Power and the People in Russia

Author(s):  
Geoffrey Hosking

Whereas many European states sought to dominate corporate associations in order to exploit their resources, the Russian monarchy had to create them in the late eighteenth century in order to transmit its own authority. Both before and after that, however, the Tsars mediated authority downwards through persons rather than institutions. This chapter highlights the paradoxes of a system which compensated for under-institutionalization through the workings of competing elite patron-client networks and small-scale popular communities of joint responsibility which survived long beyond 1917. Communists may have transformed and modernized society in appearance, but in reality that modernization perpetuated or even restored some of the archaic practices of pre-revolutionary society. The Soviet state, like the Tsarist one, depended on archaic social arrangements which lubricated its everyday functioning, but frustrated its ultimate purposes. Even at the start of the twenty-first century Russian politics were still in thrall to personalized power factions.

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.


1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (53) ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
J.C. Beckett

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW RILEY

This article establishes a dialogue between twenty-first-century music theory and historical modes of enquiry, adapting the new Formenlehre (Caplin, Hepokoski/Darcy) to serve a historically oriented hermeneutics. An analytical case study of the first movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 92 (1789) traces the changing functional meanings of the opening ‘caesura prolongation phrase’. The substance of the exposition consists largely of things functionally ‘before-the-beginning’ and ‘after-the-end’, while the recapitulation follows a logic of suspense and surprise, keeping the listener continually guessing. The analysis calls into question Hepokoski and Darcy's restriction of the mode of signification of sonata-form movements to the narration of human action. The primary mode of signification of the recapitulation is indexical: it stands as the effect of a human cause. This account matches late eighteenth-century concepts of ‘genius’.


Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wawrzinek

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>


Author(s):  
Jeremy Zallen

The prologue introduces the history, historiography, and myths of light. It begins by exploring two “pre-industrial” modes of producing light, first telling the story of how Martha Ballard, in the late eighteenth century, butchered a cow, rendered its fat, and dipped her own candles. Second, the prologue explores the making and use of tallow candles in Potosí. The prologue contrasts these accounts of tallow candles with end-of-the-nineteenth-century accounts of how electricity had transcended labor and history. It shows how this familiar before-and-after narrative is flawed, and we need to reexamine what came between, paying special attention to work, energy, and power struggles.


Author(s):  
Marvin A. Sweeney

This essay traces and analyzes modern-critical scholarship on the Minor Prophets or Book of the Twelve Prophets from the late eighteenth century through the early twenty-first century. It differentiates between the Christian practice from the time of Jerome and Theodore of Mopsuestia that treated the Twelve as twelve individual Minor Prophets that were collected together and the Jewish practice of reading the Twelve as the Book of the Twelve Prophets. Early treatment of the Minor Prophets focuses especially on the early work of J. G. Eichhorn (1780–1783), W. M. L. de Wette (1817), F. Hitzig (1838), H. Ewald (1840–1841), and B. Duhm (1875, 1922). More modern treatment of the Book of the Twelve Prophets focuses especially on the work of K. Budde (1922), R. E. Wolfe (1935), D. Schneider (1979), O. H. Steck (1991, 1999), James D. Nogalski (1993, 2011), Jakob Wöhrle (2006, 2008), and the author (Sweeney 2000).


Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.


Author(s):  
Steve Wilson ◽  
Helen Rutherford ◽  
Tony Storey ◽  
Natalie Wortley

Tribunals have operated for over 200 years. They are essentially specialised courts dealing in specific areas of legal dispute such as employment, housing, immigration, mental health, social benefits, and tax. This chapter explains the development of tribunals from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It examines the major reforms that have taken place in the twenty-first century, resulting in most tribunals being re-organised into ‘chambers’ within the First-tier Tribunal and the Upper Tribunal. The chapter explains the composition of tribunals and the rules on appointment of tribunal members. It explains the ways in which tribunal decisions may be challenged, either by way of an appeal to another tribunal or to the mainstream courts, or through judicial review. The chapter examines the advantages of tribunals over mainstream courts but also considers whether, through a process known as ‘legalism’, tribunals are becoming too much like the mainstream courts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-444
Author(s):  
Trevor Herbert

The role and importance of military musicians changed and intensified in the late eighteenth century through two important processes. The first was the culture of display that took root in both the home-based army and units in the colonies. The second was the result of successive militia acts which effectively ensured that military units with bands would be systematically placed in every corner of the British Isles.It became evident that music as a component of military display served an important diplomatic purpose. Music performed in public spaces was heard by a population deeply sceptical of the army and with an essentially local sense of identity. The experience of the sight and sound of military music raised entirely new perceptions of nation and of the state as a benign power.Two important and related themes emerge here. The first is the historical process that led, almost accidentally, to a realization that music as part of military display had potential to influence populations across the country and in the colonies. The second, more challenging, theme concerns the nature of the evidence for this idea and how it is to be treated. It is an idea that is totally convincing if the experience of hearing and seeing military spectacle by the mass of the people can be shown to have had impact. What is the evidence of listening to music by those people at whom it was targeted, how robust is it and what can be made of it?


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Anna Cullhed

Bengt Lidner's poem &lsquo;Ode to the Finnish Soldier' from 1788 was written during the Swedish war with Russia. This paper argues that Lidner took part in Gustav III's staging of the war by accusing the officers of the so-called Anjala league of treachery, and at the same time turning to &lsquo;the people' for support. &lsquo;The people' were defined as subjects of the Swedish crown from the core parts of the realm, today's Finland and Sweden, irrespective of language or ethnicity, but sharing a common and glorious history. Lidner combines a cosmopolitan perspective with a patriotic tendency in his poem. Some of the central concepts of the ode, such as &lsquo;citizen' and &lsquo;citizen-ness', carry potentially republican and egalitarian connotations, but this tendency is counteracted by the poet's obvious praise of the king. Lidner's ode stands as an example of the ambivalent use of political concepts during the late eighteenth century, the very concepts that would transform into the key concepts of nineteenth-century nationalism.


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