Antisemitism as an Ideology and Its General Function

1984 ◽  
pp. 602-652
Author(s):  
Stephen Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
General Function ◽  
Scientific Rationality ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Degree Of Coherence ◽  
Private Opinion ◽  
Structural Coherence ◽  
Mode A

This chapter addresses antisemitism as an ideology. If it is compared not with modern political ideologies of which socialism is the model, but with belief-systems that are more “popular,” more common, and more diffuse, with popular religion and mythology, antisemitism can be seen to have a certain unity and structural coherence. It can be seen, too, to have its own “rationality,” its own power of explanation, different from but as compelling as “scientific rationality.” Two further factors lend force to this interpretation. First, antisemitism was not a private opinion, formulated by individuals for themselves; it was a social, cultural phenomenon, an already existing ideological system, to which they adhered with more or less conviction, or which they ignored or rejected. Second, in the last decades of the nineteenth century in France precisely, this system achieved a new degree of coherence; a set of old beliefs and ideas about Jews was articulated and systematized by writers and journalists to serve new functions. Antisemitism was by origin and mode a “popular” ideology, but, in its modern shape, it was formulated by intellectuals.

The Challenges of Modernity: The Case of Political Islam

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 215-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdi Parvizi Amineh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
First Case ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Traditional Cultures ◽  
Fault Lines

AbstractSince the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century in England, all traditional cultures at one point in history have been challenged by modernity. This happened first in Europe and later in the rest of the world as a result of the late nineteenth century expansion of European capitalism and civilization. When confronted with modernity, individual traditional cultures conflict with the increasing plurality of lifestyles and values. There are two ways to solve this conflict: either remain in the past or innovate. In the first case, tradition prevails. In the second case, the challenges of modernity are embraced by adapting to the new circumstances. This will eventually lead to the renewal of one's own culture. Since the late nineteenth century, the challenges of modernity have resulted in a variety of often contradictory Islamic political ideologies and practices. In contrast to the cultural-essentialist and a-historical assumptions of some scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, who see the phenomenon of political Islam as a characteristic of an inevitable "clash of civilizations"—according to which conflicts and threats to world peace and security in the twenty-first century will be carried out along "civilizational fault lines"—this article argues that the actual fault-lines are socio-economic, not geo-cultural, and that conflicts in today's world do not take place between cultures but within them. Those societies that are more successful in adapting to the challenges of modernity show a relatively stronger capacity to cope with the growing complexity of political and cultural pluralism.

Myth, metaphor and hypothesis: how anthropomorphism defeats science

1995 ◽  
Vol 349 (1328) ◽  
pp. 215-218 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The State ◽  
Selfish Gene ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Rationalism

Dawkin’s theory of the selfish gene has achieved an hegemony quite out of proportion to its intellectual finesse. Its popularity among not just sociobiologists, but biologists proper, provides yet another illustration of the susceptibility of scientific rationalism to the social and political ideologies of the day, to which scientists, being only too human, are heir. A singular achievement of nineteenth century biology, through such writers as Darwin and Huxley, was the construction of an objectifying language for the description of biological phenomena. Transposed into evolutionary theory, this language carefully deanthropomorphizes the processes of mutation, competition and survival, which were defined as central to the state of being of the natural world. Implications of motivation and intention were excluded from the meaning of these terms, as improper for the species and operations involved.

Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-369
Author(s):  
Roger Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Perfect Equilibrium ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
The Public ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Mode A

By any measure, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) must be considered the leading singer, if not the leading musician, of the later nineteenth century. Her sizable body of recordings (twenty-eight) makes her a key witness to late nineteenth-century performance style. Her great celebrity also ensured lavish written documentation of her life, including what she did, what people said about her, and sometimes what she said about herself. In this article I bring together these two types of material to consider a central aspect of Patti's life and artistry: her relationship to contemporary notions of femininity. Like all women who entertained before the public, Patti contended with the taint of immorality. I argue that her response to that taint shaped both her overall conduct and her particular vocalism. For while in truth her way of life fundamentally contradicted the reigning ideals of womanhood, Patti projected in her dress, her makeup, her public statements, her published imagery, and, most importantly, her stage characterizations and vocal styling the most perfect manifestation of femininity available: the virginal ingénue. The consistency of this self-performance encourages the identification of a similar persona in her singing, and indeed through close readings of several recordings I expose what I call her “maidenly mode,” a vocal strategy analogous to her other ingenuous representations. If many, like Verdi, found in Patti a “perfect equilibrium between singer and actress,” her example can begin to suggest to us what it meant to sound like an ingénue in late nineteenth-century Europe.

Love in a Colonial Climate: Marriage, Sex and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tapan Raychaudhuri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
World Views ◽  
Basic Emotions ◽  
Sexual Impulse ◽  
Different Cultures

Studies concerned with the intimate areas of human experience suggest that the institutions and social mores structured around the instinctive drives of mankind—such as sex, love and fear, are not meant to serve the same purpose in every culture. Belief systems, world views and culturally-determined expectations from life determine the texture, causation and expression of even our very basic emotions. Nature's purpose for the sexual impulse may be the propagation of the species, but in controlling and harnessing this drive for the ends of social cohesion, different cultures have had very different objectives in view and used very different means. The emotive affects associated with its expression have also varied accordingly.

The Merging of Spiritualities: Jane Eyre as Missionary of Love

1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Jeffrey Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
Christian Discourse

This essay analyzes the discourses of spirituality represented in Jane Eyre within the context of the Evangelical upheaval in the Britain of Charlotte Brontë's childhood and the mixing of supernatural with Christian elements in the "popular religion" of early-nineteenth-century British rural society. In addition to a dominant Christian spiritualism and a supernatural spiritualism, however, a third discrete discourse is identified in the text-the discourse of spiritual love. The novel stages a contest between these three competing discourses. Christianity is itself conflictually represented, being torn between the repressive, masculine Evangelicalism of Mr. Brocklehurst and the healing communion (among women) represented by Helen Burns and the figure of "sympathy." The supernatural is equally conflicted: it is shown to empower Jane and to be a necessary vehicle for bringing Christian discourse in contact with the discourse of spiritual love, but then it is denied and left, like the madwoman in the attic, as the excluded term. Finally, spiritual love is offered by the text as that which solves these contradictions, revising and merging Christianity and the supernatural to produce a rejuvenated spirituality, one that fosters what is conceived of as the "whole" person, her need for mutual human relationship, her spiritual needs, and her desire.

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