‘Christian Patriots’: The Intersection Between Proto-fascism and Clerical Fascism in the Antebellum South

This article examines the convergence between clerical fascism and proto-fascism in the Antebellum South of the United States. The author employs Roger Griffin’s theories of palingenetic ultranationalism and clerical fascism to understand the worldviews of Southern intellectuals. The author argues that a cadre of Southern theologians rejected the liberal heritage of the United States and redefined the relationship between the individual and state. Southern clerical fascists reconceived of an alternative modernity that reflected God’s precepts. Slaves, laborers, and slave masters all had a mandate to guide secular and spiritual progress. Furthermore, these Southern clerics believed the best hope for securing God’s order was to be found in the birth of a new Southern society – the Confederate States of America. This study builds upon the works of other historians who discerned the illiberal and authoritarian qualities of the American South while also contributing to delineation of the protean qualities of clerical fascism.

Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Enlightenment and Modernity’

These introductory remarks present a brief overview of the question of the Enlightenment’s relationship to modernity. It charts the emergence of a novel sense of historicity connected to eighteenth-century usage of the term ‘enlightened’ and the belated, late twentieth-century attempts to connect this usage to modernity. The three contributions to this special issue are then introduced and the commonalities and divergences between them are highlighted.

In the Shadow of the Public: Enlightenment and the Pitfalls of Modernity

The Enlightenment has often been presented as the ideological programme of modernity, the set of ideas and values from which modern, democratic and secularized Western societies have emerged. This reading, however, fails to account for the diversity and polyphony of the Enlightenment. Another reading, that of Michel Foucault, insisted on the ethos of modernity that the Enlightenment would have brought: a critical relationship with the present and current events. Conversely, this interpretation neglects the militant and collective dimension of the Enlightenment that favoured emancipation through knowledge. This article suggests, rather, seeing in the Enlightenment a way of problematizing modernity, of thinking about its contradictions. It develops this argument from a case study: the philosophes’ reflections on the public and its ambivalences. The optimism of the Enlightenment’s fight against prejudice was counterbalanced by a more pessimistic analysis of the new public space and of the media obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge and critical thinking.

Reflections on the Enlightenment and Modernity: In Our Plague Year

Written as a polemical piece, the essay confronts the detractors of the Enlightenment and modernity. It asks if science is simply a social construction, how can we put so much faith in it to help solve the current crisis brought about by COVID-19? If we turn away from the Enlightenment and its values, how can we deploy liberal solutions to work in our current predicament and preserve what is progressive within modernity?

Enlightenment and Modernity, Historians and Philosophers

Since the 1990s, historians of the Enlightenment have been notably keen to emphasise their subject’s contribution to modernity. In doing so, they have not shied away from ground usually occupied by philosophers, identifying Enlightenment’s modernity with a system of values and even with specific philosophical positions. This article asks how this has come about, and what have been its consequences. It does so by offering an account of Enlightenment historians’ relations with philosophy since the 1960s, when Franco Venturi repudiated Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical understanding of Enlightenment and urged historians to adopt a different approach. Before 1989, it will be argued, historical study of Enlightenment expanded rapidly but with little reference to philosophers, or interest in demonstrating the modernity of Enlightenment. It was the challenge of Postmodernism (however intellectually chaotic it seemed) in the 1980s, and still more Jürgen Habermas’s vigorous espousal of modernity, which gave historians their cue. Three dimensions of the ensuing association of Enlightenment with modernity are identified: Enlightenment and the public sphere; Radical Enlightenment and one-substance metaphysics; and Enlightenment as cosmopolitan and global. In conclusion, it is argued that while this enthusiasm for modernity appears to be on the wane, the episode has underlined the impossibility of separating historical and philosophical study of Enlightenment.

Disclosing a Transfer: Art and Religion in the Notebooks of Dominique de Menil

The art collector and educator, Dominique de Menil (1908–1997) has mostly been remembered as a pragmatic orchestrator of high-profile commissions in the art world. However, little attention has been paid to her role as a thinker. This article seeks to address that lacuna in the literature by attending to an overlooked source in the Menil archives, de Menil’s notebooks, which were written between 1974 and 1994. By analysing de Menil’s use of metaphor in the notebooks, we place them within the trajectory of de Menil’s intellectual development stemming back to her 1936 article: ‘Pour l’unité du monde chrétien’. The first part situates the metaphors which de Menil employed in the notebooks from the 1970s in the intellectual context of her inception of these figures of speech in Montmartre, Paris in 1936. The second part unpacks a central metaphor which grounds de Menil’s conception of tradition. The third part compares de Menil’s art historiography vis-à-vis other models which sought to reinvigorate the avant-garde art scene via pre-modern sources. The Coda critically assesses de Menil’s art historiography against other prevalent views on the relation between pre-modern and modern works of art.

Monumentality, Counter-monumentality, and Political Authority in Post-socialist Albania

This article examines the role that monumentality—and efforts to critique it—have played in shaping the experience of public space in post-socialist Albania. It considers artistic and architectural strategies often labeled ‘counter-monumental’ because they were first developed as a way to challenge authoritarian and nationalist monumental structures from the past, and it argues that in Albania these counter-monumental strategies have become wedded to centralized state power. In the conditions of neoliberal capitalism, projects that aim to undo traditional monumentality can effectively obfuscate political agendas. In Albania, where Edi Rama—the current Prime Minister—is also a practicing artist, the discourses of contemporary art have served to increase the centralization of political authority, and the work of architecture and design firms such as the Brussels-based group 51N4E have reinforced the symbolic power of the state at the same time that they claim to open public spaces up for citizen participation.

Colony, Metropole, and the Ocean in Between

Kris Alexanderson’s Subversive Seas showcases the worth of combining thorough archival research with critical literary reading techniques. Her research brings new vigor to subfields of history with a penchant for antiquarianism, like Dutch maritime history, but it also prompts questions regarding the direction of new imperial history. Alexanderson’s history of Dutch imperial shipping lines fits a number of historiographical trends, most importantly the ‘archival turn’ in histories of empire, but also reminds us of some of the limits of ‘reading along the archival grain’, as anticolonial voices are sometimes simply absent or muffled in colonial archives.

The Patarei Sea Fort: Perspectives on Heritage, Memory and Identity Politics in Post-Soviet Estonia

This paper studies the struggle over the rehabilitation of the Patarei Sea Fort in Tallinn (Estonia), a former prison where during the Soviet period political prisoners were held and corralled before deportation to Siberia. We explore how three groups of stakeholders assemble and define the future of the site: The Estonian State; ngo Eesti Muinsuskaiste Selts (the Estonian Heritage Society); and Europa Nostra. Each of these groups have a competing future for the site in mind. The struggle over the Patarei Sea fort is connected to discussions over heritage politics in those countries that entered the European Union around the early 2000s. In comparison to other memory practices in the region, the Patarei Sea Fort is not instrumentalized by the state to support a national historical narrative othering the Russian Federation. Rather the state’s engagement with the site is restricted and textured by ambitions to gentrify the district it is situated in. Not the state, but an ngo, assisted by a European heritage association, promotes a heritage discourse geared at strengthening the Estonian national narrative.

Embryonic Modernity: Infectious Dynamics in Early Nineteenth-Century Finnish Culture

The article explores the early decades of the nineteenth century as an era of what we call embryonic modernity. It focuses on Finland which, in 1809, became a Grand Duchy of the Russian empire. The article concentrates on early mass phenomena as embryos of an emerging modern culture. We scrutinize our subject through three different lenses, starting with social infectivity on a minor scale, the unrest caused by students. We then investigate the contagiousness of ideas seen through the press as a news medium in the 1820s. The last section concentrates on the news about cholera and its rapid spread during the early 1830s. We argue that historical embryos were formations of social relationality, composed of affects, beliefs, expectations and sentiments. These formations of emotive dynamics had the capacity to be imitated; they became components of larger social entities by extending their contagiousness to new regions and populations.