scholarly journals Order and culture. Passages of popularization

1970 ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Marie-Louise Von Plessen

I will try to draw a portrait of the political genesis of the museum as a popular institution for national thought and education by examining Europe's first National Museums: the British Museum, the Louvre, the Versailles Museum of the History of France and those museums characterized by an early expression of nationalist feeling before the political institution of the nation state emerged. Their influence grew from enlightened philosophy and they became, in spite of their aspiration of objectivity, major teachers of minor and later pupils. 

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Hunter

ABSTRACTThe ‘triumph of liberalism’ in the mid-twentieth-century west is well known and much studied. But what has it meant for the way the decolonisation of Africa has been viewed, both at the time and since? In this paper, I suggest that it has quietly but effectively shaped our understanding of African political thinking in the 1950s to 1960s. Although the nationalist framing that once led historians to neglect those aspects of the political thinking of the period which did not move in the direction of a territorial nation-state has now been challenged, we still struggle with those aspects of political thinking that were, for instance, suspicious of a focus on the individual and profoundly opposed to egalitarian visions of a post-colonial future. I argue that to understand better the history of decolonisation in the African continent, both before and after independence, while also enabling comparative work with other times and places, we need to think more carefully and sensitively about how freedom and equality were understood and argued over in local contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-196
Author(s):  
Gunay N. Qafarova ◽  

The history of museums in Azerbaijan is only a hundred years old, but the path traveled over the years has been very difficult. The development of museums was directly affected by the political course of the Soviet country. Museums were supposed to reflect the politics and ideology of the country, and everything that did not correspond to this was gathering dust in storage or even worse destroyed. The names of the owners of the collections were not mentioned in any public publication. Their names preserved only the basic documents of museums, acts and books of receipts, which were available to a very narrow circle of people. Often, collections mercilessly broken into small groups and transferred to various museums in the country. Namely, the property of many representatives of the national bourgeoisie enriched our museums. Nevertheless, in the first years of Soviet power, the museums created in Azerbaijan managed to assemble a rich collection, despite the obvious distortions in the reflection of historical truth. It was these works that formed the basis of the collections of modern National Museums, and, of course, the Azgosmuzey laid their foundation. It was the first museum to systematically and consistently assemble a collection. Azgosmuzey organized expeditions and conducted archaeological excavations. Excavations on the territory of Azerbaijan have always been carried out officially and unofficially, unfortunately, many discovered artifacts were exported outside of our country, but after the establishment of Soviet power, the situation in this area changed somewhat, and it should be noted for the better. On the initiative of the museum’s management, various exhibits were transferred to our museums from Moscow, and then from Leningrad, enriching the repositories of Western European and Russian art. Many materials cited in the article are not known to a wide circle of researchers.


2020 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
Yael Tamir

This chapter begins with narrating the creation of a cross-class coalition to offer all citizens a set of valuable goods and opportunities. It notes that nationalism started as a project of the elites, and in order to materialize it, they had to gather the support of the people. The chapter emphasizes that for social cooperation to prevail, participants need not attain identical goods and benefits; it is sufficient that they secure for themselves significant benefits they could not have otherwise acquired. It argues that membership in the nation became the relevant criteria for inclusion (and exclusion). Wealth, education, skills, and social status were still relevant for the distribution of power but could not be used as benchmarks for participation in the political game. The chapter also examines how the nation-state gave members of all classes a reason to participate in a collective effort to form a national political unit that would benefit (albeit in different ways and to a different extent) all its members. Ultimately, the chapter investigates why the emergence of the modern nation-state paved the way for inclusive social policies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar Abdel-Razek ◽  
Miriam Puttick

The question of majorities and minorities has dominated the Iraqi political scene since the American-led invasion of 2003. As an occupying power, the US enshrined sectarianism in post-Saddam Iraq through divisive policies and structures that continue to pervade the political institution from top to bottom. As a result, what was considered a remedy for Iraq's political ills opened the gates for more sectarian division, the dispersion of religious minorities and power struggles between the main majority groups: Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. How this deadlock will be resolved is the key question that Iraq is facing as it prepares for an imminent defeat of the so-called Islamic State (Da'sh or ISIS). This paper traces the development of the concepts of majorities and minorities in Iraq's recent history, analyzing the factors that led to the sectarian paralysis of today and exploring possibilities for a post-ISIS political solution that preserves the multi-ethnic, multi-religious character of the Iraqi nation-state.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Schler

Abstract:This article examines processes of community-building in the immigrant quarter of New Bell, Douala, during the interwar years. Historians of Douala have overlooked the history of New Bell, focusing instead on the political and economic activity of Duala's Westernized elite during this period. This historiographic oversight reflects a preoccupation with elite politics identified as the seeds of nationalism in Cameroon. An examination of the community of immigrants provides us with an alternative conceptualization of a multiethnic collective. By tracing the construction and evolution of public space in interwar New Bell, we can uncover elements of group solidarity binding together this highly diverse population.


2018 ◽  
pp. 90-123
Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky

This chapter analyzes the political outlook of Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am, 1856–1927), the founder of spiritual–cultural Zionism. The approach to Ahad Ha'am in this historiography, however, is another instructive example of the distortion that the nation-state paradigm creates in the study of the history of Zionist national thought, and any reevaluation of the ideological history of Zionism must contend with this distortion as well. Here, it will also become clear that the nation-state methodology creates a somewhat artificial dichotomy in its representation of the Jewish national vision held by Zionism's founders. This time, the dichotomy to be overcome is between the Herzlian “Jews' state” and the Ahad Ha'amian so-called spiritual center.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Leszek Zinkow

This paper brings to light the reports and analyses written by Tadeusz Smoleński, a forgotten source on the political history of the Middle East and particularly Egypt, in the first decade of the 20th century. Tadeusz Smoleński (1884–1909), the first Polish Egyptologist, was also a regular correspondent of the Lviv daily newspaper Słowo Polskie [‘The Polish Word’]. In his reports, he outlines a panoramic view of Egypt’s extraordinarily complex political situa­tion, determined by tensions between the European powers, i.e., the rivalry between Britain and France, and between Russia and Germany. Another fac­tor whose growing importance was noted by the Polish observer, is the rise of nationalist and Islamist movements in both Egypt and the Arab world as a whole. This takes place alongside the chronic political instability of the Otto­man Empire. While acknowledging all of the beneficial aspects of British rule (especially under the consulship of Sir Evelyn Baring), Smoleński does not hide his sympathies for Mus????t????afà Kāmil Bāšā, leader of the Egyptian national­ists. In his analysis, Smoleński also hints at some analogies between the situa­tion of the Egyptians and the Poles in their ambitions to set up an independ­ent nation-state.


2020 ◽  
pp. 157-200
Author(s):  
Adam Sutcliffe

This chapter focuses on the purpose of the Jews in relation to the potential and meaning of nationhood, in both Zionist and non-Zionist contexts. It talks about Moses Hess, a writer in Germany in the 1860s, who linked a profoundly negative view of the Jews' diasporic role as arch-capitalists to his irenic view of the role of the Jews in his Zionist vision of the future. It explains how a Zionist grappling with the idea of Jewish exemplarity runs through the twentieth-century history of the movement. This chapter also highlights the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha'am and the political rhetoric of David Ben-Gurion, who repeatedly invoked Isaiah's “light unto the nations” as his vision for the Jewish state. It analyzes the relationship of Jewish exemplarity and purpose to the broader political life of the nation state that became a rich and complicated seam of debate within twentieth century thought.


1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Roberts

It is widely recognized that the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ developed largely out of the history of Europe. In Western Europe the process of state-building preceded and assisted the process of nation-formation. In consequence, the concept of the nation that developed from this process focused on the political community as defined by the institutional and territorial framework. In the tradition of Rousseau, Abbé Sieyes could define a nation as ‘a body of associates living under one common law and represented by the same legislature’. In most lands of Western Europe these developments also produced the model of a single nationality nation or nation-state. In Central and Eastern Europe the process was different: ‘the nation was first defined as a cultural rather than a political entity’ and the underlying theoretical foundation was in the tradition of Herder rather than Rousseau Nevertheless, once nationhood had been achieved in these regions there was a tendency to approximate to the model associated with Western Europe. This was made all the easier in such states as Italy and Germany because the majority of their citizens were from one ethnic group; they, too, were single nationality nations. Whatever the dualisms and amalgams in Europe, the export model has been that associated with that of Western Europe—for the simple reason that the predominant colonizing powers were from this part of the Continent.


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