Review of Richard W. Sterling, Ethics in a World of Power: The Political Ideas of Friedrich Meinecke (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958; London, Oxford University Press, 1959)

Meinecke’s student and friend, Richard Sterling, composed this intellectual biography concerning Meinecke’s political ideas. Born in 1862, Meinecke was raised to venerate Hegel, Ranke, and Bismarck as pillars of the German State and conservative nationalism. Wight summed up Meinecke’s political evolution as follows: ‘In the first World War he justified the ultimatum to Serbia and the invasion of Belgium, he approved of unrestricted submarine warfare, and he explained to the minority peoples of the Central Powers that though the nation-state had been the proper goal for the Germans, it was their duty to remain content with the multi-national state. The shock of defeat started him on an assiduous criticism of his old beliefs. The moral autonomy of the State, the primacy of foreign policy, international relations as the fruitful competition of vigorously egotistic Powers, all gradually dissolved. He moved nearer to Goethe, and as an old man came to find the ultimate truth of politics not in the ideal, super-individual corporate personality of the nation-state, but in the martyrdom of the individual rebel against Hitler’s Reich.’

Subject-activity approach of S.L. Rubinstein: Neo-Kantianism and Marxism

Pages history Soviet psychology often contain gaps, which are due to incomplete or inaccessible sources as well as to ideological distortions реrception and interpretation events epoch totalitarianism. Historical-psychological reconstructions, inspired these days archival and revisionist turns, as well as methodology latent change, offer other interpretative models, on one hand, overcoming established mythologems, and on other, revealing а complex, contradictory and ambiguous picture development socio-humanitarian knowledge first half 20th сеntury. Under influence globalization and transnational research projects, contemporary Russian historiography in one way or another updates its methodological tools, turns to polyparadigmatics and transdisciplinarity, and shifts from linear interpretative schemes to constructions that include marginal and non-obvious narratives and discourses along with canonical ones. In light new interpretive model, which takes into асcount historio-graphical materials related sciences as well as hidden currents Soviet culture, three methodological milestones are singled for analysis in S.L. Rubinstein’s intellectual biography: neo-Kantian, Marxist, and anthropological (existential) реriods scientific work. It is emphasized that Soviet historiography left almost no doubts concerning Marxist foundations S.L. Rubinstein’s subjectivе-асtivity арproach, but other models interpretation not only immerse Russian psychology in context epistemological twists and turns in socio-humanitarian knowledge 20th сеntury, but also problematize established ideas and call them into question. Among such problematizations is а comprehension neo-Kantian and Marxist premises S.L. Rubinstein’s doctrine. It is stated that principle creative асtivity, notion self-development and individuation subject, problem ethics and values as internal guidelines human development represent latent neo-Kantianism in intellectual biography scientist.

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz

An intellectual biography of early Arabic feminist Zaynab Fawwaz and a study of her life in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, in the context of debates on gender, modernity and the good society, 1890s-1910. Chapters take up her writing and debates in which she participated, concerning social justice, girls’ education, marriage, divorce and polygyny, the question of ‘Nature’ and Darwinist notions of male/female, and intersections of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and feminism. Fawwaz also wrote two novels and play, which are analysed in the context of fiction rewriting history, and on theatre as a reformist tool of public education in turn-of-the-century Egypt. The book also comprises a study of some important periodical venues for public debate in Egypt in this period, particularly the nationalist press and one early women’s journal, and it highlights the writings of lesser-studied journalists and other intellectuals, within the context of the Arab/ic Nahda or intellectual revival. It argues that Fawwaz’s feminism, based on an Islamic ethical worldview, was distinct from prevailing ‘modernist’ views in posing a non-essentialist, open-ended notion of gender that did not, for instance, highlight maternalist discourses. Fawwaz’s own background was Shi’i, an element that was quietly present in her work.

The Rise and Decline of Polish Revisionist Marxist Economics: The Fates of Włodzimierz Brus and the Faculty of Political Economy (University of Warsaw), 1953–1968

The paper deals with the history of Polish revisionist Marxist political economy, which flourished between 1956 and 1968, mostly in the academic institutions of Warsaw. The fate of Polish revisionism in Marxist economics is presented in parallel to the intellectual biography of Włodzimierz Brus (one of its leaders) and the fate of the Faculty of Political Economy ( Wydział Ekonomii Politycznej [WEP]), which he co-established at the University of Warsaw. The authors compare contemporary documents and existing analyses of the period with memories of Brus’s colleagues and students, collected decades after the events. The authors show that both the relative freedom of expression and academic research and the process of gradual closing of these possibilities were related to the changing balance of power within Party elites.