Introduction to Max Weber’s article ‘The “Threatening” of the Reich Constitution’

2022 ◽  
pp. 1468795X2110674
Author(s):  
Sam Whimster

In May 1904 Max Weber published a short article in the Frankfurter Zeitung. It has gone unnoticed in the extensive Weber literature and it appears here in English translation for the first time. It is an important statement of Weber’s political views after his withdrawal from his active political engagement in the 1890s. He defends the Reich Constitution from attack and a possible coup d’état. He demands that the German Parliament (Reichstag) stand up to autocratic plans, closely linked to Emperor William II, to suppress democracy and voting rights. A constitutional conflict would require not a great statesman but an ‘unscrupulous idiot or a political adventurer’ who would undermine ‘all our institutions and the security of law for many generations’. The article marks the start (earlier than previously assumed in the literature) of Weber’s consistent championing of Parliament and democratic institutions.

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.


Author(s):  
James Retallack

In the period 1894 to 1902 Saxons demonstrated that the expansion of voting rights could be slowed and actually reversed. This chapter shows how right-wing politicians, statesmen, municipal councilors, and others used a perceived crisis following political assassinations in mid-1894 to refocus middle-class fears on the “threat” of socialism. At the national level, calls for a coup d’état against the Reichstag dovetailed with less dramatic calls to action against Social Democracy. When these appeals yielded meager results, Saxons responded by passing a reform of their Landtag’s suffrage in 1896: it replaced a relatively equitable system with unequal three-class voting. Socialists disappeared from the Landtag, and the Reichstag elections of 1898 were unexciting. In the period 1898–1902 Saxon Conservatism reached the zenith of its power. But Social Democratic outrage over “suffrage robbery” had already planted the seeds of a political reversal.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0248049
Author(s):  
Bo MacInnis ◽  
Joanne M. Miller ◽  
Jon A. Krosnick ◽  
Clifton Below ◽  
Miriam Lindner

Research in a few U.S. states has shown that candidates listed first on ballots gain extra votes as a result. This study explored name order effects for the first time in New Hampshire, where such effects might be weak or entirely absent because of high political engagement and the use of party column ballots. In general elections (in 2012 and 2016) for federal offices and the governorship and in primaries (in 2000, 2002, and 2004), evidence of primacy effects appeared in 86% of the 84 tests, including the 2016 presidential race, when Donald Trump gained 1.7 percentage points from first listing, and Hillary Clinton gained 1.5 percentage points. Consistent with theoretical predictions, primacy effects were larger in primaries and for major-party candidates in general elections than for non-major-party candidates in general elections, more pronounced in less publicized contests, and stronger in contests without an incumbent running. All of this constitutes evidence of the reliability and generalizability of evidence on candidate name order effects and their moderators.


ARTMargins ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
Ronald Kay

The text presented here constitutes the first time that Ronald Kay's work has been rendered and published in English translation. A fundamental figure within Chile's art scene during its recent dictatorial period (1973–1990), Kay's written, pedagogic, and editorial contributions were instrumental in shaping the sophisticated and insurgent discourse of the artists working under the rubric now known as the neovanguardia. The first chapter of Ronald Kay's Del Espacio de Acá (1980), “On photography Time split in two” lays out, in a style and rhetoric that are both lyrical and rigorous, Kay's theorization of the photographic phenomenon as a miniature geological event.


10.54179/2101 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanine De Landtsheer

Famed for his ground-breaking philological, philosophical, and antiquarian writings, the Brabant humanist Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) was one of the most renowned classical scholars of the sixteenth century. In this volume, Marijke Crab and Ide François bring together the seminal contributions to Lipsius’s life and scholarship by Jeanine De Landtsheer (1954-2021), who came to be known as one of the greatest Lipsius specialists of her generation. In Pursuit of the Muses considers Lipsius from two complementary angles. The first half presents De Landtsheer’s evocative life of the famous humanist, based on her unrivalled knowledge of his correspondence. Originally published in Dutch, it appears here in English translation for the first time. The second half presents a selection of eight articles by De Landtsheer that together chart a way through Lipsius’s scholarship. This twofold approach offers the reader a valuable insight into Lipsius’s life and work, creating an indispensable reference guide not only to Lipsius himself, but also to the wider humanist world of letters.


Author(s):  
Robert B. Talisse

Democracy is hard work. It can flourish only when citizens actively participate in the business of collective self-government. Yet political participation gives rise to deep political divides over core political values. In the midst of these divisions, citizens are required to recognize one another as political equals, as fellow participants who are entitled to an equal share of political power. Research shows that political engagement exposes citizens to forces that erode their capacities to regard their political opponents as their equals. In the course of democratic participation, we come to see our opponents as inept and ill-motivated, ultimately unfit for democracy. This tendency is especially pronounced among those who are the most politically active. Democratic citizenship thus can undermine itself. With this conflict at the heart of democratic citizenship, we must actively pursue justice while also treating those who embrace injustice as our equals. Sustaining Democracy navigates this conflict. It begins by exploring partisanship and polarization, the two mechanisms by which citizens come to regard their opponents as unsuited for democracy. It then proposes strategies by which citizens can mitigate these forces without dampening their political commitments. As it turns out, the same forces that lead us to scorn our opponents can also undermine and fracture our political alliances. If we are concerned to further justice, we need to uphold civil relations with our opponents, even when we despise their political views. If we want to preserve our political friendships, we must sustain democracy with our foes.


Images ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Batsheva Goldman-Ida

Abstract Batsheva Goldman-Ida, art historian and museum curator, introduces the article by Jiří Mordechai Georgo Langer (1894, Prague–1943, Tel Aviv): “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll,” presented for the first time in English translation, and originally written for the Freud journal Imago in 1928. Langer, a Hebrew poet and teacher of Jewish studies was a friend of Franz Kafka. Langer joined the Belz Hasidism from 1913–16 and was one of the people who introduced Kafka to Hasidism. Langer suggests an explanatory model for Jewish religious artifacts such as the Mezuzah and Phylacteries in the context of compulsion neuroses, referencing the rites of indigenous people and totem theory. The introduction provides background material on the author and details of his other books and endeavors, as well as a framework to better appreciate his poetry and scholarly work. Langer sought a revival of “comrade love” whose homerotic bias is of interest today. His essay on the Mezuzah opens up a range of questions on Jewish artifacts, psychoanalysis, and the origins of Jewish rites. Long left unnoticed, it challenges the current field of Jewish scholarship to rethink its methodology.


2020 ◽  
pp. 247-270
Author(s):  
Brian Holden Reid

This chapter details how the year 1864 allowed William T. Sherman to operate for the first time not as a subordinate commander but as director of a series of armies in the field. His contribution to overall Union strategy would be significant and thus he began to exercise command at the level military analysts currently refer to as the operational level of war. Such a level links tactics and methods of fighting with strategy, in the overall scheme. It defines the manner in which armies organize in discrete campaigns and seek to fulfill the object of strategy by winning victories. Sherman’s performance overall needs to be considered by taking all aspects into account. As he began to work at the higher levels of the military art, he began to change the way in which people think and talk about war, and he propounded an individual philosophy of war. The higher he progressed, the more Sherman could not avoid confronting the harsh realities of political life, for his campaigns increasingly had an impact not just on American political discourse but indeed in 1864 on the outcome of the presidential election. Sherman expressed clear-cut political views and expounded them perhaps too forcefully. This complex mix worked as a catalyst in developing his ideas about war and his ability to put them into practice.


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
Helen Astbury

This articles studies the English translation of Beckett's first French-language novel, in order to ascertain whether the linguistic discovery it represents was translatable into English. A close analysis of how Beckett translated his very markedly oral French reveals how Beckett uses for the first time, Hibemo-English structures and words, as if the use of a foreign language had allowed him to rediscover his mother tongue as he has never used it before.


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