Nagorny Karabakh conflict: prospects for conflict transformation
10.1080/00905992.2016.1157158<br/>Artak Ayunts
Archiv für Mai 2016
‘The Germans are back’: Euroscepticism and anti-Germanism in crisis-stricken Greece
10.1080/14608944.2015.1113242<br/>Asimina Michailidou
The influence of the elites’ discourse in political attitudes: evidence from the Basque Country
10.1080/14608944.2016.1177006<br/>Francisco José Llera
The European Alps – an exceptional range of mountains? Braudel’s argument put to the test
10.1080/13507486.2016.1155540<br/>Jon Mathieu
Issue Information – TOC
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.00003
ARRIVAL OF COURTLY LOVE: MOVING IN THE EMOTIONAL SPACE
Courtly love appeared in twelfth-century Europe as a dissent from the emotional regime established by the Gregorian Reform, by setting the lady, instead of God, as the object of worship. From a game-theory perspective, courtly love and hedonism correspond to Nash equilibria, in contrast to Christian marriage, whose stability is threatened by sex-as-appetite on one side and devotion to God on the other, and whose maintenance depends on moral control. The Church developed fear and shame, which are counter-emotions to desire-as-appetite. Courtly love restored the thrill of forbidden adventure. It also shared traits common to innovations in the natural world: it added complexity (by increasing costs, emphasizing courtship, self-restraint, and extremes of suffering); it was made possible by the plasticity of mating relationships; it introduced a small disorder in the ordered regime of Christian marriage; it demanded an adaptive effort, requiring the man to face ever more perilous trials and the woman to appear ever more attractive. Though obtained as a small deviation from the existing emotional regime, it had thoroughgoing and long-lasting consequences for social control and for the political power of the Church. It also deeply modified the dynamic of longing in ego’s representation. By taking the temporal form of a capture, it contrasts with twelfth-century Bengal, where love was characterized by maintenance in an indefinitely repeating worship, by the absence of a here-now versus target-later dualism. It also contrasts with eleventh-century Heian Japan, where love was intermingled with the melancholy of an impossible return, which is the antithesis of the concept of capture.
ON THE ELUSIVENESS OF CONTEXT
How can we decide the pertinent context in which a given object of historical study should be examined? This question has long puzzled historians. In the field of intellectual history, the Cambridge contextual school represented by Quentin Skinner triggered a series of methodological debates, in part relating to its opaque notion of context; critics have argued that a satisfactory answer to the question—how to recover a relevant context—has yet to be given. This article tackles why the question has continued to elude us. The article demonstrates that it is simply impossible to propose a practical set of guidelines on how to reconstruct a correct context because the identification of the relevant context is presupposed in the logical structure of inference in historical inquiries; identifying a relevant context is logically antecedent to the inquiry. In order to show this, the article deploys Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of inference. Thus the article submits that Skinner conceptualized his method as what Peirce called “abduction,” which specifically seeks authorial intention as an explanatory hypothesis. This observation entails two ramifications in relation to the notion of context. One is that context in Skinner’s methodology operates on two levels: heuristic and verificatory. Confusing the two functions of context has resulted in a futile debate over the difficulty of reconstructing context. The other ramification is that abduction always requires some sort of context in order to commence an inquiry, and that context is already known to the inquirer. Any attempt to reconstruct a context also requires yet another context to invoke, thus regressing into the search for relevant contexts ad infinitum. The elusiveness of context is thus inherent in the structure of our logical inference, which, according to Peirce, always begins with abduction.
AN IMPERIAL SYLLABUS
Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire, edited by distinguished historians Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, brings together ten essays on individual books with a substantial methodological introduction. Covering the full geographical expanse of the Empire, the volume seeks to unify book and imperial history through careful accounts of the circulation, recycling, and uptake of each of the books under consideration. The upshot is an invaluable overall work with important individual contributions. At the same time, the project’s methodology and mode of presentation raise questions for the writing of history, particularly at the nexus of the histories of empire and of the book, that are reiterated but never queried within the volume itself. Specifically, in its focus on the moment of the circulation of texts, Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire reflects a general condition in the human sciences: a resistance to narrative, to causality, and to critique, which this essay attempts to describe and briefly explain.
CONTEXTS OF COLONIALISM
The contributions to the collection under review offer a wide range of treatments of ways in which German colonialism intersected with aspects of domestic German culture and politics, with particular attention to the larger global setting in which the German colonial empire existed between 1884 and 1918—or was remembered up to 1945. The review situates and critiques the contributions in interpretive contexts based on general suggestions by one of the editors, Geoff Eley. These include a context in which “colonialism” and “imperialism” are recognized as specific discursive constructions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another in which the causal focus in interpreting colonial phenomena is placed on exchanges that constituted an accelerating globality with which available conceptual modes (including colonialism and imperialism) could not keep pace, a third that complicates the categorical distinctions usually made between types of imperial program, and a fourth that aims at replicating on a much broader and more flexible basis something like the concept of “social imperialism” that forty years ago dominated interpretations of German imperialism. The essay ends with a view of how such an interpretive framework might be constructed.
MODERNITY AND THE PROBLEM OF ITS CHRISTIAN PAST: THE GEISTESGESCHICHTEN OF BLUMENBERG, BERGER, AND GAUCHET
Recent years have seen the rise of “post-secularism,” a new perspective that criticizes the dominant secularization narrative according to which “modernity” and “religion” are fundamentally antagonistic concepts. Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo are the most prominent defenders of such a post-secularist account. But though post-secularism presents itself as a necessary rectification of the secularization story, it has not been able to come up with a credible and generally accepted alternative account. In this article I will explain why, arguing that the use of “essentially contested concepts” such as “Christianity” and “modernity” rest on normative standpoints of the narrators that are incompatible with one another. To show this I will analyze the position of three older voices in the debate, namely those of Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Marcel Gauchet. These authors seem to agree in understanding the modern disenchanted worldview in relation to Christian transcendence, but I will show that beneath their similar narratives lie incompatible normative beliefs on which their use of the concepts of “Christianity” and “modernity” is founded. After having laid bare the roots of the contemporary debate by exploring these three fundamental positions, I will finally argue that we should not take their accounts as objective, historical descriptions but as what Richard Rorty has called “Geistesgeschichte“: a speculative history that is aimed at conveying a moral, in which essentially contested concepts play a constitutive role. Each author draws his own moral, and consequently each author will construct his own corresponding history. This lesson can then be applied to the contemporary debate on secularization. The value of the debate does not lie in its historical claims but in the visions of the protagonists; at the end of this article I will explain how we can capitalize on this value.