scholarly journals The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War

Slavic Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 808-831 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores some of the principal themes in the intellectual history of early Soviet state violence. I argue that political religions theory, as applied principally to understanding fascism, is especially useful for understanding Leninism and Bolshevik justifications of violence during the civil war. In addition to its principal focus on the relationship between violence and the Bolshevik conception of the sacred, the article examines the significance of Bolshevik punitive discourse more generally and the alternative currents in the approaches to violence and repression. In comparing the approaches of the Chekas and the Soviet Justice Commissariat to repression, it becomes apparent that distinctly more reformatory and more repressive strands of thought coexisted in the early Soviet state. Yet these distinctions were fluid, and the overtly medicalized nature of Bolshevik punitive discourse ensured a certain harmonization of these strands.

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.

At the Edge of Reformation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Linehan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

Out of Empire into Socialist Modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy [The October Revolution and Factory-Committees], edited by Steve A. Smith, London: Kraus International Publications, 1983 Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, Volume 3, Second Edition, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, Tokyo: Waseda University, 2001 Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov, Volume 4, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji, St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press, 2002

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Flenley
Keyword(s):  
October Revolution ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe article re-examines the key debates concerning the relationship between the Russian factory-committee movement and the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state in 1917‐18. It does so with reference to a four-volume collection of documents in Russian on the history of the factory-committees in 1917/18 which first began to be published in 1927 and completed publication in 2002. Rather than the traditional totalitarian view of a movement which was cynically manipulated and dominated by an authoritarian party, what emerges is a much more complex and dynamic relationship. The article in particular argues that the so-called bureaucratisation of the factory-committee movement after the October Revolution emerged out of the practical dilemmas faced by the committees in the economic chaos of 1917/18 and the factory-committee leaders’ own desires to promote a rational, planned alternative to that chaos.

scholarly journals Theorizing the Grounds of Rhetorical Judgment

1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Loius Lucaites ◽  
Charles A. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Persian Gulf ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
The Relationship

Prudence has long been an important topic for rhetorical theorists and its place in intellectual history is becoming increasingly well documented. This essay develops a conception of prudence as an ideological construct, a term crafted in the history of its public usages to govern the relationship between common sense and political action as enacted in the name of historically situated social actors. From this perspective, prudence represents the recursive interaction between a rhetoric of judgment and the grounds on which that rhetoric is evaluated by a historically particular community of arguers. A case study of the 1991 U.S. Senate debate regarding the authorization of offensive military action in the Persian Gulf illustrates how competing standards of prudential judgment are crafted and evaluated in discursive controversy.

Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Como
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Press ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This book charts the way the English Civil War of the 1640s mutated into a revolution (paving the way for the later execution of King Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy). Focusing on parliament’s most militant supporters, the book reconstructs the origins and nature of the most radical forms of political and religious agitation that erupted during the war, tracing the process by which these forms gradually spread and gained broader acceptance. Drawing on a wide range of manuscript and print sources, the study situates these developments within a revised narrative of the period, revealing the emergence of new practices and structures for the conduct of politics. In the process, the book illuminates the appearance of many of the period’s strikingly novel intellectual currents, including ideas and practices we today associate with western representative democracy—notions of retained natural rights, religious toleration, freedom of the press, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. The book also chronicles the way the civil war shattered English Protestantism—leaving behind myriad competing groupings, including congregationalists, baptists, antinomians, and others—while examining the relationship between this religious fragmentation and political change. Finally, the book traces the gradual appearance of openly anti-monarchical, republican sentiment among parliament’s supporters. Radical Parliamentarians provides a new history of the English Civil War, enhancing our understanding of the dramatic events of the 1640s, and shedding light on the long-term political and religious consequences of the conflict.

A New Sion? Reform, Rebellion, and Colonization c. 1625–1640

The Puritans ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 206-251
Author(s):  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
British History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Unique Event ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Politics Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil Politics ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies how, in the aftermath of his failure to subdue the Scottish insurgency by military means, Charles I authorized the election of two new parliaments. Its policies were so at odds with Charles I's understanding of monarchy and the true church that the outcome was civil war in England between supporters of the king and supporters of Parliament. Explaining this sequence of events tests every historian of 1630s and 1640s Britain. The puzzles are many. In the context of this book, the most significant of these is the relationship between civil politics and the politics of religion. Intertwined throughout the history of the English and Scottish reformations, their relationship tightened in the practice and rhetoric of Charles I and the party he favored, here known as the Laudians. Like his immediate predecessors, the young king took for granted that opposition to his version of true religion was equivalent to challenging his authority as king. At once, the religious and the political become inseparable. Before 1640, the political and the religious in Scotland had also become intertwined, but in a quite different manner. There, it was being argued that a monarch's policies were corrupting a perfect church. And there a unique event in British history unfolded.

Political Theory of Council Democracy from Bakunin to Luxemburg

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-72
Author(s):  
Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Preliminary Discussion ◽  
History Of

The chapter reconstructs the intellectual history of council democracy from early anarchist interpretations of the Paris Commune over Karl Marx famous analysis of the Commune in The Civil War in France and Vladimir Lenin’s writings on the Russian Soviets to the Interwar council communists’ engagement with the German workers’ councils. The chapter argues, firstly, that Marx’ interpretation of the Commune sets the parameter for many subsequent theories of council democracy, and secondly, that Lenin’s analysis of the Russian soviets delivers an alternative theory of council democracy, insofar as he subordinates the councils to the Bolshevik party. The chapter ends with a preliminary discussion of the relation between the historical councils, theories of council democracy and the concept of the constituent power.

scholarly journals Cultural and educational work in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army during the front-line Civil War: Soviet historiography of the 1920s - the first half of the 1930s (a brief review of the history of the problem)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-192
Author(s):  
Sergey Aleksandrovich Tribunsky
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Front Line ◽  
Educational Work ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Red Army ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon

The researcher highlighted (in the format of a lapidary historiographic review) historiographic sources published in the 1920s - the first half of the 1930s, which dealt with the topic of cultural and educational work in the Workers and Peasants Red Army (RKKA) during the front-line Civil War (1918-1920). In the historiographic period, the chronological framework of which is indicated above, a relatively large number of historiographic sources appeared on the history of the Russian Civil War (at the front stage of its course). They reflected, among other things, many aspects of the historical phenomenon of party political work in the Armed Forces of the young Soviet state, that historical phenomenon, within the framework of which cultural and educational work in the Red Army was born and strengthened. Moreover, such studies were carried out immediately as the Civil War continued until the end of 1922 on the outskirts of the Soviet state, although it was not so large-scale. Such historiographic sources require understanding and rethinking from the standpoint of new theoretical and methodological approaches, established in modern Russian historical science. For a lapidary historiographic review the author has selected, first of all, a complex of historiographic sources that have both direct and indirect relation to the topic of cultural and educational work in the Red Army during the front-line Civil War, which were published in the chronological framework indicated above. Of course, there are no copyright claims in the work for the completeness of coverage of the topic under consideration. This, in fact, cannot be achieved in the format of a historiographic survey, especially lapidary.

scholarly journals ON THE CONTRADICTIONS IN THE PROLETKULT

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-46
Author(s):  
Yevgeniy Ye. Abekhtikov
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
State Institution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The article is devoted to the problem of proletarian culture, the history of the creation and functioning of the Proletkult organisation. The author considers its theoretical basis, the practical implementation of which proved to be problematic. The work shows that all Marxist intellectuals believed that proletarian culture has nothing to do with the bourgeois one. Alexander Bogdanov, the most infl uential ideologist of the Proletkult, believed that the proletarian culture is developed by the newest proletariat, which he called «industrial». An analysis of the majority of his statements shows that the intelligentsia and peasantry was not even considered to be involved in the creation of the new culture by Alexander Bogdanov. However, during its heyday, the Proletkult was a refuge for intellectuals who devoted themselves to the service of Revolution and the Communist Party. The article also draws attention to the problem of the relationship of the creators and organisers of the Proletkult with the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party. The Proletkult claimed autonomy in the sphere of culture, completely rejecting the idea of submission to any state institution. However, Lenin evaluated the Proletkult negatively, considering it to be not only useless, but also harmful. Part of Lenin’s problem with the Proletkult was Alexander Bogdanov personally, as he would be the rival of the former at one time and, possibly, could be the political rival in future, using the Proletkult as an organisational base

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