Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
The Core ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Sacrifice

This chapter on Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty centers on the most famous piece in it, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” As a matter of genre, it is an essay in conceptual analysis. Because liberty is a historically inflected concept, it is also an essay in the history of ideas. The chapter argues that Berlin was a “Cold War liberal” only in the limited sense that he campaigned against all doctrines that licensed the sacrifice of real individuals on the altar of impersonal entities such as the proletariat or the nation, and Soviet Communism was a salient case both because of the Cold War and Berlin’s own Russian origins. Individuals have an inviolability that governments of any stripe must not infringe. That is the core of negative liberty. Positively, Berlin’s faith was that unimpeded, individuals with adequate resources would spontaneously lead varied and vivid existences.

Louis Menand: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. 2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 546 pp.

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-204
Author(s):  
Lance Kenney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
William James ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
The Cold War

Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, daunting in its choice of subject matter, closely aligns itself with the ancient sense of the word ‘history’ as a fluid, almost epic narrative. The Metaphysical Club of the title was a conversation group that met in Cambridge for a few months in 1872. Its membership roster listed some of the greatest intellectuals of the day: Charles Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, amongst others. There is no record of the Club’s discussions or debates—in fact, the only direct reference to the Club is made by Peirce in a letter written thirty-five years later. Menand utilizes the Club as a jumping-off point for a sweeping analysis of the beliefs of the day. The subtitle of the book belies its true mission: ‘a story of ideas in America.’ Menand discusses the intellectual and social conditions that helped shape these men by the time they were members of the Club. He then shows the philosophical, political, and cultural impact that these men went on to have. In doing so, Menand traces a history of ideas in the United States from immediately prior to the Civil War to the beginning of the Cold War.

Brazil and ‘Latin America’

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
LESLIE BETHELL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
History Of ◽  
America Latina ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time

AbstractThis essay, part history of ideas and part history of international relations, examines Brazil's relationship with Latin America in historical perspective. For more than a century after independence, neither Spanish American intellectuals nor Spanish American governments considered Brazil part of ‘América Latina’. For their part, Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilian governments only had eyes for Europe and increasingly, after 1889, the United States, except for a strong interest in the Río de la Plata. When, especially during the Cold War, the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, began to regard and treat Brazil as part of ‘Latin America’, Brazilian governments and Brazilian intellectuals, apart from some on the Left, still did not think of Brazil as an integral part of the region. Since the end of the Cold War, however, Brazil has for the first time pursued a policy of engagement with its neighbours – in South America.

From Cold War Island to Low Carbon Island

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 63-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hua-Yueh Liu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Front Line ◽  
The Core ◽  
Military Administration ◽  
Distributed Power System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Facilities ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Management

Kinmen’s military landscape is a legacy to the history of war. Since the abolishment of military administration after the Cold War, Kinmen Island has transformed from a front-line to a tourist-oriented island. Due to the recent opening of relations between Taiwan and China, there has been a large influx of tourists into Kinmen Island to visit its rich ecosystems and the historic battlefields, leading the author to rethink the future management of the island. As Kinmen Island lacks electricity and water resources, the development of renewable energy to render Kinmen a low-carbon island has been identified as the best option. To achieve this goal, the installation of a distributed power system integrated with abandoned military facilities to replace the centralized power plant on the island would benefit development and would represent the core strategy of the low-carbon initiative.

Global Development

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Lorenzini
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

In the Cold War, “development” was a catchphrase that came to signify progress, modernity, and economic growth. Development aid was closely aligned with the security concerns of the great powers, for whom infrastructure and development projects were ideological tools for conquering hearts and minds around the globe, from Europe and Africa to Asia and Latin America. This book provides a global history of development, drawing on a wealth of archival evidence to offer a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a Cold War phenomenon that transformed the modern world. Taking readers from the aftermath of the Second World War to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the book shows how development projects altered local realities, transnational interactions, and even ideas about development itself. The book shines new light on the international organizations behind these projects—examining their strategies and priorities and assessing the actual results on the ground—and it also gives voice to the recipients of development aid. It shows how the Cold War shaped the global ambitions of development on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and how international organizations promoted an unrealistically harmonious vision of development that did not reflect local and international differences. The book presents a global perspective on Cold War development, demonstrating how its impacts are still being felt today.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

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