Two Forgotten Studies in Political Psychology

1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 707-717 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Lasswell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Psychology ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Power ◽  
European Politics ◽  
Basic Fact ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Point Of Departure

While it is true that every writer on politics has been to some degree an observer of psychological facts, the significance of this has never been so apparent to systematic students as it is today; otherwise, writings of considerable merit in political psychology could scarcely have suffered the fate of the two books referred to in the present study and have disappeared from sight. Dr. J. G. Zimmerman's Essay on National Pride, published at Zürich in 1758, might very well have been the point of departure for extended research into the nature of patriotism and international attitudes; Gottfried Duden's inquiry, Concerning the Essential Differences of States and the Motives of Human Nature, published at Cologne in 1822, stated problems and suggested methods for the examination of the realities of political power which ought to have inspired a century of minute research. Both books fell flat, and it is only in this day of numerous soundings in psychological politics that it has become worthwhile to disinter them.That a book about national pride should have been published two years after the beginning of the Seven Years' War is a sharp reminder that European politics had undergone a transformation. The Reformation was undoubtedly a nationalist movement in many of its phases, but it introduced a series of sectional and party disturbances which intercepted the progress of nationalism. These had subsided, and by the eighteenth century the clash of competing imperialisms became not only a basic fact but a fact of which the men of the age were aware.

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

Between History and Nature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hermeneutic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

Communicatio Idiomatum

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Communicatio Idiomatum

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Christological debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the ascription of divine and human predicates to the person of the incarnate Son of God (the communicatio idiomatum). It does so by close attention to the arguments deployed by the protagonists in the discussion, and to the theologians’ metaphysical and semantic assumptions, explicit and implicit. It traces the central contours of the Christological debates, from the discussion between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s to the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586. The book shows that Luther’s Christology is thoroughly Medieval, and that innovations usually associated with Luther—in particular, that Christ’s human nature comes to share in divine attributes—should be ascribed instead to his younger contemporary Johannes Brenz. The discussion is highly sensitive to the differences between the various Luther groups—followers of Brenz, and the different factions aligned in varying ways with Melanchthon—and to the differences between all of these and the Reformed theologians. And by locating the Christological discussions in their immediate Medieval background, the book also provides a comprehensive account of the continuities and discontinuities between the two eras. In these ways, it is shown that the standard interpretations of the Reformation debates on the matter are almost wholly mistaken.

“Modern Biography”: Form, Function, and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Genre Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-55
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Proper Selection ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
Form Function ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Periodical Essays

This essay outlines the comprehensive theory of “modern” eighteenth-century biography that was articulated throughout the century in the often lengthy prefaces to collections of lives, disseminated in periodical essays, and applied in reviews to stand-alone lives. This theory addressed the proper selection, presentation, and treatment of both individual and collected “lives.” It gave biography national, historical, commercial, and educational functions; detailed the components of its life-historical narrative and of its critical portions; set standards for what constituted “a fair and full account” of a character, life, and works; and contained in embryo virtually all aspects of biography that would later be singled out as the primary or most valued characteristic of biographical writing. This essay describes the ways biographers and theorists confronted and resolved two ubiquitous difficulties arising from their consensus that “fame or celebrity among us in their generation” was “the grand principle” on which biography was founded: first, how to “do justice” to a person on the basis of sources and testimonials that reflected the partisanship of a country “rent by faction” since the Reformation; and second, how to represent people who had been celebrated in their own time, but not in the biographer's later generation.

Fielding and Richardson

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
General Type ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

Prologue

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Western World ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Secular Terms

This prologue provides an overview of the Secular Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference. In the Western world, art, music, science, politics, and even the categories of space and time had undergone a gradual process of secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Enlightenment built on this process and made it into an international intellectual cause. This book then aims to understand the major intellectual currents of the century that gave birth to the label “secular.”

Reformation, Resistance, and Reason of State (1517-1625)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

The period 1517–1625 was crucial for the development of political thought. During this time of expanding empires, religious upheaval, and social change, new ideas about the organization and purpose of human communities began to be debated. In particular, there was a concern to understand the political or civil community as bounded, limited in geographical terms and with its own particular structures, characteristics, and history. There was also a growing focus, in the wake of the Reformation, on civil or political authority as distinct from the church or religious authority. To explain these new ideas about political power, the concept of sovereignty began to be used, alongside a new language of reason of state. Yet political theories based upon religion still maintained significant traction, particularly claims for the divine right of kings. In the midst of these developments, the language of natural law became increasingly important as a means of legitimizing political power; natural law provided a rationale for earthly authority that was separate from Christianity and its use enabled new arguments for religious toleration. This book offers a new reading of early modern political thought, drawing on a wide range of sources from Europe and beyond. It makes connections between Christian Europe and the Muslim societies that lay to its south and east, showing the extent to which concerns about the legitimacy of political power were shared. It demonstrates that the history of political thought can both benefit from, and remain distinctive within, the wider field of intellectual history.

Political, Social, and Cultural Legacies

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
J.S. Grewal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Considerable Importance ◽  
Main Stream ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Legacies

A long struggle for political power that culminated in the establishment of Khalsa Raj in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was the most striking legacy of Guru Gobind Singh. Significantly, a wide range of literature was produced during this period by Sikh writers in new as well as old literary forms. The Dasam Granth emerged as a text of considerable importance. The doctrines of Guru Granth and Guru Panth crystallized, and influenced the religious, social and political life of the Khalsa. The Singhs formed the main stream of the Sikh Panth at the end of the century. Singh identity was sharpened to make the Khalsa visibly the ‘third community’ (tisar panth).

order to answer this question, we should obviouslyexamine Weyer's Depraestigiis to see if it contains elements of what is called, perhaps inappropriately, a myth. One of my students researched this and provided me with the results . She demonstrated that Johann Weyer was nowhere presented as one who opposed the theological approach by means of a medical approach. Admittedly, he pointed to certain 'somatic' causes which affected the physical constitution of witches and which predisposed them to be influenced by the peculiar materiality of the devil's 'spirit'. Weyer even spoke of 'melancholia' when he described the specificsomatic constitution of the witches. But in this he did not differ from the philosophers, theologians and physicians of his time. The same can be argued regarding the second element of the myth. Certainly, Weyer pleaded for a humanitarian approach and acted courageously against unnecessary cruelty , as Montaigne and others did. However, does this imply that he was defending an approach which foreshadowed the specific psychiatric practice? I find it impossible to draw this conclusion. Nevertheless, the debate around witch-hunting was of historical significance for modern times because of the changes which it introduced in the Western concept of man. More elements are involved than are usually related in the traditional Weyer myth. The witch-hunt period was also the period during which the disciplines of theology and philosophy started to diverge. The Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion were partly responsible for this development. It was also influenced by the new findings in lruman biology. Around that time, the circulatory system was discovered. One had also become aware of the existence and importance of the nervous system, although its precise way of functioning was not yet fully understood. The theory of physiological humours was being gradually discarded and, along with it, the belief in 'spirits', the very tiny but distinct material elements in the body's centre. The manner in which Descartes, for example, attempted to construct a. theory of the blood's circuiation which did not abandon the belief in these material spirits, demonstrates how difficult was for modern thought to leave the old experience of the body behind. Moreover, religion was linked to this bodily experience. The beliefs that a human being was part of the harmony of creation, that mankind was influenced by the cosmos, that all kinds of spirits existed; the moral consequences derived from these key beliefs and the more particular religious statements such as, for example, transubstantiation as the core of the Eucharist, were shaken by the new conceptions of the human body which focused on 'man as a machine'. It is characteristic of the changes in this period that the Church did not attack Descartes's philosophical system for its sceptical point of departure. At that time, scepticism was an attitude favoured

2013 ◽  
pp. 157-157
Keyword(s):  
Circulatory System ◽  
The Body ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
New Findings ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunt ◽  
Theology And Philosophy ◽  
Point Of Departure
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