Spy Training Secret Society

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-14
Author(s):  
Stephanie Bearce
Keyword(s):  
Secret Society

The Confederacy and the Purge of the Unionist Free Traders, 1906–1910

1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Conservative Party ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Secret Society ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Tariff Reform ◽  
Corn Laws ◽  
English Politics

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘… in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers … [which] … saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement…’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’.

scholarly journals HOW TO SABOTAGE A SECRET SOCIETY: THE DEMISE OF CARL FRIEDRICH BAHRDT'S GERMAN UNION IN 1789

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-402
Author(s):  
ANDREW MCKENZIE-MCHARG
Keyword(s):  
Secret Society ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Public ◽  
The North ◽  
State And Society ◽  
German Republic ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn 1789 in Leipzig, a slim pamphlet of 128 pages appeared that sent shock waves through the German republic of letters. The pamphlet, bearing the title Mehr Noten als Text (More notes than text), was an ‘exposure’ whose most sensational element was a list naming numerous members of the North German intelligentsia as initiates of a secret society. This secret society, known as the German Union, aimed to push back against anti-Enlightenment tendencies most obviously manifest in the policies promulgated under the new Prussian king Frederick William II. The German Union was the brainchild of the notorious theologian Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–92). But who was responsible for the ‘exposure’? Using material culled from several archives, this article pieces together for the first time the back story to Mehr Noten als Text and in doing so uncovers a surprisingly heterogeneous network of Freemasons, publishers, and state officials. The findings prompt us to reconsider general questions about the relationship of state and society in the late Enlightenment, the interplay of the public and the arcane spheres and the status of religious heterodoxy at this time.

Acéphale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Elder
Keyword(s):  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Hierarchical Organization ◽  
The Self ◽  
Secret Society ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Gift

The name Acéphale refers to two related projects: one is a journal, founded by Georges Bataille (1887–1962), published between 1936 and 1939, whose articles often extolled Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy; the second refers to a secret society that formed around Bataille. That the term derives from the Greek ἀκέφαλος (akephalos, "headless") made it an appropriate name for the counter-religion Bataille aimed at founding to revitalize the mythic experience of plenitude: the head, Bataille maintained, stands for hierarchical organization and God, so the society and journal that gave the gnostic-inflected counter-religion expression should be headless. Bataille’s interest in an atheological counter-religion was grounded in the principle of expenditure that he saw manifested in unproductive forms of consumption, which have no end beyond themselves, and thereby constitute an irrecoverable loss. This anti-Platonic, anti-renascence social body would be headless because it would recover, within the isolation that confines modern humans, the vitalizing experience of the sacred—that is, of a privileged moment of communal unity and convulsive communication of ordinarily suppressed sensations. It would headless, too, because the Dionysian-orgiastic rituals of the secret society would be aimed against both reason and identity. Bataille’s conviction that ultimate expenditure is "the gift of the self" led the participants in Acéphale to an interest in sacrifice.

scholarly journals Secret society, secret sources?

2016 ◽  
Vol Volume 112 (Number 3/4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Edwardsr ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Secret Society

Story of a Secret Society

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Marina Galletti
Keyword(s):  
Secret Society ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
History Of

This article aims to retrace the history of the Acéphale secret society and its role in the development of the work of Bataille, notably the unfinished project of the Atheological Summa ( Somme athéologique) . Based on sociological notions of the ‘secret society’ and ‘the society of men’, it updates the dual aspects of Acéphale: a diurnal or ‘political’ aspect constituted by the publication of the journal Acéphale, and afterwards by the public activity of the College of Sociology; and a nocturnal or religious side, as evidenced by the activity of the secret society itself, an activity aiming to strengthen the communitarian link amongst the followers, and to open them up to what Caillois would call ‘a broader conspiracy’.

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