scholarly journals The Deepest Strand. Isiah Berlin and the Intellectual History of Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
John Ackroyd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia ◽  
Historical Thought

Abstract Isaiah Berlin’s essays on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia throw light not only on their subject – the role of that group in preparing the ideational ground for the coming revolutions – but more broadly on Berlin’s central philosophical preoccupations and historiographical and hermeneutical assumptions and method. I try to show this – the centrality to his overall project of Berlin’s work on the Russians – by contextualising that work within the broader framework of his philosophical and historical thought.

Leontiev on Nationalism

1955 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-272
Author(s):  
H. Handley Cloutier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Interesting Aspect ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia ◽  
Emotional Strain ◽  
Representative Member

In the intellectual history of Russia, Konstantin Leontiev (1831–1891) emerges as a singular and enigmatic figure. Generous and benevolent in his personal relations and a scintillating conversationalist, he encountered antagonism or indifference where his writings and theories were concerned. The extremely unique and even esoteric quality of his thought caused him to exert virtually no influence either in his own day or in more recent periods. He was not a representative member of the Russian intelligentsia; indeed, he beggars assignment to any particular school. Perhaps the best description one can make of him is that of heir to the emotional strain of German philosophical romanticism. His predilection for naturalism and aestheticism are typical of early nineteenth century German anti-rationalist philosophy, as is his emphasis on tradition and organic development. Leontiev lacked utterly the humanistic qualities of the earlier Slavophiles who first appropriated German philosophic influence, and this quality of severity divorces him from the Russian romantic tradition. At the same time, his idealism caused him to be wholly out of tune with the nihilist, revolutionary, and populist tendencies of his own day. A prophet without honour, he was not without merit; his views are most provocative and reward attention. Not the least interesting aspect of Leontiev lies in his attitude towards nationalism; and it is with this facet of his thought that we shall be concerned.

Oral Testimony as Historical Source Material for the Reconstruction of the Judicial History of Shipping in India (1600-1800)

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mir Kamruzzman Chowdhary
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Alternative Source ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
History Of ◽  
Judicial History ◽  
Source Materials

This study was an attempt to understand how the available alternative source materials, such as oral testimonies can serve as valuable assets to unveiling certain aspects of maritime history in India. A number of themes in maritime history in India failed to get the attention of the generation of historians, because of the paucity of written documents. Unlike in Europe, the penning down of shipping activities was not a concern for the authorities at the port in India. The pamphlets and newsletters declared the scheduled departure of the ship in Europe but, in India, this was done verbally. Therefore, maritime history in India remained marginalised. Hence, in this article, I make an endeavour to perceive how the oral testimonies can help shed some new light on certain aspects of maritime history in India, such as life on the ship, maritime practices, and perceptions among the littoral people in coastal societies. This article also outlines an approach on how the broader question on the transformation of scattered maritime practices among coastal societies can be adapted and transferred into an organised institution of law by the nineteenth century, and how these can be pursued in future. I also suggest in this article that the role of Europeans, especially the British, in the process of transformation, can be investigated further through oral testimonies in corroboration with the colonial archival records.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

Hearing the Crimean War

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Black Sea Region ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This book addresses the sounds of the Crimean War, along with the many ways nineteenth-century wartime is aurally constructed. It examines wide-ranging experiences of listeners in Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Crimea, illustrating the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the modes by which wartime sound was archived and heard. This book covers topics including music in and around war zones, the mediation of wartime sound, the relationship between sound and violence, and the historiography of listening. Individual chapters concern sound in Leo Tolstoy’s wartime writings, and his place within cosmopolitan sensibilities; the role of the telegraph in constructing sonic imaginations in London and the Black Sea region; the absence of archives for the sounds of particular ethnic groups, and how songs preserve memories for both Crimean Tatars and Polish nationalists; the ways in which perceptions of voice rearranged the mental geographies of Baltic Russia, and undermined aspirations to national unity in Italy; Italian opera as a means of conditioning elite perceptions of Crimean battlefields; and historical frames through which to understand the diffusion of violent sounds amid everyday life. The volume engages the academic fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, literary studies, sound studies, and the history of the senses.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

scholarly journals VIRTUE LANGUAGE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ORIENTALISM: A CASE STUDY IN HISTORICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 689-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
HERMAN PAUL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Historical Epistemology ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Thought Pattern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dependency Relations

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka(The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.

scholarly journals Authorial Self and Modernity as Reflected in Diaries and Memoirs. Three 19th-Century Hungarian Case Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

Abstract The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three written sources, a diary of a Calvinist student of theology, Péter (Litkei) Tóth, the memoirs of an influential public intellectual, Gusztáv Szontagh, and a belletristic printed diary of a young intellectual, János Asbóth.

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