All Societies Die

Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-159
Author(s):  
Oxana Timofeeva

The chapter approaches Hegel’s idea of reconciliation with reality, focusing on the figure of enjoyment presented in the Preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and the voice of reason as the source of an insight that elevates reason to the peak of enjoyment. The voice is theorized as what connects Hegel’s imperative of the enjoyment of reason with two other imperatives—the Kantian imperative of reason and the Sadean imperative of enjoyment. Hegel’s absolute freedom is interpreted as the form of consciousness where the opposites of Kant and Sade, i.e., moral and immoral, reason and enjoyment, intertwine. From this perspective, Hegel’s philosophy of the French Revolution and the revolutionary terror is considered as a turning point between the solitude of consciousness and the ethical community, or the “we” that creates a utopian horizon within the post-apocalyptic political-theological situation of the death of God and the end of the world.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Giesela Rühl

The past sixteen years have witnessed the proliferation of international commercial courts around the world. However, up until recently, this was largely an Asian and a Middle Eastern phenomenon. Only during the past decade have Continental European countries, notably Germany, France and the Netherlands, joined the bandwagon and started to create new judicial bodies for international commercial cases. Driven by the desire to attract high-volume commercial litigation, these bodies try to offer international businesses a better dispute settlement framework. But what are their chances of success? Will more international litigants decide to settle their disputes in these countries? In this essay, I argue that, despite its recently displayed activism, Continental Europe lags behind on international commercial courts. In fact, although the various European initiatives are laudable, most cannot compete with the traditional market leaders, especially the London Commercial Court, or with new rivals in Asia and the Middle East. If Continental Europe wants a role in the international litigation market, it must embrace more radical change. And this change will most likely have to happen on the European––not the national––level.


Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Nurbaev ◽  

The world community will turn into a common international system. States, which are a separate independent part of this universal system, develop in all spheres in interaction, interdependence and interdependence. Each individual state can benefit from the best practices of another state in the field of political, legal, legislative and state building.Naturally, the study of the experience of foreign parliamentarism is of great importance for Uzbekistan, which democratically restructures its political and legal system and moves towards the formation of a bicameral legislature through parliamentary reforms. Over the past two hundred years of the historical development of parliamentarism, an incredibly rich and meaningful experience has been accumulated. No matter how diverse the diversity in this regard, comparing the activities of existing parliaments on the planet, it will be possible to identify all important aspects, common features and features of this state-legal phenomenon. The essence, traditions and general laws of parliamentarism can be understood by comparing the legislative practice that has developed in advanced countries with the procedures formed in them. At the same time, it should be noted that a number of rare works have been published based on a comparison of the experience of different parliaments


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 553-584
Author(s):  
Michał Chaberek

This paper elaborates upon the Catholic Church’s teaching on religious freedom in the period from The French Revolution to The Second Vatican Council. Based on quotations from the original documents, the author presents the evolution of the Church’s position that switched from the initial rejection to the final acceptance of the religious freedom over past two centuries. The fact of this dramatic change begs the question about the continuity of tradition and credibility of the contemporary position of the Church. Based on the document by the International Theological Commission, “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” as well as the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, the author demonstrates that – in contrast to some contemporary interpretations – the hermeneutics of continuity is possible regarding Church’s teaching on religious freedom.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-167
Author(s):  
T. E. C.

The French jurist, Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), was driven into exile during the French Revolution by Robespierre's accession to power. From 1794 to 1798 Moreau lived in the United States. In the journal he kept during these years, he described American young girls as follows: American girls are pretty, and their eyes are alive with expression; but their complexions are wan, bad teeth spoil the appearance of their mouths, and there is also something disagreeable about the length of their legs. In general, however, they are of good height, are graceful, and, in enumerating their charms, one must not forget the shapeliness of their breasts. Philadelphia has thousands of beauties between fourteen and eighteen. To offer but a single proof: on the north side of Market Street, between Third and Fifth Street, on a single winter's day I saw four hundred young maidens promenading, each one of whom would surely have been followed in Paris, a seductive tribute that could be offered by perhaps no other city in the world. But these girls soon became pale, and an indisposition which is reckoned among the most unfavorable for the maintenance of the freshness of youth is very common among them. They have thin hair and bad teeth, and are given to nervous illnesses. The elements which embellish beauty, or rather which compose and order it, are not often bestowed by the graces. Finally, they are charming, adorable at fifteen, dried up at twenty-three, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty or fifty.


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