Developmental Stages of the Law and of the Legal Process

This chapter provides an overview of Max Weber's ideal-typical developmental stages of the law and of the legal process. These stages include charismatic revelation by law prophets; empirical lawmaking and lawfinding by legal honoratiores; imposition of law by the secular imperium and theocratic power; and specialist administration of justice by legally educated jurists, on the basis of scholarly and formally logical education. Here it is a question of developments which ultimately proceed in the West in the direction of rational law, if not always in a linear way, and in which Weber particularly emphasizes, if not overstates, the ‘role’ of logic. For one thing, the development of rational law can have both a material and a formal character; for another, the stage of highest rationality, where Weber's ideal-typical ‘system’ of law is to be found, has, it must be admitted, never actually been reached in history. Moreover, it is important to remember that Weber ‘did not want to write legal history’ in his ‘Sociology of Law’. Rather, his discussion of legal history always has to be read in the light of his cognitive interest, so that ‘when integrated into a sociological or theoretical system of the law, historical detail will always be a little different to what it was before’.

Fact-Checking Elizabeth Bishop

This chapter looks at historical and factual mistakes in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. Elizabeth Bishop was a writer dedicated to a sense of accuracy; her poem “In the Waiting Room” bears the markers of a specific place and time—“Worcester, Massachusetts” and “the fifth / of February, 1918.” Descriptive specificity is one of her specialties, and this poem, which refers to real stories in that month's National Geographic magazine, gives the impression of combining specificity with objective truth. And yet its facts are muddled: much of the material in the poem actually comes from a different issue of the magazine. Does Bishop's inaccuracy matter given her own adherence to the facts, or is it possible for descriptive poetry to offer its own aesthetic narrative? Focusing on her use and misuse of historical detail in this and other autobiographical poems, the chapter highlights what Bishop's readers have to gain by separating her poetry's fictionalized facts from its literal and empirical truths.

Sovereignty, RIP

Social order requires a sovereign: an actor with unlimited, undivided, and unaccountable authority. Or so the classic theory says. But without noticing, we've gutted the theory. Constitutionalism limits state authority. Federalism divides it. The rule of law holds it accountable. In vivid historical detail—with millions tortured and slaughtered in Europe, a king put on trial for his life, journalists groaning at complaints about the League of Nations, and much more—this book charts both the political struggles that forged sovereignty and the ones that undid it. The book argues that it's no longer a helpful guide to our legal and political problems, but a pernicious bit of confusion. It's time to retire sovereignty.

Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Transit’, The London Sinfonietta, and the Emergence of Complexity in 1977

In November 1977 the London Sinfonietta began its tenth-anniversary season with a performance in London of Transit by Brian Ferneyhough. The concert marks a significant moment in the formation of Ferneyhough’s public persona, just as the tenth-anniversary season marked a turning point for the London Sinfonietta. In this article I undertake a microhistory of this performance in order to ascertain how Ferneyhough’s reputation for complexity was forged in Britain. Rooted in performance and reception history, and based around close readings of key tropes, I show that early critical opinion ranged from sympathetic to ambivalent or curious; yet it never developed into the type of hostility commonly referenced in critiques of New Complexity. The historical detail of this pivotal performance, I argue, suggests the need for a broader cultural history attuned to the transitional state that characterizes both the history and the historiography of new music in the late 1970s.

The Battle of the Atlantic: The environmental front of World War II

This article examines the potential environmental impact in one specific theatre of World War II during a specific time frame. The study begins with an examination of the major oil spills that occurred after the 1960s to place them in a relationship with the cumulative effects of smaller spills, which best describe the numerous individual spills during 1942. It provides historical detail into the German offensive against North American shipping to establish a general scale of the resulting oil spills. Finally, it will describe the environmental impacts and assess current efforts to mitigate risks of continued oil exposure from shipwrecks in sensitive marine ecosystems. This establishes the theoretical framework to answer, at least in part, the question of whether a rapid succession of small spills would cause as much damage as large spills.

Interpretacje nieobecności i obecności historii w artystycznych projektach wizualnych

Interpreting the presence and absence of history in artistic visual projects In the article I analyze selected artistic projects presented at international art exhibitions - 55. The Biennial of Art in Venice (2013) and Documenta (13) in Kassel (2012). What binds the projects is the historical connotation which becomes a pre-text for artistic creation. The artists were inspired by unwritten events, yet determined by the presence of other facts. The origin of the topics are military conflicts which provoke questions concerned with experiencing violence, as well as nationalist ideologies confronted with the ideas of humanism. What is more, the ethic part of these projects becomes a value of itself, which is particularly visible in the non-traditional form. The projects described are as follows: Letter to a Refusing Pilot by Akram Zaatari, an installation by Zsolt Asztalos entitled Fired but Unexploded and a countermonument by Horst Hoheisel in Kassel. Akram Zaatari uses an anecdote, a mysterious historical detail as an exemplum of the event which deconstructs the official political order. The installation by Zsolt Asztalos Fired but Unexploded mentions dormant conflicts which nonetheless bear the same historic burden. A negative reconstruction of a fountain called Jewish by Horst Hoheisel found in Kassel, is a postulate of revoking traumatic history.Key words: military conflict; counterhistory; anecdote; modern art; counter-monument;

Buddhism and Sexuality

Because of its high regard for celibate monasticism and incisive critique of desire as a root cause of suffering, Buddhism is widely assumed to be a sex-negative religion. In fact, as a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated, the sexual landscape of Buddhist traditions across time and place is varied, complex, and at times transgressive. The beginnings of Buddhism and sexuality as a research subfield can arguably be traced to the 1998 publication of Bernard Faure’s The Red Thread, a work that attempts to identity major themes and lines of tension in Buddhists’ imaginative encounters with, efforts to discipline, and philosophical understandings of human sexuality. Faure’s monograph was, however, preceded by L. P. N. Perera study of sexuality in ancient Buddhist India (Sexuality in Ancient India); see Perera 1993, cited under Seminal Monographs), Miranda Shaw’s monograph on women and Tantra (Passionate Enlightenment); see Shaw 1994, cited under Sexuality in Indo-Tibetan Tantra), and Liz Wilson’s book on disgust and the female body in early Buddhism (Charming Cadavers); see Wilson 1996, cited under Seminal Monographs). Since Faure, specialists in various Asian traditions have focused on sexuality with ever increasing levels of historical detail and theoretical sophistication. Examples include Sarah Jacoby’s work, Love and Liberation (Jacoby 2014, cited under Seminal Monographs), Richard Jaffe’s monograph, Neither Monk nor Layman (Jaffe 2001, cited under Non-celibate Monasticisms), John Power’s 2009 book A Bull of a Man (Powers 2009, cited under Seminal Monographs), and José Ignacio Cabezón’s Sexuality and Classical South Asian Buddhism (Cabezón 2017, cited under Seminal Monographs). In the meantime, scholars of tantra, yoga, and consort traditions such as Holly Gayley, David Gray, Janet Gyatso, and Christian Wedemeyer have moved past the orientalist judgements of early Indology and the phenomenology of Mircea Eliade in their treatments of Tantric sexuality; advances in Vinaya studies by Shayne Clarke, Alice Collett, Anālayo, and others have deepened understanding of early monastic negotiations with Indian sexual concepts and social mores; and queer and LGBT studies by Richard Corless and Hsiao-lan Hu have generated new research angles. The subfield of Buddhist ethics has also produced a small literature on Buddhist sexual ethics to complement its already substantial work on related topics like human rights and abortion. Additionally, specialists in Buddhist modernisms such as Ann Gleig and Stephanie Kaza have enriched the literature on Buddhism and sexuality by addressing issues such as sexual expression, sexual identity, and sexual abuse in contemporary Buddhist communities in the West.

Presence, Ideality, Signification

This chapter approaches the question of the “spectacle” in a different way, by taking the position of a historically naive contemporary who believes that there is an essence of spectacle simply waiting to be uncovered. In doing so this chapter pretends that the idea of “spectacle” has always existed, as if the historical detail of its emergence and development could be bracketed. It then proceeds in line with the fiction of the concept, by eidetic variation and the testing of limits. The chapter starts from a few examples of “spectacles” some of which might be considered frankly marginal in relation to the core concept: a football match, a bullfight, a concert, a theatrical representation, and a liturgical ceremony. It then tries to answer a very simple question from this historically naive position: in virtue of what common element are these different events called “spectacles,” literally or metaphorically?

La Débâcle

‘My title speaks not merely of war, but also of the crumbling of a regime and the end of a world.’ The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Débâcle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as for its attention to historical detail. La Débâcle seeks to explain why the Second Empire ended in a crushing military defeat and revolutionary violence. It focuses on ordinary soldiers, showing their bravery and suffering in the midst of circumstances they cannot control, and includes some of the most powerful descriptions Zola ever wrote. Zola skilfully integrates his narrative of events and the fictional lives of his characters to provide the finest account of this tragic chapter in the history of France. Often compared to War and Peace, La Débâcle has been described as a ‘seminal’ work for all modern depictions of war.

The Vernacular Moment

Observes the attention to historical detail in the Līḷācaritra and this allows us some access to the social conditions that were arrayed around vernacularization in the decades just before the full advent of Marathi literature. This chapter studies the cultural practices of caste and gender that pervaded everyday life in the mid-thirteenth century and were recorded by the early Mahanubhavs in the Līḷācaritra. Attention to these questions of social ethics is vital for understanding the cultural politics at work at the core of a new literary world in Marathi.