Ageing in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Carvallo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Other ◽  
Normal Process ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Category

ArgumentAt the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, ageing was specifically a medical issue. Indeed, on the one hand, ageing is a normal process of living; on the other hand, old age often entails specific pathologies. Is it really possible to dissociate old age from pathology? If so, how can we think of old age and explain both the necessity and the normality of it? If not, what is the cause of this dysfunction? Modern medical controversies argue along the lines of the respective partisans of iatromecanism (Descartes), empirical medicine (Sydenham), and animist medicine (Stahl). Furthermore, it progressively appears that the issue of aging must also be addressed within the social field, where old age is affected by sanitary, economic, and strategic conditions. Indeed, doctors, economists, and philosophers (Graunt, Petty, Leibniz) even tried to assess old age quantitatively with new methods of arithmetic. Thus, in this paper, we want to draw what constitutes the systems of knowledge of old age as a medical category located at the borderlines between epistemological, practical, and social challenges.

scholarly journals “Each Punishment Should Be a Fable”: Punitive Analytics, The Punitive-City Diagram, and Punishment as Technology of Power in Foucault’s Works of the 1970s and 1980s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Bruzzone
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Problem ◽  
Extensive Form ◽  
Social Field ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Relations Of Power

Michel Foucault’s Punitive Society lectures make clear that, for him, punishment presents a critical problem. On the one hand, Foucault struggles to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to punishment, and particularly to the prison-form as a penal development. On the other hand, the Punitive Society lectures clearly indicate the stakes of punishment. How, Foucault asks, might punishment focalize relations of power? How might it serve as a field of struggle? What does a punitive technology of power look like, if it exists? Indeed, across numerous works from the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault traces the varying place of penalties within penal and punitive tactics, showing how punishment reciprocates historical relations of power and problems of power. Yet it remains necessary to develop Foucault’s account of punishment, which is never formalized. In this paper, I develop punishment as a polyvalent technology. Foucauldian punishment may be an analytic, a technology, and—in the allegorical “punitive city” from Discipline and Punish—a diagram of power. I argue that Foucauldian punitive power seizes the body in the name of an authority or a reified power to subordinate individuals to that authority, and with an objective to correct the individual’s relation to a multiplicity. It operates “above,” at the level of, and in “fragments” of embodied individuals. Further, with Foucault’s account of the “punitive city,” we find a theoretical model in whichpunishment becomes the ordering force of the social, and therein a diagram of punitive power exerted in extensive form across the social field.

scholarly journals Tributary Labour in the Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Factors in Development

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Dmitry Khitrov
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Service Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The One

AbstractThis article addresses the system of state-organized and state-controlled tributary labour in the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. On the basis of the taxpayers’ registry of 1795, it focuses on the social groups obliged to perform military service or labour directly for the polity. They included the numerous “service class” of the southern and eastern frontier regions, including Russian, Ukrainian (mainly Cossack), and indigenous (Bashkir and Kalmyk) communities, and the group of pripisnye, peasants “bound” to industries and shipyards to work for their taxes. The rationale behind the use of this type of labour relation was, on the one hand, the need of the state to secure the support of labour in distant and poorly populated regions, and, on the other, that the communes of labourers saw performing work for the state as a strong guarantee of their landowning privileges.

Lorenzo at ‘The Theatre’ Meeting actors and audience

2018 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
N. Ceramella
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One

The article considers two versions of D. H. Lawrence’s essay The Theatre: the one which appeared in the English Review in September 1913 and the other one which Lawrence published in his first travel book Twilight in Italy (1916). The latter, considerably revised and expanded, contains a number of new observations and gives a more detailed account of Lawrence’s ideas.Lawrence brings to life the atmosphere inside and outside the theatre in Gargnano, presenting vividly the social structure of this small northern Italian town. He depicts the theatre as a multi-storey stage, combining the interpretation of the plays by Shakespeare, D’Annunzio and Ibsen with psychological portraits of the actors and a presentation of the spectators and their responses to the plays as distinct social groups.Lawrence’s views on the theatre are contextualised by his insights into cinema and its growing popularity.What makes this research original is the fact that it offers a new perspective, aiming to illustrate the social situation inside and outside the theatre whichLawrenceobserved. The author uses the material that has never been published or discussed before such as the handwritten lists of box-holders in Gargnano Theatre, which was offered to Lawrence and his wife Frieda by Mr. Pietro Comboni, and the photographs of the box-panels that decorated the theatre inLawrence’s time.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

A Comparison of Wolff’s and Kant’s Receptions of Emanuel Swedenborg

Kant-Studien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Laura Follesa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Emanuel Swedenborg ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The One

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

Interactional means of teaming up: enacting the features of contemporary working life in a theater performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Riikka Nissi ◽  
Melisa Stevanovic
Keyword(s):  
Working Life ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Setting ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Societal Issues ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Workplace Organization ◽  
The One

Abstract The article examines how the aspects of the social world are enacted in a theater play. The data come from a videotaped performance of a professional theater, portraying a story about a workplace organization going through a personnel training program. The aim of the study is to show how the core theme of the play – the teaming up of the personnel – is constructed in the live performance through a range of interactional means. By focusing on four core episodes of the play, the study on the one hand points out to the multiple changes taking place both within and between the different episodes of the play. On the other hand, the episodes of collective action involving the semiotic resources of singing and dancing are shown to represent the ideals of teamwork in distinct ways. The study contributes to the understanding of socially and politically oriented theater as a distinct, pre-rehearsed social setting and the means and practices that it deploys when enacting the aspects of the contemporary societal issues.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

The Body in Theory

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

COMMUNICATING EMPIRE: THE HABSBURGS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1700–1919

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Power Base ◽  
The One ◽  
At Home

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

Voltaire, Philosopher of Human Progress

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 356-364
Author(s):  
Virgil W. Topazio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Addition ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Popular Consent ◽  
Positive Knowledge ◽  
Separate Discipline

With the emergence of philosophy in the nineteenth century as a separate discipline which stressed primarily questions insoluble by empirical or formal methods, Voltaire's reputation as a philosopher has gone into gradual eclipse. It has become unfashionable and degrading for philosophers to concern themselves with the practical aspects of philosophical enquiry. In eighteenth-century France, on the other hand, the identification of philosophy with science, which by twentieth-century standards had vitiated philosophical thought, produced the “philosophes” or natural philosophers who were on the whole more interested in human progress than in the progress of the human mind. And Voltaire was by popular consent the leader of this “philosophe” group, the one who had unquestionably contributed the most in the struggle to make man a happier and freer member of society. Yet, ironically, despite a lifelong effort in behalf of humanity, Voltaire's reputation as a destructive thinker has steadily grown even as the critics have pejoratively classified him as a “practical” rather than a “real” philosopher. Typical of this criticism of Voltaire is Macaulay's statement: “Voltaire could not build: he could only pull down: he was the very Vitruvius of ruin. He has bequeathed to us not a single doctrine to be called by his name, not a single addition to the stock of our positive knowledge.”

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