Xu Jilin and the Thought Work of China's Public Intellectuals

2006 ◽  
Vol 186 ◽  
pp. 401-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Cheek
Keyword(s):  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Public Issues ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Intellectual Discourse ◽  
Public Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
China Today

This article takes recent theoretical essays by Shanghai scholar and public intellectual, Xu Jilin, and other scholars of the history of thought and culture (sixiang wenhua shi) as a case study of efforts by intellectuals in the People's Republic of China to define and promote a role as public intellectuals separate from the party-state. This analysis suggests that political liberalism is used in such intellectual discourse to explain the social experience of intellectuals in China today and to promote a renewed public role for them. This public intellectual discourse is characterized by the continued privileging of sixiang (thought), by the naturalizing of foreign theories about liberalism, and by the use of such thought work to argue for a renewed public role for intellectuals as interpreters of public issues rather than as legislators of public values.

Theodor W. Adorno

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).

Out of War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

Making It Count

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Statistics ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Philosophy in Belarus: Historical Specificity – Modern Trends – National Context

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Anatoly A. Lazarevich
Keyword(s):  
Professional Education ◽  
National Language ◽  
Educational Activity ◽  
National Context ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Cognitive Orientations

The article considers the formation and development of philosophy in Belarus in the context of historical conditions and modern opportunities. Discussing the national context of the philosophical process, the author reveals the four aspects of the phenomenon of “national philosophy.” Firstly, there are national institutional and disciplinary structures, which are responsible for an organized scientific, methodological, research and educational activity, which at the level of the nation-state is formalized by certain institutions, system of professional education, norms of professional ethos, standards of behavior within the community and in the wider social environment. Secondly, in the light of philosophical culture, national philosophy is interpreted as a set of value and cognitive orientations passed down from generation to generation. Thirdly, national philosophy can be viewed in the aspect of the tradition of studying the philosophical thought of the nation in the context of its historical development. Fourthly, national philosophy appears in the aspect of the philosophical foundations of the national idea and national-cultural identity. The author examines the main stages of the development of the Belarusian philosophical culture, it is shown that the features of this culture were formed under the condition of a complex combination of the worldview and values of Latin civilization, Christianity, modern European science, rationalism of social projects of the Enlightenment, ideological and worldview attitudes of Western Russian culture, formalized Soviet philosophical disciplines. The article reviews the circle of theoretical, ideological, and practical problems that the modern philosophical process in Belarus faces, the author emphasizes the unfading value of philosophical knowledge as a source of heuristic means for finding effective local answers to global problems of cultural and civilizational development. The author argues that there are two conditions that make national philosophy possible: this is, first of all, a connection with the history of thought in the area of national genesis and also the expression of thought in a national language.

Foucault, Lenin, and Western Marxism

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Keyword(s):  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Marxist Tradition ◽  
Western Marxism

This article others a brief historical account of the complex relationship between Michel Foucault and certain theorists in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition. In the context of the history of the “short twentieth century,” Western Marxism is an intellectual trend based on an interpretation of non-Western revolutionary praxis (by Bolsheviks, Maoists, Guevaristas, etc.). Comparative analysis of several schematic portraits - of Lenin’s revolutionary intellectual, of traditional as opposed to organic intellectuals in Gramsci, and of Foucault’s public intellectual - shows that Foucault in a certain instances was not an external enemy of the Western Marxist tradition, but rather its internal critic. Foucault comes across as a revisionist who engaged in a debate with Lenin about the strategy of the revolutionary movement in France of the 1960s and the 70s. Foucault’s criticism of Leninism unexpectedly turns out to be consistent with the basic struggle of post-WWII Western Marxism to find an alternative to the Bolshevik experience of revolution. This deliberate concurrence makes Foucault one of the significant figures in the history of late Western Marxism, but this becomes a real problem for current historians of neo-Marxist thought when coupled with his generally anti-Marxist views. The article discusses two possible solutions to this problem devised by Perry Anderson and Daniel Bensaid. Anderson’s description of the role of Foucault in the fate of Western Marxism is limited to conceptual questions about the relationship between Marxism and (post) structuralism. Bensaid tries to explain how Foucault fits into the Marxist tradition by appealing to social changes, specifically the changing ideology of capitalist society (in the spirit of The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello). Building on Bensaid’s work, the article shows the link between Foucault’s position on public intellectuals and the crisis of the revolutionary movement of the last half-century, in particular by reference to the famous “Iranian episode” in Foucault’s biography.

A ABORDAGEM SOBRE O TERRITÓRIO EM AUTORES DA GEOGRAFIA BRASILEIRA: MUTAÇÕES DE UM CONCEITO

GEOgraphia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (42) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Lucas Labigalini Fuini
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
History Of ◽  
Territorial Approach ◽  
Selection Of

Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é reconhecer, através de uma seleção de autores e obras, as características principais da abordagem territorial na Geografia brasileira desenvolvida desde fins dos anos 1970, quando se reconhece um verdadeiro interesse na sistematização e no conhecimento teórico sobre o conceito em nossa ciência. No perpassar por autores, objetiva-se identificar a crescente multidimensionalidade e transescalaridade que o conceito adquire nos seus conteúdos e aplicações e a mudança de sentido explicativo que assume no avançar dos anos 2000.Palavras-chave: Território. Territorialidade. História do pensamento. Político. Geografia brasileira. THE APPROACH TO THE TERRITORY IN AUTHORS OF THE BRAZILIAN GEOGRAPHY: MUTATIONS OF A CONCEPTAbstract: The purpose of this article is to recognize, through a selection of authors and works, the main features of the territorial approach in the Brazilian Geography developed since the late 1970s, when it recognizes a real interest in the systematization and theoretical knowledge about the concept in our science. In pervade by authors, aims to identify the increasing multidimensionality and transescalarity that the concept gets in their content and applications and the change in explanatory sense that assumes in advance the years 2000.Keywords: Territory. Territoriality. History of thought. Political. Brazilian geography. EL ENFOQUE SOBRE EL TERRITORIO EN AUTORES DE GEOGRAFÍA BRASILEÑA: MUTACIONES DE UN CONCEPTOResumen: El objetivo de este artículo es reconocer, a través de una selección de autores y obras, las características principales del abordaje territorial en la Geografía brasileña desarrollada desde fines de los años 1970, cuando se reconoce un verdadero interés en la sistematización y en el conocimiento teórico sobre el concepto en nuestra ciencia . En el traspaso por autores, se objetiva identificar la creciente multidimensionalidad y transescalaridad que el concepto adquiere en sus contenidos y aplicaciones y el cambio de sentido explicativo que asume a lo largo de los años 2000.Palabras-clave: Territorio. Territorialidad. Historia del pensamiento. Político. Geografía brasileña.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principal Subject ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

Luther's Word on Man's Will: A Case Study in Comparative Intellectual History

1984 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-667
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Thematic Unity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Single Set

It is commonplace to observe that the history of thought reveals certain recurring patterns whose mode of expression changes according to context. It is equally apparent that to chart the salient characteristics of an influential way of thinking – to give concrete, clearly defined shape to the usually tangled fundamental impulses informing a cast of mind – is a complex, difficult task which calls for attention from (at least) the historian, the psychologist, the philosopher and, in the case of religious figures and movements, the theologian alike. With regard to the manner of thinking embodied in the theological doctrines of Martin Luther such a task is fraught with more than the usual number of pitfalls. In the first place, following recent Luther scholarship, we must be wary of assuming that the great Reformer held fast to a single set of theological opinions throughout his long career. We shall not, therefore, attempt to reach conclusions applicable to Luther's thought as a whole, but rather shall focus exclusively on a number of key early expositions of the Theologia Crucis. Here, between about 1514 and 1520, we find, according to our argument, enough thematic unity to warrant the search for underlying principles. A second, less easily disposed of difficulty is the lack of a working consensus as to how and with what aims in mind one should even begin an historical analysis of Luther's texts. For example, to the believer who regards Luther's basic tenets as in a straightforward sense divinely inspired, the attempt to extract from his writings the ingredients of a certain thoroughly human way of thinking will seem doomed to inadequacy from the start. Likewise, for different reasons, many of today's.

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