Although they produced vastly more turmoil, the uprisings in the Arab world shared many characteristics with other early 21st-century popular protests on both the left and the right, from Spain’s Indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the anti-elite votes for Brexit and Trump. The conviction that political elites and the states they rule, which were once responsible for welfare and development, now ignore and demean the interests and concerns of ordinary citizens takes many forms, but is virtually universal. The Arab (...) world was only one site of this discontent, but the story of the Arab Spring insurrections provides a cautionary illustration of the perils in abdication of political authority and accountability and provokes questions about how we understand historical moments when passions outstrip interests. (shrink)

Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human: "The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole" . Nonetheless, Nietzsche's interpreters have, to a large extent and to this day, proceeded in just this way. Instead, Nietzsche demanded that one read his aphorisms and aphorism books slowly and thoroughly within the contexts in which he placed them and, further, that one always be (...) attuned, in this reading, to new surprises. This article advocates for such a contextual interpretation of Nietzsche's works . This interpretation must be penetrating enough to clear away the ostensible ambivalence and contradiction with which Nietzsche's work is so often maligned. While notes that Nietzsche did not intend for publication can offer important assistance, they should not themselves become the basis of such an interpretation. (shrink)

In the modern Middle East, the public institutions associated with the internationally recognized states of the region are rarely viewed as trustworthy or reliable. Born in the demise of the Ottoman Empire, midwifed by European imperial powers who paid lip service to the development of the inhabitants, and nurtured in the cold war by superpowers largely indifferent to the well-being of the peoples of the region, the existing states came to be associated with expectations of welfare provision and structures of (...) accountability that privileged external actors over local interests. In the absence of public institutions that responded to and represented local interests, people organized around those still vibrant alternative forms of community that existed – the exchange networks of informal economies or the kinship systems of extended families and the ethnic and religious communities of language, sect and confession – and sometimes they reorganized and reinterpreted these identities to supplement and ultimately supplant the failing states in which they found themselves. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, across disciplines. New translations of work by and about Hamann are appearing, as are a number of books and ar­ticles on Hamann’s aesthetics, theories of language and sexuality, and unique place in Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought. Edited by Lisa Marie Anderson, Hamann and the Tradition gathers estab­lished and emerging scholars to examine the full range of Hamann’s im­pact—be it on German Romanticism or on the (...) very practice of theology. Of particular interest to those not familiar with Hamann will be a chapter devoted to examining—or in some cases, placing—Hamann in dialogue with other important thinkers, such as Socrates, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Anderson explores the ramifications for the Middle East of the profound transformations in global politics at the end of the Cold War and the birth of a new, American-dominated world order.

Examination of the fluidity of communal and individual identity in the Middle East and North Africa suggests that such identities are not stable, singular or mutually exclusive but shaped by circumstances, particularly political and economic duress. An approach that adopts the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics may be more productive in understanding identity politics in the region and in general.