The British Origins of the French Jacobins: Radical Sociability and the Development of Political Club Networks, 1787-1793
Approaching the Revolutionary era from a transnational perspective, this article explores the rich exchanges and collaborations between radical British and French popular societies. Both early French political and antislavery societies adapted their associational strategies from Anglo-American examples – indeed, borrowing the word ‘club’ itself to describe such organizations. Most significantly, in November 1789, correspondence from the London Revolution Society directly inspired the founding of the Paris Jacobin Club, and the integrated national network the Jacobins formed consciously built from British designs. By 1792, active experimentation proliferated in both nations as the Jacobins radicalized, and their example boomeranged to motivate the creation of a more integrated radical political network in Britain, the London Corresponding Society. Utilizing club correspondence, radical newspapers and pamphlets, and personal communications between key members, this article seeks to demonstrate the applied power of Revolutionary cosmopolitanism and transnational epistolary connections. Whereas prior scholarship of these connections has been largely limited to the French Revolution’s influence on Britain, the extent of the British influence on the early Jacobins has been virtually ignored. This account attempts to highlight the rich mutual exchanges that inspired the most radical and influential movements of the Revolutionary age.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/4/593?rss=1
Liberal Theocracy in the Italian Risorgimento
The article deals with the place of religion in the Risorgimento moderates’ theorizing. It is contended that ultramontanism should be viewed as the proper starting point of moderatism. If the political divorce between the two patterns of thought was sharp, the cultural one was nuanced. The chief element of continuity was a ‘theocratic’ argument: the course of history is governed by divine laws. This argument featured not only in the 1840s, when a current of ‘liberal Catholicism’ first developed, but also in secularizing Piedmont in the 1850s. Therefore liberty was not rooted in the interplay of social interests – as Benjamin Constant for example had argued – but resulted from a transcendental philosophy of history interpreting divine Providence. This approach had a series of ‘illiberal’ implications, such as a failure to accept pluralism, in both the political and the religious spheres, and a shaky appreciation of individual rights. The article also shows that Taparelli d’Azeglio’s version of ultramontanism accommodated important elements of economic and political modernity.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/4/620?rss=1
Turning Defects to Advantages: The Discourse of Labour in the Autobiographies of Soviet Blinded Second World War Veterans
This article explores how blinded Soviet Second World War veterans faced the problem of social reintegration and adjustment to peacetime civilian life. Their suddenly acquired blindness compelled these men to craft new subjectivities. To give legitimacy to their desires for inclusion and equality, many blind veterans advocated integration through labour. While these men chose to operate within the hegemonic discourses of labour and ability, their status as blind veterans also altered the Soviet idiom of productive work and exemplary subjectivity. Using the highly scripted genre of autobiography, disabled individuals engaged with the standards of fitness promoted by the socialist culture of labour, but also reconceived work as a source of happiness and proposed an alternative model of Soviet subjectivity.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/4/651?rss=1
Cold War Politics in Britain and the Contested Legacy of the Spanish Civil War
This article offers a sustained examination of how the vicissitudes of the Cold War shaped changing interpretations of the Spanish Civil War in Britain. Considering the perspectives of participants and historians, it focuses on the diverse strands of the Left that frequently drew on the civil war to attack each other and to make wider arguments about the global Cold War. First, with the aim of criticizing Communist take-overs in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, the article analyzes retrospective assaults on Communist party tactics and Soviet foreign policy in Spain. Second, in order to argue that the Soviet Union took a counter-revolutionary line after 1956, it investigates the re-emergence of debates over the Spanish revolution. Third, to express disapproval of the United States, it examines the increasing use of the civil war as an analogy in Cold War international affairs from the 1960s. Fourth, in support of non-Soviet Left-of-Centre collaboration, most notably Eurocommunism in the 1970s and opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s, it considers the renewed emphasis on the popular front. The trajectories of these debates reveal that, over time, the weight of the Left’s criticism moved from the Soviet Union towards the United States.
Quelle: http://ehq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/4/678?rss=1