Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph M. Leck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Officer Corps ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Cultural Affinity

This concluding chapter discusses how underlying the choice of Ulrichs as a symbol of resistance to Prussian–Nazi politics resulted to growing popular recognition of sexual politics as a vital feature of modern history. In this vein, Minister Einem's expulsion of homosexuals from the German officer corps reveals the cultural affinity between the rise of mass armies in the nineteenth century and the construction of modern masculinity. This affinity was a core cultural–political continuity between Prussian authoritarianism and the Nazi dictatorship. Indeed, the aspect of Nazi ideology that most closely resembled the fascist archetype was its gender politics. The choice of Ulrichs as a replacement for Einem, then, symbolizes rising acknowledgment that reactionary sexual politics was the greatest moral–cultural appeal of fascist populism.

Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dunagan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Development ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
And Gender

Katherine Dunagan Osborne, "Inherited Emotions: George Eliot and the Politics of Heirlooms" (pp. 465––493) This essay removes George Eliot's heroines from heterosexual dyads to focus on the roles that things play in women's autonomous moral and sexual development. Because Eliot's female protagonists can adapt heirlooms for their own private and emotional purposes, they can replace traditional inheritance based on bloodlines with a non-familial, emotional inheritance, thus illustrating the subtlety of Eliot's family and gender politics. This reading of Eliot contextualizes specific heirlooms in Middlemarch (1871––72) and Daniel Deronda (1876)——including miniature portraits, emeralds, turquoises, and diamonds——to reveal the surprising politics embedded in Eliot's heirlooms that her nineteenth-century readers would certainly have recognized.

‘The Most Portentous Event in Modern History’: Ireland Before and After the Peterloo Massacre

2019 ◽  
pp. 140-159
Author(s):  
James Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Irish Catholics ◽  
Irish Question

This chapter looks at Irish responses to Peterloo. It looks at the relations between radical reformers and the movement for Catholic Emancipation. The kind of political repression that was enacted in Manchester in August of that year was more common in Ireland, and reformers made common cause with Irish Catholics, many of whom were beginning to migrate to the industrial towns of Northern England. Ireland gave English reformers a cautionary example of tyrannical government, while Irish writers and politicians saw in Peterloo an illustration of the English establishment's true coercive colours. There was however a deeper sense in which Peterloo and the Irish Question were imbricated in early nineteenth-century culture. The role of public speaking, the control of potentially subversive speech, and the challenge of radical politics to traditional standards of rhetoric and oratory were all brought into focus in the years leading to the massacre.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin R. Hochman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Book Studies ◽  
Shifting Boundaries

This introductory chapter illustrates that there were multiple understandings of Germanness during the Weimar era, hence emphasizing how the triumph of Nazi ideology after 1918 was far from certain and pointing out how historical understandings of Nazism has overlooked the vital historical relationship between Germany and Austria. It examines the state of Germany in both the nineteenth century and the immediate postwar situation, from which the more contemporary contests that emerged between republicans and their opponents over the nature of German nationalism and politics that this book studies had emerged. The chapter contextualizes the shifting boundaries of Germanness against this backdrop, at the same time highlighting the long-neglected connections between Germany and Austria and the importance of exploring the exchange of people and ideas across the Austro-German boundary.

Review of Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)

2021 ◽  
pp. 317-318
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Personal Responsibility ◽  
State Power ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Raison D’État ◽  
Historical Life

Wight praised Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History, as ‘by any odds the most important and enduring book on international relations published in the 1920s, and perhaps between the wars’. It is, Wight wrote, ‘an essay in the historiography of human thought, a study of how Machiavelli’s principles infiltrated into European statecraft, how thinkers and politicians who most strenuously repudiated him found it necessary to borrow from him, and how the idea of raison d’état developed to guide the greatest statesmen from Richelieu to Bismarck, until it was swamped by the ignorant popular passions of 1918’. Meinecke was preoccupied, Wight observed, with (in Meinecke’s words) ‘that tragic duality which came into historical life through the medium of Machiavellism—that indivisible and fateful combination of poison and curative power which it contained’. Moreover, Wight added, the tension between ‘necessity’ and ‘moral traditions’ has been recognized by some statesmen ‘as the central experience of international politics’. Wight noted that ‘Meinecke, despite his honourable retirement under the Nazis, was infected with the German heresy of idealizing State power and fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility. … Yet it was easier for a Burckhardt or an Acton, in the security of nineteenth-century Switzerland or Britain, to condemn power as evil without qualification.’

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