The Rhetoric of Hobbes's Translation of Thucydides

In several key passages in Thomas Hobbes's understudied translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes's Pericles directs audiences to distrust rhetoric in favor of calculative self-interest, inward-focused affective states, and an epistemic reliance on sovereignty. Hobbes's own intervention via his translation of Thucydides involves similar rhetorical moves. By directing readers to learn from Thucydides, Hobbes conceals his own rhetorical appeals in favor of sovereignty while portraying rhetoric undermining sovereignty as manipulative, self-serving, and representative of the entire category of “rhetoric.” Hobbes's double redescription of rhetoric is an important starting point for an early modern project: appeals that justify a desired political order are characterized as “right reason,” “the law of nature,” or “enlightenment,” while rhetoric constituting solidarities or publics outside the desired order is condemned. Hobbes's contribution to this project theorizes rhetoric as a barrier to individual calculations of interest, placing a novel constraint on political life.

Habermas’ neue Phänomenologie des Geistes: Zwei Jahrhunderte nach Hegel

Jürgen Habermas’s opus magnum, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, synthesises his impressive work of the last half century. His thesis is that the modern project of the normativity of “rational freedom” can be reconstructed as a learning process of the conflictual dialogue between reason and faith, philosophy and religion in the West. Furthermore, under conditions of a world society, cross-cultural communication across lifeworlds, based on such normative principles, is possible. I argue that Habermas’s argument recapitulates a claim first made in The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel, who presented the normativity of modernity through a narrative unfolding between two epistemological standpoints, namely, that of consciousness and “we.” Just like Hegel, in order to defend the idea of a Lernprozess, Habermas too must presuppose a unified subject called “we;” furthermore the development of such subjectivity unfolds in a homogeneous temporal process that is then assumed to be the same for all mankind. I call this a form of “historicism,” and juxtapose recent historical writing that presents the narrative of modernity and the emergence of world-society as a much more diverse and fractured process than Hegel’s and Habermas’s methodology. “Die Einbeziehung der Anderen,” I argue, must involve including the voices of those others who do not experience the normative of modernity as a process like the one unfolding between faith and reason in the West. Nevertheless, I conclude that this plea for a more complex narrative that “provincialises Europe,” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) is not a rejection of the normative legacy of modern rationality and freedom that are based on the ideals of fallibilism, refutability and revisability through a rational community of inquirers.

B(ordering) Utopia in Birobidzhan: Spatial Aspects of Jewish Colonization in Inner Asia

The borderline territory serves a double purpose, being simultaneously zones of cultural contact and cultural barriers–administrative and often civilizational. This ambivalence frequently affects borderline area inhabitants turning them into hostages of border management regimes and outside projections concerning their cultural and civilizational status, and the authenticity of forms of their culture representation. In the case of Birobidzhan, we are dealing with an absolutely modern project of creating ethnic territoriality without reference to the historical context and far from the places of traditional settlement of the Jewish population. The implementation of this project put the Jewish settlers at the center of a complex process of border management and securitization of the border areas. The factors of border and “remoteness” are largely underestimated in Birobidzhan studies. The article fills this niche, emphasizing the spatial aspects of the implementation of the “anti-Zionist utopia” and its complex relationship with previous models of territoriality in the region and local inhabitants.

CONCEPTS "NATION", "NATIONALISM", "NATIONAL STATE" AS ELEMENTS OF A MODERN PROJECT

The article is devoted to an analytical review of scientific research literature on the problems of defining the concepts of "nation", "nationalism", "nation state" as basic for understanding the essence of the project of modernity in the XXI century. The aim is to fix the content of the terminological apparatus on the problems of the national and to align the research priorities in accordance with the modern trends of the globalizing world. The study identifies the relevance of the topic research, reveals the technologies for constructing the concept of "nation" in foreign scientific research of the 19th - 20th centuries, analyzes the concepts of "nationalism" and "nation state" in the context of a modern project.

Significance of Building Information Modeling in Modern Project Management for Sustainable Smart City Applications

Building information modeling (BIM) is one of the most exciting recent construction, engineering, and architecture developments. Built environments play a significant role in Smart City worldwide, and they are used to convey useful information to achieve smart city strategic goals. In modern project management, optimizing resources, BIM data integration, and data sharing in a smart city environment is challenging. Hence, in this paper, IoT-based Improved Building Information modeling (IoT-IBIM) has been proposed to overcome the challenges in building information modeling in modern project management for sustainable smart city applications. This paper discusses the efforts to create and integrate built-in environment data with IoT sensors for effective communication. The Internet of Things provides efficient resource control, increased efficiency, and improved human quality of life. As a result, the Internet of Things is a critical enabler of smart societies, including smart homes, smart cities, and smart factories. Building Information Modeling is an advanced asset allocation framework that generates high-quality output, reduces resource use, reduces environmental effects of development, and secures resources and availability for future generations. The experimental results show that the proposed IoT-IBIM method enhances the performance ratio and improves data integration and data sharing in a smart city environment.

The Rise and Decline(?) of the Modern in Sweden - Reflected through Cultural Resource Management Archaeology

A social and ideological trend that has been most influential in the 20’" century is modernism. It is of interest to closer examine the relationship between archaeology and the western social-liberal modernistic project. The archaeology related to Cultural Resource Management in Sweden is a suitable for a study of this kind. This article tries to illustrate this by presenting a case study from Malmö in Scania, south Sweden. The Swedish modern project went hand in hand with industrialization. This development has been of importance for the accumulation of archaeological data. Modernistic ideas were however also largely to influence archaeological methods and interpretations.

Finding symmetry? Archaeology, Objects, and Posthumanism

Well before the turn of the century, it had become clear that archaeology's aspiration to study the past was, true to the modern project, a pretext for a deeper desire to fabricate its objects. Material culture, materiality, the material past, material residues, heritage—the objects of interpretive (post-processual) archaeology could only be characterized as a continuation of this modern project. While finding symmetry was tied to an upheaval from this mode of disciplinary production, it may now be characterized as one cue among others in more agile archaeological theory. After briefly contrasting archaeological thought before and after the turn of the century, this article sketches out some of the core features of an object-oriented approach to things, including symmetry, irreduction, emergent causality, and strangeness, among others. It then outlines how, by finding our way alongside things, we might aspire to ever more creative work with archaeological objects and their pasts. Finally, it closes with a few words on Posthumanism.

The foundation and development of International Relations in Brazil

This article aims to contribute to the critical understanding of how International Relations (IR) was built as a social science field within Brazil's modern project. I argue that the foundation and the development of IR in Brazil in the twentieth century is closely associated with foreign policy, on the one hand, and with the national geopolitical thinking, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War, on the other. In its trajectory, Brazil's IR has been influenced, among others, by the analysis of domestic and systemic determinants of foreign policy, historical interpretations, the study of the components of state power, studies of diplomacy and its contribution to the country's development, the analysis of decision-making processes and to a lesser extent, cognitive approaches. This article is organised around three sections. First, I present a brief history of the geopolitical tradition in Brazil's IR. Second, I discuss IR development in Brazil, stressing the role of diplomats, the key contribution of intellectuals coming from social and human sciences, and finally the emergence of the first generations of IR scholars in the eighties. Third, I analyse the institutionalisation of the field, its quantitative and qualitative growth, presenting some data on its organisation in recent times.