scholarly journals How Do Local Conditions Inform Socio-Political Language? The Concept of ‘Intelligentsia’ in Łódź Press before the Mid-Twentieth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 122 ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Kamil Śmiechowski
1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 10-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Edelman

The most incisive twentieth century students of language converge from different premises on the conclusion that language is the key creator of the social worlds people experience, and they agree as well that language cannot usefully be understood as a tool for describing an objective reality. For the later Wittgenstein there are no essences, only language games. Chomsky analyzes the sense in which grammar is generative. For Derrida all language is performative, a form of action that undermines its own presuppositions. Foucault sees language as antedating and constructing subjectivity. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory entails an intellectual ferment that raises fundamental questions about a great deal of mainstream political science, and especially about its logical positivist premises.While the writers just mentioned analyze various senses in which language use is an aspect of creativity, those who focus upon specifically political language are chiefly concerned with its capacity to reflect ideology, mystify, and distort. The more perspicacious of them deny that an undistorting language is possible in a social world marked by inequalities in resources and status, though the notion of an undistorted language can be useful as an evocation of an ideal benchmark. The emphasis upon political language as distorting or mystifying is a key theme in Lasswell and Orwell, as it is in Habermas, Osgood, Ellul, Vygotsky, Enzensberger, Bennett, and Shapiro.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akinobu Takabayashi

In recent decades, historians of English psychiatry have shifted their major concerns away from asylums and psychiatrists in the nineteenth century. This is also seen in the studies of twentieth-century psychiatry where historians have debated the rise of psychology, eugenics and community care. This shift in interest, however, does not indicate that English psychiatrists became passive and unimportant actors in the last century. In fact, they promoted Lunacy Law reform for a less asylum-dependent mode of psychiatry, with a strong emphasis on professional development. This paper illustrates the historical dynamics around the professional development of English psychiatry by employing Andrew Abbott’s concept of professional development. Abbott redefines professional development as arising from both abstraction of professional knowledge and competition regarding professional jurisdiction. A profession, he suggests, develops through continuous re-formation of its occupational structure, mode of practice and political language in competing with other professional and non-professional forces. In early twentieth-century England, psychiatrists promoted professional development by framing political discourse, conducting a daily trade and promoting new legislation to defend their professional jurisdiction. This professional development story began with the Lunacy Act of 1890, which caused a professional crisis in psychiatry and led to inter-professional competition with non-psychiatric medical service providers. To this end, psychiatrists devised a new political rhetoric, ‘early treatment of mental disorder’, in their professional interests and succeeded in enacting the Mental Treatment Act of 1930, which re-instated psychiatrists as masters of English psychiatry.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
H. S. Jones

AbstractThis article traces the invention of pluralist political language in France to a very specific ideological source: Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and the progressive Catholic circles that gathered around the journalEspritin the 1930s. It shows that the dialogue with the émigré Russian Jewish sociologist Georges Gurvitch was an important influence on theEspritcircle, but also that it was Maritain rather than Gurvitch who did most to disseminate the language of pluralism. The paper thus builds on recent work according Maritain and Christian democracy a central place in the intellectual history of twentieth-century politics. It also contests the Anglo-American bias that has dominated histories of pluralism, and instead places France at the centre.


1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Benouar

Dr. Benouar presents a full and integrated study of the recent seismicity of Algeria and adjacent regions during the twentieth century. He has amassed an impressive amount of macroseismic information pertaining to individual earthquakes, which he combines with instrumental information to reassess the origin parameters of each event. In any compilation of earthquakes it is the additional information beyond the bare accumulation of figures and facts that adds interest and social understanding to the scientific appreciation of the earthquakes themselves. For this it is necessary to know the local conditions, and Dr. Benouar brings out for us very vivid1y the differences between reporting procedures at different times this century, and the ensuing difficulties. It would be most difficult for an outsider to gather the information he presents, and he makes good use of his knowledge of his native land, as well as his professional training as an engineer. We thus learn of the reluctance of the colonial powers to report on damage or casualties outside those inflicted on the expatriate community, and the general difficulties of finding information about earthquakes that occurred during the wars of independence, at a time when effects of even major earthquakes were sometimes minor compared to those of the war itself. He also does not spare us details of political difficulties that arose during periods of reconstruction following recent earthquakes. This work is not restricted, however, to description. He examines the underlying tectonics of the area and deduces estimates of hazard and risk in various parts of the country. He then proceeds to examine the engineering consequences and discuss future needs for building codes and civil protection. Dr. Benouar has produced a work which could well form a model for those wishing to undertake comprelzensive studies of seismicity of other areas, and the measures needed to reduce the effects of catastrophic earthquakes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-104
Author(s):  
Wiktor Marzec

AbstractThe article seeks to fill a lacuna in Marxist scholarship concerning the actually-existing Marxism of politically-mobilised workers as an organic philosophy in its own right. To shed light on this issue, I investigate the reading-material which stimulated Marxist conversion and the accompanying intellectual invigoration of workers at the turn of the twentieth century in Russian Poland. For proletarian readers Marxism was the main political language, ushering them into the public sphere and allowing them to comprehend the emerging capitalist world. As a particular liaison of scientific knowledge and a practical political weapon, it allowed its adherents to redefine themselves and make political claims. Such a situational Marxism, drawing from but not reducible to the prevailing ‘orthodoxy’, allows one to see the latter as a socially diverse plethora of ideas.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karel Davids

A seafaring community is a village, a small town or a neighbourhood where a substantial part of the population earns its livelihood wholly or partly by work at sea or is directly dependent on seafaring. A seafaring community can arise because an established population at a particular locality increasingly takes up seafaring, or it can be created by the settlement of a sizeable number of seafaring immigrants. The former type of community might be called ‘endogenous’, the latter one ‘exogenous’. This essay analyses in what respect seafaring communities of these two types (or mixtures between them) in the North Sea area changed over time and in what ways these changes were connected to larger, transnational processes or to local conditions. It examines three periods of great transformation: the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; the period between about 1850 and the First World War; and the last decades of the twentieth century. The story of endogenous seafaring communities in the North Sea area differed from the story of exogenous communities in many ways. While seafaring communities in villages and small towns vanished in one region and emerged in another, social differentiation within communities increased as well, with shipmasters organising separately from common seamen; eventually, this type of seafaring community disappeared in the late twentieth century. Seafaring communities in big port cities, by contrast, thanks to immigration, continued to exist, although this category, too, has seen shifts in geography in the last 150 years, notably from Amsterdam and London to Rotterdam and Hamburg; moreover, the origin of immigrant seamen vastly changed. This article offers several explanations for these changes and variations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Jakob Molinder ◽  
Tobias Karlsson ◽  
Kerstin Enflo

Will technical change spur conflicts in the labor market? In this study, we examine electricity adoption in Sweden during the first decades of the twentieth century. Exploiting that proximity to hydropowered plants shaped the electricity network independently of previous local conditions, we estimate the impact of electricity on labor strikes. Our results indicate that electricity adoption preceded an increase in conflicts, but strikes were of an offensive nature and most common in sectors with increasing labor demand. This suggests that electrification provided workers with a stronger bargaining position from which they could voice their claims.


Author(s):  
Martin Daunton

The British state in the long eighteenth century created an effective fiscal–military state based on an efficient tax system that allowed borrowing without the default that afflicted France. The result was success in wars with France and the expansion of the empire. After the victory at Waterloo in 1815, consent was lost as a result of the high level of debt service which fell on producers within an unreformed political system. This chapter explains how consent was re-established by the use of a political language of neutrality and equity between classes, and by the design of parliamentary and administrative controls over spending. The fiscal state secured a high level of legitimacy and consent that prepared the ground for an expansion of public spending on welfare and warfare in the early twentieth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Banks

AbstractThis article examines negotiations on aid, scholarship provision, and a hoped-for visit by former cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, that took place between the Committee for Soviet Women (KSZh) and the Organization for Mozambican Women (OMM) as a lens into Soviet-African interaction in the late twentieth century. Women's organizations offer a unique perspective as women's rights occupied a central place in socialism, conceptions of modernity, and African nationalist organizing. Drawing on archives, interviews, and organizational publications, the article highlights how the symbolic and pragmatic politics of these connections were woven together through the circulation of gifts. At the same time, the article draws attention to fundamental misalignment in the groups' conceptions of gender and in their ambitions for the relationship. Bound by institutional norms, the KSZh consistently offered OMM the same set of items year after year, while OMM women asked for alternative forms of support with higher material and symbolic value because they believed their relationship should be mutually determined and relevant for local conditions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Harel Chorev-Halewa

This article presents a new approach for analyzing the characteristics and historical transformations of an institution central to Palestinian society and the Fertile Crescent at large – the Elite Family. The approach perceives elite families in the twentieth century as complex organizations with three fundamental traits: structure, distinct goals and strategy. Based on the cases of the al-Jaʿbarī family from Hebron and the al-Maṣrī family from Nablus, the article comparatively examines the ways each family dealt with historical shifts from the early twentieth century through the late 1970s and how this affected its sociopolitical status. My principal argument is that the three attributes of goals, structure and strategy – which were influenced by local conditions too – shaped the different ways in which the two families managed changes and challenges, and directly determined the degree to which each endured in the sociopolitical arena. This approach challenges the prevalent view of the West Bankʼs elite families as “traditional” players that were doomed to fall from grace due to the major upheaval that the Palestinians experienced during the second half of the twentieth century.



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