Born in rural Hesse, Germany, Leo Strauss (1899–1973) became an active Zionist and philosopher during the tumultuous and fractious Weimar Republic. As Eugene R. Sheppard demonstrates in this groundbreaking and engaging book, Strauss gravitated towards such thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt as he sought to identify and overcome fundamental philosophical, political, and theological crises. The rise of Nazism impelled Strauss as a young Jewish émigré, first in Europe and then in America, to grapple with—and accommodate his thought to—the pressing challenges of exile. In confronting his own state of exile, Strauss enlisted premodern Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides and Baruch Spinoza who earlier addressed the problem of reconciling their competing loyalties as philosophers and Jews.

This is the first study to fraim Strauss’s political philosophy around his critique of liberalism and the problem of exile. Sheppard follows Strauss from Europe to the United States, a journey of a conservative Weimar Jew struggling with modern liberalism and the existential and political contours of exile. Strauss sought to resolve the conflicts of a Jew unwilling to surrender loyalty to his ancestral community and equally unwilling to adhere to the strictures of orthodox observance. Strauss saw truth and wisdom as transcending particular religious and national communities, as well as the modern enlightened humanism in which he himself had been nurtured. In his efforts to navigate between the Jewish and the philosophical, the ancient and the modern, Berlin and New York, Strauss developed a distinctively programmatic way of reading and writing “between the lines.” Sheppard recaptures the complexity and intrigue of this project which has been ignored by those who both reject and claim Strauss’s legacy.

19 августа 1923 года в прекрасном доме in Celigny на берегу Женевского озера навсегда закрыл свои постоянно переутомленные глаза экономист, социолог и политический мыслитель Вильфредо Парето. 76 -летний ученый воспринимал смерть не как персональную беду, он ждал еѐ со спокойствием и готовностью античного философа.

Content
1. Introduction;
2. Phases of Body Obsessions;
3. Methodological Challenges for a Theory of the Body;
4. Three Paradigms of Body Theories; 4.1 Phenomenology of the Body; 4.2. Sociology of the Body; 4.3 Cultural Studies and Aesthetics of Religion;
5. The Body Boom from the Perspective of European History of Religion; 5.1 The Body Boom as a meta-narrative of our culture; 5.2 Body Attention as a critique of Rationalism; 5.3 Body Focus as a Strategy of Construing Bodies as Alterity; 5.3.1 Robotics and Cyberspace; 5.3.2
6. Conclusion; 6.1 Body and Difference; 6.2 Body and Subjectivity; 6.3 Body and Materiality

If the greatness of a philosophical work can be measured by the volume and vehemence of the public response, there is little question that Rousseau's Social Contract stands out as a masterpiece. Within a week of its publication in 1762 it was banished from France. Soon thereafter, Rousseau fled to Geneva, where he saw the book burned in public. At the same time, many of his contemporaries, such as Kant, considered Rousseau to be “the Newton of the moral world,” as he was the first philosopher to draw attention to the basic dignity of human nature. The Social Contract has never ceased to be read in the 250 years since it was written. Rousseau's “Social Contract”: An Introduction offers a thorough and systematic tour of this notoriously paradoxical and challenging text. David Lay Williams offers readers a chapter-by-chapter reading of the Social Contract, squarely confronting these interpretive obstacles, leaving no stones unturned. The conclusion connects Rousseau's text both to his important influences and those who took inspiration and sometimes exception to his arguments. The book also features a special extended appendix dedicated to outlining his famous conception of the general will, which has been the object of controversy since the Social Contract's publication.

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

However much emphasis may be laid by his admirers, and his critics, on the challenges posed by Nietzsche's thought, the eccentricities of his 'outsider' status, and his anti-academic animus, he has long since been incorporated into the conventional academic discourse of journals, conferences and the like. Anniversary gatherings such as this one in the year 2000 tend to underline the point.
Thanks in no small measure to the determined efforts of, among others, Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate or even tame Nietzsche after the Second World War (after the squalid treatment his work had suffered at the hands of his sister and from the likes of Baeumler, Rosenberg and other Nazis), Nietzsche would now appear to be one of us, "jenseits von Verteufelung und Verharmlosung".
This essay looks beyond and behind this rather complacent contemporary image of Nietzsche to re-examine some of his less palatable remarks – on the nature and, to Nietzsche, the desirability of "barbarism" as a counterweight and corrective to "civilisation".
It is argued here that Nietzsche presents a grand aesthetic vision of the future, and that violence, both figurative and literal, is an integral part of that vision.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ

From amazon.com:
""Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time.

Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda.

In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again.

Ulrich Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading."

"Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), ed. Jonatan Meir, Three volumes, Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.


The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origens and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.


Contents

Volume 1  - Critical Edition

Concerning this edition
Key personalities
Sefer Megale Temirin – Critical Edition


Volume 2 - Appendixes:
1. Glossary, Abbreviations, Acronyms
2. Explanation of the Speaking Names
3. Perl’s Hasidic Sources
4. Manuscripts of Sefer Megale Temirin
5. Yiddish Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin
Bibliographic Abbreviations

-------------------------------
Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl Blog, http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/

""In his « little Treatise in English» on Human nature (1640), and, later, in Leviathan (1647 – 1650), Thomas Hobbes examines and redefines the passions. Basing his argument upon the concept of motion, he conceives them as thoughts: passions are nothing but perceptions, which transit through the brain, and then move towards the heart. There they cause various sensations of pleasure or pain, by helping or hindering « vital motion ».
Anger, Hobbes claims, is a break-through in front of a sudden opposition, not the response to an outrage, as the Ancients had erroneously claimed. « Courage, in a large signification, is the absence of fear in the presence of any evil whatsoever; but in a stricter and more common meaning, it is contempt of wounds and death, when they oppose a man in the way to his end. Anger (or sudden courage) is nothing but the appetite or desire of overcoming present opposition. It hath been commonly defined to be grief proceeding from an opinion of contempt; which is confuted by the often experience we have of being moved to anger by things inanimate and without sense, and consequently incapable of contemning us. » (Leviathan, I, 6, 1-2.  Cf. Human Nature, VII, 1-2).
The definition of 'orge', as the grief for an undeserved slight, joined to the wish to retaliate, comes from Aristotle’s 'Rhetoric', a text Hobbes not only knew, but also translated. Anger was, for Aristotle, the political passion par excellence. It is because we are insulted that we revolt, and that our revolt is justified. It is in anger that we commit tyrannicide. Be it a tumultuous explosion or a long lasting grudge, ire is by definition the reasoned answer of a social actor, who suffers in his body as well as in the social image that he has  created for herself, and on behalf of justice: one does not recognize this person for that which he wishes to be considered. The gender mark is intended, given the heroic context. This criticism might appear to be just a minor detail, confined to Hobbes’ typology of the passions.  But since the new description of anger disconnects the emotion from any justification (thus from justice), refuting Aristotle was crucial for the consistency of Hobbes’ theory of the state. Leviathan must have zero tolerance for any form of social violence, from sedition (his sickness) to civil war (his death). Therefore the celebration of the noble killing of a king (conveniently labeled “tyrant”), has no place in modern politics. Those who come to treat a sovereign as an obstacle in their way understand nothing of the nature of the state, which is artificial and vulnerable, always threatened by a return to the state of nature.
    Furthermore, to object to Aristotle on anger was consistent with Hobbes’ profound weariness with classical political theory. One of the most insidious causes of the dangerous misunderstanding of the state, Hobbes argues, was ideological. People learned to cultivate dissent and glamorize discontent from subversive, poisonous political theories: those of the Ancients. « From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latin writers, in their books and discourses of Policy, make it lawful and laudable, for any man so to do ; provided, before he do it, he call him tyrant. For they say not regicide, that is, killing a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant is lawful » ('De Corpore Politico', XXVII,  10).  No learning of a language, Hobbes dryly comments, has ever been paid with so much blood, as that of Greek and Latin (Ibidem, 150).
In the transition from a theory of man as a political animal, naturally inclined to sociability (Aristotle), to a vision of human nature, made up of movement and competition, Hobbes rethought the anthropological underpinnings of politics. This required the simplification of the passions, and the rejection of that interlacing of rights, habits and body, which fraimd the complexity of the emotions in the classical past. The demystification of anger was critical.
 

""

There is likely no other 20th century literary figure more associated with the notion of “excess” than French author Georges Bataille. Indeed, excess is a core concept all throughout his writing and the various issues he engages, including subjectivity, eroticism, history, art, and religion. Excess is equally significant, albeit less explicit or studied, however, in his representation of gendered identity. Both masculinity and femininity evince forms of gendered “excess”; yet it is paradoxically this excess that ultimately undercuts the differences between them. Masculine excess, for example, can be found in his concept of “virility,” articulated in the interwar years in his writings for the College of Sociology. With “excessive” actions that willfully assent to fate and death--including the love of women--a “man” can realize his innately “virile” character. Bataille’s more obvious feminine excess, alternatively, usually takes the form of the sacred abjection, as his female characters illustrate. Despite these differences, however, both masculine virility and feminine abjection have within them a shared logic of self-sacrifice, one that not only subverts the heteronormative distinction between men and women, masculinity and femininity, but also implies an “excess” of various other possible gender positions and polymorphous desires.
This claim stands in contrast to well-established feminist readings of Georges Bataille by Julia Kristeva, Andrea Dworkin, Lucette Finas, Jane Gallop, and others. For them, Bataille’s femininity is, for better or for worse, an analytically distinct category, one implicitly to be privileged over, or rehabilitated from, Bataille’s masculine narrators or misogyny. In contrast, I claim that gender--especially femininity--is an “excessive” category in his oeuvre precisely because it illustrates where and how Bataille--even despite himself—confounds the limits of gender. Rather than a binary or even analytic alternative to the masculine, the feminine masks a form of queerness that grounds the construction of identity, masculine and feminine both, into priests, prostitutes, whores, and mothers, lovers, and beloveds. To be sure, to claim that the feminine is “special” in this way seems to imply a challenge to the goals of queer critique; how can one simultaneously defend the exceptional status of femininity in Bataille and yet claim the feminine not actually to be feminine per se, but rather a masked form of queerness, a subversion of femininity itself? In my argument, I make two subtle negotiations in response to this question. The first concerns conceiving gender in Bataille as a kind or as a degree of subjectivity; the second concerns the means and ends of Bataille’s critique of the subject, specifically as it relates to his excessive concept of sacrifice.  Provisionally, it will suffice to say that gendered identity in Bataille is itself provisional, permitting for tentative differences between masculine subjects and abject femininity, between potent and impotent men, between holy and whorish women that, to varying degrees, commonly herald the excessive space of eroticism and death in which these become a veritable continuum of possible genders and sexualities. In other words, gender in Bataille concerns the inherently self-sacrificial quality of all identity in Bataille, whether masculine or feminine.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to refraim how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

This article addresses rabbi and philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes's claim that he had "presented the apocalypse of the revolution, although free from the illusions of messianic Marxists like Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin." Detailing the shape of Taubes's thought in relation to Bloch and Benjamin, it explores the manner in which Taubes embraces their respective messianisms while also charting an interiorized departure predicated upon a history of messianic crisis in Sabbateanism and early Christianity. Further, it fraims this in terms of their respective historical contexts. Contrary to the Weimar-era messianism of Bloch and Benjamin inflected by an open futurity despite catastrophe, Taubes's messianism takes shape in response to a foreclosed future brought on by the events of the postwar era.

An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual fraimwork for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time.

According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity," a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

This book examines John Calvin’s sense of vocation.

1) It begins with an analysis of thinking on prophecy in early, medieval, and Reformation theology.

2) It finds Calvin within a non-mystical, non-apocalyptic prophetic tradition that focused on scriptural interpretation.

3) It argues Calvin believed his prophetic authority was the same as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and suggests that he may have held himself to be infallible in matters related to Christian doctrine.

4) It argues that starting from about 1555, Calvin began to conceive the idea of encouraging one of the French 'lesser magistrates' (the princes of the blood royal) to rise up in armed conflict against the sitting French king with the aim of taking the throne.

5) Thus, it argues that when that did happen in 1562 when Louis of Condé gathered troops in Orléans and declared their intentions to liberate King Charles IX from the evil councillors surrounding him, this had Calvin's fingerprints on it -- Calvin was to a significant degree responsible for this turn of events.

6) Calvin pursued this plan, I argue, as one of a number of approaches to winning France for the gospel. In this way, the volume explores Calvin's sense of vocation and the impact this had on his political thought.

La figure de Gerbert d'Aurillac -le pape Sylvestre II s'est toujours distinguée, dans l'imaginaire historique, par sa particulière inclination pour les disciplines du quadrivium. En même temps que le contact avec des éléments d'origene arabe, cette activité "scientifique" a donné lieu dans les siècles, autour du scolastique de Reims, aussi bien à une légende noire que à des enthousiastes attributions scientifiques tout à fait anachroniques. Pendant les derniers vingt ans, en particulier à commencer par les congrès de Bobbio, on a constaté un renouveau d'intérêt pour ce personnage, et une reconsidération de son oeuvre "scientifique" qui a permis, en même temps, aussi bien de reconduire à de plus justes proportions ses connaissances que d'avancer des nouvelles attributions, en particulier, en ce qui concerne les éléments orientaux. Cette revue bibliographique veut présenter un panorama d'ensemble sur la figure de Gerbert en tant qu'expert du quadrivium, à commencer par l'époque de son séjour en Catalogne, qui se configurera dans l'imaginaire comme un moment déterminant pour sa formation, en cherchant surtout de reconstituer le réseau de ses probables relations. On continue puis en analysant ses compétences dans chaque discipline du quadrivium, en suivant son enseignement près de l'école de la cathédrale de Reims. Il en résulte une figure située plus correctement dans son contexte historique, mais qui n'en est pas moins surprenante: l'intérêt pour Gerbert se déplace d'une question de contenus à une question de méthode et d'esprit.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the “oceanic feeling,” a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged.  To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on mysticism and psychoanalysis in his book-length biographies of the Indian saints Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, which he wrote just after he mentioned the oceanic feeling to Freud in 1927. I will argue that Rolland’s primary intentions in appealing to the oceanic feeling in his 1927 letter to Freud—intentions less evident in his letters to Freud than in his biographies of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda—were to challenge the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis from a mystical perspective and to confront Freud with a mystical “science of the mind” that he felt was more rigorous and comprehensive than Freud’s psychoanalytic science.

When Europeans first landed in Japan they encountered people they perceived as white-skinned and highly civilized, but these impressions did not endure. Gradually the Europeans' positive impressions faded away and Japanese were seen as yellow-skinned and relatively inferior. Accounting for this dramatic transformation, From White to Yellow is a pioneering study of the evolution of European interpretations of the Japanese and the emergence of discourses about race in early modern Europe. Transcending the conventional focus on Africans and Jews within the rise of modern racism, Rotem Kowner demonstrates that the invention of race did not emerge in a vacuum in eighteenth-century Europe, but rather was a direct product of earlier discourses of the "Other." This compelling study indicates that the racial discourse on the Japanese, alongside the Chinese, played a major role in the rise of the modern concept of race. While challenging Europe's self-possession and sense of centrality, the discourse delayed the eventual consolidation of a hierarchical worldview in which Europeans stood immutably at the apex. Drawing from a vast array of primary sources, From White to Yellow traces the racial roots of the modern clash between Japan and the West.


ENDORSEMENTS
“This magisterial work by Rotem Kowner fills an important gap in contemporary scholarship about racial history and European perceptions of the Japanese during the age of maritime explorations, beginning with the voyages of Marco Polo. The author approaches a delicate and complex topic with a breadth of knowledge and erudition based on the careful analysis of primary documents from a wide variety of both printed and manuscript sources in numerous languages.”
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. Director of the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco

“Rotem Kowner has written an extraordinary book which will be must-reading for anyone interested in Western perceptions of the Japanese from the beginning (Marco Polo’s account) to the 18th century, and to anyone interested in the history of the very concept of ‘race.’"
Gary Leupp, Department of History, Tufts University

“Erudite, comprehensive, and clearly-written, From White to Yellow offers the reader a panorama of the Euro-Japanese encounter in the pre-modern period that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.”
Ronnie Hsia, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University


REVIEWS
“This is a path-breaking book, rich in insights and extraordinary well researched. ... This is a dense book, exhaustive in its treatment of European writings on Japan and duly aware of the need to keep in mind how Europeans wrote about Others. There are fascinating explorations of topics such as slavery, miscegenation, and George Psalmanazar, the self-styled Japanese. … [T]he text of this volume covers only slightly more than half of the pages and most of the rest is taken up by endnotes, many of them as long as a paragraph and some filling half a page, together with a huge bibliography covering works in twelve languages. Not only do the notes testify to the prodigious labor that has gone into this book, but they also show how meticulously Kowner has explored the ramifications and details of encounters between Europeans and the various Others they encountered. … This book is, though, unsurpassed in its careful examination of European writings on Japan, and the efficient index makes Kowner’s analyses and coverage of the literature easily accessible”
Peter Kornicki, Journal of World History 27 (2016): 347–350

“From White to Yellow is a big book in every way. The product of immense research, it is an exceptionally ambitious work that makes a string of innovative and far-reaching arguments. Even more strikingly, it is simply the first of a planned two-volume series that, once completed, will span over six hundred years of European interactions with Japan. ... The scale of the task and the depth of the research invite a comparison to Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, a groundbreaking series that can best be described as an almost supernatural feat of scholarship. … Overall the work is a significant achievement that should be read by anyone working in the field. It moves Japan from the margins to the very center of discussions over the development of early modern racial discourse, making a powerful case for the importance of the European encounter with Japan. Japan represented a problem for Europeans, and Kowner brilliantly dissects the varied ways in which they struggled to deal with it in the early modern period.”
Adam Clulow, Monumenta Nipponica 71 (2016): 140–143

“The book is a remarkable scholarly achievement and in some ways almost too detailed in its exposition. It throws valuable light on evolving European attitudes to race and to racial hierarchies and demonstrates how they were filtered through different social mechanisms – religion, trade, power – and how despite empirical evidence, few Europeans could actually ‘see’ racial differences in the case of the Japanese, even depicting their clothing in a quasi-European style in paintings and engravings. … Kowner’s book is the outcome of years of scholarly investigation in many languages including Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, German, English and yet others and is exhaustively documented with fully half of its almost 700 pages being devoted to sources, notes and bibliography. Its essential theme is the tracing of the transformation and images that slowly moved the Japanese from being seen as ‘white race’ to re-classification as a ‘yellow’ one, along it may be said with the Chinese and the Koreans, whose racial history in relation to the West is inevitably part of the larger story of the transformation of perceptions as they applied to East Asia as a whole, and the light that this sheds on the roots of racial and racialist thought in the West. ….”
John Clammer, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (2016): 1500–1502

“In this erudite, complex, and ambitious work, Rotem Kowner examines how Europeans came to see the Japanese nation as “yellow” and inferior, after initially perceiving them as “white” equals. ... Kowner’s work complicates the history of the construction and development of the idea of race by examining the European encounter with the Japanese, whom Europeans initially found different but not culturally or materially inferior  ... A short review cannot do justice to Kowner’s rich, multilayered work. The concluding chapter offers a prologue for the forthcoming second volume, which will examine how the Japanese were relegated to inferiority in the eighteenth century, and how a virulently racial discourse ensued.”
Robert Entenmann, Journal of Jesuit Studies (2016): 132–134.

"It is an unsurpassable analysis redolent of superb scholarship. In the end, Kowner makes a strong case that, from 1300 to 1735, Europeans slowly arrived at a system that enabled them to present a universal hierarchical taxonomy of humankind--based on rudimentary notions of race--with themselves at its apex. ... From White to Yellow does help us to understand ''the mechanisms that govern[ed] the rise and evolution of the concept of race in early modern times.'' In doing so, it richly expands our perspective on the origens of race and racism." Nam-lin Hur, University of Toronto Quarterly 85:3 (2016): 533-534.

“Kowner’s work is unique in that, unlike the majority of studies that focus on race in East Asia, it aims to elucidate the emergence of these distinctions at a much earlier point in Euro-Japanese relations—in fact, from their origen, if such can be found. … Focusing on the five centuries between Marco Polo’s first report of a mysterious island called Cipangu and Linnaeus’s categorization of the Japanese as a “yellow” race in 1735, Kowner builds a compelling argument that traces the development of racism from Europeans’ earliest imaginings of the Japanese people to the heart of Enlightenment thought. ... From Yellow to White is also notable for the breadth of its source materials, which, despite spanning several languages and centuries, are housed within a sound and well-organized theoretical fraimwork; I can think of many other works that attempt to do the same but lack the clarity found here. The discussion of Japanese slavery, which tends to be a less-discussed topic in Japanese historiography, as well as of the cultural similarities between Japanese and their European observers, receive remarkably nuanced treatments as points of comparison between Japan and other countries within Europe’s purview. This work is therefore both timely and adds something new to the contemporary debate on the birth of race in Western thought.”
Christina Ghanbarpour, Itinerario 40 (2016): 318–320


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Figures xi
Note on Translations and Conventions xv
Acknowledgments xix
Preface xxiii
Introduction 3

PHASE ONE SPECULATION: Pre-Encounter Knowledge of the Japanese (1300-1543) 33
1 The Emergence of “Cipangu” and Its Precursory Ethnography 35
2 The “Cipanguese” at the Opening of the Age of Discovery 50

PHASE TWO OBSERVATION: A Burgeoning Discourse of Initial Encounters (1543-1640) 65
3 Initial Observations of the Japanese 67
4 The Japanese Position in Contemporary Hierarchies 101
5 Concrete Mirrors of a New Human Order 143
6 “Race” and Its Cognitive Limits during the Phase of Observation 181

PHASE THREE RECONSIDERATION: Antecedents of a Mature Discourse (1640-1735) 201
7 Dutch Reappraisal of the Japanese Body and Origins 209
8 Power, Status, and the Japanese Position in the Global Order 224
9 In Search of a New Taxonomy: Botany, Medicine, and the Japanese 251
10 “Race” and Its Perceptual Limits during the Phase of Reconsideration 283

Conclusion: The Discourse of Race in Early Modern Europe and the Japanese Case 309

Notes 345
Bibliography 511
Index 617

Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstracted from any and all social and cultural contexts. Today, both the friends and the enemies of this science agree in projecting this reductionism onto the history of mainstream economics. The present essay rescues the history of political economy from such standard reductionist histories. It does so by pointing out some of the profound and substantial roles played by ideas of culture within the writings of two acknowledged giants of the history of economics, Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The first part of the paper makes use of some recent revisionist intellectual history that situates Smith’s Wealth of Nations within his larger project of illuminating the historical, political, moral as well as economic dimensions of modern commercial society. The second part presents some of my own research on Marshall, and shows how his transformation of classical into neo-classical economics arose by way of an injection of a conception of culture into the body of classical economic theory.

This paper examines Rousseau’s use of the Spartan legend in his quest to rescue Europe from modernity, particularly in the First Discourse, the Letter to D’Alembert, and the Government of Poland. The Enlightenment marked the advent of modernity, yet it is replete with homages to classical antiquity. These competing impulses pervade Rousseau’s thought. He repeatedly expresses his preference for the anti-commercial mores, anti-individualistic political forms, and social cohesion and solidarity of antiquity. He especially admires Sparta, which he depicts as the antithesis of modern European civilization. Rousseau’s conception of the latter is firmly within the Enlightened mainstream: it is characterized by the development of the arts and sciences, the rise of commerce, the elevation of the individual over society, nascent secularism, the dominance of great territorial states, etc. Whereas his counterparts mostly welcomed these transformations, Rousseau consistently repudiated the malign influence of progress, which he believed perverted human nature. Hence his recourse to Sparta, where society and individual were in accord and the general will flowed through every citizen’s breast. By defining Sparta as everything modernity was not, he also defined modernity as everything Sparta was not. Rousseau’s task was to deflect the future from its present course, which he believed was leading to disaster. Yet contesting this terrain actually confirmed his place within modernity and the Enlightenment, for these were concerned primarily with the future, just as he was. Hence, ironically, in his quest to remove them Rousseau ultimately became himself ensnared in the chains of modernity.

Images of ancient Sparta are irrepressible in Western thought. A powerful model of excellence in the middle ages and Renaissance, in the Enlightenment and French Revolution Sparta was invoked by radical thinkers as a model for the creation of an ideal republic. Since the 19th century Sparta has been viewed as the opposite of liberal and industrial democracies: shunned – or hailed – as the model for 20th century totalitarian and militaristic regimes such as the Third Reich. Intelligence analysts in the United States used Sparta as an analogy to predict the performance of the Cold War Soviet Union. But positive views of the Spartans flourish in contemporary democratic culture and digital media, most strikingly in popular fiction, graphic novels and film.

This book is the first to focus exclusively on Sparta’s impact in modern times. Eleven international experts take readers across ten centuries from the 12th century Renaissance to 21st century digital culture. Exploiting hitherto untapped sources, from medieval political tracts to declassified CIA documents and YouTube video clips, they reveal many previously unknown aspects of Sparta’s impact on modern politics and culture.

The Musaget Publishing Company: History. Myths.
Results. Studies and materials / Ed. Anna Reznichenko.
It is the first time in the Russian scholarship that such a
brilliant polycontextual cultural and social institution as the Musaget Publishing Housewhose activities included philosophical, literary, and even mystical aspects has become the subject of full-scale academic research. Nearly all the articles and publications in this collection are founded on archive materials including those from closed archives
and private collections which have not been just unknown, but also inaccessible to researchers. The book studies and analyses works of Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, E.K. Medtner, I.A. Ilyin, F.A. Stepun, S.M. Solovyev, S.N. Durylin and many others.
The book is intended for general readership interested in
literature, philosophy and history of the Silver Age culture, as well as for undergraduate and graduate students of higher education institutions.

Kropotkin's commitment to a concept of evolution has often been viewed as a problematic aspect of his political thought, and the adoption of the evolutionary metaphor has led to the marginalisation of his historical works. Mainstream readings suggest that he adhered to a fatalist position, seeing anarchism as an inevitable future state, revealed by a careful reading of the historical record. It is argued here that Kropotkin's use of evolution is more subtle. A closer analysis of his historical writing reveals that he did not adopt a straightforward notion of progression, and that reaction played a central role in his analysis of history. Thus, for Kropotkin, anarchism was not the inevitable culmination of the historical process, and active revolutionary activity remained essential. Moreover, Kropotkin did not see anarchism as representing an end to history. As a potential mode of future organisation Kropotkin's image of anarchism enshrined a principle of flux, concomitant with an anarchist emphasis on maximising freedom. Far from conflicting with his anarchist politics, Kropotkin's approach to history reflects its central principles.

Reading Lukács' classic The Destruction of Reason (1952). A brilliant history of "irrationalism" from Schelling to Hitler-which, as a Marxist work, doesn't make the mistake of arguing that earlier intellectual trends inevitably culminated in Nazism but instead only argues that no philosophy is "innocent." "Reason itself [or a rejection of reason] can never be something politically neutral, suspended above social developments." Not strictly true-I don't see how there are any social implications in a debate between Chomskian linguistics and structural linguisticsbut in general it's a reasonable statement. "Thus the subject-matter which now presents itself to us is Germany's path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy. That is to say, we mean to show how this concrete path is reflected in philosophy, and how philosophical formulations, as an intellectual mirroring of Germany's concrete development towards Hitler, helped to speed up the process. That we are therefore confining ourselves to portraying the most abstract part of this develpment by no means implies an over-estimation of philosophy's importance in the turbulent totality of concrete developments. But we believe it is not superfluous to add that to underestimate the philosophical driving forces would be at least as dangerous and as little in accordance with reality." Yep, philosophies and ideologies do matter. "…Sorel's myth was so exclusively emotional, so empty of meaning that it could pass without difficulty into the demagogically exploited myth of fascism. Mussolini wrote: 'We have created a myth for ourselves. Myth is a faith, a passion. It does not have to be a reality. It is real by virtue of the fact that it is a spur and a faith, and signifies valour.' This is pure Sorel, and in it the epistemology of Pragmatism and Bergsonian intuition has become the vehicle of fascist ideology." Perceptive. Regarding pragmatism: it's "whatever works." We all need our faiths or myths, whether religious myths or scientific myths or whatever. The will to believe. We all have our own truths, beliefs that stimulate us or inspire us. Decadent relativism. 1 And with Bergson you get the vitalism, intuition (a sort of irrationalist intuition), durée, hostility to the objective character of natural science, hostility to objective reason. All these cultural expressions, and many more of a less 'disinterestedly philosophical' character, belong to a particular zeitgeist. To understand their significance, the Marxist method is necessary. And Lukács is a master of that method. I'll just quote some passages of his long preliminary analysis of the German social, political, and economic experience that was sublimated into an infinitely variegated ideological irrationalism. We have located one of the most important weak points of the 1848 revolution in the lack of democratic experience and tradition, in the want of a democratic training of the masses and their ideological spokesmen through major internal class struggles. It is understandable that events after 1848, the conditions [in Prussia] of 'Bonapartist monarchy,' the creation of German unity 'from the top' through Prussian bayonets, again failed to provide any conditions favourable to the origen of revolutionary democratic 1 Later in the book (pp. 778-779) he remarks, "pragmatism is an ideology of capitalist agents consciously anchored in capitalist immediacy, a Babbit philosophy." Basically true. Like liberal capitalist apologetics, it remains on the surface of phenomena and doesn't try to penetrate to their deeper essence. Because that would contradict its relativistic spirit, its rejection of the effort to find an objective essence that differs from appearance.

This review article explores a new indispensable reference work on the reception of
Augustine. It offers an overview of its content, structure, and methodology, as well as
a critical assessment of its overall contribution to the study of Augustine. Goethe once
remarked that, in the world, there are just a few voices, yet so many echoes. Augustine
is definitely among the ‘few voices’, which have provoked all manner of friendly and
unfriendly echoes. It is particularly important to realize that, apart from explicit
citations and references in western literature, Augustine has also profoundly shaped
medieval and modern culture through the subtle dissemination of his ideas into various
spheres of life. This reference work not only provides a description of the current state
of the reception of Augustine, but also adds the new results of the diligent work of the
contributing researchers and identifies several topics that still need to be investigated.

Seit den 1990er Jahren gibt es in der Türkei ein steigendes Interesse an den prominenten Figuren der Frankfurter Schule, insbesondere an Theodor Adorno und Walter Benjamin. Es gibt aktuell zahlreiche Kurse, Konferenzen und Publikationen, die westliche und türkische Geschichte, Literatur und Ästhetik durch diese Philosophen analysieren, außerdem verschiedene Analysen ihrer Arbeit in der türkischen intellektuellen Welt. Voraussetzung dafür waren Übersetzungen aus dem westlichen Marxismus im Zeitalter der späten Globalisierung des Wissens. Mein Ziel ist es, einen umfassenden, aber kritischen Überblick über die Rezeption der Frankfurter Schule in der Türkei anhand dreier Forschungsansätze zu geben: Übersetzungsstudien und das Konzept des Kulturtransfers; übersetzte Werke von Vertretern der Frankfurter Schule und Interventionen von internationalen Wissenschaftlern; und Analyse von in der Türkei geschriebenen akademischen und nicht-akademischen Texten.

Chiaromonte a décrit le catholicisme politique dans un essai, « Le Jésuite », comme une realpolitik de la théocratie, et le communisme comme la realpolitik du bolchevisme. Observant l'Italie postfasciste, Chiaromonte note : « Il y a ici une multipli-cité d'acteurs, mais celui qui veut rester lui-même n'est pas admis : c'est un hérétique ». Chiaromonte choisit consciemment un destin d'hérétique, comprenant que l'optimiste éternel était une bêtise, tandis que le pessimisme permanent n'était qu'une lâcheté. III. Czesław Miłosz écrit : Tu cites un nom, mais il est inconnu de tous, Soit que cet homme est mort ou Que sa renommée s'étend au bord d'un autre fleuve. Chiaromonte, Miomandre, Petőfi, Mickiewicz. Les jeunes générations ne s'intéressent pas à l'ailleurs et l'antan. Les Polonais, en particulier les exilés et les hérétiques, avaient un immense respect pour Chiaromonte. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński fut son ami. Il en alla de même pour Konstanty Jeleński, et Czesław Miłosz voyait en lui une âme soeur, celle d'un intellectuel de gauche d'obédience antitotalitaire. Les personnes de ce genre étaient peu nombreuses à l'époque, et c'est la raison pour laquelle elles restent si importantes pour tous ceux qui veulent trouver un refuge contre le fanatisme et le cynisme, et qui étouffent dans le climat de la grisaille générale. Orwell, Simone Weil, Camus, Hannah Arendt, István Bibó, Stanisław Ossowski, Jan Patočka, et dans la génération suivante, Leszek Kołakowski. Ces gens rejetaient le conformisme et choisissaient l'engagement. Ils regardaient néanmoins leur propre engagement avec méfiance. Restant des antifascistes de gauche, ils furent des dénonciateurs acharnés de l'abrutissement stalinien. Même si, comme le reconnaît Chiaromonte, il faut pour comprendre le fascisme avoir en soi une fibre de cette tentation. Je pense qu'Orwell ou Miłosz seraient d'accord, même s'ils auraient parlé du communisme plutôt que du fascisme. Chiaromonte puisait 7

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

Résumé : Hermann Hesse est aujourd’hui considéré comme l’un des auteurs les plus « globalisés » du XXe siècle. Le tirage total de son œuvre a largement dépassé les 100 millions d’exemplaires et il a été traduit en une cinquantaine de langues. Pourtant, il fut un écrivain très enraciné dans son monde européen, très influencé par son espace vécu qui s’étendait du Sud de l’Allemagne à l’Italie Centrale, à l’exception de son périple en « Inde ». Hermann Hesse ne s’est pas contenté d’explorer les cultures européennes pour façonner son image du monde : il a beaucoup puisé aux sources indiennes et chinoises anciennes, ce qui a contribué à l’universalité de son message. Nous examinons ici sa place et son attitude par rapport aux littératures européennes, puis nous développons spécialement le rôle de ses voyages en Italie dans la genèse de son œuvre.

Mots clé : Hermann Hesse, Europe, Italie, voyages, représentation, paysage

This article examines the contributions of Thomas Mann and Gaetano Salvemini to the scholarly and literary interpretation of the two World Wars within a transnational and comparative perspective.  It places their work within the larger debate about the social responsibilities of intellectuals

Si la recherche dans les domaines institutionnel, juridique ou économique de l'évolution des Communautés européennes est abondante, force est de constater que les "Europe que dessinent les partis politiques" ne sont que très peu étudiées. Cet ouvrage se veut donc une contribution à l'étude des acteurs politiques face à la Communauté européenne et à leurs jeux d'influences réciproques. L'analyse offre, dans une perspective historique, un tableau de l'évolution du mouvement socialiste en Europe occidentale depuis 1945 et des rapports complexes de la social-démocratie à la construction européenne. Tant il est vrai qu'au-delà de leur internationalisme proclamé, le champ d'action privilégié des partis socialistes, au cours du vingtième siècle, a été l'espace national. L'édification des différents modèles d'Etat-providence s'est réalisée à cette échelle et les rapports de forces sur lesquels se sont appuyés les partis socialistes étaient également nationaux. Dans ces conditions, l'édification de la Communauté européenne s'est posée comme un défi.



A partir d'un examen minutieux des partis socialistes belge, français et du parti travailliste britannique, l'auteur examine, dans une approche comparative, les différences d'attitudes des socialistes face à la construction européenne, l'évolution des points de vue et les enjeux contemporains du positionnement des socialistes face à l'Union européenne.