This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

A cultural studies textbook that deals with issues of methodology, as well as mapping out the history and theories and ideas in cultural studies. The book examines the work of Raymond Williams, Lacan and Hoggart, among others, and explores notions of subculture, psychoanalysis, Marxist thought, narrative, autobiography, fiction, subjectivity, language, history and representation. The book focuses on the past, present and future of cultural studies, with the aim of providing readers with a clear overview of the central ideas (...) within the area, developing current debates and possible future avenues. (shrink)

Turning his back on neoliberalism, voicing 'the end of history' and the unstoppable spread of liberal values across the globe, Gray's was a lone voice of scepticism. The thinking he criticised would lead to the invasion of Iraq. Today, its folly might seem obvious, but Gray has been trying to warn us for years.

Starting from the position of the ancient Stoa, these two interdisciplinary collections examine the influence of Stoic thinkers from late antiquity to modernity. Following an introductory overview, the 42 essays examine central Stoic themes and consider their cultural significance.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond the Aesthetic Garden: Politics and Culture on the Margins of Fin-de Siècle ViennaScott SpectorThe rhetorical structure supporting Carl E. Schorske’s seminal Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture 1 is frankly exposed. The argument—which may have single-handedly changed the discipline of cultural history—is an apparently simple one, and it is reasserted in this series of essays on diverse areas of cultural activity through the use (...) of recurring metaphors. Schorske’s famous thesis (modern culture as political surrogate for a marginalized liberal bourgeoisie) is represented through constantly resurfacing dichotomies: liberal political engagement and (vs.) the aesthetic “garden” of modern art; history and (vs.) desire and “the psyche”; politics and (vs.) culture. All of this is well known. In this essay I want both to assess our necessary debt to Schorske’s powerful work and to suggest what lies beyond it. If at the end of our own century we want to rethink Schorske’s founding project of an interdisciplinary cultural history of Central Europe, we cannot limit this initiative to the obviously important question of extending the contents of cultural inquiry (from high culture to popular culture, from the hegemonic nationality to non-German-speaking cultures, from patriarchy to the voices of women). The formal question packed up in the image of refuge from the historico-political in the aesthetic garden or the fortress of the psyche may offer most productive access to rethinking the Schorskean paradigm, instead of merely expanding its scope. For these reasons I want to focus on the rhetorical structure of Schorske’s essay collection against that of aesthetic and critical works from the Central European turn of the century. 2 Schorske’s historical analysis seems to be at odds [End Page 691] with these projects seen on their own terms—but to utter this is ironically to reiterate the tension between history or politics and aesthetic modernism articulated in the essays.The question at hand is hence two-fold. First of all, what is ideologically at stake in a historiographical construction that identifies Central European modernist aesthetic innovation as an escape from history and politics? Schorske’s interdisciplinary project of contextualization (his significant subtitle “Politics and Culture” has become an unshakable legacy for cultural history) is peculiar insofar as his diagnosis is that culture became increasingly isolated from political life. I have chosen to focus on the rhetorical opposition of “center” and “margin” in this essay because of Schorske’s implicit claim that the very class which was central to nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism—the German-speaking bourgeoisie—was “marginalized” by the rise of hostile anti-liberal ideologies (the “culture-makers” were “alienated along with their class in its extrusion from political power”). 3 As I hope to show, this geometry of center and margins was at the heart of the most innovative and potentially explosive play within so-called aestheticist texts around 1900. This brings us to the second half of this two-fold question: how might the “aesthetic moment” of the Central European fin de siècle be seen if we wish to go beyond Schorske’s diagnosis of a forced retreat into the temple of art, the fortress of the psyche, or the aesthetic garden? To get at both sides of this question—the ideological valence of the aesthetic moment and of its histories—I will focus on literary products, in particular on essays, for several reasons. One of these is that Schorske’s synthetic work is, after all, itself a collection of essays published over two decades.The privileging of the essay genre in coming to terms with the problem of turn-of-the-century aestheticism was established long before Schorske’s work. If we can find early examples of this generic strategy in fin-de-siècle authors such as Musil and Broch, the paradigmatic instance—and the place where the function of the essay-critique within aestheticist criticism is worked through—is the collection of Georg Lukács, Soul and Forms. 4 Several positions are taken in that work which may be useful to an understanding of Schorske’s essay project: Lukács asserts the essay’s fragmentary nature at... (shrink)

What is the relationship between intellectual and cultural history? An answer to this question may be found in the area between the two poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist methods. The first of these deals with old-fashioned `ideas' (in Lovejoy's sense) and the second with social and political context and the sociology and anthropology of knowledge. This article reviews this question in the light of the earlier historiography of philosophy, literature and science, and debates over the (...) role of context in determining historical meaning. Within the horizon-structure of experience and interpretation the short answer is that cultural history is the outside of intellectual history and intellectual history the inside of cultural history. Ideally, historians ought to work both sides of the historical street. (shrink)

This article considers different ways in which keywords and concepts have been, and might be, explored. It summarizes the methodological discussions of a project to analyse 'commonwealth' in the period 1450-1800. 'Commonwealth' was a part of a conceptual field of terms to do with the public good and thus serves as a case study for wider problems of approaching such keywords through a collaboration across disciplines and reflects the importance of recent attempts to provide social and literary contexts for political (...) discourse. Early modern states and their authority are now recognized to be as much socially and culturally as politically constructed, thus widening not only the essential 'context' which students of political discourse must take into account, but also requiring social historians to engage with the language of politics, the metaphors, images and genres of which scholars of literature and art likewise can illuminate. This social and cultural turn to political discourse helps the recovery of the language of vice and virtue which was so intrinsic to the deployment of keywords and concepts. The German conceptual history school is also relevant and useful in requiring us to think about how concepts were constituted and change over time, though its chronological focus needs to be extended to embrace more fully the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, the article offers some pointers about how technology might be utilized to maximize the necessary collaborations that have been outlined. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health by Keisha RayChioma Dibia (bio)Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health by Keisha Ray New York: Oxford University Press, 2023Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, bioethics had engaged only sparingly with the concept of racism. In 2016, Danis and colleagues published an article exhorting bioethicists to engage more meaningfully with the concept (...) of racism—given its impact on health and well being—and to consider strategies for combating it within and outside clinical settings (Danis et al. 2016, 5). While this paper generated considerable debate regarding how far bioethics ought to go in its engagement with racism (Baker 2016, 16; Weddle 2016, 32; Fuller 2016, 29), the focus of the field of bioethics quickly turned to more traditional subjects of bioethical inquiry, including ethical issues arising in doctor-patient relationships and new reproductive technologies. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd during that time, racism has received greater attention in the bioethics literature and Keisha Ray's Black Health arrives just in time to urge us to ensure that the current focus on the impact of racism on the health of racially minoritized people is not short-lived (Ray 2023, 21; BBC News 2020).The overarching argument in Ray's Black Health is that Black people's poor health does not arise from innate biological deficiencies but stems from their experience of racism at the structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels. Ray stresses that far from being solely a feature of America's past, racism [End Page 105] continues to taint Black people's relationship with the healthcare system and other societal institutions. In each chapter, Ray focuses on a specific racial disparity in health to illustrate how racism limits Black people's access to the social determinants of health and thereby contributes to their poor health. To set the context for this discussion, Ray provides an introductory chapter where she unpacks key terms including "racism," "racial disparities," and "the social determinants of health." In this chapter, Ray also clearly outlines the structure of the text and provides a summary of each chapter. This chapter provides the blueprint for the rest of the book, as in it, Ray provides a clear statement of the style, content, and purpose of Black Health.The first racial disparity that Ray considers is Black birthing mortality, and in chapter 1, Ray traces this to the history of slavery and eugenic policies which have shaped the relationship between physicians and Black women. As Ray explains, since Black people were forcibly brought to the United States, the government has sought to control Black women's reproductive lives and has often relied on physicians to effect control. She demonstrates how harmful stereotypes about Black women, including their so-called hardiness, originated in medical literature and have been used to deny pregnant Black women humane care. According to Ray, "[c]linicians' attitude and behaviors towards Black pregnant people still reflect an enslaved and slave-owner mentality, and this has great consequences for the survival of Black pregnant people." (32) By highlighting the birthing experiences of Serena Williams and Shalon Irving, Ray dispels the assumption that wealth or academic qualifications are a panacea for Black birthing mortality and shows how racism can be deadly for all Black pregnant women, irrespective of socioeconomic status. Ray also considers how income and housing inequities affect Black pregnant women and the cumulative effect of weathering on their health as well as that of their unborn children. This chapter most clearly shows how interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism operate and intersect to render pregnancy and childbirth a potentially dangerous experience for Black women.Next, Ray turns to racial disparities in clinical pain management and continues to explore the impact of historically racist beliefs and false stereotypes on the care of Black people. However, in this second chapter, Ray delves more deeply into the role of medical literature—both historical and contemporary sources—in perpetuating false assumptions about the Black body. She demonstrates how the historical portrayal of the Black body as not only less than human... (shrink)

Kahn's reputation as a historian rests primarily on his studies of the Habsburg monarchy, produced over a thirty-year period. These essays, however, reflect his other, far-ranging interests and offer reinterpretation of such diverse and complex issues as the personality of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the implications of the Anschluss of 1938, among other topics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), generally recognized as the founder of the school of modern critical historical scholarship, and Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), the great Swiss proponent of cultural interpretation, are fathers of modern history--giants of their time who continue to exert an immense influence in our own. They are usually seen as contrasts, Ranke as representative of political history and Burckhardt of cultural history. In five essays, each flowing gracefully into the next, the distinguished historian Felix Gilbert shows (...) that such contrasts are oversimplifications. Despite their interest in different aspects of the past, Ranke's and Burckhardt's views arose from common elements in the first half of the nineteenth century, the time in which they grew up and in which their first masterworks attracted such wide attention. This concise volume clarifies the beginnings of history as an autonomous discipline, while forcing us to examine our views on basic questions in historical scholarship. In the case of Ranke, relating his work to his times counteracts the current tendency to disregard the difference between the historical concepts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on this difference, Gilbert emphasizes the originality and novelty of Ranke's ideas about history. Although Burckhardt is often portrayed as an intellectually lonely figure, this book reveals the importance of relating his thought to the intellectual trends of his time. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In a series of incisive readings of signature historical works, Mark Poster charts the move from social history to new practices of cultural history that are drawing strength from poststructuralist interpretive strategies and raising issues found in feminist and postcolonialist discourse. In the process, he sets forth an outline for a postmodern historiography that can negotiate the contested terrain between the ambiguities of discourse and the pull of the "real." As Poster provides close readings of leading historians and (...) theorists such as Lawrence Stone, Francois Furet, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault, key themes animate his work: the often irreducible difference between past and present; the relationship of writing and representation to power and domination; the dissolving distinctions between high and low culture, production and consumption, and reality and fiction; and, most important, a new perspective on human agency and the construction of political subjects. (shrink)

The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 coincided with a complex set of changes in the political situation of the west, the role of intellectuals, the state of the social sciences and humanities, and in the development of the welfare state itself. These changes provided the conditions for the creation of a body of thought quite different from the one the sixties had produced, and a significant change from the discipline-dominated thinking of the period after the (...) Second World War. The immediately relevant events included the effective demise of Parsons’ systems theory, the waning of the passions of 1968, and an enrollment crisis in universities’ humanities and social science departments as economic fear drove students into professional programs, creating a sharp downturn in demand for faculty. The optimism that had characterized disciplines in these fields during the 1960s quickly faded. The idea that sociology was soon to become a “science,” the source of the positivism dispute of the sixties, faded along with it. Logical Positivism as a coherent movement collapsed under the weight of the problems of the theory-observation distinction. At the same time Political Theory, which had been taught largely as an historical study – a history of error, as Leo Strauss described the standard textbook of the time, George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, or as a continuation of the mood of Kulturpessimismus, as in the writings of Sabine’s critic, Leo Strauss – revived, partly in response to the stimulus from the success of Rawls, partly in response to new ideas about participatory democracy rooted in the experience of the sixties. Social theory also changed: the role that Parsons had played as a focus of theoretical discussion was replaced; the work of Ju˝rgen Habermas, particularly his Theory of Communicative Action, reassessed and re-appropriated the classical theoretical tradition in social theory to replace Parsons’ synthetic account, and this work coincided with a systematic reconsideration of the classic social theorists, especially Weber. An additional source of new thinking came from the “dependent” periphery, as thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which emancipated Socialist theory from received dogmas about class struggle and recognized the centrality of other antagonisms and the need for open democracy. (shrink)

In this carefully researched, thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Hughes examines the trajectory of political correctness and its impact on public life.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 313-315.

This article studies the adoption of the nickname Malleolus by members of the gens Publicia in mid-republican Rome to illustrate the importance of grounding cultural history in the lives of seemingly minor political players and the mundane objects with which they came to be associated. After reviewing the occupational significance of hammers during the First Punic War, I scrutinize the ritual and cultic intersignifications of hammers in fourth- and third-century BCE central Italy in order to set up a comprehensive (...) reconstruction of the social and semiotic networks that structured and mediated the dedication of a temple to the goddess Flora by the brothers Publicii Malleoli at a time of internal political crisis and external conflict. Central to the political and intercultural contests of mid-republican Rome was the generative force of the polyvalent and object-centered cognomen in establishing and promoting individual and collective identities. (shrink)

This paper draws on the cultural-materialist paradigm articulated by Raymond Williams to offer a radical historicisation of identity and identity-politics in capitalist societies. A keywords analysis reveals surprisingly that identity, as it is elaborated in the familiar categories of personal and social identity, is a relatively novel concept in Western thought, politics and culture. The claim is not the standard one that people’s ‘identities’ became more important and apparent in advanced capitalist societies, but that identity itself came (...) to operate as a new and key mechanism for construing, shaping and narrating experiences of selfhood and grouphood in this period. From a cultural-materialist perspective, the emergence and evolution of this idea of identity can only be properly understood in relation to the social contexts of its use, namely, the new contexts of consumption of capitalist societies, and the development of new forms of group-based struggle from the 1960s. What the analysis shows is that it was the commercialisation and politicisation of older essentialist understandings of selfhood and grouphood in these contexts that has given rise to the concepts of personal and social identity as we know them today.By exploring the material conditions that have given rise to the contemporary powerful attachment to ‘identity’, this paper offers a new point of departure from which to pursue many issues of concern to critical theorists and radical activists today, including the conflict over identity politics in radical circles, the historical and social processes behind their development and at least partial co-option, and their relation to neoliberal political-economic formations today. (shrink)

This is a general reading of Callimachus' work within the socio-political context of Ptolemaic Alexandria. "Alibis" refers to the constitutionally expatriate nature of the populace and culture established there, which in Callimachus gives rise to a poetics based on the principles of displacement and convergence. Close analysis of a wide variety of passages, drawn principally from the epigrams, Aetia, and Hymns, demonstrates how the "order of the alibi" informs all major aspects of the poet's work, from the lexical make-up (...) of his texts to their larger narrative and thematic structure. Certain poems in the corpus, such as the Lock of Berenice and the Hymn to Apollo, not only require detailed knowledge of Greek literature, history, and religious institutions, but also draw extensively on Egyptian mythography and cultural models, which do not so much replace the Hellenic matter as-characteristically-cohabit with it. In this respect, Callimachus served both as a key architect of the new, multi-ethnic culture that the Ptolemies institutionalized in Egypt and as its most penetrating critic. (shrink)

Today, the demand for transparency is omnipresent. In particular, transparency is considered a prerequisite for good governance, for political participation and democracy. On closer inspection, however, transparency proves to be ambivalent. For complete transparency has not yet been achieved anywhere. Moreover, measures to increase transparency can have the opposite effect and stir up mis-trust. Historians are just beginning to discover this topic. The volume aims at elucidating the opportunities and the restrictions of transparency in historical research. It assembles contributions covering (...) European history since the 19th century. The contributors focus on political and cultural history, but include also economic and media history as well as the history of ideas. They analyse publicly debated demands and efforts for transparency, conceived as the access to information or its disclosure. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining (...) this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow. I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

This book paints a comprehensive portrait of Mexico’s system of assisted reproduction first from a historical perspective, then from a more contemporary viewpoint. Based on a detailed analysis of books and articles published between the 1950s and 1980s, the first section tells the story of how the epistemic, normative, and material infrastructure of the assisted reproduction system was built. It traces the professionalization process of assisted reproduction as a medical field and the establishment of its professional association. Drawing on ethnographic (...) material, the second part looks at how this system developed and flourished from the 1980s up to 2010, its commercialization process, how the expansion of reproductive services took place, and the messages regarding reproductive technologies that circulated within a wide discursive landscape. Given its scope and methods, this book will appeal to scholars interested in science and technology studies, reproduction studies, history of medicine, medical anthropology, and sociology. (shrink)

Liberalism sanctifies the values chosen by the sovereign individual. This tends to rule out criticisms of an individual's “preference” for one value over another by, ironically, establishing a deterministic view of the self that protects the self's desires from scrutiny. Similarly, rational choice approaches to social theory begin with previously determined individual preferences and focus on the means by which they are pursued, concentrating on the results rather than the sources of people's values.A striking new attempt to go behind the (...) liberal and rational‐choice starting point in order to understand political preferences is found in Aaron Wildavsky's Cultural Theory. Yet Cultural Theory does not facilitate the criticism of preferences, because its understanding of them is fundamentally liberal. Even while rejecting methodological individualism, Cultural Theory's monocausally social theory of preference formation retains in a new guise the liberal preservation of preferences from criticism by reestablishing a deterministic view of the formation of values, leading it to share with liberalism an a historical view of their origins. (shrink)

Almost wherever we look, depictions of sexuality, both subtle and not-so-subtle, are omnipresent. Whatever the medium, popular culture representations tell us something about ourselves and about the ideologies of which they are symptomatic. These essays examine the strategies of power implicit in popular representations of sexuality. The authors—scholars in fields such as sociology, philosophy, biology, political science, history, and English literature— eschew rigid disciplinary boundaries.

In a 1988 conference, American and British scholars unexpectedly discovered that their ideas were converging in ways that formed a new picture of the variegated Hellenistic mosaic. That picture emerges in these essays and eloquently displays the breadth of modern interest in the Hellenistic Age. A distrust of all ideologies has altered old views of ancient political structures, and feminism has also changed earlier assessments. The current emphasis on multiculturalism has consciously deemphasized the Western, Greco-Roman tradition, and Nubians, Bactrians, and (...) other subject peoples of the time are receiving attention in their own right, not just as recipients of Greco-Roman culture. History, like Herakleitos' river, never stands still. These essays share a collective sense of discovery and a sparking of new ideas—they are a welcome beginning to the reexploration of a fascinatingly complex age. (shrink)

This article takes up Peter Winch’s remarks concerning ‘the “fragility” of the conditions under which ethical conceptions can be active in social life’. It explores Winch’s discussion of political concepts and his account of the nature of politics. There are two related themes: a concern with the nature of political concepts; and a recognition (a reminder?) of the way in which disagreement belongs to our idea of politics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 116-120 [Access article in PDF] Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2002, 396 pp. Giovan Pietro Bellori is a name familiar to all who have studied seventeenth-century Italian art. His magisterial book, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (...) (Le vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni), published in Rome in 1672, continued in the grand tradition of artists' biographies established by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, while at the same time espousing a classical theory of artistic creation that has often been seen as the foundation of academic classicism, popular well into the nineteenth century. He is, in other words, an immensely significant figure, as a source of information on artists' lives, and, more importantly, as a cogent, early spokesperson for one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Western European culture.Given this importance, the relative dearth of publications dedicated toBellori, especially in the Anglo-American world, is surprising. PerhapsBellori's famously negative assessment of Caravaggio, or his complete avoidance of two of the most successful Italian artists of the seventeenth century, Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, account for the scarcity ofscholarly treatments, or maybe his supposed insistence that all great art should be grounded in rules is to blame. The reasons are hard to pin down, but the volume of essays under consideration here goes some significant way towards rectifying the situation. Stemming from a 1996 conference organized by the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History and held at the American Academy in Rome, the volume is divided into two roughly equal sections, one on "Bellori and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Rome," and the other on "Bellori's Lives: History, Criticism, Theory." It comprises twelve essays, including a long and very useful introduction by Janis Bell, one of the editors of the book. The overall goal of the collection is to treat Bellori's activity as a whole, rather than focus single-mindedly on the Lives. After all, as Bell points out, the preponderance of Bellori's publishing was not dedicated to aesthetic theory, or even artists' biographies, but to antiquarian studies. In this, the present volume is very different from the other major new work on Bellori, a two-volume cataloguepublished in 2000 to accompany anexhibition held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, L'idea del Bello: viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori. The exhibition did acknowledge Bellori's antiquarian interests, but was aimed principally at something else: making visible his aesthetic theory. Unfortunately, the authors of Art History in the Age of Belloriwere not able to take into account fully [End Page 116] the conclusions of this important study,although it should be noted that several authors are represented in both publications.The first group of essays in the book, six in number, treats a wide range of themes, with the intention of crafting a context, both literary and political, for understanding Bellori's achievement. Giovanna Perini's essay, the first of section one, describes Bellori's career trajectory, and, more significantly, how this path had an impact on his life as a scholar. Bellori did not come from the wealthiest stratum of society. On the contrary, he was of relatively modest means, which meant that he had to rely on employment income. One implication of being economically beholden to his employers was that his writing had to conform to their political agendas. The Vite, for instance, are famous for lionizing the French artist Nicolas Poussin, of obvious appeal to his Francophile patrons. Diego Velázquez, however, was not included in the Vite, perhaps because he was Spanish and would thus have appealed to the opposing political faction in Rome at the time, which was linked to Spain. At the same time, Perini convincingly argues that Bellori's own voice was not drowned out in the process... (shrink)

During the transition from the early to the modern era, the marginalization of astrology from the learned world marked a significant shift. The causes of this phenomenon are complex and still partially obscure. For instance, some sociological interpretations have linked it to a broader shift in mentality among the gentry and bourgeoisie, while other scholars attributed the decline to the emergence of the ‘new science’. Focusing on the case of Jean-Baptiste Morin (1583–1656), this paper examines the changing dynamics of patronage (...) for what has been termed ‘the last official astrologer’. It demonstrates that Morin's appointment as professor of mathematics at the Collège royal and his prominence within the French court were expressions of a cultural politics in which his patrons were deeply invested. Conversely, Morin's efforts to restore astrology lent validation to the belief systems of his patrons. The paper further analyses Morin's fall from grace during his polemics with Gassendi and his circle, highlighting the political context of the Fronde and a growing public weariness regarding the relationship between politics and astrology. Ultimately, this case study reveals that in the French context, the marginalization of astrology was not solely determined within the ‘learned jurisdiction’. Instead, the shifting cultural and political investments of the ruling classes played a significant role. (shrink)

The soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture-from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements. This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and (...) North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century. Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements-ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today. (shrink)

Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some (...) cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe political impact of “social acceleration” has recently attracted much attention in sociology and political theory. The concept, however, has remained entirely unexplored in the discipline of history. Although numerous British historians have noted the prominent position of acceleration in the late‐Victorian and Edwardian imagination, these observations have never expanded beyond the realm of rhetorical flourish. The present paper attempts to build a two‐way interdisciplinary bridge between British political history and the theories of social acceleration that have been (...) posited in the social sciences, arguing that both British political historians and acceleration theorists have much to gain from further dialogue. (shrink)

There is no other published work in English devoted to analyzing the political and intellectual dimensions of black Cuban women’s thought across the island’s history. This text is essential reading for students of Afro-Latin American studies, Caribbean history, or courses focussing on black women in the Atlantic region.

How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and academic literatures, biophysical and political-economic factors are often cited as the reason for meat’s preeminent status. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive investigation of these claims by reviewing the available evidence on the political-economic and biophysical features of meat over the long arc of Western history. We specifically focus on nine critical epochs: the Paleolithic, early to late Neolithic, antiquity, ancient Israel (...) and early Christian societies, medieval Europe, early modern Europe, colonial America, the American frontier, and the modern industrial era. We find that except under conditions of environmental scarcity, the meaning and value of meat cannot be attributed to intrinsic biophysical value or to the political-economic actors who materially benefit from it. Rather, meat’s status reflects the myriad cultural contexts in which it is socially constructed in people’s everyday lives, particularly with respect to religious, gender, communal, racial, national, and class identity. By deconstructing the normalized/naturalized materialist assumptions circling around meat consumption, this paper clears a space for a more nuanced appreciation of the role that culture has played in the legitimation of meat, and by extension, the possibility of change. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1992, John Dunn published an essay in Italian (which came out in English only years later) in which he summarized and clarified certain aspects of his historiographical vision concerning the history of political theory. A careful analysis of the text – corroborated by a consideration of later comments as well as general historical-theoretical references – gives us an insight into the lights and shadows of his thought. This reinterpretation reveals the originality of a perspective that examined the (...) meaning of ‘canon’ within the history of political theory, and indicated certain cultural and political aims to be consciously pursued through it. This original thought has recently been consolidated by other considerations on the need for a global history of political thought capable of offering interesting food for thought. Nevertheless, these seem to have emerged from a change of opinion on Dunn’s part, focusing to a greater extent on certain (more or less well-defined) moral duties that should be pursued by scholars of the history of political thought. (shrink)

What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture? Today’s culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling — they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone’s (...) concern. Some of the best answers might be found in an unexpected source: Romanticism. Too often we bring the values of the Enlightenment, particularly that of reason, to critique phenomena not inherently rational, such as pop culture or the Internet. This means that much criticism of current culture already has an intellectual foundation antagonistic to it — inviting postmodern arguments that suggest history has ended and reality is an illusion. In contrast, Romanticism, a cultural movement founded in Germany and England during the late eighteenth century, offers us an archive of concepts surprisingly sensitive to these problems. The Romantics were poets, dreamers, and politicians who advanced ideas that anticipated much contemporary thinking. David Black has organized these ideas systematically, and has then applied them to key issues in communications, such as representation, audience, and the information society, as well as to significant debates in cultural studies. As a result, The Politics of Enchantment offers a new theory of media and culture that is grounded in intellectual history, yet as feverishly current as the latest digital device. (shrink)