THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORIAN AS CRITIC: REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK OF STEFAN COLLINI

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
CESARE CUTTICA
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Critical Practices ◽  
Original Picture

This article examines the work of the intellectual historian and critic Stefan Collini (1947–). It illustrates his methodological approach to the study of history; traces the unexpected similarities between his intellectual practice and that of cultural critics as diverse as Matthew Arnold and William Empson; points to the differences in content and vision informing his manifold scholarly pursuits and those of other intellectual historians (e.g. Skinner) as well as critics (e.g. Mulhern and Eagleton); and levels some criticism at his writings. Specific attention is given to the centrality of cadence, congeniality, irony and sympathy, as well as to the function of the intellectual portrait in his narrative. The article's main claim is that Collini's history writing is better understood as the embodiment of the activity of the intellectual historian as critic. Situated within a broad range of different historical and critical practices, Collini's own practice is thoroughly analyzed both for its intrinsic value and for providing an original picture of the activity generally referred to as “intellectual history.”

Matthew Arnold and the Institutional Imagination of Liberalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-375
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Great Books ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Literary Canons

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.

Notes on anthropogenic risks mitigation management and recovery of ancient theatres’ heritage

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 222-256
Author(s):  
Naif Adel Haddad ◽  
Leen Adeeb Fakhoury ◽  
Talal S. Akasheh
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Preventive Conservation ◽  
Qualitative Risk Assessment ◽  
Technical Risks

Purpose Ancient theatres and odea are one of the most significant and creative socio-cultural edutainment centres of human history that are still in use. They stood and served as huge multi-functional structures for social, religious, propaganda and political meeting space. Meanwhile, ancient theatres’ sites have an intrinsic value for all people, and as a vital basis for cultural diversity, social and economic development, they should continue to be a source of information for future generations. Though, all places with ancient theatre heritage should be assessed as to their potential risk from any anthropogenic or natural process. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The main paper’s objective is to discuss mainly the anthropogenic and technical risks, vulnerability and impact issues on the ancient classical theatres. While elaborating on relevant recent studies, where the authors were involved in ERATO and ATHENA European projects for ancient theatres and odea, this paper provides a brief overview of the main aspects of the anthropogenic qualitative risks and related issues for selected classical antiquity theatres. Some relevant cases are critically presented and investigated in order to examine and clarify the main risk mitigation issues as an essential prerequisite for theatre heritage preservation and its interface with heritage reuse. Findings Theatre risk mitigation is an ongoing and challenging task. By preventive conservation, theatre anthropogenic qualitative risks’ management can provide a framework for decision making. The needed related guidelines and recommendations that provide a systematic approach for sustainable management and planning in relation mainly to “ancient theatre compatible use” and “theatre technical risks” are analysed and presented. This is based on identification, classification and assessment of the theatre risk causes and contributing factors and their mitigation. Originality/value The paper also suggests a new methodological approach for the theatre anthropogenic qualitative risk assessment and mitigation management, and develop some recommendations that provide a systematic approach for theatre site managers and heritage experts to understand, assess, and mitigate risks mainly due to anthropogenic and technical threats.

Playing the Cerebral Savage: Notes on Writing German History before the Linguistic Turn

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 343-359
Author(s):  
Rudy J. Koshar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
German History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Formal Properties

I want to begin by suggesting that to speak of a linguistic turn in the writing of modern German history is premature. It may be true that intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic has taken “the” linguistic turn, in the sense that, more than ever before, much current research involves “a focused concern on the ways meaning is constituted in and through language.” The formal properties, degree of sophistication, and utility for historians of these studies vary greatly. They encompass by now almost classical poststructuralist perspectives, methodologically more conservative discussions of cultural representation, and the influential works of Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock. Yet history writing on twentieth-century Germany, considered broadly, stands very much before rather than after a linguistic turn, if there will be a turn at all. Scholars of modern German cultural, social, or political history who engage current debates on language and rhetoric in truly innovative ways are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, considerations of a linguistic turn in modern German history take place at a time when some historians criticize poststructuralist thought more forcefully than ever before.4 This makes for an interesting confluence of tensions, especially when one considers that disciplines such as literary criticism and anthropology have turned anew to the study of history.

A History of Qualitative Research in Education in China

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manli Li
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Statistical Tests ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Research In Education ◽  
Education In China

Since the early 2000s, qualitative research (QR) emerged as an interpretive approach and has gained increasing interest in education in China, while it is deeply rooted in Chinese intellectual history. Indigenously, the concept of QR methodology sought to explore the richness, depth, and complexity of phenomena, which was a way to gain insights through discovering meanings by improving the comprehension of the whole overall. In the 1920s, pioneering intellectuals promoted Western education or new education in the New Culture Movement (around the time of the May 4 Movement in 1919), led by Hu Shih, Chen Tuhsiu, Li Tachao, and others. They actively advocated democracy and science. The May 4th Campaign dealt a heavy blow to the traditional rituals that ruled China for more than 2,000 years. It has inspired people’s democratic consciousness and promoted the development of modern science in China. Quantitative research, like statistical methods, was introduced in the field of education. With the development of theories and methods of probabilistic statistics for studying randomness, small sample theory, statistical estimation, and statistical tests were widely introduced in the 1940s. In the upcoming decades, for many, quantitative research evoked a strong allegiance in academia, particularly in education, since it was considered to be based on a belief in science, perhaps more so than what many considered qualitative research in China. Actually, the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research in education has been fraught with misunderstanding, confusion, and tension in China. After the 1990s, QR, which has been primarily advocated by Western researchers, has also grown in importance in educational and cultural studies in China as a methodological approach to research that aligns in important ways with quantitative research. Thus, internal tensions within the field of education have also emerged. Yet, though both approaches vary and have distinct genealogies and commitments, QR may be seen as a broad methodological genre in which open-ended interviews, participatory and non-participation observation, literature analysis, case studies, and other methods of social phenomena engage in long-term, in-depth, and meticulous studies. Such critically oriented QR has important implications for educational research.

scholarly journals Topological descriptors of philosophical text

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 04007
Author(s):  
Marina Danilova ◽  
Anatoliy Enikeev
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Topological Descriptors ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Philosophical Text ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Philosophical Texts

The article considers the problem of topological descriptors of a philosophical text. Topological descriptors act as discursive points for the localization of the philosophical text, which allow us to describe its role and place in the production of modern humanitarian knowledge. Three perspectives of the analysis of the philosophical text in the contemporary sociocultural situation are outlined: the perspective of historical and philosophical research, the perspective of cultural research and the perspective of modern humanitarian knowledge. The historical and philosophical perspective from the point of view of topology is described through genre differences between philosophical texts, and also taking into account the differences between philosophical schools, trends, styles of thinking in intellectual history. The perspective of cultural research includes a philosophical text in a wide context of political, social and cultural transformations of modern society, and it becomes possible to talk about social topology. The perspective of modern humanitarian knowledge is analyzed from the perspective of the rehabilitation of philosophical discourse, the need for detailed textual work for the full inclusion of philosophy in the production process of significant social and cultural knowledge. As an original methodological approach, the article describes topological analytics, which is actively used by modern researchers to solve a whole range of issues of localization, description and understanding of the role of a philosophical text in modern humanities. Conclusions are drawn about the prospects of further research in this direction.

Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn of Lubavitch (“Maharash,” 1834–1882) and the False Twilight of Chabad Hasidism

AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 348-381
Author(s):  
Eli Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Methodological Approach

The maskilic characterization of the nineteenth century as a period of decline and ossification for Hasidism is increasingly eschewed by scholars, yet continues to mark current research in significant ways. As a case study, this article takes up Rabbi Shmuel Schneersohn of Lubavitch (“Maharash,” 1834–1882), rescrutinizing (1) the controversy surrounding the onset of his leadership, (2) his personality and charisma, (3) his methodological approach to the teachings and texts that he inherited from his predecessors, and (4) his theological contributions and their place in the broader trajectory of Chabad's intellectual history. His tenure emerges as a false twilight, in which a new foundation was laid for the perpetuation and expansion of Chabad-Lubavitch, as both an intellectual and activist movement, in the century that followed.

In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity in Romanian Studies, 1990-2000

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantin Iordachi ◽  
Balázs Trencsényi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
New Research ◽  
Usable Past

This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of local intellectual discourses to the international “market of ideas” had a powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the Western scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian historiography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditionalist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceauşescu regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that relativizes the traditional dichotomy between “Westernizers” and “autochthonists,” accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from social-political narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the historical research on Eastern Europe.

African Intellectual History and Historiography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon L. Earle
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Modern World ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The 1960S

Intellectual historians of Africa are principally concerned with how Africans have understood and contested the contexts that they inhabited in the past, and how ideas and vernacular discourses change over time. As a particular approach in historical methodology it is closely associated with cultural history, and its evolution followed the emergence of political history writing during the 1960s and social history during the 1980s. The first innovative works in African intellectual history were concerned with pan-Africanism and Négritude. These studies were followed by histories of religious ideas and social dissent. Historians have since offered varying descriptions of Africa’s “intellectuals.” For some, Africa’s colonial intellectuals were mostly missionary-educated literati, while others emphasize Africa’s rural intellectual histories and the importance of studying “homespun,” or vernacular historiographies. African epistemologies and knowledge production have also remained a central concern in the study of African intellectual history. To illuminate Africa’s intellectual registers, historians interrogate different topics, regions, and temporalities. Historians of precolonial Africa use historical linguistics to understand the intersection of ideas about public healing and social organization. Scholars of the colonial period challenge many of the earlier assumptions held by colonial researchers and policy makers, who had cast African communities as primordial, conquered peoples. Intellectual historians, by contrast, explore the constantly changing arenas of ideational disputation and political contestation within African societies. Intellectual historians of gender have shown how ideas about production, masculinity, and femininity have informed competing nodes of authority. By the early 21st century, global intellectual historians began demonstrating how Africans reworked European political ideas into local vernacular debates about the past, and how Africans have shaped the making of the modern world. To write Africa’s intellectuals histories, scholars draw from a range of sources, which are often maintained in institutional archives, public libraries, and private homes. These sources—textual, oral, and material—include letters, diaries, annotated libraries, vernacular newspapers, grammars, novels, oral histories, linguistic etymologies, sculptures, clothing, paintings, photography, film, and music.

scholarly journals CHECKING SOMEONE ELSE’S PRESENT WITH YOUR OWN PAST (ON THE FORMATION OF AN ÉMIGRÉ HISTORIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE)

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
V. Р. Korzun ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Registration Method ◽  
Specific Description ◽  
The One ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Soviet Historiography

The article analyzes the historiographic texts of the first wave of Russian émigré historians. In these texts, the Soviet historiographic process of the 1920s and 1930s was interpreted. The relevance of the study is associated both with the poor study of historiographic texts created during that period in emigration, and with the narrative turn of modern historical science, as well as with the experience of understanding the structure and nature of the Soviet narrative, which is beginning to be comprehended and problematized as an independent problem. The study of narratives makes it possible to move away from general assessments of the Soviet stage of historical studies to a more specific description of it through studying the stylistics of the text, isolating the standards and the uniqueness of their construction, with close attention to the problems of their unification. This process can be clarified and refined through the prism of the “emigre mirror”. The source base was the historiographic texts of P.N. Milyukov, A.A. Kizevetter, A.V. Florovsky, and E.F. Maksimovich in the form of published works and manuscript heritage from the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN) and the Slavic Library in Prague (Slovanská knihovna v Praze). Based on textual analysis and developments in the field of intellectual history, the author highlights the unifying features of the émigré narrative. These include: 1) scholars’ understanding of their special mission in emigration which consists of preserving the historiographic tradition and presenting Russian historical science to the world community as part of world science; 2) close attention to the classics, focus on tradition; 3) an assessment of the historiographic process within the framework of the reference time, the Golden age of pre-revolutionary historical science (late 19th – early 20th centuries); the criterion for assessing the current historiographic process was the compliance with the experience of Moscow and St. Petersburg scientific schools; 4) a statement about the lack of freedom of research, the monopoly of Marxist methodology and the hypertrophied class approach in relation to the historicist views of historians; 5) changes in the form and structure of the classic narrative – the proportion of reviews, literature reviews, obituaries in the structure of emigrant narrative was increasing; the deconstruction of the old narrative followed the path of its archaization; 6) the unifying factor that tightened the texts, gave them tension and a special emotional charge, was the figure of M.N. Pokrovsky. However, the verification of the current historiographic process by one’s own past is not without contradictions. On the one hand, this ensures the continuity of historiographic knowledge and confirms the thesis of the intrinsic value of the so-called «outdated innovations». In addition, in this В. П. Корзун 54 regard, we can talk about the fundamental eclecticism of science as a cultural tradition. On the other hand, the reciprocating nature is fraught with a closure on the old. The absolutization of tradition leads to the blocking of intellectual transfers. In science of science, this process is called the rut effect. As an example of searching for «one’s own track», the article presents an attempt by A.V. Florovsky to understand and to clarify the phenomenon of Soviet historiography by coarsening the classical historiographic approach and using the inventory-registration method. As a result, he managed to present the meaningful complexity of the internal structure of Soviet historical science

scholarly journals Making Sense of Madness : Mental Disorders and the Practices of Case History Writing in the Early Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-242
Author(s):  
Janka Kovács
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Case History ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Specialized Care ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The article focuses on interpretations of madness in early nineteenth-century Hungary medical practice from a comparative perspective. By relying on the methodological approach of the anthropology of writing and the analytical considerations offered by Michel Foucault’s 1973–1974 lectures on Psychiatric Power, the article discusses the formalized and standardized practices of case history writing. It draws on sources from the teaching clinics at the universities of Pest and Edinburgh, as well as the largest mental asylums in the Habsburg Monarchy in Vienna (est. 1784) and Prague (est. 1790), and the ideal type of mental asylums at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the York Retreat (est. 1796). In doing so, an attempt is made to reconstruct both the physicians’ gaze and (to a certain extent) the patients’ view, and by examining the therapeutical regime of each hospital and its correlations with the institutional background, uncover whether madness was perceived as a pathological somatic or psychological state in the medical practice of these institutions. This is in and of itself a fundamental question if we seek to understand changing attitudes towards the mad and their curability in a period of transition from a “world without psychiatry” to a “world of psychiatry,” when specialized care was still not an option for many, especially in the East Central European region.

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