Maruyama's Achievement: Two Views

1977 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. D. Harootunian

The long-awaited English-language publication of Maruyama's famous study is a major event for scholars of Tokugawa Japan. Those of us engaged in teaching Toku-gawa intellectual history have often known a malaise and even frustration which this work will ease considerably. Faced with English-language material that is sparse and often of limited usability, communicating the richness or simply a sense of the vitality and development of Tokugawa thought to students who know no Japanese often becomes a problem. This work, however, opens for them the possibility of new levels of sophisticated analysis and discussion.For over three decades now this seminal work, consisting of three long essays written between 1940 and 1944, has dominated Tokugawa intellectual studies. As the translator, Mikiso Hane, rightly suggests, Maruyama's stature in this field is comparable to the place occupied in Tokugawa thought by the main figure of his work, Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728). Just as Sorai is seen as the “discoverer of politics,” Ma-ruyama can be regarded as the pioneer of intellectual history in Japan, especially of political thought.


1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-440
Author(s):  
Yousuf Dadoo

This work has ventured to fill a vast gap in contemporary Islamicpolitical thought. By relating relevant basic and secondary sources to contemporarycontexts in different countries, it has attempted to determinethe extent of harmony and discord between Islamic political theory andcurrent praxis. Being the first English-language publication on this subjectinevitably raises the expectations about its scholarly merit.The first paragraph of the introduction highlights the anomalousconsequences of democratization in the Muslim world: reconciliation insome and heightened adversity in others. In principle, democracy can bereconciled with Islamic political thought. The editor then gives an historicaloutline of misconceptions toward the role of democracy in Islamicpolitics, which began with the Crusades and were reaffirmed during theIranian revolution of 1979. Turning to the twentieth century, revivalism,which often has explicit political motivations, could be easily traced tothe collapse of the Islamic caliphate. It has always welcomed ...



2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-754
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil

AbstractIn this address, I examine the lexical, geographic, temporal and philosophical origins of two key concepts in modern political thought: colonies and statistics. Beginning with the Latin word colonia, I argue that the modern ideology of settler colonialism is anchored in the claim of “improvement” of both people and land via agrarian labour in John Locke's labour theory of property in seventeenth-century America, through which he sought to provide an ideological justification for both the assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This same ideology of colonialism was turned inward a century later by Sir John Sinclair to justify domestic colonies on “waste” land in Scotland—specifically Caithness (the county within which my own grandparents were tenant farmers). Domestic colonialism understood as “improvement” of people (the “idle” poor and mentally ill and disabled) through engagement in agrarian labour on waste land inside explicitly named colonies within the borders of one's own country was first championed not only by Sinclair but also his famous correspondent, Jeremy Bentham, in England. Sinclair simultaneously coined the word statistics and was the first to use it in the English language. He defined it as the scientific gathering of mass survey data to shape state policies. Bentham embraced statistics as well. In both cases, statistics were developed and deployed to support their domestic colony schemes by creating a benchmark and roadmap for the improvement of people and land as well as a tool to measure the colony's capacity to achieve both over time. I conclude that settler colonialism along with the intertwined origins of domestic colonies and statistics have important implications for the study of political science in Canada, the history of colonialism as distinct from imperialism in modern political thought and the role played by intersecting colonialisms in the Canadian polity.



2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evonne Levy

<P>This study in intellectual history places the art historical concept of the Baroque amidst world events, political thought, and the political views of art historians themselves. Exploring the political biographies and writings on the Baroque (primarily its architecture) of five prominent Germanophone figures, Levy gives a face to art history, showing its concepts arising in the world. From Jacob Burckhardt’s still debated "Jesuit style" to Hans Sedlmayr’s <I>Reichsstil</I>, the Baroque concepts of these German, Swiss and Austrian art historians, all politically conservative, and two of whom joined the Nazi party, were all took shape in reaction to immediate social and political circumstances. </P> <P>A central argument of the book is that basic terms of architectural history drew from a long established language of political thought. This vocabulary, applied in the formalisms of Wölfflin and Gurlitt, has endured as art history’s unacknowledged political substrate for generations. Classic works, like Wölfflin’s <I>Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe</I> are interpreted anew here, supported by new documents from the papers of each figure.</P>



2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Roberto Breña

This article provides an overview of some prominent aspects of intellectual history as practiced today in Latin America, especially regarding conceptual history. It delves into the way this methodology arrived to the region not long ago and discusses the way some of its practitioners combine it with the history of political languages, often ignoring the profound differences between both approaches. Therefore, the text stresses some of the most significant contrasts between them. In its last part, the article is critical of the purported “globality” of global intellectual history, an issue that is inextricably linked with the pervasive use of the English language in the field. Throughout, the text poses several of the challenges that lie ahead for intellectual history in Latin America.



2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Vergerio

AbstractWhile the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a long tradition of celebrating ‘great thinkers’ and appropriating their ideas for contemporary theories, it has rarely accounted for how these authors came to be seen as ‘great’ in the first place. This is at least partly a corollary of the discipline’s long-standing aversion to methodological reflection in its engagement with intellectual history, and it echoes IR’s infamous tendency to misportray these great thinkers’ ideas more broadly. Drawing on existing attempts to import the methodological insights of historians of political thought into IR, this article puts forward a unified approach to the study of great thinkers in IR that combines the tenets of so-called ‘Cambridge School’ contextualism with those of what broadly falls under the label of reception theory. I make the case for the possibility of developing a coherent methodology through the combination of what is often seen as separate strands of intellectual history, and for the value of such an approach in IR. In doing so, the article ultimately offers a more rigorous methodology for engaging with the thought of great thinkers in IR, for analyzing the way a specific author’s ideas come to have an impact in practice, and for assessing the extent to which these ideas are distorted in the process.



2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li

AbstractThis essay explores the ways in which Lu Gwei-djen (1904–91) served as a gatekeeper for interpreting medicine in China in the second half of the twentieth century. After retiring from science in 1956, Lu set out to write one of the first comprehensive English-language histories of medicine in China. Through a close study of Lu’s work notes and marginalia from later in her life, this essay examines how she carefully articulated the material characteristics of a “Chinese” medicine that gave rise to jingluo, or therapeutic paths often known as “meridians.” I argue that at the heart of this uneasy comparison was the difficult process of translating across multiple expressions of physiology. By placing Lu Gwei-djen at the center of a feminist intellectual history of medicine, this essay further shows how Lu’s translations were influenced by the social hierarchies in which she was embedded, including cultural, gender, and temporal dualities.



2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 395-403
Author(s):  
Taras Boyko

The bibliography provides a list of Boris Uspenskij’s publications in English, including works written in co-authorship and various reprints/reissues. For the most part, Uspenskij’s publications in English are translations of his books and articles originally written in Russian and previously published in the Soviet Union/Russia. The first English-language publication of his work, the monograph Principles of Structural Typology appeared in 1968; the current bibliography consists of 65 entries from a period spanning from 1968 till today.



2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAIMUND OTTOW

The author discusses the discourse-theory of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Quentin Skinner, John Pocock), which is favorably compared to alternative approaches in the field of the intellectual history of political thought. Some conceptual problems of this kind of discoursetheory are discussed and some remedies proposed, resulting in the formulation of a general model, which could be applied to contemporary debates, exemplified by a short analysis of the discursive situation of modern liberalism.



1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Stone ◽  
Liu Binyan

This paper examines the foreign policy priorities and concerns of the People's Republic of China as expressed by that nation's official international, English language publication, China Daily. The paper argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the official Chinese press can be a useful tool in assessing Chinese foreign policy priorities as result of its propaganda function. Within this paradigm, it finds that China's primary foreign policy priorities are sovereignty and territorial integrity and that China considers itself primarily a regional rather than a global power. It concludes that China's foreign policy is driven by pragmatism rather than ideology because of China's domestic project of economic development.



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