3 Engaging the Constitutive Laws of Others: Necessities, Ideas, Interests

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hirschl Ran
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Simon Bolivar ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Government ◽  
John Selden

The chapter explores some key junctures in the intellectual history of comparative public law in the early-modern and modern eras. It highlights how the interplay between intellectual inquisitiveness and instrumentalism has influenced many of the field’s epistemological leaps, from the first attempts in the 16th century to delineate a universal public law and to study comparative government in a methodical fashion (John Selden, Montesquieu, and Simón Bolívar, among others), to the current renaissance of comparative constitutional inquiry particularly in Europe, the United States, and Canada. The examples illustrate that comparative constitutional inquiry is best understood as being driven by a combination of intellectual innovation and a compatible political agenda or ideological outlook. In some instances, intellectual pursuit led the way with an instrumentalist goal or ideological agenda providing added impetus. In other instances, comparative constitutional inquiry was more directly driven by political interests, ambitions, and aspirations, writ small or large.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
American Thought

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

IS THERE AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICAN WOMEN?

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
John Adams ◽  
James I ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.

Public Law 78: A Tangle of Domestic and International Relations

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Creagan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Natural Movement ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Boundary ◽  
The Impact

The movement of Mexican laborers across the international boundary into the southwestern United States has been occurring since the establishment of a boundary in that area. It is a natural movement of worker toward the source of work. Interests of the governments involved have caused checks to be placed upon this movement of workers. Public Law 78 represented one of the recent attempts of the United States government, through co-operation with the Mexican government, to regulate the movement of migrant workers.In this article I will briefly trace the history of PL 78. The impact of this law upon Mexico and its relevance for United States relations with that country are of importance.

Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
South India ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Renaissance ◽  
New Framework

Abstract This essay reviews a major new study of European Renaissance Arabist-humanist philology as it was actually practiced, humanist neoclassicizing anti-Arabism notwithstanding. While definitive and philologically magisterial, that study nevertheless falls prey structurally and conceptually to the very eurocentrism whose ideological-textual genesis it chronicles. Situating it within the comparative global early modern philologies framework that has now been proposed in the volume World Philology and the present journal is a necessary remedy—but only a partial one; for that framework too still obscures the multiplicity of specifically genetically Western early modernities, thus hobbling comparative history of philology. I therefore propose a new framework appropriate to the study of Greco-Arabo-Persian and Greco-Arabo-Latin as the two parallel and equally powerful philosophical-philological trajectories that together defined early modern Western—i.e., Hellenic-Abrahamic, Islamo-Judeo-Christian, west of South India—intellectual history: taḥqīq vs. taqlīd, progressivism vs. declinism. But a broadened and more balanced analytical framework alone cannot save philology, much less Western civilization, from the throes of its current existential crisis: for we philologists of the Euro-American academy are fevered too by the cosmological ill that is reflexive scientistic materialism. As antidote, I prescribe a progressivist, postmodern return to early modern Western deconstructive-reconstructive cosmic philology as prerequisite for the discipline’s survival, and perhaps even triumph, in the teeth of totalitarian colonialist-capitalist modernity.

Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
EMILY WEISSBOURD
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black America ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
History Of

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

scholarly journals Through the Walls of Time: A Short Reflection on Writing Early Modern Intellectual History

Zutot ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Irene Zwiep
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
History Of

This short piece takes a longstanding problem from the history of ideas, viz. the use of contemporary concepts in descriptions of past phenomena, and discusses its implications for broader intellectual history. Scholars have argued that being transparent about anachronism can be a first step towards solving the issue. I would argue, however, that it may actually interfere with proper historical interpretation. As a case study, we shall explore what happens when a modern concept like ‘culture’ is applied to pre-modern intellectual processes. As the idea of cultural transfer is prominent in recent Jewish historiography, we will focus on exemplary early modern intermediary Menasseh ben Israel, and ask ourselves whether his supposed ‘brokerage’ (a notion taken from twentieth-century anthropology) brings us closer to understanding his work. As an alternative, I propose ‘bricolage,’ again a central analytical tool in modern anthropology but, as I hope to show, one with unexpected hermeneutical potential.

The Predicament of National Character

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Character ◽  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Military ◽  
American Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Henry Luce ◽  
Second World

“National character” has a curious history in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead wrote the first anthropological account of the United States in 1942, but the history of national character as a concept runs through social psychology and anthropology between the wars, the cultivation of “morale” during the Second World War, and the deployment of social science in postwar American military occupations. That history is the subject of this chapter: what “American character” revealed and obscured, both nationally and internationally. Mead was the Henry Luce of anthropology: her life and writings offer a miniature of the science of characterology in the American Century. The chapter begins as an institutional and intellectual history, but concludes with new readings of three postwar texts. Characterology was indeed a science, of a kind, but it was also an art. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a remote ethnography of Japan, is a parable of American power and its limits. Mead’s New Lives for Old, recounting her return to New Guinea in 1953, becomes a sermon about a Polynesian city upon a hill. David Riesman’s classic of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, closes one frontier of national character but opens another. To consider national character as narrative and ideology illuminates American character’s imprint on the world.

The Making of American Society: An Institutional and Intellectual History of the United States

1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 472
Author(s):  
Wilbert H. Ahern ◽  
Richard A. Gerber ◽  
Edwin C. Rozwenc ◽  
Judith Mara Gutman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society
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