During the interwar period, the encyclopaedia became a popular educative instrument for demonstrating knowledge. Within the field of cultural internationalism, the pioneer of documentation Paul Otlet redefined the encyclopaedia as a documentary product or as we would say today a "multi-media" product. This article discusses the exchange of ideas between Otlet, Patrick Geddes and Otto Neurath and shows how the graphic and scenographic demonstration of encyclopaedic knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century applied the values of scientiic (...) universalism to programs of international education and cultural reform. (shrink)

New means of transport and communication allowed unprecedented mobility of people, goods and ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which contributed to far-reaching economic, social and political changes in a first wave of globalisation. In its genuine transnationality, the European historical avant-garde can be seen as a product of this development. Cosmpolitanism, internationality and internationalism became emblems of the avant-garde in its pursuit of a 'new', modern international culture trangressing 'old' borders and limitations dictated by conceptions (...) of nationhood, linguistic restrictions, and state boundaries. Simultaneously, national and nationalist reflexes can be traced in the avant-garde as well - in a European context marked by a plethora of competing nationalisms. This collection of essays focuses on the transnationality and inter-nationalisms in the European avant-garde as well as on conflicts, paradoxes and debates in the avant-garde as genuinely transnational configuration of artistic movements, which possessed nevertheless many nationalist edges. The book presents a panorama of the historical avant-garde oscillating and operating between transnationality, internationalism and nationalisms of different kinds, both in national cultural fields and a transnational European arena - from Iceland to Greece and from the Pale of Settlement to the Atlantic. (shrink)

The contributors to this issue focus on legal internationalism, including hybrid mixes with nationalist forms. They have provoked us as editors to think more about these sites and forms of engagement. Sankey shows how civic participation in the ECCC has played a key role in surfacing the gendered harms of separation and starvation. Turan highlights the problems with ICC exclusion of the experience of men and boys from sexual violence. Peroni expresses her hesitations over the Istanbul Convention given an (...) association between assumed vulnerability and migrant women, while admiring its uncoupling of violence and culture. Cruz’s interview with Wendy Brown contextualizes and expands on these themes as they consider, with other participants, the future of feminist theory in the context of neo-liberal capturing of rights and legal space. Thinking more about internationalism and commitment in this context also helps us hold a mirror up to ourselves as we reflect more critically on our own naming of FLS as an ‘international’ journal. Together these contributions, and the reviews of new work, play a role in fleshing out an editorial commitment to enacting the journal as a living thing that ‘hangs together somehow’ even as it is known differently in different places. (shrink)

The problems of internationalism often look different and require different solutions depending on one’s particular cultural standpoint. Contemporary Indian philosophers find that their philosophical efforts have long been too much oriented to the West, and that what Indian philosophy now needs is less international influence and more rootedness in their own rich tradition. This is needed for a more balanced international dialogue. The goal of internationalism in philosophy is not to bring into being a world‐philosophy, but a (...) global conversation on philosophical problems that is not inhibited by differing approaches. (shrink)

By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until the 2000s, and they have become more broadly utilized in these territories only (...) in the past decade. Further, it must be admitted that few results of these applications of postcolonial tools to postsocialist cases have made much of a mark among broader circles of postcolonial scholars and thinkers. Djagalov's book may help to correct this situation. Rather than work in the mode of “application”—applying a postcolonial framework to yet one more case—Djagalov reconstructs the history of a century of socialist anti-imperialism, as it was expressed in global cultural institutions and networks, and in so doing discovers the ignored or forgotten genealogy that links contemporary postcolonial thought to writers, activists, and theoreticians of the socialist world.Djagalov's book toggles between, on the one hand, chapters of institutional history that chronicle the global cultural institutions (such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association, the Tashkent Film Festival, and the Lotus Prize) that connected the Soviet Union with decolonizing countries and, on the other hand, chapters of synthetic cultural criticism that articulate typological analyses of common narrative forms that circulated in the fiction and film of the socialist world—recurring varieties of “solidarity narratives,” as Djagalov calls them. His work reveals how central the state-socialist political imaginary was for writers and filmmakers ranging from Nâzım Hikmet to Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, and how prominent their itineraries through Soviet institutions and networks were in their biographies. Ngūgī, for instance, finished his 1977 novel Petals of Blood during a residency in the Soviet Writers House in Yalta.In recovering the lost continent of anti-imperial socialist globality that bridged the “second” and “third worlds,” Djagalov has demonstrated not how postcolonial terms can be applied to postsocialist cases but how postcolonial theory and method are themselves postsocialist phenomena. Djagalov does not attempt to rectify the state-socialist prehistory of postcolonial thought with a critique of Soviet imperial habits or of the postcolonial contexts of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At least, though, the challenges of thinking “postcolonial” and “postsocialist” together have now become clearer. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism leaves us with new research problems: what, for example, does it mean to be a postcolony of an anti-imperial empire? (shrink)

It is commonplace that the modern world is more international than at any point in human history. Yet the sheer profusion of terms for describing political orders above the nation-state-including "international," "global," "transnational," and "cosmopolitan," among others-is but one indication of how conceptually complex this topic actually is. Taking a wide view of international projects in Europe since the eighteenth century, Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined explores discourses and practices to challenge nation-centered histories and trace the entanglements that arise from (...) international cooperation. In this volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars in history, political science, philosophy, computer science, and other fields ask how internationalism and adjacent concepts have been experienced, understood, constructed, debated, and redefined across different European political cultures. (shrink)

Philosophies sometimes claim international authority by claiming to be the expression of rationality that is universal in character or validity. This paper attacks Hegel’s internationalism of universal spirit and world history for unjustly excluding the philosophical value of non‐European cultures and races: Africans, Asians, Arabs, Jews, and Native Americans. Hegel’s Eurocentric internationalism also displays a particularly strong nationalist pride in German philosophical superiority. One cannot simply excuse the prejudices of Hegel’s historical context for his exclusionary attitudes. For Hegel’s (...) contemporary Goethe displayed a more truly international spirit in his inclusionary concept of world literature. (shrink)

This paper describes the situation of philosophy in Japan with respect to the question of internationalism. For more than a hundred years, Japan took Western culture as its model and European philosophy as the authentic philosophy. This tendency was paradoxically strengthened by the post‐war humanism. It gave us Japanese philosophers a clear discipline to work in but cut us off from our own native culture, history, and philosophical traditions. In wishing to recover this loss, I argue that it is (...) necessary to distinguish between two forms of internationalism: humanistic and merely fashionable. The latter in fact derives from domestic reasons. (shrink)

This is the thirty-first volume in Religion and Public Life, formerly This World, a series on religion and public affairs. This ongoing series seeks to provide a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The essays grouped together in Culture and Consumption discuss the phenomenon of consumption, an identifiable and pervasive feature of American culture that distinguishes it from other national cultures. The lead article provides an insight into the long-standing pattern of consumption that has been progressively (...) elevated into social policy in America. This is a balanced analysis of the history of the consumption cultural ethos beginning with the undermining of the Native American Culture and ending with Wilsonian Liberal-Internationalism and the demise of the moral authority of organized labor. This commercialization of culture has always competed with the funding vision of a dispassionate social order in which custom, deferential politics, and continuation of traditional hierarchal values would be the constitutional agenda. Another contributor argues that the emergence of the democratic-consumer state in America was anticipated in de Tocqueville's observation that "in democracies nothing has brighter luster than commercea." Other contributor essays treat issues such as the New Class and the consumer state; technology's triumph at the expense of the social and natural worlds; and argue against the materialist perspective in addiction. Culture and Consumption includes the following major contributions: "The Dialectic of Consumption: Materialism and Social Control" by David Brown; "Religion, Social Science and the Ironies of Parasitic Modernity" by Guy Alchon; The Dilemma of Hypermodernity" by Mark Wegierski; "Toward an Epistemology of Addiction" by Leonard Kaplan and Vince Rinella. Also included are book reviews by Martha Davis and Conrad Kanagy. In a concluding essay, Gabriel Ricci reviews Jerome Bruner's The Culture of Education. Culture and Consumption is part of an annual survey of religion and public life that provides relevant information and ideas about significant issues of the day. (shrink)

The history of eugenics has become a classic arena for examining how the interplay of culture, social interests and social structures affects the advancement of science. At the same time eugenics demonstrates how in the first half of the twentieth century, the expectation arose that science could offer the solution of social problems; for biology intruded into many areas of social policy during the 1920s and 30s. Historians of science have been struck by the coincidence between the rise of genetics (...) and eugenics after 1900. Genetics underpinned techniques of family reconstruction, which were deployed for the screening of population groups. Areas of social policy such as the prediction of potential criminals and other types of social deviancy relied on eugenic rationales. This poses intriguing problems concerning the extent to which genetic research was motivated by eugenic ideals, particularly in the field of human genetics. At the same time, it is important to recognize that eugenics was a heterogenous agglomeration of sciences: in addition to genetics, a prominent place was taken by anthropology, clinical medicine, statistics, and psychology. These diverse constituents were welded together by cultural and social movements peculiar to respective national contexts. (shrink)

The Confucian doctrine of _tianxia_ outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to _Chinese Visions of World Order_ examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation (...) to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou. (shrink)

The turn of the 20th and the 21st century is a very interesting period. On the one hand, there is a growth of internationalist tendencies, which make us look for common values and universal culture, and on the other hand, the centrifugal tendencies lead to the revival of new forms of nationalism and national and religious conflicts. Integrative tendencies are an unquestioned fact of every aspect of societal life: economic, political, and in culture, which succumbs to a tendency to create (...) global and universal mass culture. It turns out, however, that neither international commerce, nor the blossoming systems of communication and transport, provide us with the common feeling of identity or belonging. At the same time the need for those does not cease to exist. As a result, “people rediscover or create new historical identity”, since they feel uprooted and “need new sources of identity and new forms of stable community, new systems of moral imperatives, which could give them a sense of meaningful and purpose life”. One of the most important forms of collective and cultural identity still turns out to be the national one. The prophecies of the end of the era of nations have not come true. “The strength of national sentiments – writes Jerzy Szacki – even if changeable in time and diverse in space, does not show any symptoms of clear decline, the era of nations keeps lasting and nothing predicts it will end soon.”. (shrink)

At the turn of the twenty-first century, historical studies of internationalism--above and beyond the call to the workers of the world to unite--have become the norm in a relatively short space of time. This shift has occurred in the context of a historical vogue for 'transnationalism,' that is, capturing experiences that traversed and transcended the borders of nation-states both within and beyond the European world. The work of the diplomatic historian Akira Iriye has been central to these developments, illuminating (...) the traces of a distinctively twentieth century history of 'cultural internationalism' that resonated through the realms of politics. Following in the footsteps of Iriye and others--including feminist and pacifist historians who had long engaged the internationalist past--a new cohort of international historians, often sensitive to cultural analyses and with expertise in imperial and transnational as well as national histories, are now accruing broad-ranging evidence of the geographies of internationalism and the political and economic reach of its various strands at critical moments in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Our thinking is still the captive of the dichotomy “national/ international.” The reaction to nationalism takes the form of an abstract internationalism, and reaction to internationalism leads to the rebirth of nationalism. However, this dichotomy was only true (and that relatively) in 19th century Europe, or at the latest, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when subnational cultures seemed on the way to disappearing, and everything European was considered “universal” (two hypotheses that the facts prove to be (...) untrue). As H. Frey observes, “Today, the decline or decadence of the West is part of the contemporary view of the world, like the electron or the dinosaur.” The linear outline of progress, with Europe at the head, did not withstand the test of the First World War. The year 1918 marked the beginning of the end of Europeanism. Since then, we have begun to speak of “areas of civilization” (Splengler), “civilizations” (Toynbee), “cultural coalitions” (Lévi-Strauss). The existence of “areas of civilization” (regions) is commonly admitted today; it has entered journalistic language and even the structure of regional commissions and agencies of the United Nations (Europe, Near East, Southern Asia, South-east Asia, and the Far East). New communities have inserted themselves between nations and humanity. What do they represent? Are they something unique, or are they divided into a certain number of types in opposition to each other because of some characteristic? And in what way have they modified our view of universal history? (shrink)

Chronicling the emergence of an international society in the 1920s, Daniel Gorman describes how the shock of the First World War gave rise to a broad array of overlapping initiatives in international cooperation. Though national rivalries continued to plague world politics, ordinary citizens and state officials found common causes in politics, religion, culture and sport with peers beyond their borders. The League of Nations, the turn to a less centralized British Empire, the beginning of an international ecumenical movement, international sporting (...) events and audacious plans for the abolition of war all signaled internationalism's growth. State actors played an important role in these developments and were aided by international voluntary organizations, church groups and international networks of academics, athletes, women, pacifists and humanitarian activists. These international networks became the forerunners of international NGOs and global governance. (shrink)

This article shows how the legacy of Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851), and his discovery of electromagnetism in 1820, was reconfigured and used by the H.C. english abstracts Ørsted Committee from 1914 before and during the centenary of 1920. Combining Somsen’s (2008) concept of olympic internationalism with uses of the past, I suggest understanding the 1920-centenary as an instance of olympic commemoration [olympisk historiebrug]. I argue that central actors from the committee, e.g. Martin Knudsen (1871-1949) and Kirstine Meyer, née Bjerrum (...) (1861-1941), used Ørsted's nationality to substantiate Denmark’s cultural and scientific achievements. By comparison to pre-twentieth century biographies, I show how the committee re-described Ørsted, i.e. from a scientist [Naturforsker] to being a Danish scientist [dansk Naturforsker]. The committee was deeply concerned with proving the big contributions by the small nation of Denmark, and I show how this relates to cultural politics of the early twentieth century Denmark. (shrink)

The European dimension of civic education can allow educators to promote many positive elements of internationalism. These include the promotion of general respect for the rule of law and for human rights and of commitment to democratic and egalitarian principles. This paper accepts these aspects of the European dimension in civic education. What it objects to is the attempt, through education, to change the focus of the political allegiance of young people by promoting the notion of ‘European citizenship’. Support (...) for the valuable elements in the European dimension of civic education does not entail support for a contrived notion of citizenship for inhabitants of nations who have long civic traditions of their own. In the first section of the paper, the project of appropriating education to engineer political loyalty to the ‘New Europe’ is criticized. The second part of the article draws attention to certain unacknowledged difficulties in conceptualizing the shared identity which would be required in order to animate and sustain a sense of ‘European citizenship’. (shrink)

The word "globalization" is used to convey the hope and determination of order-making on a worldwide scale. It is trumpeted as providing more mobility--of people, capital, and information--and as being equally beneficial for everyone. With recent technological developments--most notably the Internet--globalization seems to be the fate of the world. But no one seems to be in control. As noted sociologist Zygmunt Bauman shows in this detailed history of globalization, while human affairs now take place on a global scale, we are (...) not able to direct events; we can only watch as boundaries, institutions, and loyalties shift in rapid and unpredictable ways. Who benefits from the new globalization? Are people in need assisted more quickly and efficiently? Or are the poor worse off than ever before? Will a globalized economy shift jobs away from traditional areas, destroying time-honored national industries? Who will enjoy access to jobs in the new hierarchy of mobility? From the way the global economy creates a class of absentee landlords to current prison designs for the criminalized underclass, Bauman dissects globalization in all its manifestations: its effects on the economy, politics, social structures, and even our perceptions of time and space. In a chilling analysis, Bauman argues that globalization divides as much as it unites, creating an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Rather than the hybrid culture we had hoped for, globalization is creating a more homogenous world. Drawing on the works of philosophers, social historians, architects, and theoreticians such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alfred J. Dunlap, and Le Corbusier, Globalization presents a historical overview of the methods employed to create and define human spaces and institutions, from rural villages to sprawling urban centers. Bauman shows how the advent of the computer translates into the decline of truly public space. And he explores the dimensions of a world in which--through new technologies--time is accelerated and space is compressed, revealing how we have arrived at our current state of global thinking. Bauman's incisive methods of inquiry make Globalization an excellent antidote to the exuberance expressed by those who stand to benefit from the new pace and mobility of the modern life. (shrink)

High cultures and the inter-regional system: beyond Hellenocentrism -- The material moment of the ethics, practical truth -- Formal morality, intersubjective validity -- Ethical feasibility and the "goodness claim" -- The ethical critique of the prevailing system : from the perspective of the negativity of the victims -- The anti-hegemonic validity of the community of victims -- The liberation principle -- Appendix I. some theses in the order of their appearance in the text -- Appendix II. Sais: capital of Egypt.

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going (...) against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism. (shrink)

Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also (...) complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism. Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic. (shrink)

This article poses the question of the social and intellectual conditions for genuine social scientific internationalism, through an analysis of the worldwide spread of a new global vulgate resulting from the false and uncontrolled universalization of the folk concepts and preoccupations of American society and academe. The terms, themes and tropes of this new planetary doxa - `multiculturalism', `globalization', `liberals versus communitarians', `underclass', racial `minority' and identity, etc. - tend to project and impose on all societies American concerns and (...) viewpoints, thereby transfigured into tools of analysis and yardsticks of policy fit to naturalize the peculiar historical experience of one peculiar society, tacitly instituted as a model for humanity. The article suggests how the logic of the international circulation of ideas, the transformations of the academic field, the strategies of foundations and publishers, and of local collaborators in global conceptual `import-export' converge to foster a particularly powerful and pernicious form of cultural imperialism of which academics are at once perpetrators and victims. (shrink)

In recent years historians have revisited the creation of the United Nations system by highlighting the enduring influence of Empire and recognizing the substantial role of cultural and scientific actors in wartime international diplomacy. The British biochemist Joseph Needham, who participated in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was one of them. Yet, if historians have recognized his role as the leading architect of the sciences at UNESCO, they still fall short of engaging (...) with the Chinese and imperial geography of his involvement with UNESCO. During the Second World War, Needham was stationed in war-torn China. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham not only organized Sino-British scientific cooperation against the Japanese invasion, but his mission inspired his engagement for a reform of international science and fueled an international campaign that led him to become the director of UNESCO’s Natural Science division after the war. By reconstructing his campaign in context, this article seeks to demonstrate how the imperial and transnational scientific networks of the wartime era fostered the creation of a scientific mandate for UNESCO. It situates Needham’s activism and ideas in the context of the Sino-Japanese war, imperial wartime technocracy, and China’s scientific nationalism. In so doing, it reveals a string of forgotten partners from China and the British Empire. Their conception of a reorganized international science and shared belief in modern science and its ideal of universality shaped Needham’s vision for science at UNESCO, while their activism contributed decisively to the success of his campaign. This inquiry hence participates in recent efforts to challenge the existing Eurocentrism corseting the historiography of the UN and expands the historiography of scientific internationalism beyond Europe and North America. Importantly, it also contributes to uncovering the technocratic ties established between Empire and the UN system from its onset. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to aesthetics, from the perspective of analytic philosophy. It traces aesthetics from its ancient beginnings through the changes it underwent in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and the first half of the twentieth century. The responses in the 1960s of the cultural theories to these earlier developments are discussed in detail. Five traditional art evaluational theories, Beardsley's and Goodman's evaluational theories, and the author's own evaluational theory are presented. Four miscellaneous topics are discussed - internationalist criticism, (...) symbolism, metaphor, and expression. (shrink)

J.M. Coetzee has unquestionably achieved the status of ‘international author’ within dominant conceptions of world literature: his works circulate widely in both English and translation and have been legitimated by the principal arbitrators of the global cultural industry. He has, however, recently positioned himself as ‘an international author, but in a different sense’; that is, as a writer whose internationalism is achieved through his location in ‘the South’. This article considers how Coetzee’s narratives thematize being ‘international’ in this (...) ‘different sense’. It focuses on the pivotal works of Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life (2002) and the opening chapters of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) while tracking an orientation southward across his oeuvre in allusions to Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges and, in particular, Pablo Neruda as well as in Coetzee’s repeated turn to littoral settings. These settings open to what the article describes as the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, implicating narrative world-making in the geophysical properties and ‘troubled histories’ that constitute the South and recasting the act of writing from ‘the far edges’ into a planetary perspective that contends with the uncanny nature of settler societies in the southern temperate zone. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper is concerned with “holism” as a German cultural “style” of doing psychobiology in Central Europe between the two world wars. The paper takes its starting point from a critical analysis of Forman's writings on nationalism versus internationalism in interwar German science, and the alleged “accommodation” of interwar German physics to an antiscientific, irrationalist culture. The paper argues that psychobiological holism was not just a reaction against nineteenth-century atomistic or mechanistic approaches to modeling life and mind; (...) it also represented a domestically directed answer from within the German biomedical scientific community to broad religious and cultural “disenchantment.” As such, holistic psychobiology emerges as a phenomenon that challenges us with at least four levels of discourse: experimental/clinical, epistemological/philosophical, existential/religious, and ideological/political. The paper defends the methodological appropriateness of a collective case-study approach to the problem of holism as a multilevel discourse. It concludes by offering a preliminary contextualized analysis of the thought of three representative holistic leaders of the time: behavioral biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll; clinical neurologist Constantin von Monakow; and neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. (shrink)

Queer theorists have considered the problems concerning the political strategy of using LGBT rights to justify racist xenophobia and using homo/transphobia to consolidate heterosexist nationalism. Their timely interventions are important in exposing state violence in the name of human rights and sovereign equality, but they have offered no alternative. They may also have reinforced the assumption of state science. This assumption is based on a trinity structure of the nation-state-sovereignty of ‘modern, self-determining men’, who are against each other and thereby (...) co-built the so-called ‘international’. State-centric internationalism produces exclusionary effects that undermine the rights of sexual and gender minorities. To address this, I first consider the debate over ‘LGBT rights as human rights’, and identify two types of cultural relativism (epistemological and political) as the categories to formulate a decolonial response to the debate. In this article, queer political theorising is pushed forward to: 1) critically evaluate universalism, 2) differentiate cultural relativism (opposing the political version of it) and 3) revise the epistemological version with decolonial-queer praxis. I propose a pluralist approach to sovereignty and human rights; informed by this approach, the lack of international consensus is remedied by recognising the polyvocality within transnational queer activism beyond the monopoly of states’ representation of their own peoples. This proposal also aims to decentre modern statecraft from the political imagination of contemporary international studies scholarship. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism is a demanding and contentious moral position. It urges us to embrace the whole world into our moral concerns and to apply the standards of impartiality and equity across boundaries of nationality, race, religion or gender in a way that would have been unheard of even fifty years ago. It suggests a range of virtues which the cosmopolitan individual should display: virtues such as tolerance, justice, pity, righteous indignation at injustice, generosity toward the poor and starving, care for the (...) global environment, and the willingness to take responsibility for change on a global scale. This book explains and espouses the values of cosmopolitanism, adjudicates between various forms of cosmopolitanism, and defends it against its critics.Cosmopolitanism has relevance for international distributive justice; peace; human rights; environmental sustainability; protection for minorities, refugees and other oppressed groups; democratic participation; and inter cultural tolerance. The book does not aim to impart factual information about global issues or to offer prescriptions for the solution of global problems. Rather, it highlights the ethical issues inherent in them and identifies the moral obligations that individuals, multinational corporations and governments might have in relation to them.While espousing a cosmopolitan form of global ethics, a liberal form of politics, sustainable and just forms of business practice, and an internationalist approach to global conflict and governance, it seeks to present as many sides of the ethical debates as can be supported by reasonable argument. Discussing the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Henry Shue, Peter Singer and others, this book provides a clear and accessible survey of cosmopolitanism and analyses the reality of the rights and responsibilities that it espouses. (shrink)

This article undertakes a critical examination of the political philosophy of Richard Rorty with special reference to his treatment of patriotism, pragmatism and democracy. Pragmatism, especially in the work of John Dewey, provided an energetic defence of American democracy, claiming that American democratic culture did not require any philosophical lessons from European social theory. American pragmatism is in this sense a celebration of indigenous political traditions. In his defence of pragmatism and patriotism against the cosmopolitanism of Left cultural critics, (...) Rorty advocates pragmatic ethnocentrism. Through a parallel commentary on socialist internationalism, this article asks whether ‘democracy in one country’ - the United States of America - is either feasible or compatible with the critical legacy of pragmatism. In its response to the growth of international terrorism, especially in its ‘liberation of Iraq’, the United States is in danger of becoming a ‘predatory democracy’. While Rorty has in the past argued that America cannot function as a global policeman, the trend of contemporary international relations is to create an American Empire. The article concludes by arguing that Rorty’s patriotism functions as ‘a final vocabulary’ that contradicts his postmodernism and makes it difficult for modern pragmatism to remain a critical theory. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is a classic name in political theory, but does he have anything to teach us about international relations? In the Cold War he was a realist disciple of the containment doctrine, indeed a more hawkish container than his friend George Kennan, at least until he saw what was happening in Vietnam. In the aftermath of the Cold War, confronted with an outburst of resurgent nationalism, he seemed more like a utopian idealist, dreaming with Herder of a world of (...) cultural harmony. But that dream is undermined by his own value pluralism, which points towards something more rigorous and interesting, a case for liberal internationalism in tension with its realist rival. From a value-pluralist point of view, realism tends towards moral monism, and liberal internationalism is normatively the more balanced view. However, liberals should still take seriously the central realist insight that security is an especially important value in the anarchic international context. (shrink)

An appropriate combination of Quine’s ontology and Frege’s semantics is useful to emphasize the empirical entities “ethnic group” and “nation” expressed through an axiomatic system. If “cultural diversity” is taken as a primitive because it is good ethically and it is beautiful esthetically, then “internationalist nationalism” is the correct order of human society from a political point of view.

In light of world globalization, three visions of the world order have been examined. The naive cosmopolitanism has been examined first and then rejected as being unrealistic because it overlooks the reasons for state pluralism in the international order. On this naive view, the world state is the only source of sovereignty and the individual is the only focal point of moral concern. Second subject matter of our investigation were Kantian and Rawlsian views which still defend the state-centered view on (...) international relations with peoples as a major subject of moral concern. However, on Rawls view, the principle of peoples' self-determination should be combined with the principles of universal morality which protect some individuals' fundamental rights thus enabling his theory to be classified into moderate liberal internationalism. Third, the idea of functional sovereignty as a foundation of the system of international sovereignty has been abandoned as being too unrealistic given recent tendencies in the world which associate the identities of individuals with cultures and civilizations rather than with practices and professions. Finally, some reasons have been given for preferring Rawlsian approach. The major reason is that there are close cultural ties between nations and their states and that this fact can contribute greatly to the resolution of coordination problem among states both internally and externally.. Pokusacemo, krecuci se u oblasti politicke normativne teorije, i to pre svega u okviru problema vezanih za analizu pojma suvereniteta drzave i teorije medjunarodnih odnosa, da na adekvatan nacin pojmovno odgovorimo na kulturne, politicke i ekonomske fenomene u svetu koji se u strucnoj literaturi, a i u javnosti uopste, cesto jednim imenom nazivaju "globalizacija". Razmotricemo pre svega klasicno shvacen pojam suvereniteta i ispitacemo kakvu ulogu taj pojam moze da ima u jednoj normativnoj viziji savremenih medjunarodnih odnosa. Branice se teza da uprkos globalizacijskim trendovima u svetu, drzavno shvatanje suvereniteta vezano za pojam nacije-drzave mozda treba i dalje da ima kljucnu ulogu u sistemu medjunarodnih odnosa jer je to najcelishodniji nacin da se ostvare zahtevi za pravdom i mirom na nivou kolektivnog delanja naroda kako unutar drzave tako i na medjunarodnom planu. (shrink)

Preview: /Scott Shapiro interviewed by Eli Kramer / EK: Thanks for talking with me today. Your book, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World is not only kind of groundbreaking in the way it changes how we think about the role of international law in the history and philosophy of culture, and some of our progressive success of not having disastrous violence shape us each generation, but it has only become more relevant since the war (...) in Ukraine was launched. As a starting point for our conversation, can you summarize the main premise of the work? SS: It’s a story about the modern international order. Despite its imperfections, it needs to be defended now more than ever. The central argument of the book is that the origins of the modern international order can be traced to a specific date in history. Namely August 27th, 1928, when the great leaders of the world gathered in Paris to outlaw war. The treaty that was signed on that day is sometimes called the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Peace Pact, or the Paris Peace Pact. Its actual formal designation was “The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War,” basically saying it all was an attempt to outlaw war. Now, of course most people have never heard of it. It’s amazing that basically all the countries in the world decide to outlaw war, which in itself is initially a strange thing to do, but then nobody knows about it. (shrink)

Zionism needs a fundamental overhaul given both the collapse of the Oslo-initiated peace process and the erosion of liberal values in Israeli society. There is no better guide than Hannah Arendt for such an undertaking. On the one hand, she provided a searing diagnosis of mainstream Zionism’s foundational shortcomings, which persist to the present. One is a creed that assumes an eternal anti-Semitism. Two is a corresponding insular nationalism, which rejects affirmative engagement with the outside. On the other hand, Arendt (...) articulated an affirmative humanist Zionism based on three elements. First, is a Jewish self-determination aimed at cultural enrichment and emancipation. Second, is an outward-oriented Zionism that embraces internationalism. Third, is substantive coexistence with Palestinians based on an innovative alternative to the homogenous nation-state model. This article retrieves and updates Arendt’s humanist Zionism. I emphasize her plea to confront Zionism’s pathologies, break from an insular nationalist mindset, and foster new political channels for attaining genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 76 Reviews REAPPRAISING GILBERT MURRAY Louis Greenspan Religious Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4k1 [email protected] ChristopherStray,ed.GilbertMurrayReassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xii, 400. £65; £27.50 (pb). Cdn. $156 (hb). us$55 (pb). isbn 978-0-19-920879-1 (hb). For much of the Wrst half of the twentieth century Gilbert Murray was a leading Wgure in British (...) academia, in British theatre, on the British and American lecture circuits and even in British politics. He was admired by the community of scholars as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the most prestigious position in classical scholarship in the English-speaking world. He was also esteemed by a wider reading public as the champion of a magisterial liberalism rooted in classical Greek culture. Finally he was respected by the world at large as a liberal activist who, during World War 1, wrote well-argued pamphlets in support of the war and who later became co-chairman of the League of Nations Union, an organization that in the ’20s and ’30s attracted 400,000 members. Among his companions were George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, both of whom remained his friends for life. As chief editor of the Home University Library he commissioned Russell’s The Problems of Philosophyz, which is still unsurpassed as an introduction to this subject. Today he is forgotten. Younger classical scholars would endorse the statement by Fowler (quoted in this volume): “in spite of his great fame when he was alive, he might never have written, so far as most scholars are concerned today” (p. 58). His role as the public intellectual who connected modern liberalism with Hellenism has been taken over by the followers of Leo Strauss who view this connection rather diTerently than Murray did. As for his liberal activism, when he died in 1957 Murray was regarded aTectionately as a noble ghost of Victorian liberalism past, whose passionate advocacy of the League of Nations was seen as well meaning and futile as the organization he had championed. In the ’60s and ’70s his words and deeds were swept away in the tides of anti-liberal fervour that inspired the newly emerging leftist revolutionaries and neo-conservatives. At Wrst perusal Gilbert Murray Reassessed zhas the format of festschrifts and other scholarly reviews of the accomplishments of a particular writer. There are articles on every aspect of Murray’s activities: his translations of Greek drama, his critical editions of Euripides, his views of Hellenism, his post-World War 1 September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 77 internationalism and even his lectures on the bbc, all by specialists in these topics. But this volume is more than a summing up of Murray’s contributions to scholarship. The aim of the volume is to revive Murray the public intellectual, a voice of liberalism that deserves a new hearing. The book could have been entitled Gilbert Murray Retrieved for Our Timesz: a contribution to the struggle to Wnd a liberalism that addresses the anti-liberal, anti-intellectual forces that threaten us today. In this spirit the volume is dedicated to those who died in the London terrorist attack of July 2005. The volume opens with two sets of memoirs, one by Murray’s grandchildren Ann Pauladan and Alexander Murray, the other Francis West’s account of Murray ’s reXections on an Australian childhood. The memoirs of his grandchildren, aTectionate and charming, seem less interested in refashioning Gilbert Murray for our time. They still portray Murray as one who inhabited a world that is no more, the proponent of a liberalism that was naively optimistic and top heavy with reason at the expense of the emotions. Murray’s optimism is evident in their anecdote about an encounter between Murray and Sir Edward Grey, during a summer walk in 1914. Murray opened the conversation by scoUng at rumours of impending war in Europe, for him impossible between civilized powers. Grey closed it by assuring him that war was certain, thus causing the speechless and horriWed Murray... (shrink)

The democratic surprises of 2016—Brexit and the Trump phenomenon—fueled by “fake news”, both real and imagined, have come to constitute a centrifugal, nationalistic, even tribal moment in politics. Running counter to the shared postwar narrative of increasing internationalism, these events reignited embers of cultural and moral relativism in academia and public discourse dormant since the culture wars of the 1990s and ‘60s. This counternarrative casts doubt on the value of belief in universal human rights, which many in the (...) humanities and social sciences argue have of late been used as instruments of postcolonial oppression. This book essay introduces three texts written before the dawn of the latest “post-truth” era—The Sociology of Human Rights by Mark Frezzo, The Political Sociology of Human Rights by Kate Nash, and Keeping Faith with Human Rights by Linda Hogan—that address moral skepticism of human rights. Along with these authors, the essay briefly treats human rights’ past and prospects, analogizing it to the waves of feminist thought: in international politics, developing nations first desired a seat at the table and repeal of discriminatory laws and practices; when one-nation-one-vote did not result in equal treatment, the persistence of hierarchy helped developing nations awaken to their own evolving national identities and they wished to be recognized as not only equal, but different and unique. The essay recapitulates and amplifies these authors’ argument that the contemporary challenge for all nations, their citizens, and for the human rights community is to deliberatively decide what values unite these identities beyond simple self-determination and extend them toward the goal of a just global whole. The essay also makes an original contribution in summarizing the initial post-war debate in the United Nations that birthed the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which has been subject to revisionism and perspectivism typical of cultural and moral relativism. It provides some social scientific, historical, and philosophic grounding for serious conversation of the ideas of truths in politics, and universal, transcultural goods and rights that underpin the authority of the international human rights regime in theory and practice. It does so while recognizing the serious epistemological challenges to this universalist conception, chiefly: how a social construct can be both time-bound human creation and continue to be morally binding across space, time, and the accelerated change global citizens of all corners are experiencing, simultaneously yet in their own way. (shrink)

After centuries of symbolic and political oppression, Galicia has been recognized by the Spanish constitution as a historic nationality. However, despite a certain degree of political autonomy, Galician identity is threatened by increasing homogenization in the economic, social, cultural and linguistic fields. In the early 1990s the aesthetic movement Bravú constructed an aesthetic community, sustained by an ideological project, and with the aim to, on the one hand, prevent Galician culture from becoming folklore stuck in a time warp and, (...) on the other hand, to validate Galician identity. The Bravú artists refused the historically inherited outsider position and contributed to a reinvention of Galician identity and of a political ideal within a cosmopolitan, internationalist framework and by reversing social stigmas through their works and performances. (shrink)

Regardless of unpredictable and contingent geopolitical events such as last year’s surprising rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, this coming year will certainly witness a large surge in patriotism. The Winter Olympics in February, and the World Cup in the summer, both promise to whip national sentiments into a fever pitch. One other thing is certain, though: journals of philosophy and ethics will continue to debate the virtues of cosmopolitanism, as this number of Ethical Perspectives does (...) through its contributions below.Why is this? Why do philosophers and academics hold on to this idea of cosmopolitanism, an idea utterly lacking in the convictions of the general public? Is it perhaps because the first cosmopolitans were in fact philosophers? The first to identify himself as a cosmopolitan was Diogenes the Cynic, and Plato’s dialogues paint many of the Sophists in cosmopolitan hues. Although people generally support the idea of internationalism as far as it promotes trade, travel, and football tournaments, once it begins to meddle in internal affairs, as it does with outsourcing and transnational constitutions, they tend to fall back upon the patria. They killed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, not the youth of the world.Whether it is the service and manufacturing industries of Asia and India ‘stealing’ American jobs, or widespread fears of Brussels’ legendary bureaucrats, the non-academic public consistently turns from its tepid embrace of cosmopolitanism to patriotism whenever threatened. Are we too quick to label this as self-interest or even selfishness? Or is there something else at work in the debate between cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Some approaches to cosmopolitanism are certainly guilty of an absolute removal of difference, of wishing away the nation state, of replacing it with an international body based on purely universal principles, and of wiping away the competencies of nations on many levels. The call for the world state can come across as an appeal for an anodyne and internationalist homogeneity based on a clinical morality that, for all its sensitivity, runs roughshod over the well-engrained cultural, legal, and social beliefs of many peoples.Clearly, this is what many Europeans fear, and to a large degree, Americans as well in their dislike for the International Court of Justice. Even the economic hegemony of outsourcing removes national power, and replaces it with pure economic rationality.Our contributors below do not advocate these reductions, although some may point to them. Key to each contribution below is sensitivity to the world as it is, to its need for difference even in the face of an ever-increasing globalisation that sometimes is connected with cosmopolitanism. Yet, every proponent of cosmopolitanism must sketch how it is possible in practice. Of course, an obvious problem is how to dwell consequently as a cosmopolitan. Not many contemporary cosmopolitans would be prepared to follow Diogenes’ commitment to rootlessness: living in exile after having been included in a forgery conviction aimed at his father, the ascetic Diogenes called a barrel his home. Such was his drive to live a levelled life that he cast away his only bowl upon seeing a poor peasant boy drinking from cupped hands. Today’s cosmopolitan leads a much more prosaic life, and hence the problem with cosmopolitanism begins as something mundane. Does not a cosmopolitan still pay national taxes? Does not a cosmopolitan still need a national passport and second country visas? But, the questions quickly turn ontological: how can one shed oneself of one’s nationality, of one’s belonging, as if it is just an accident of one’s own constitution, instead of as an important property of one’s own constitution? In other words, belonging is important: a citizen of the world still values citizenship. Clearly, the absolute cosmopolitan reduction is an absurdity: one is always rooted, in some sense. Even cosmopolitanism is rooted in a specific Western mindset, and is no self-evident preference of human existence.As Rudi Visker’s contribution so clearly shows through an investigation of the narcissism of minor differences, these questions revolve around the question of confrontation with alterity. What I am, in no small way plays off what I am not. I cannot be everything, if I am something. Freud’s analysis of minor differences reveals that members of a group identify with that group on the basis these minor differences. What is self-evident to a particular culture marks that culture off from another culture, a culture that by definition does not share the same set of the self-evident. To be a foreigner, as any ex-patriot can attest, is to stand outside of the self-evident, whether this means interpreting gestures, understanding commercial practices, or, as Freud would have it, staying on the correct side of national taboos. There is thus a dialectic of inner and outer, a dialectic which refuses a reduction of one to the other. As Visker puts it, recognising the stranger within oneself is quite different than recognising the stranger outside of oneself, and to confuse these as being the same is not only to misunderstand the very issue at stake, it is also a dangerous trivialisation of difference.But clearly, there is something viable and laudable in the idea of cosmopolitanism, since it stresses the universal moral community of humanity. Cosmopolitanism is an attempt to see all human subjects as subject to the same moral law. Indeed, the sort of federation to which cosmopolitanism leads, at least in a modified Kantian expression as Bert van Roermund tells us, even gives us good grounds to recognise the legitimacy and moral equivalence of states. Importantly, the international legal order does not draw its power from any supranational force, but from the choice of independent national actors to recognise it. Hence, this cosmopolitan order depends on nationhood, and good standing within this order depends on the degree to which a country decides to participate. Again, the universal here depends on well-rooted particularity, a particularity able to choose for the universal.What do we do, then, with outlaw nations, those nations that are hostile to the choice for the universal? Through a clear reading of Hegel, Paul Cobben proposes that the metric for a state’s legality is the measure to which it permits the moral freedom of its citizens to bloom. A free person requires a free legal order; only in such can a person obtain the full measure of human rights due. States that do not permit this blooming are illegitimate; they contradict the nature of the human person, and citizens dwelling under the yoke of these have the right to ask for outside assistance in removing this illegitimate power above them. However, for this plea to be met, two conditions must obtain: the oppressed people must have the wherewithal to form a political order after the removal of the illegitimate state, and the action must be grounded in the principles and support of a legal community, which in essence would be a world federation of states. In fact, it is morally incumbent upon all legal states to aim at such a world federation, upon pain of contradiction.Our duty to others does not end with the politically oppressed; the economically oppressed also lay a moral claim upon us. So, as Toon Vandevelde asks in his contribution, what about the global poor? The poor are hungry and in need of shelter and a future, but to address these issues at the level of rights is in a way heartless: what good does it do to legislate that everyone has the right to food, when this right can never be called upon, or enforced, in any meaningful sense? Moreover, approaches that demand non-prioritised generosity not only ignore the fundamental economic fact of scarcity, they also run the risk of creating the moral hazard of dependence on charity. The true cosmopolitan approach is the recognition of our common humanity and of our concomitant duty to help others as far as this help does not endanger us. This duty is compounded by the marginalisation of the poor through globalisation, a globalisation that they did not ask for. The extent of our help is indeterminate, but its direction is clear: it must aim to integrate those poor who wish it within our international systems, and so to ease their own transitions from poverty.Both Gil Anidjar and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher continue this theme of economy, but each from a highly specific viewpoint. Indeed, their contributions are perhaps somewhat darker, delving into an aspect of the unspoken underneath the choice for the universal. Anidjar begins with the relation between religion and economy within the interplay of Judaism and Christianity, whereas Bonnafous-Boucher focuses on the development of political economy through a Foucaultian lens. Although highly distinct contributions, both share the insight that the economy is now the central theme of our power structures, and that economy, isolated from questions of morality or justice, must likewise play a decisive role within the structure of cosmopolitanism, or, at minimum, the political unity of peoples. For, national government long ago ceded to a promiscuous mix of governance, and religion to economy. This nexus enthrones governance as an economic rationale stripped of all other trappings, and inscribes any possible cosmopolitanism within a framework of an aggressive capitalism, a kind of economic theology, a kind of hegemony in which state boundaries are essentially liquefied. Capital, after all, knows no boundaries. (shrink)

The philosophic moment of Marx : Marx's transformation of the Hegelian dialectic -- Preface to the Iranian edition of Marx's humanist essays -- The theory of alienation : Marx's debt to Hegel -- The todayness of Marx's humanism -- A 1981 view of Marx's 1841 dialectic -- The inseparability of Marx's economics, humanism, and dialectic -- Capitalist development and Marx's capital, 1863-1883 -- Today's epigones who try to truncate Marx's capital -- Letter to Herbert Marcuse on automation -- Marx's grundrisse (...) and the dialectic in life and in thought -- Capitalist production/alienated labor -- Marx's critique of culture -- Post-Marx marxism and the battle of ideas -- Post-Marx marxism as a category -- Hobsbawm and Rubel on the Marx centenary, but where is Marx? -- Marx's philosophy of revolution vs. non-marxist scholar-careerists in "marxism" -- Paul Mattick : economism vs. Marx's humanism -- Bertell Ollman : pitting "human nature" against Marx's humanism -- The dialectic of labor in Marx and "critical thought" -- Gramsci's "philosophy of praxis" -- Rosdolsky's methodology and Lange's revisionism -- Adorno, Kosik, and the movement from practice -- Marx as philosopher of revolution in permanence-reading Marx for today -- Section A: Marxist-humanism -- Introduction to philosophic notes -- The emergence of a new movement from practice that is itself a form of theory -- New stage of production, new stage of cognition, new kind of organization -- The dialectic of absolute idea as new beginning -- Section B: Black liberation and internationalism -- Abolitionism and the American roots of marxism -- Marx and the two-way road between the U.S. and Africa -- Black intellectuals in dilemma -- Women's liberation and the dialectics of revolution -- Marx's "new humanism" and the dialectics of women's liberation in "primitive" and modern societies -- Marx's and Engels' studies contrasted : relationship of philosophy and revolution to women's liberation -- Letter to adrienne rich on women's liberation, gay liberation, and the dialectic -- Dialectics of organization and philosophy -- Spontaneity, organization, philosophy (dialectics) -- Philosopher of permanent revolution and organization man -- A post-World War II view of Marx's humanism, 1843-1883 : marxist humanism, 1950s-1980s -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

Since the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the interests of the working class have become progressively more marginalized within mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. Years of austerity politics following the financial crash of 2008 deepened popular disenchantment with the political class, paving the way for the 2016 Brexit referendum result. This, Brian Elliot argues, has precipitated a crisis of British democracy. -/- Does the current wave of populism constitute a threat to or promise for democracy? What has (...) led to the emergence of populism and to what extent can populism be shaped into a program of progressive reform of democracy today? In this timely new book, Brian Elliott takes a long view on populism, tracing its history back to the struggles waged by the British workers’ movement of the nineteenth century to gain general enfranchisement. -/- Countering the depiction of populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism, Elliott argues that the populist sentiment contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Identifying and examining the contemporary challenges of work, Elliott outlines a new working-class politics to overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years. (shrink)

_An expansive and ambitious intellectual history of democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists_ The fallout from twenty years of neoliberal economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism—a democracy in which the people control the economy and government, no group dominates any other, and every citizen is free, equal, and included. With a focus on the intertwined legacies of Christian socialism and Social Democratic politics in Britain (...) and Germany, this book traces the story of democratic socialism from its birth in the nineteenth century through the mid‑1960s. Examining the tenets on which the movement was founded and how it adapted to different cultural, religious, and economic contexts from its beginnings through the social and political traumas of the twentieth century, Gary Dorrien reminds us that Christian socialism paved the way for all liberation theologies that make the struggles of oppressed peoples the subject of redemption. He argues for a decentralized economic democracy and anti-imperial internationalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pax Americana and the World of Music EducationEstelle R. Jorgensen (bio)It may seem ironic to speak of a Pax Americana at a time when the United States is prosecuting a war and its aftermath.1 Still, imperialism, or the desire to keep the peace on one's own terms, has led other nations into war when their will and power was frustrated and thwarted. My purpose in this essay is to (...) raise four important and interrelated questions: What are the political tasks that hopeful music teachers, administrators, and those interested in their work need to undertake to pursue an ethically universalistic, democratic, and humane education? What are some guiding principleswhereby music educators and policy-makers can navigate this territory? What are the conditions that would facilitate educational dialogue of the sort that is needed? How should music to be taught in order to achieve the intellectual objectives necessary in dialogical education? I view these questions from the limited musical perspective of the Western classical tradition — a misnomer since it is now an international tradition practiced around the world by people of many different languages, ethnicities, and cultures — and in the context of my position that this tradition merits transformation.2 This is a particularly interesting example since its roots originally are European, Eastern, and African, and it potentially subverts the predominant American popular musical culture of our time.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write of a global empire in the making and the seeds of its decline and fall, the multitudes that arise against it and the challenges they encounter in making their voices heard in the political arena.3 The forces of globalization, interwoven as they are with those of capitalism and the ideologies that foster it, are so pervasive that it is difficult for nation states to resist. The powers of nation-states decline while pervasive internationalism lies like an "epidermis" over the many nation-states, religions, languages, and ways of life that characterize societies on planet earth.4 The United States might champion capitalism and its own [End Page 1] breed of democratic ideology, yet globalization engulfs it such that it becomes the creature of its own making. Its values and culture might lie at the heart of the cultural, economic, and political agents of globalization — the multinational corporations with their corresponding distribution networks, interlocking international corporate directorships, licensing agreements, technological inventions, and powerful political and religious liaisons — yet even the United States becomes the child of forces it has exported throughout the world and that it is now unable to control. A culture of fear and violence pervades the country.5 Outsourcing, off-shore export of production capacity, the power of the profit motive, and management decisions made far from the particular places they impact leave many Americans without jobs and security, and a sense of powerlessness to change their circumstances — a phenomenon that also appears in other countries. Eventually, as Hardt and Negri posit in Marxian vein, the people impacted by these developments both here and abroad begin to organize themselves and rise against the oppression they may at first sense if not fully understand; in the beginning they may march peacefully but as their anger and frustration grow, they may eventually revolt. One need not buy into their particular reading of history to notice that, at least over the long term of decades or centuries, there seem to be limits on the human willingness to tolerate oppression; when their patience is eventually exhausted, people resist, subvert, escape, or overthrow their oppressors.One of the particular challenges of our time is the "polyvocality" of contemporary societies. Globalism may constitute the epidermis overlying these "multiplicities and pluralities" but underneath are the hosts of differing tribes, religions, languages, colors, and identities. Ways need to be found for people to dwell together in peace and debate and reconcile their differences without resorting to violence.6 In such a world, even in societies that espouse democratic ideals and principles, moral conflicts cannot be avoided, and differences between and among individuals and groups are often deeply rooted, persistent, and pervasive. This necessitates forging mechanisms that enable deliberation about how to solve the conflicts that necessarily arise.7 Seyla... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Lumps and Bumps”Katherine Arens (bio)“Lumps and Bumps” offers a fresh look at nosological classifications in terms of their genesis in eighteenth-century philosophy by acknowledging the proximity of philosophy to the sciences of the mind in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Germany. Today, strict borders are drawn between these fields by mainstream practitioners, but work like Radden’s makes a strong case for acknowledging not only multiculturalism, (...) but also the historicity of science. As such, it is exemplary interdisciplinary work tracing a set of concepts (here, a taxonomy of mental illness) back to its sources. Yet Radden tacitly raises other questions significant for the interrelationships between psychology/psychiatry and philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.First, Radden quite rightly points to the fact that taxonomies defining mental illness will differ across cultures (e.g., that Scottish and German “faculty psychologies” differed). Yet her question can be inverted to ask a historical question: how can taxonomies of mental illness be used to interrogate the very construct of “the European Enlightenment” itself (in a sense, offering a variant on Michel Foucault’s Birth of a Clinic). This question is significant, since the “Enlightenment” has an internationalist contour in the history of philosophy that it may well not have had in medicine.In what way, for example, can Hume and Locke be considered more direct references for Kant than his philosophical nemesis, Johann Gottfried Herder, or physiologists La Mettrie (French) and Albrecht von Haller (Swiss)? Today, these two questions seem to lie on opposite sides of acknowledged disciplinary boundaries, across discourses of the various sciences, and they are not generally asked by intellectual historians, since they lie in different cultural traditions. Yet the German Idealist tradition that came out of the Enlightenment in the generation between Wolf and Kant had different boundaries between philosophy and the natural sciences than did its English equivalent. In this sense, then, Radden has made an argument that could be used to indicate how far the British empiricists actually influenced Kant, as an index of how science crosses both disciplinary and national boundaries.Second, Radden’s work raises a methodological issue for interdisciplinary work on the emergence of psychology: how one can trace the rapid mutation of critical terminology within the evolution of a single discipline across time. Even if some differentiation between affect and cognition was in place from the time of Kant all the way through to the DSM, for instance, the historical and cultural behavioral phenomena to which that distinction refers need to be specified in each context in which they occur, in different [End Page 15] times and places. Psychology between Kant and Kraepelin exemplifies this “interdisciplinarity” of an evolving field. Was psychology to be institutionalized as part of philosophy departments, or of physiology, or of education? The research in these three fields was carried out in almost identical terms in the early nineteenth century, but what that research means needs to be further historicized.For example, “reason” and “passion” occur as reference concepts in Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, just as they do in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise and Confessions, and in Richardson’s Pamela. Yet the behaviors that are identified as “passionate” differ across cultures, and so need to be defined today in ways that acknowledge chains of influence as they existed at that time, not as reconstructed for other purposes.The third issue raised by Radden’s study and needing further study is the question of power politics in science. Each use of terms has its own strategic importance, and every act of classification is potentially political. When classification schema are exported, imported, rejected, or upheld, the practitioner/professional not only makes a scientific statement, but a social one as well, by adhering to a set of professional organizations, institutions, and other power configurations in which the schema appear. In the case of Kant’s taxonomy of mind, one might ask what the significance was when he added “will” to the reason/passion dichotomy that pervaded his sources. What has he gained or lost by using these terms in the context of faculty psychology?Similarly, what is the cultural significance of that third... (shrink)

This article examines Chen Ziying, an American-trained Chinese biologist and his prewar efforts to bring his Woods Hole experience from the United States to China between 1930 and 1936. I argue that the Marine Biological Laboratory appears as a prominent American scientific institution in the twentieth century among visiting Chinese students and scholars who were drawn to the American approach of building world-class seaside laboratories to facilitate marine biological study while cultivating a collaborative culture via songs of biology. Chen was (...) one of the leading US-trained Chinese scientists who aspired to the international trend of developing coastal biology in the early twentieth century and was determined to modernize China’s discipline-building of biology with the construction of marine research facilities similar to the MBL. I show that Chen’s efforts of bringing the MBL practice to China took place at a time when science in China was overshadowed by the impulse of nationalism. Despite the nationalistic rhetoric, Chen was able to establish a Chinese connection with Woods Hole by introducing the MBL cultural practices of songs with biological significance. Lyrics from popular biological songs such as “It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus” and “Songs of Amoy” reflect not just Darwinian themes but also a transnational connection between American and Chinese biologists in Republican-era China––a period in modern Chinese history that is often characterized by soaring sentiments of nationalism. This paper sets out to reconsider the interplay of scientific nationalism and scientific internationalism in shaping marine science in modern China, as well as to reflect on the meanings of value-laden terms such as “nationalism” and “foreignness” and their conceptual impacts on writing the historiography of biology in twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on ‘community’ focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being (...) tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Ivekovic—included in this volume are essays by all three—have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the “expropriation” of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject’s vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a “wound” (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism’s naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women’s bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others. Joana Sabadell-Nieto is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature (Gender and Feminist Studies) at Hamilton College (USA) and Researcher at the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Marta Segarra is Professor of French and Francophone literature and Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona (Spain), Director of the UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures and co-founder and director of the Center for Women and Literature (2003-2012). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 34 (winter 2014–15): 131–4 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM _ibliography NEW PERIODICAL ARTICLES BY RUSSELL Kenneth Blackwell here are 35 new C entries since 1993 for A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell, and more for all Parts of Vol. 2. With many thanks to several readers. C15.18a [RECONSTRUCTION OF (...) INTELLECTUAL INTERNATIONALISM AFTER THE WAR]. Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, 18 July 1915, sec. b, p. 5. Published under the general title “Det kulturella samarbetets återupptagande efter kriget” [The re-establishment of cultural cooperation after the war]. There is a subtitle : “Tre nya svar på Svenska Dagbladets världsenquête” [Three new responses to Svenska Dagbladet’s world enquiry].—Ms. (ra3 rec. acq. 1,325).—In English in Russell, n.s. 18 (1998): 141–3 (ed. K. Blackwell). C16.07a THE CASE OF MR. E. CHAPPELOW. The Manchester Guardian, 19 April 1916, p. 6. Six sentences, introduced thus: “The Hon. Bertrand Russell writes”.—Russell makes reference to the Everett case. C16.10a THE CASE OF THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR. The Freethinker, 36 (14 May 1916): 310. “… the country is drifting into the infliction of serious persecution upon a large number of young men.…”—Reprinted, with two-thirds omitted, in Jim Herrick, Vision and Realism: a Hundred years of The Freethinker (London: Foote, 1982), pp. 51–2. C22.39 INSTINCT, HABIT, AND INTELLIGENCE. Hull Weekly Recorder, no. 1 (16 Dec. 1922): 6–9. Reprinted in Collected Papers 16 (in preparation). C23.10a BERTRAND RUSSELL PREDICTS U.S. WILL EVENTUALLY CONTROL THE ENTIRE WORLD. The Daily Argus, Mt. Vernon, ny, 7 March 1923, p. 3. Subtitled “Famous British Philosopher Declares America Will Conquer through Economic Causes What Others Have Tried to Win by Force”.—A note states: “Written exclusively for I.N.S.” (International News Service).—Reprinted in Collected Papers 16 (in preparation). C28.02a WHAT I THINK OF COMPANIONATE MARRIAGE. Children, the Magazine for Parents, Chicago, 3 (Feb. 1928): 17. Russell’s contribution—one of four under the title, the others being by Ernest R. Groves, Stephen S. Wise, and Anna Garlin Spencer, pp. 17, 47—is five sentences long.—Reprinted in Collected Papers 18 (in preparation). C28.02b [ADVICE ON WRITING]. The Daily Illini (U. of Illinois), Champaign, il, 12 Feb. 1928, p. 15. Letter to the author on developing a writing style, quoted fully in Newton York, q= 132 kenneth blackwell c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM “What Authors Advise”, ibid.—Part of Russell’s advice is to “read Gibbon all through, at least twice.” —Reprinted in Collected Papers 18 (in preparation). C32.39a MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL’S QUESTIONS. The Manchester Guardian, 27 June 1932, p. 10. Letter to a Coventry correspondent, under the title, “The Dismissed Teacher”. C34.36a ROMAN-CELTIC FARM SITE. The Times, 18 Sept. 1934, p. 7. Letter in “Points from Letters”, signed by John Russell, Telegraph House, Harting, Petersfield, referring to S. E. Winbolt’s “A Roman-Celtic Farm Site; Discovery near Harting, Sussex”, ibid., 10 Sept. 1934, p. 7. The writer states that his part was “not so great” as it appears in the account.—The composition of the letter is ascribed here to Bertrand Russell because a draft, with the exception of a phrase added later, is entirely in his fluent hand. That of his 13-year-old son is not present.—The draft was crossed out, and the verso became folio 1 of the ms. of “On Ceremony” (C34.48). C34.55a [THE AMERICAN LIBRARY OF NAZI BANNED BOOKS]. Jewish Daily Bulletin, New York, 11, no. 3,030 (23 Dec. 1934): 1. A telegram congratulating the Brooklyn Jewish Center for “inaugurating an American Library for Nazi burnt books”.—The allusion is to the Nazi bonfire of banned books on 10 May 1933.—The dinner celebrating the Library and mentioned in Russell’s telegram is the subject of Joseph Goldberg, “ ‘A Splendid and Historic Gathering’: Brooklyn Jewish Center Inaugurates Library of Nazi Banned books”, Brooklyn Jewish Center Review... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 34 (winter 2014–15): 131–4 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM _ibliography NEW PERIODICAL ARTICLES BY RUSSELL Kenneth Blackwell here are 35 new C entries since 1993 for A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell, and more for all Parts of Vol. 2. With many thanks to several readers. C15.18a [RECONSTRUCTION OF (...) INTELLECTUAL INTERNATIONALISM AFTER THE WAR]. Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, 18 July 1915, sec. b, p. 5. Published under the general title “Det kulturella samarbetets återupptagande efter kriget” [The re-establishment of cultural cooperation after the war]. There is a subtitle : “Tre nya svar på Svenska Dagbladets världsenquête” [Three new responses to Svenska Dagbladet’s world enquiry].—Ms. (ra3 rec. acq. 1,325).—In English in Russell, n.s. 18 (1998): 141–3 (ed. K. Blackwell). C16.07a THE CASE OF MR. E. CHAPPELOW. The Manchester Guardian, 19 April 1916, p. 6. Six sentences, introduced thus: “The Hon. Bertrand Russell writes”.—Russell makes reference to the Everett case. C16.10a THE CASE OF THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR. The Freethinker, 36 (14 May 1916): 310. “… the country is drifting into the infliction of serious persecution upon a large number of young men.…”—Reprinted, with two-thirds omitted, in Jim Herrick, Vision and Realism: a Hundred years of The Freethinker (London: Foote, 1982), pp. 51–2. C22.39 INSTINCT, HABIT, AND INTELLIGENCE. Hull Weekly Recorder, no. 1 (16 Dec. 1922): 6–9. Reprinted in Collected Papers 16 (in preparation). C23.10a BERTRAND RUSSELL PREDICTS U.S. WILL EVENTUALLY CONTROL THE ENTIRE WORLD. The Daily Argus, Mt. Vernon, ny, 7 March 1923, p. 3. Subtitled “Famous British Philosopher Declares America Will Conquer through Economic Causes What Others Have Tried to Win by Force”.—A note states: “Written exclusively for I.N.S.” (International News Service).—Reprinted in Collected Papers 16 (in preparation). C28.02a WHAT I THINK OF COMPANIONATE MARRIAGE. Children, the Magazine for Parents, Chicago, 3 (Feb. 1928): 17. Russell’s contribution—one of four under the title, the others being by Ernest R. Groves, Stephen S. Wise, and Anna Garlin Spencer, pp. 17, 47—is five sentences long.—Reprinted in Collected Papers 18 (in preparation). C28.02b [ADVICE ON WRITING]. The Daily Illini (U. of Illinois), Champaign, il, 12 Feb. 1928, p. 15. Letter to the author on developing a writing style, quoted fully in Newton York, q= 132 kenneth blackwell c:\users\ken\documents\type3402\rj 3402 050 red.docx 2015-02-04 9:19 PM “What Authors Advise”, ibid.—Part of Russell’s advice is to “read Gibbon all through, at least twice.” —Reprinted in Collected Papers 18 (in preparation). C32.39a MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL’S QUESTIONS. The Manchester Guardian, 27 June 1932, p. 10. Letter to a Coventry correspondent, under the title, “The Dismissed Teacher”. C34.36a ROMAN-CELTIC FARM SITE. The Times, 18 Sept. 1934, p. 7. Letter in “Points from Letters”, signed by John Russell, Telegraph House, Harting, Petersfield, referring to S. E. Winbolt’s “A Roman-Celtic Farm Site; Discovery near Harting, Sussex”, ibid., 10 Sept. 1934, p. 7. The writer states that his part was “not so great” as it appears in the account.—The composition of the letter is ascribed here to Bertrand Russell because a draft, with the exception of a phrase added later, is entirely in his fluent hand. That of his 13-year-old son is not present.—The draft was crossed out, and the verso became folio 1 of the ms. of “On Ceremony” (C34.48). C34.55a [THE AMERICAN LIBRARY OF NAZI BANNED BOOKS]. Jewish Daily Bulletin, New York, 11, no. 3,030 (23 Dec. 1934): 1. A telegram congratulating the Brooklyn Jewish Center for “inaugurating an American Library for Nazi burnt books”.—The allusion is to the Nazi bonfire of banned books on 10 May 1933.—The dinner celebrating the Library and mentioned in Russell’s telegram is the subject of Joseph Goldberg, “ ‘A Splendid and Historic Gathering’: Brooklyn Jewish Center Inaugurates Library of Nazi Banned books”, Brooklyn Jewish Center Review... (shrink)