How they made us believe their truths: Monumental art in public spaces before and after the fall of communism (the case of Slovakia)

Human Affairs ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabína Jankovičová ◽  
Magda Petrjánošová
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Before And After ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The One

AbstractThis paper is concerned with monumental art in Slovakia before and after the fall of Communism in 1989. Generally, art in public spaces is important, because it influences the knowledge and feelings the people who use this space have about the past and the present, and thus influences the shared social construction of who we are as a social group. In this article we concentrate on the period of Communism and the formal and iconographic aspects that were essential to art at that time. We also look at the political use of art—the ways in which explicit and implicit meanings and ideas were communicated through art to the general public. We touch also on the present situation regarding the perception of “Communist art”. In the final section we discuss the state of affairs of the last twenty years of chaotic freedom in the post-socialist era. On the one hand, since there is no real cultural politics or conception for artworks in public spaces at the level of the state many artworks simply disappear, often without public discussion, and on the other hand, some actors use their political power to build monuments that promote their private political views.

scholarly journals The Art of Governance and the Political Grammar of Legitimacy: Tales of the State for a Unified Korea

2002 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Byung-ok Kil
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Real World ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Of Affairs

This inquiry demonstrates that the political legitimacy of a certain society is historically determined, reflects specific institutional and contextual features, and employs a variety of meanings. These meanings can describe both a state of affairs and a process that ultimately involves justifications for legitimate agents and socio-political structures. This paper attepmpts to understand how the meanings of political legitimacy are conceptualized in society. As a case study, it questions: What are the conditions for the existence of political legitimacy and how have they been constructed? How is political legitimacy endorsed in South Korea today, and how does it differ from the past? This paper applies a deconstructive theory of political legitimacy that exploresa a distinctively modern style, or 'art of governance' that has an all-encompassing, as well as individualized effect upon its constituencies. By this approach, this paper argues that the concept of unification does not have a solid significance in the real world, but rather, it is an imaginary idea imposed by the dominant elite class, which is constantly imposed, reinterpreted and transformed in its political context.

The Political Doctrine of Feodor Samarin

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 391-398
Author(s):  
Kirill A. Solovyov
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The One

The article is devoted to the political views of F.D. Samarin, his conception of the political system in Russia before 1905, constitutional reforms of 1905–1906 and Stolypin’s reforms. The author demonstrates how Samarin tried to adopt the Slavophile doctrine to the situation of the beginning of the 20th century. At that he had to carry on polemics both with the opponents of the Slavophilism and its supporters. On the one hand, this fact stresses Slavophilism diversity and its inner heterogeneity. On the other hand, it shows the nature of the Slavophile doctrine itself that resembled more the historiographic approach to researching the past than a well-structured political conception. Giving meaningful political content to Slavophile ideas depended fully on every single representative of the Slavophile intellectual heritage.

scholarly journals Utilitarianism: Doctrinal analysis evolution of thought

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Olgierd Górecki
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Universal Principles ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Individual

Utilitarianism as an innovative and original stream of ethical and political thought has enriched the philosophical discourse of the last three centuries. Utilitarian thinkers claim that maximization of pleasure correlated with minimization of pain is the correct way to create an objective catalog of rules or behaviors that result in the formation of the highest utility for a society and its individuals. From a methodological perspective, there are differences among the utilitarian philosophers on issues such as: happiness, pleasure or utility guide to diametrical disaccord on an ethical or institutional area. The present analysis of the utilitarian thought represents some of the interesting differences in interpretation of this doctrine. However, utilitarianism does not include logical or intellectually strong arguments for the protection of an individual’s rights against the interest of people at large. Thus, this doctrine during the 18th and the 19th centuries postulated the political egalitarianism. Nowadays, utilitarianism has lost its strong ethical position. In the past, utilitarianism was a political instrument to protect most of the people in a society from an arbitrary reigning of small elite groups. In recent times, this thought legitimizes the coercion of the majority will regardless of the fact that other smaller groups may have different political views. Such thinking allows to objectify the individual man which is only identified with instrumentality to maximization of utility. The author analyzes the writings of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, and compares their doctrines with the scientific literature and forwards a basic thesis on the universal principles of utilitarianism. The author argues that the actual rules of political ethics under conditions of limitation theory of utility append the law of inviolability of the natural rights of an individual.

scholarly journals Talking to the System: Imre Mikó, 1911–1977

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Bottoni
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
The Political ◽  
Security Officer ◽  
Social Legitimacy ◽  
State Security ◽  
The People ◽  
Push Forward ◽  
The One ◽  
Infrastructural Support

Taking a cue from an intelligence file produced by the Romanian political police on Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual Imre Mikó (Cluj, 1911–1977), the article analyzes the various patterns of accomodation with the political system, which represents a key to the understanding of how social legitimacy was built and maintained by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The framework in which this story takes place is especially interesting due to the Romanian context. On the one hand, the analysis of an unconventional collaboration established during the 1970s between the security organs of a national communist system and a prominent conservative intellectual stimulates us to rethink the state-society relationship in Ceaușescu’s Romania in more dynamic terms. Among the multiple reasons that led Mikó to accept the role of informer, one finds the communitarian ideology of “serving the people”, but also his belief that cooperation with the state security on relevant issues to the Transylvanian Hungarian community did not represent a betrayal of national ideals but the only way to achieve certain political goals, such as informing the Western public opinion on the worsening condition of the Hungarian minority. The case of Mikó can be compared with other files unveiled in Romania during the last years, and shows that often uncritically accepted definition of “collaboration” require serious conceptual reshaping. During the last decades of the communist regimes, significant parts of the formerly persecuted elite came to work together with the state security organs. They did not “talk to the system” with the purpose of spying on fellow citizens, but seeked to push forward their own cause with the infrastructural support of the state security, in a context where non-party members had been denied any access to the political sphere, and they regarded personal contact with a high-raking state security officer as a counterbalance of their marginality.

Early History of Elis and Pisa: Invented or Evolving Traditions?

Klio ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mait Kõiv
Keyword(s):  
Early Period ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

SummaryThe article discusses the development of ethnic and political identities, and the related traditions concerning the past, in Archaic and Classical Elis and Pisa. It shows that the earliest signs of Pisatan identity can be traced to the sixth century BC, and that the Eleans of the valley of Peneios on the one hand, and the people dwelling in the valley of Alpheios (i.e. the Pisatans) and the so-called Triphylia farther south on the other, nourished distinct traditions about their heroic past, which reflect distinct ethnic identities. Instead of assuming that the Pisatans as a group was intentionally constructed and its ‚history‘ invented during the political disturbances of the fourth century BC, we must accept that the Eleans and the Pisatans had since an early period developed and mutually re-negotiated the traditions confirming their identities and promoting their interests in the changing historical conditions.

scholarly journals Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-38
Author(s):  
Janar Mihkelsaar
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

In this article, I argue that at the center of Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to the political lies the thinking of subject as that of relation. Throughout the historical actualizations of, for example, the individual, the state, or the people as a subject, the problematic of relation is one that has retreated and now demands to be subjected to a retreatment. When the arche-teleological presuppositions that constitute subject as that which is given enter the phase of deconstruction, subject comes to present itself as nothing but the activity of relating itself to itself. I respond to Nancy’s call to invent “an affirmation of relation” by way of rethinking the logics of sovereignty and democracy. While sovereignty unites, posits, finitizes, and finishes the self of the people, a post-68 democracy pluralizes, infinitizes, and disfigures the identity of the people. Between sovereignty and democracy, notwithstanding their conflicting tenets, the relation is not that of reciprocal exclusion. One is rather the correlative of the other. Without the one, the other would not make any sense. Through this Janus-faced economy of the political, the people can experience its own “reality”—to experience relation itself. The affirmation of relation is what gives and keeps free the voided site of the political for the infinite self-institution of the people, and for that reason is political par excellence.

Basel Mission and Revolutions in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century China: Debating Societal Renewal

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Tobias Brandner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Taiping Rebellion ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Basel Mission

Abstract This article analyzes how the Basel missionaries interpreted the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary changes in China. After a short historical overview, it assesses the different aspects and roots of what implicitly constituted the political theology of the Basel Mission. In the body part of the essay it analyzes documents written by missionaries (letters, reports written to the home committee) to understand how the missionaries saw the epochal changes that they witnessed: the Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century and the political changes taking place between 1911–1949. A final section considers how timely the past Basel missionaries’ political views are in present-day China and how they are reflected in parts of recent Chinese political theology.

(Anamnesis) Revolting Bodies: “Le Forgeron” and the Poetry of the Past

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert St. Clair
Keyword(s):  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Louis Xvi

weChapter 4 takes up the question of poetry and engagement at its most explicit and complex in Rimbaud, focusing on a long, historical epic entitled “Le Forgeron.” We read this poem, which recreates and re-imagines a confrontation between the People in revolt and Louis XVI in the summer of 1792, as Rimbaud’s attempt to add a revolutionary supplement to the counter-epics modeled by Victor Hugo in Châtiments. Chapter 4 shows how Rimbaud’s “Forgeron” challenges us to examine the ways in which a poem might seek “to enjamb” the caesura between poiesis and praxis by including and complicating revolutionary (counter)history into its folds in order to implicate itself in the political struggles of its time.

The State as an Actor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Menz
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regulatory Capture ◽  
Banking Institutions ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Central Actor ◽  
Capitalist State ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Despite the state being such a central actor in establishing and policing the rules of the game of any given political economy, its role is often neglected. In this chapter, we briefly review relevant state theories and explore changes to the nature and appearance of the capitalist state. The awesome increase in the political fire power of the financial service sector has unfortunately led to regulatory capture. The state can no longer be considered a neutral umpire, being heavily influenced by the prerogatives of major banking institutions. This state of affairs corrupts the hopes that liberals place in the self-policing powers of the marketplace and reflects certain fears on the political left regarding the pernicious effects of ‘financialization’.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

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