Policing the Subject: Confessional Absolutism and Communal Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Austria

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Regina Pörtner

If proverbial wisdom predicts longevity to the falsely proclaimed dead, then the paradigm of absolutism and its confessional variant must surely be considered a prime example. Having drawn intense fire from scholars of Western Europe over the past two decades, the concept of absolutism has recently been given a fresh lease of life by research, exploring and, to some extent, vindicating its applicability in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe. Given the evolutionary nature of the making of the early modern Austrian-Habsburg monarchy, the complexity of its constitutional, religious, and ethnic makeup, and the waywardness of some of its governing personnel, it seems doubtful if future research will ever be able to satisfactorily clarify the relationship between the political aspirations of individual Austrian rulers, among whom Ferdinand II arguably made the most serious bid for absolute rule, and the practice of negotiated power that characterized the normal state of relations between the Crown and the monarchy's estates.

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 6222
Author(s):  
Kacper Szewczyk ◽  
Aleksandra Chojnacka ◽  
Magdalena Górnicka

Tocopherols and tocotrienols are natural compounds of plant origin, available in the nature. They are supplied in various amounts in a diet, mainly from vegetable oils, some oilseeds, and nuts. The main forms in the diet are α- and γ-tocopherol, due to the highest content in food products. Nevertheless, α-tocopherol is the main form of vitamin E with the highest tissue concentration. The α- forms of both tocopherols and tocotrienols are considered as the most metabolically active. Currently, research results indicate also a greater antioxidant potential of tocotrienols than tocopherols. Moreover, the biological role of vitamin E metabolites have received increasing interest. The aim of this review is to update the knowledge of tocopherol and tocotrienol bioactivity, with a particular focus on their bioavailability, distribution, and metabolism determinants in humans. Almost one hundred years after the start of research on α-tocopherol, its biological properties are still under investigation. For several decades, researchers’ interest in the biological importance of other forms of vitamin E has also been growing. Some of the functions, for instance the antioxidant functions of α- and γ-tocopherols, have been confirmed in humans, while others, such as the relationship with metabolic disorders, are still under investigation. Some studies, which analyzed the biological role and mechanisms of tocopherols and tocotrienols over the past few years described new and even unexpected cellular and molecular properties that will be the subject of future research.


1974 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 5-7

During the past forty years the dominant preoccupation of scholars writing on Livy has been the relationship between the historian and the emperor Augustus, and its effects on the Ab Urbe Condita. Tacitus’ testimony that the two were on friendly terms, and Suetonius’ revelation that Livy found time to encourage the historical studies of the future emperor Claudius, appeared to have ominous overtones to scholars writing against the political backcloth of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Though the subject had not been wholly ignored previously, the success of the German cultural propaganda-machine stimulated a spate of approving or critical treatments. While some were hailing Livy as the historian whose work signalled and glorified the new order, others following a similar interpretation were markedly scathing.


2020 ◽  
pp. 79-96
Author(s):  
Leila Brännström

In recent years the Sweden Democrats have championed a clarification of the identity of the ‘the people’ in the Instrument of government. The reference, they argue, should be to the ethnic group of Swedes. This chapter will take this ambition to fix the subject of popular sovereignty as the point of departure for discussing some of the ways in which the contemporary anti-foreigner political forces of Northern and Western Europe imagine ‘the people’ and identify their allies and enemies within and beyond state borders. To set the stage for this exploration the chapter will start by looking at Carl Schmitt’s ideas about political friendship, and more specifically the way he imagines the relationship between ‘us’ in a political and constitutional sense and ‘the people’ in national and ethnoracial terms. The choice to begin with Schmitt is not arbitrary. His thoughts about the nature of the political association have found their way into the discourse of many radical right-wing parties of Western and Northern Europe.


Rural History ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Kent

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such asThe Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 221-250
Author(s):  
Sheilagh C. Ogilvie

Institutions and economies underwent profound changes between 1500 and 1800 in most parts of Europe. Differences among societies decreased in some ways, but markedly increased in others. Do these changes and these variations tell us anything about the relationship between social organisation and economic well-being? This is a very wide question, and even the qualified ‘yes’ with which I will answer it, though based on the detailed empirical research of some hundreds of local studies undertaken in the past few decades, is far from definitive. Many of these studies were inspired by an influential set of hypotheses, known as the ‘theory of proto-industrialisation’. While this theory has been enormously fruitful, its conclusions about European economic and social development are no longer tenable. This paper offers an alternative interpretation of the evidence now available about proto-industrialisation in different European societies, and explores its implications by investigating one region of Central Europe between 1580 and about 1800.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-146

The article presents edited material from a meeting with Giorgio Agamben to publicize the release of the Russian translation of his book The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Agamben discusses the reasons and conditions for the formation of power in the West as oikonomia; the early Christian origins of the modern domination of the economy and government in all spheres of public life; the certainty of modern power; together with what makes politics possible and the connection of politics with inactivity, dispositives and processes of deactivation. The archaeological study of the phenomenon of power suggests that its modern forms are notconfined exclusively to government, but power is also characterized by the concept of “glory” whose ceremonial, liturgical and praiseworthy aspects we have customarily viewed as rudiments of the past even though they still retain their influence. Power in the guise of government shifts the focus to action that reveals its own baselessness and radically reconfigures ideas about the relationship between economics and politics. In turn, the groundlessness of praxis requires conceptualizing will, understood as dispositive, which raises the issue of adequate strategies for constructing relations between the subject and the government as a condition for the very possibility of the political. Deactivation, profanation and inactivity are a prism through which the potential of the political, the poetic, the economic and the human is revealed.


1987 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Peace ◽  
Graham Mellsop

Over the past 50 years the relationship between alcoholism and psychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, has been the subject of a great deal of research. Psychiatric problems have been seen as both a cause and a result of alcoholism. Whatever the relation between alcoholism and psychiatric disorder is, it may have significance for the development of differentially effective treatment strategies. Several authors have argued that the presence and nature of psychiatric symptoms should form the basis of a classification system for alcoholics. Given the potential rewards of such a system for both understanding the aetiology of alcoholism and developing effective treatment strategies, it is important to have a clear picture of the nature and extent of this relationship. This paper reviews critically the published studies of the association between alcoholism and psychiatric disorder and outlines directions for future research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-262
Author(s):  
Christoph Kampmann

Summary Calculated Conflict? The Cologne Election Dispute of 1688 and the Origins of the Nine Years’ War Historians have recently begun to focus on the relationship between elections and conflict during the Early Modern period. Against the backdrop of these debates, the article takes another look at one of the most conflict-laden elections of that era, the election dispute (“Doppelwahl”) of Cologne in July 1688 involving Cardinal Fürstenberg and Duke Joseph Clemens of Bavaria. The spectacular failure of Fürstenberg, the candidate backed by King Louis XIV of France, in the succession struggle in Electoral Cologne was one of the major causes of the Nine Years’ War (known in German as the “War of the Palatine Succession”), which impacted wide swathes of Western and Central Europe. The resolution of the succession dispute in the Archdiocese of Cologne occurred within the context of growing tensions between Louis XIV and his rivals, in particular Emperor Leopold I. Yet up to the summer of 1688, there continued to be opportunities – albeit diminishing ones – to resolve the conflict peacefully. It was only when Emperor Leopold decided to publicly and solemnly declare Fürstenberg ineligible, explicitly citing the cardinal’s allegiance to Louis XIV, that open conflict became unavoidable. As a result, the very reputations of the protagonists were at stake in the Cologne succession, including that of Louis XIV; there was no longer any way to withdraw from the conflict without losing face. There are convincing reasons to believe that the emperor, by deciding to exclude Fürstenberg, was consciously accepting a conflict with France, with the prospect of a broad anti-French alliance that was already forming in Central and Western Europe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.


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