Oktober 2, 2012, 4:47 a.m., PETER BAEHR, GORDON C. WELLS, Allgemein.
In 1952, Waldemar Gurian, founding editor of The Review of Politics, commissioned Eric Voegelin, then a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, to review Hannah Arendt’s recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She was given the right to reply; Voegelin would furnish a concluding note. Preceding this dialogue, Voegelin wrote a letter to Arendt anticipating aspects of his review; she responded in kind. Arendt’s letter to Voegelin on totalitarianism, written in German, has never appeared in print before. She wrote two drafts of it, the first and longest being the more interesting. It contained an early reference to her thinking about the relationship among plurality, politics, and philosophy. It also invoked her notion of the compelling “logic” of totalitarian ideology. But this was not the letter Voegelin received. Because of this, he misunderstood significant parts of her argument. Below, the two versions of Arendt’s letter are translated. They are prefaced by a translation of Voegelin’s initial message to Arendt. An introduction compares Arendt’s letters, offers context, and provides a snapshot of Arendt’s and Voegelin’s perceptions of each other. Their views of political religion and human nature are also highlighted. Keyed to Arendt and Voegelin’s letters are pertinent aspects of the debate in The Review of Politics that followed their epistolary exchange.
Oktober 2, 2012, 4:47 a.m., Antoon De Baets, Allgemein.
This essay investigates the thesis that inhumanity breeds humanity. Many questions arise when we try to corroborate it: Can we say anything at all about the inhumanity of human beings? Why did large-scale inhumanity occurring before 1700 not elicit a human rights regime? Was the human rights take-off from 1760 to 1800 triggered by instances of inhumanity, and why did the take-off not last? Why did the human rights idea eclipse after 1800 only to reemerge after 1945? Were war and genocide the sole causes of the human rights revival after 1945 or were there also other factors? Was the breakthrough in 1977 of human rights as a mass movement related to any inhumanity? And, finally, is the contemporary enthusiasm for human rights, with 1998 as its stepping stone, sufficient to make atrocities unthinkable for good? I conclude that, at several moments in history, inhumanity did propel humanity, but also that there are many other instances in which inhumanity only gave birth to more inhumanity. If the inhumanity thesis were necessarily true, we would need more human rights catastrophes to inspire more human rights progress. And that would be a self-defeating paradox.
Oktober 2, 2012, 4:47 a.m., JOUNI-MATTI KUUKKANEN, Allgemein.
The narrativist turn of the 1970s and 1980s transformed the discussion of general history. With the rejection of Rankean historical realism, the focus shifted to the historian as a narrator and on narratives as literary products. Oddly, the historiography of science took a turn in the opposite direction at the same time. The social turn in the historiography of science emphasized studying science as a material and practical activity with traceable and documentable traits. This empirization of the field has led to an understanding that history of science could be directly describable from scientific practice alone without acknowledging the role of the historian as a constructor of narratives about these practices. Contemporary historians of science tend to be critical of science’s ability to describe its object—nature, as it is—but they often are not similarly skeptical of their own abilities to describe their object: past science, as it is. I will argue that historiography of science can only gain from a belated narrativist turn.
Oktober 2, 2012, 4:47 a.m., History and Theory, Allgemein.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fj.1468-2303.2012.00641.x
Oktober 2, 2012, 4:47 a.m., Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Allgemein.
This essay reviews the recent book by Carolyn Dean that seeks to elucidate the ways in which complaints about a “surfeit of memory” and the privileging of Jewish victimization during the Holocaust as unique and as the emblem of radical evil in our times has shaped discussions of victims in general, creating an environment in which groups vie for victim status as a means of validating their grievances and making claims for justice. The hostility to such claims has, Dean argues, created antivictim discourses that end up generating aversion toward victims, primarily by denying the validity of their claims to suffering and, in the case of Jews, projecting them as “perpetrators” in their neglect of the suffering of others. At the same time, Dean argues, the demand that victims narrate their suffering in the aesthetically constrained style of “minimalism” equally undermines the legitimacy of victims‘ memories by demanding that they be presented in an already mastered form, thereby erasing the very trauma that, in principle, such narratives seek to represent.
At stake in the debates concerning Holocaust memorial consciousness and its proper modes of representation, this article suggests, are larger historiographical and ethical issues about how to integrate the horrors of the past and the traumatic experience of terror into the normal protocols of historical writing, which rely on distance, objectivity, and interpretive critique as governing procedures. To incorporate terror into historical representation will mean acknowledging and accepting as historiographically legitimate the differing status of analytically recuperated “facts” and victim testimony and finding a way to theorize the reality of “voices” from the past without assuming the necessary “truth” of what they convey.
Oktober 2, 2012, 4:47 a.m., Cesare Cuttica, Allgemein.
Javier Fernández Sebastián’s edited collections of essays, Political Concepts and Time, is both a critical homage to the monumental work of Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) and an important contribution to the methodology of history-writing. Centered on the polysemic nature of concepts, which are read as “‘vehicles for thought’” studied in their pragmatic and communicative applications in society, Political Concepts and Time provides a stimulating analysis of the role, weight, and future of conceptual history.
Its thirteen essays offer an account of problems, questions, and debates on the interplay of words and concepts, meaning and historical change, context and discourse. They endeavor to clarify the complicated and perennially unresolved relationship between theory and practice. In order to do so, Fernández Sebastián has assembled a scholarly composite and broadly international group of specialists from a variety of disciplines and research fields.
With the intellectual legacy of Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte looming large, this book rethinks the ways in which not just historians but also social scientists and philosophers study the past as the expression of contingent, ever-changing, and revocable semantic units shaping the culturally plural worlds we inhabit. Informed by the idea that history is porous, Political Concepts and Time also deals with the perhaps obvious but no less challenging issue of our approach to time as everyday experience and through its representation(s).
Together with exploring the volume’s specific historical topics, this essay will highlight some of its limitations and, above all, will respond to its criticism of intellectual history. The following pages will thus argue the case for the latter methodological perspective by reflecting on the type of historian it delineates. Claiming that in their investigation of past meanings intellectual historians make use of creative imagination, the essay will suggest that this model of history-writing leads to a better understanding of multiple sources and that it might ultimately help overcome some of the inconsistencies and often simplistic divisions between various branches of the historiographical tree. In particular, a small proposal to reconcile conceptual and intellectual history will be advanced.
Oktober 1, 2012, 11:00 p.m., Anabases, Allgemein.
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Pascal Payen
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La chaîne du savoir
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Philippe Borgeaud
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Hinnerk Bruhns
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Hinnerk Bruhns
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Andrea Giardina
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Bernard Legras
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Stéphane Ratti
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Corinne Bonnet
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Françoise Waquet
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Historiographie et identités culturelles
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Traditions du patrimoine antique
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Fabrice Robert
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Germaine Aujac
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Colombe Couëlle
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Archéologie des savoirs
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Actualités et débats
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Amandine Declercq
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Adeline Grand-Clément
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L’atelier de l’histoire : chantiers historiographiques
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Antiquité et fictions contemporaines (6)
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Les mots de l’Antiquité (2)
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Ressources informatiques sur l’Antiquité (3)
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Comptes rendus et notes de lecture
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Véronique Krings
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Véronique Krings
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Philippe Foro
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Nathaël Recoursé
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Laure Caillot
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Olivier Devillers
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Germaine Aujac
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Germaine Aujac
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Corinne Bonnet
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Sarah Rey
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Sylvie Pittia
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Geneviève Hoffmann
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Olivier Gengler
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Charalampos Orfanos
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Germaine Aujac
Oktober 1, 2012, 3:00 p.m., Eurozine journals, Allgemein.
Kinas nye dilemma [China’s new dilemma]
Oktober 1, 2012, 1:00 a.m., Speculum - Current Issue, Allgemein.
Speculum, Volume 87 Issue 04
| Speculum , published quarterly since 1926, was the first scholarly journal in North America devoted exclusively to the Middle Ages. It is open to contributions in all fields studying the Middle Ages, a period ranging from 500 to 1500. The journal’s primary emphasis is on Western Europe, but Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew, and Slavic studies are also included. Articles may be submitted on any medieval topic; all disciplines, methodologies, and approaches are welcome, with articles on interdisciplinary topics especially encouraged. The language of publication is English. |
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Oktober 1, 2012, 12:00 a.m., Tempo - Current Issue, Allgemein.
Tempo, Volume 66 Issue 262 Tempo is the premier English-language journal devoted to twentieth-century and contemporary concert music. Literate and scholarly articles, often illustrated with music examples, explore many aspects of the work of composers…