New worlds for old: the League of Nations in the age of electricity

2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
JO-ANNE PEMBERTON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Electric Energy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Control

This article examines representations of the League of Nations as a creature of early twentieth century modernity. In particular it focuses on the propagation of the doctrine of rationalization in that forum from mid-1920s until early 1930s. Rationalization came to signify not only the scientific organization and control of social development, but also world interpenetration in technical, industrial, cultural and political spheres. Conjuring images of a globe crisscrossed by streams of electric energy, League functionaries and devotees spoke of a bright new dawn. Industrial flow would meld the ‘minds of men’. Discussions of globalization today have a similar repertoire of arguments and many of the same linguistic items as of rationalization. In the inter-war period rationalization was held out as the destiny of the world's people, promising both harmonious integration and cultural profusion. Its rapid evaporation from intellectual and public discourse in the face of the crises of the 1930s serves as a warning to those who would weave fantastic tales of globalized tomorrows.

The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Race War ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Indirect Rule

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

In International Pursuit of a Caliphate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Models ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Post War

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.

scholarly journals DEMOCRACY AND EXPERTISE IN THE LIPPMANN–TERMAN CONTROVERSY

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 561-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Intelligence Testing ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Lippmann ◽  
And Control

Historians often interpret American political thought in the early twentieth century through an opposition between the technocratic power of expertise and the deliberative promise of democracy, respectively represented by Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. This article explores Lippmann's concurrent controversy with Lewis Terman about intelligence testing, in which Dewey also intervened. It argues that the Lippmann–Terman controversy dramatized and developed a range of ideas about the politics of expertise in a democracy, which centered on explaining how democratic citizens might engage with and control the authority of experts. It concludes by examining the controversy's influence on democratic theory.

Buddhist Salvation Armies as Vanguards of the Sāsana: Sorcerer Societies in Twentieth-Century Burma

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 1083-1104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Patton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Buddha

Since the early twentieth century, groups of Burmese Buddhist sorcerers and their followers have taken on the duty of guarding the Buddha's sāsana from colonial, ideological, and Islamic threats. Sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how it should be sustained in the face of its inevitable demise have been central concerns of these societies, expressed in both their textual and oral representations. To illustrate this tension between endurance and change, this article explores ideas of the life cycle of the sāsana and how ideas about its responsibility to wider communities of Burmese Buddhists became expressed through the intersection of sāsana and sorcery. Examining the ways these associations understood themselves to be protecting and propagating the sāsana through various means demonstrates how sāsana vitality gave their beliefs and actions a distinct collective and collectively ethical tone.

A Bureaucracy of Rejection: Petitioning and the impoverished paternalism of the British-Indian Raj

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-202
Author(s):  
JULIA STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Steady Flow ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Colonial Resistance ◽  
Imperial Governance

AbstractBombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.

National Languages and Neutral Idioms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tekla Mecsnóber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Languages

This essay considers laws governing display and use of languages in locales present to James Joyce—early twentieth-century Trieste, Zurich, and the British Empire—as well as attempts in the 1920s to have certain languages officially recognized by the League of Nations. Tekla Mecsnóber argues that these developments and statutes contribute to the polyglot sensibility of Joyce's work and the implications of political resistance in his language play.

Introduction to Richard Rogers

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Attlee ◽  
Richard Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Trafalgar Square ◽  
The City

It is surprising how few architects have come to grips with the crisis that faces the contemporary city. Richard Rogers is an exception. Over the last thirty years or so, the buildings that have made Rogers famous have been, as much as anything, explorations of the principles that have concerned him: flexibility, modernity, inclusivity, and sustainability. At the same time, in his writings and public discourse, he has been a passionate advocate of the city as a place of social and intellectual interchange, a democratic and architecturally stimulating environment. This vision is rooted as much in the civic ideals of the Italian Renaissance—Rogers was born in Florence—as in the late twentieth-century avant-garde. Many of the changes to the public face of London that have taken place over the last decade—the opening up of the river and the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square are two examples—were called for by Rogers in architectural proposals, writings, and public statements published since the 1980s. Architecture, he has argued, cannot be detached from social and political issues. Increasingly, his words have had a prophetic edge, befitting his senior status within the profession and the cultural life of the nation. As one of the best-known architects on the planet, Rogers, at least potentially, has the ear of both government and business, the twin agencies holding the future of the urban landscape in their hands. For this reason alone, what he has to say merits close attention. Rogers first came to international prominence with the opening of the Pompidou Centre in the Beauborg area of central Paris, designed with his then partner, Renzo Piano, in 1976. One of the key buildings of the twentieth century, it changed the face of the French capital, creating a new cultural heart of the city. Rogers’s banishment of services to external ducts, creating vast open interior spaces, was to become a trademark further developed in the Lloyds Building in London, completed in 1984. Both structures celebrate urban life and activity, although one is a public and one a private space. The Beauborg has been compared to a giant climbing frame.

Preference in Paris

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-77
Author(s):  
Christina Luke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Economic Gain ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

The pursuit of knowledge, cultural relations and diplomatic practice are discussed in this chapter in the context of the Treaty of Sèvres, the framing the League of Nations, and the role of early twentieth-century philanthropy and academia. The boundaries of where European and US scholars and businessmen penetrated Anatolia are defined as much by the lure of antiquity, recalling the vision of the Megali Idea, as by political posturing and economic gain embedded in the Wilsonian agenda. I trace the strategic diplomacy of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), Learned Societies, and two members of the Princeton Expedition to Sardis, Howard Crosby Butler and William Hepburn Buckler, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Turkish War of Independence. I argue that colonial networks writ large framed the nineteenth-century Western gaze of entitlement that underwrote duplicitous claims to Anatolian soil between 1919 and 1922.

scholarly journals 'Saints without God'

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Whistler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
French Intellectuals

This article addresses Camus’s response to Christianity and the problem of suffering in the context of the early twentieth century. Owing to his association with the existentialist movement, it is often assumed that Camus, like many other French intellectuals of the period, rejected Christianity altogether. For this reason, his sympathy with Christian thought is overlooked, and it seems altogether bizarre that some theologians even claimed Camus to be a convert. Among these wildly conflicting claims, Camus’s philosophical response to Christianity has become somewhat muddied; in this article I attempt to rectify this. I argue that Camus’s entire philosophy is underpinned by his response to Christianity, and that he wanted to re-establish the position of morality in the face of the problem of suffering. I thus demonstrate how his writings manifest this struggle to achieve this goal, in what I refer to as Camus’s ‘poetics of secular faith’. Camus once claimed, ‘I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist’. This article aims to elucidate just what is meant by a statement like this, as well as to catalogue and analyse Camus’s innovative attempts at reconciling spirituality and suffering through philosophical literature.

scholarly journals Dying against Democracy: Suicide Protest and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Keren He
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Modes Of Action ◽  
Social Negotiation ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Popular Movements ◽  
Chinese Political Culture

The joint rise of popular movements and mass media in early twentieth-century China gave birth to a democratic imagination, which culminated in the anti-American boycott of 1905. The transnational campaign nonetheless disintegrated as a result of partisan division—an ingrained predicament of democratic agonism that is best illustrated by the story of Feng Xiawei, a grassroots activist whose suicide in Shanghai constituted a key moment in the boycott. Juxtaposing a variety of accounts about Feng's death in journalism, political fiction, reformed opera, and advertisements, this article examines how, together, these texts construct democratic agonism and suicide protest as revealing two opposing political sensibilities as well as modes of action. Instead of expressing only nationalist passion, Feng's suicide reveals a deep anxiety of his time to locate a spiritual source of authority in the face of its glaring absence in social negotiation. This fraught dynamic between the democratic and the transcendent continues to characterize modern Chinese political culture to the present.

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