Chapter 1. Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

1998 ◽  
pp. 35-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann

Chapter 1 analyzes Schmitt’s assessment of democratic movements in Weimar and the gravity of their effects on the state and constitution. It emphasizes that the focus of Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar was mass democracy rather than liberalism. Schmitt warned that the combination of mass democracy, the interpenetration of state and society, and the emergence of total movements opposed to liberal democracy, namely the Nazis and the Communists, were destabilizing the Weimar state and constitution. Weimar, Schmitt argued, had been designed according to nineteenth century principles of legitimacy and understandings of the people. Under the pressure of mass democracy, the state was buckling and cannibalizing itself and its constitution. Despite this, Schmitt argued, Weimar jurists’ theoretical commitments left them largely unable to recognize the scope of what was occurring. Schmitt’s criticism of Weimar democracy was intended to raise awareness of how parliamentary democracy could be turned against the state and constitution.


Author(s):  
Hans Hummer

Chapter 1 explores the modern values that have animated kinship studies since their emergence in the nineteenth century. It examines the sudden invention of kinship by Johann Bachofen, Henry Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and Lewis Henry Morgan in the 1860s, and the internal and external developments in the West that prompted their discoveries: revolutionary agitation, the engagement with “primitives” around the globe, industrialization and the disintegration of old solidarities, and intellectual revolutions in the study of prehistory, especially Indo-European studies and Darwinian evolution. Social theorists transformed kinship into an elemental form of human sociality and evolutionary development, and a building block of the emerging liberal order as the West coped with the ontological sea change wrought by the desacralization and industrialization of society.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Author(s):  
Marion Thain

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.


Author(s):  
Andrew Warnes

Chapter 1 offers a brief history of the demise of the shop counter and of the rise of self-service over the late nineteenth century. It offers a brief reading of Sister Carrie, showing how self-service engendered a new relationship to the commodity object, which, in turn, reflected on individual self-image.


Author(s):  
David Fieni

Chapter 1 does a comparative reading of French theories of philological decadence and Arabic and Islamic accounts of reformism and modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century. It begins with an examination of the secular philosophy of history of French Orientalist Ernest Renan, which both denies the very existence of decadence as a useful category of analysis and simultaneously constructs the Semite as inherently decadent. Renan’s 1883 debate with Persian reformist intellectual Jamal al-din al-Afghani demonstrates how European Orientalism set the terms for discussions of modernity but also how al-Afghani’s response partially defamiliarizes the categories of thought that frame the debate itself. The chapter ends with an exploration of two Arabic analyses of Arab decadence by Farah Antun and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, who, along with al-Afghani, constitute a mode of “nomad thought” that contrasts markedly with Renan’s self-satisfied and self-centering diagnosis of Oriental decadence.


Author(s):  
Paul Stock

Chapter 1 explains the characteristics and significance of the book’s principal source material: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British geography books. These works have been largely neglected by historians, but their popularity and summative nature means that they can reveal the formative, commonplace ideas circulating in British literate culture. However, due to their opaque authorships, plagiaristic contents, and complex publication histories, geographical texts pose specific methodological challenges. The chapter therefore argues that we need to adopt different conceptual and procedural priorities in order to discern popular mentalities from these works.


Enthusiasm ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Monique Scheer

Chapter 1 argues that there are two dominant strands of emotion theory in Germany in the modern period, one of “Enlightened,” one of “Romantic” character, which exist side by side and are mobilized in sometimes paradoxical ways. These heuristic categories aim to organize the vast stores of knowledge about emotions, and what implications it has for judgments about emotional practice. They are philosophical and aesthetic traditions which intertwine with emotional styles and theological orientations, and both underlie the development of psychology as a natural-science discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. By virtue of the influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy and social theory, they still undergird scholarly and everyday discourse on emotions and conviction to this day, even beyond the strictly German context. This argument is built on an analysis of emotion concepts stored in German encyclopedias from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, which document shifts in the location of “real” emotion as well as normative stances on what “real” emotion is. Understanding the historical trajectory of knowledge about emotion more generally helps situate the analysis of debates on enthusiasm in the following chapters.


Author(s):  
Ulrich Bindseil

Chapter 1 first restates the present dominant view on the nature and origin of central banking, which can be summarized as follows: (1) Defining central banking is ‘by no means straightforward’; (2) the Riksens Ständers Bank and the Bank of England would have been the first sort-of central banks; (3) early central banks did not have a policy mandate and the orientation towards public objectives would go back only to the nineteenth century; (4) there has been no concept of central banking before 1800; (5) early central banking developed out of the largest commercial banks; (6) the lender of last resort (LOLR) would have developed only in the second half of the nineteenth century or even later. Second, the chapter reviews a recent literature which started again to question this view. It is explained how this book will take up the challenge to correct the myth about the origins of central banking.


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