Introduction

Author(s):  
Kenneth Stow

This introductory chapter explores the transformation in Jewish life that failed to occur in late eighteenth-century Rome. The French Revolution and the U.S. Constitution had established that Jews were citizens with full and equal legal rights. But in Rome, the capital of the then Papal State, no such proclamation occurred. Although Rome's Jews possessed rights in civil law, the discrimination determined by canon law was great. Roman Jews were forced to live in the ghetto decreed by Pope Paul IV in 1555, as part of a vigorous conversionary drive. People were taken to an institution known as the House of Converts, where they were held for periods of time, and most eventually converted. However, some did not, most notably Anna del Monte, who not only remained a Jew but also left a diary recounting her thirteen days in the Catecumeni, as Rome's Jews called the place.

Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.


This introductory chapter provides context for the volume’s subsequent contributions on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a variety of levels. It begins by explaining its aims with regard to the relationship between philosophy and literature. It then locates Goethe’s novel within this set of aims in three ways: first, by providing a brief outline of Goethe’s career; second, by locating his novel in the literary-historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; and third, by outlining the connections between the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and specific philosophers and thinkers who influenced his thought and for whom his work was in turn influential.


Author(s):  
Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Over the course of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the dominant powers (Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Qing China) came to espouse a surprisingly similar orientation toward legitimate statehood. While the liberation wars of the late-eighteenth century witnessed the creation of many new republics, by midcentury those republics and the empires that had survived pursued greater central authority. Although sometimes at odds with liberal rhetoric of the age (especially among reforming Republicans in the U.S.), these actors recognized the importance of coercion of violence to maintaining their states. The victory of centralized authority, whether it took the form of empires or republics, reinforced the power of established states and of organized, aggressive defense of that order.


2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew

Can the U.S. Congress address major challenges? Can Congress govern? Questions like these keep getting asked. This article addresses them by consulting the record since 1789. Given the separation-of-powers structure of the American system, such questions cannot be addressed directly. They need to be deconstructed. The presidency needs to enter the discussion, too. Also, what is a major challenge? To identify such challenges, and to supply a way of seeing how and in what respects Congress, as well as in a background frame the U.S. system more broadly, has performed, I draw on comparative analysis. How has the United States participated in thirteen major “impulses” that have invested a comparable set of nations at various times since the late eighteenth century? These challenges range from launching a new nation through building a welfare state through dealing with climate change and debt/deficit problems today.


Author(s):  
Emily Jones

The construction of Burke as the ‘founder of conservatism’ was also a product of developments in education. The increasing study of Burke arose out of several converging movements: in publishing and technology; in philosophical thought; in the increasing disposable income and leisure time of greater portions of the population; and in education movements for men and women at all levels. The popularity of topics such as the French Revolution, Romanticism, and late eighteenth-century history meant that Burke became a feature of lectures and examinations. At university, Burke was of particular interest to philosophical Idealists, English literature professors and students, and a generation of historians who taught increasingly modern courses. By analysing how Burke was studied at this much more popular, general level it is possible to pinpoint how Burke’s ‘conservative’ political thought was taught to swathes of new students—it took more than gentlemanly erudition to establish a scholarly orthodoxy.


1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger

Qualitative and quantitative research into the Jewish press in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French, German, and English is used to trace major steps in the transformation of styles of public notice of death in modern Jewish communities, and discuss its significance in both reflecting and shaping important aspects of contemporary Jewish life.


Grotiana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Nakhimovsky

AbstractThis article questions the status of Vattel's Law of Nations as an exemplary illustration of eighteenth-century developments in the history of international law. Recent discussions of the relation between eighteenth-century thinking about the law of nations and the French Revolution have revived Carl Schmitt's contention about the nexus between just war theory and the emergence of total war. This evaluative framework has been used to identify Vattel as a moral critic of absolutism who helped undermine the barriers against total war, as well as an architect and defender of those very barriers. Neither of these opposing readings is corroborated by late-eighteenth-century commentators on Vattel's treatise. To its late-eighteenth-century critics and defenders alike, Vattel's Law of Nations was distinguished by the weakness of its derivation of the law of nations from principles of natural law. Insofar as these readers did link Vattel to justifications of relatively unrestrained forms of warfare, they did so in connection with the perceived weakness of Vattel's moral position rather than with its strength. This late-eighteenth-century consensus on the defining features of Vattel's approach to the law of nations sits uncomfortably with Schmitt's evaluative framework, and indeed with other assessments of Vattel that limit themselves to orienting his treatise along fault lines in the historiography of international law.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Pauls Daija

In the article, political and historical interpretations of the first play in Latvian, an adapted translation of Ludvig Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill (1723, Latvian version 1790) are explored. Although the play has been often interpreted as a work of anti-alcohol propaganda, the article argues that the political motives of the play are no less important. Translated into Latvian during the time of the French revolution, the play mirrors the tense atmosphere of the revolutionary years and reflects changes in Latvian peasant identity. While translating, Baltic German pastor Alexander Johann Stender changed the play’s setting to the late eighteenth century Courland and added new details, emphasizing the social conflict of the play as an ethnic one. It has been argued in the article that since ‘class’ in the Baltics was divided along national lines, the difference between peasants and masters was also the difference between Latvians and Germans, so class and ethnicity merged. When the peasant and the nobleman switch places in the play, this symbolizes a change in the Latvian-German colonial relationship. The colonial interpretation allows for a characterisation of the protagonist as a desperate imitator – a colonial subject who loses his identity as a serf and is not able to form a new identity in any way other than by copying the colonialist op- pressor. But this mimicry turns into ridicule, hence the play acquires a political meaning as it implicitly shows the disastrous consequences of revolutionary pro- test. Therefore, the play can be read as a part of the discussions about the Baltic Enlightenment emancipation project and as a hidden debate on serfdom and the colonial framework of the Courland society


AJS Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Zierler

The Haskalah of the late eighteenth century, it is often observed, dealt a major blow to many traditional Ashkenazic institutions, including the rabbinate. Formerly extolled by their communities in nearly God-like superlatives—such as “Chief shepherd, a dignitary in the land … Prince among princes in Torah and wisdom”—rabbis became the object of trenchant criticism during this period. The maskilim, formerly denizens of the yeshivot, cast special aspersion on rabbis and their assertion of the authority of Jewish law, charging that the rabbinic insistence on stringencies and legal minutiae was the source of all that was wrong with Diaspora Jewish life. Much of the critique of the rabbinate targeted the culture of yeshiva learning that supported it; the maskilim promoted the study of philosophy, science, Hebrew literature, and the scientific study of Judaism. Often, this literary and philosophical assault on the authority, role, and Talmud-centeredness of the rabbinate took the form of a critique of arranged marriages and the unequal status of women in Jewish law.


Author(s):  
Arne Höcker

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how representing cases in fictional narrative became an important touchstone for the development of German literature. The concept case refers to a particular way of thinking, administrating, and classifying that has gained epistemic relevance in various disciplinary and institutional settings. In the most general terms, a case allows the making of connections between a specific, discrete incident that it reports and a general form of knowledge to which it contributes. The particular way a case fulfills its function depends on the disciplinary context in which it appears; criminal cases are used for purposes different from medical or psychological cases. The chapter then looks at the constitutive contribution of case narratives to the establishment of new scientific disciplines, in particular empirical psychology and, more important, the formation of an autonomous discourse of and about literary fiction from the late eighteenth century onward.


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