The Trope of Escape in German Electronic Music around 1968

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-352
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY SCOTT BROWN
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

‘In Search of Space’ explores the history of Krautrock, a futuristic musical genre that began in Germany in the late 1960s and flowered in the 1970s. Not usually explicitly political, Krautrock bore the unmistakable imprint of the revolt of 1968. Groups arose out of the same milieux and shared many of the same concerns as anti-authoritarian radicals. Their rebellion expressed, in an artistic way, key themes of the broader countercultural moment of which they were a part. A central theme, the article argues, was escape – escape from the situation of Germany in the 1960s in general, and from the specific conditions of the anti-authoritarian revolt in the Federal Republic in the wake of 1968. Mapping Krautrock's relationship to key locations and routes (both real and imaginary), the article situates Krautrock in relationship to the political and cultural upheavals of its historical context.

State, Sovereignty, and the People: A Comparison of the “Rule of Law” in China and India

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan K. Ocko ◽  
David Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
British India ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
China And India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

This paper uses the concept of the “rule of law” to compare Qing China and British India. Rather than using the rule of law instrumentally, the paper embeds it in the histories of state power and sovereignty in China and India. Three themes, all framed by the rule of law and the rule of man as oppositional yet paradoxically intertwined notions, organize the paper's comparisons: the role of a discourse of law in simultaneously legitimizing and constraining the political authority of the state; the role of law and legal procedures in shaping and defining society; and the role of law in defining an economic and social order based on contract, property, and rights. A fourth section considers the implications of these findings for the historical trajectories of China and India in the twentieth century. Taking law as an instrument of power and an imagined realm that nonetheless also transcended power and operated outside its ambit, the paper seeks to broaden the history of the “rule of law” beyond Euro-America.

An introduction to the history of modern Persian Sufism, Part I: The Ni'matullāhī order: persecution, revival and schism

1998 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Lewisohn
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Following the political upheavals of 1978, the history and development of Shiite religious thought in modern-day Persia has been the subject of detailed scholarly studies, but the modern development of Sufism—the mystical tradition that lies at the heart of traditional Persian culture, literature and philosophy, which is, from the cultural and literary point of view at least, the most fascinating aspect of the Perso-Islamic religious tradition—remains almost completely uncharted. In contrast to the classical and medieval periods of Persian Sufism which have undergone much scholarly investigation in recent years, the study of the modern period of Iranian tasawwuf, though far better known and documented, has been seriously neglected by scholars.

The cycle of the new left in the recent history of Argentina

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-279
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Tortti ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
New Left ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Actors

This paper aims at outlining the main processes that, in Argentina’s recent past, may enable us to understand the emergence, development and eventual defeat of the social protest movement and the political radicalization of the period 1960-70s.Here, as in previous papers, we resort to the concept of new left toname the movement that, though heterogeneous and lacking a unified direction, became a major unit in deeds, for multiple actors coming the most diverse angles coincided in opposing the vicious political regime and the social order it supported. Consequently, we shall try to reinstate the presence of such wide range of actors: their projects, objectives and speeches. Some critical circumstances shall be detailed and processes through which protests gradually amalgamated will be shown. Such extended politicization provided the frame for quite radical moves ranging from contracultural initiatives and the classism in the workers’ movement to the actual action of guerrilla groups. Through the dynamics of the events themselves we shall locate the peak moments as well as those which paved the way for their closure and eventual defeat in 1976.

De Sanctis, Francesco (1817–83)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Henry
Keyword(s):  
Italian Literature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Institutional Renewal ◽  
History Of ◽  
Letteratura Italiana ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University

Francesco De Sanctis was a literary critic and historian of Italian literature. He is best remembered for his major work, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature), and as a Hegel scholar, reformer and professor at the University of Naples, politician and militant patriot. Commentators are unanimous that De Sanctis’s biographical and intellectual life comprised two inseparable strands, the literary and the political. For this reason all his writings, even the more narrowly literary critical ones, must be read from the point of view of his commitment to promoting the moral and institutional renewal of Italian society. His Storia della letteratura italiana is the ‘civil history’ of Italy. De Sanctis, actively militant on both the Right and Left, defined his position as ‘moderate left-wing, in politics as in art’.

scholarly journals UMA HISTÓRIA DA IDÉIA DE UTOPIA: O REAL E O IMAGINÁRIO NO PENSAMENTO POLÍTICO DE THOMAS MORUS

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Antônio Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Intensive Agriculture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agrarian Communities ◽  
Article Analysis ◽  
History Of

Morus não é o criador do pensamento político utópico, mas é o teórico que fez circular o ideal utópico, em sua corrente mais influente. Foi ele quem criou a palavra Utopia. Morus foi o primeiro a criticar a ordem social orientada pela exploração do trabalho e pela força do dinheiro. Ele é crítico da agricultura intensiva que leva à desestruturação das comunidades agrárias. Como Maquiavel, ele transita pela esfera do poder, uma esfera de ligações perigosas. De um modo diferente, ele tentou também separar a ética da política. Este artigo analisa estes aspectos de seu pensamento político. A history of the idea of utopia: reality and imagination in the political thought of Thomas More Abstract Morus is not the creator of the utopian political thought, but it is the theoretical that makes to circulate the utopian ideal, in its more important version. It went him who created to word Utopia. Morus was the first to criticize the social order guided by the exploration of the work and for force of the money. He is critical of the intensive agriculture that upside down the agrarian communities. As Maquiavel, he walk for the sphere of the power, a sphere of dangerous connections. In a different way, he also tried to separate the ethical of the politics. This article analysis these aspects of its political thought.

scholarly journals ‘HIGH POLITICS’ AND THE ‘NEW POLITICAL HISTORY’

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID M. CRAIG
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Behaviour ◽  
Political World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
High Politics

ABSTRACTRecent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.

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