Pub Date : 2022-03-09DOI: 10.1017/S1479244322000051
Niklas Plaetzer
This article makes use of primary sources to reconstruct Carl Schmitt's engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt. It focuses on Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): a book that Schmitt called “exciting” and that made him sick “for a couple of weeks.” The article examines marginalia to explore the reasons behind this ambiguous reaction. It situates Schmitt's reading of Arendt in the aftermath of his 1945 defense writings in which he had come close to legitimizing the international criminal prosecution of Nazi officials: a position he feared could backfire against himself in light of the Eichmann trial. Despite points of agreement in their critiques of depoliticized legality, Schmitt's reading of Arendt remained limited by anti-Semitic hatred and his fear of persecution. Driven by a sense of antagonism rather than dialogue, Schmitt's meticulous Arendt collection reveals above all that he turned to her work in search of theoretical weapons of self-defense.
{"title":"Eichmann in Plettenberg: Carl Schmitt reads Hannah Arendt","authors":"Niklas Plaetzer","doi":"10.1017/S1479244322000051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244322000051","url":null,"abstract":"This article makes use of primary sources to reconstruct Carl Schmitt's engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt. It focuses on Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963): a book that Schmitt called “exciting” and that made him sick “for a couple of weeks.” The article examines marginalia to explore the reasons behind this ambiguous reaction. It situates Schmitt's reading of Arendt in the aftermath of his 1945 defense writings in which he had come close to legitimizing the international criminal prosecution of Nazi officials: a position he feared could backfire against himself in light of the Eichmann trial. Despite points of agreement in their critiques of depoliticized legality, Schmitt's reading of Arendt remained limited by anti-Semitic hatred and his fear of persecution. Driven by a sense of antagonism rather than dialogue, Schmitt's meticulous Arendt collection reveals above all that he turned to her work in search of theoretical weapons of self-defense.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"20 1","pages":"270 - 297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45483857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1017/s1479244321000664
Massimo Asta
{"title":"Intellectual History as History of Engagement? The French Scholarship – CORRIGENDUM","authors":"Massimo Asta","doi":"10.1017/s1479244321000664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244321000664","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"19 1","pages":"660 - 660"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41869736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-24DOI: 10.1017/S1479244321000706
Ryan M. Acton
Abstract In the mid-1920s, Wallace Donham, the dean of Harvard Business School, recruited two intellectuals, Elton Mayo and Lawrence Henderson, to find solutions to the nation's ills. Like many intellectuals since the late 1800s, Donham, Mayo, and Henderson believed that laissez-faire modernization and competitive individualism had shattered the social bonds that had once harmonized the nation. Corporations, they believed, thus should use a new science of administration to tie workers into close-knit workgroups. These bonds would fulfill workers’ needs for stability and community, discipline workers’ wayward emotions and thoughts, and diminish workers’ susceptibility to labor activism and radical politics. Historians have shown that a vein of intellectuals turned the common “progressive” faith in social bonds into an argument for the strong state. This article shows, however, that this faith also contributed to conservative thought and tools of control.
{"title":"The Search for Social Harmony at Harvard Business School, 1919–1942","authors":"Ryan M. Acton","doi":"10.1017/S1479244321000706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000706","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the mid-1920s, Wallace Donham, the dean of Harvard Business School, recruited two intellectuals, Elton Mayo and Lawrence Henderson, to find solutions to the nation's ills. Like many intellectuals since the late 1800s, Donham, Mayo, and Henderson believed that laissez-faire modernization and competitive individualism had shattered the social bonds that had once harmonized the nation. Corporations, they believed, thus should use a new science of administration to tie workers into close-knit workgroups. These bonds would fulfill workers’ needs for stability and community, discipline workers’ wayward emotions and thoughts, and diminish workers’ susceptibility to labor activism and radical politics. Historians have shown that a vein of intellectuals turned the common “progressive” faith in social bonds into an argument for the strong state. This article shows, however, that this faith also contributed to conservative thought and tools of control.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"20 1","pages":"141 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44883075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-19DOI: 10.1017/S1479244321000640
Brandon R. Byrd
The mythmaking began in 1808. Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. “The abolition of the Slave-trade took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty when they were oppressors themselves, nor from persons who were led to it by ambition or a love of reputation among men, but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times,” Clarkson proclaimed. In his telling, the inspiration for abolitionism had risen naturally from the same people who had dominated the transatlantic slave trade during the preceding century and would maintain colonial slavery for another three decades.
{"title":"Writing the World at the End of Empire","authors":"Brandon R. Byrd","doi":"10.1017/S1479244321000640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000640","url":null,"abstract":"The mythmaking began in 1808. Soon after the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published the first history of the movement that had led to the ban on the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the British Empire. It was a testament to British benevolence. A tribute to Christian virtue. “The abolition of the Slave-trade took its rise, not from persons, who set up a cry for liberty when they were oppressors themselves, nor from persons who were led to it by ambition or a love of reputation among men, but where it was most desirable, namely, from the teachers of Christianity in those times,” Clarkson proclaimed. In his telling, the inspiration for abolitionism had risen naturally from the same people who had dominated the transatlantic slave trade during the preceding century and would maintain colonial slavery for another three decades.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"20 1","pages":"345 - 355"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43590552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-13DOI: 10.1017/S147924432100069X
Samera Esmeir
Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.
{"title":"On the Lives of Modern State Law","authors":"Samera Esmeir","doi":"10.1017/S147924432100069X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924432100069X","url":null,"abstract":"Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"19 1","pages":"1316 - 1327"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42559052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-10DOI: 10.1017/S1479244321000688
Emma Planinc
Rousseau claims that the lawgiver must “persuade without convincing,” binding this legislative communication to the “first language,” which would, Rousseau writes, “persuade without convincing, and depict without arguing.” Drawing on a wide range of contextual sources, I show that this first language of Rousseau's is figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which William Warburton claimed were “the uniform voice of nature” in his Divine Legation of Moses. More importantly, I demonstrate that Rousseau was himself using this lost ancient language to provide a figuration of his own: the “illusory image” of natural man. Through the Second Discourse, men could be persuaded that they were by nature free, preparing the way for a social contract in which they could legitimately give themselves law. This is an image that I argue has been effectively persuasive up to the present day—and our politics, like Rousseau's, thus seemingly rests on figurative foundations.
{"title":"The Figurative Foundations of Rousseau's Politics","authors":"Emma Planinc","doi":"10.1017/S1479244321000688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000688","url":null,"abstract":"Rousseau claims that the lawgiver must “persuade without convincing,” binding this legislative communication to the “first language,” which would, Rousseau writes, “persuade without convincing, and depict without arguing.” Drawing on a wide range of contextual sources, I show that this first language of Rousseau's is figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which William Warburton claimed were “the uniform voice of nature” in his Divine Legation of Moses. More importantly, I demonstrate that Rousseau was himself using this lost ancient language to provide a figuration of his own: the “illusory image” of natural man. Through the Second Discourse, men could be persuaded that they were by nature free, preparing the way for a social contract in which they could legitimately give themselves law. This is an image that I argue has been effectively persuasive up to the present day—and our politics, like Rousseau's, thus seemingly rests on figurative foundations.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"20 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43041750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1017/S1479244321000676
Ohad Reiss-Sorokin
Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with them practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual circle. Based on archival research, the article uses a number of case studies to show that the Kreis was employed by the Viennese émigrés as a mental scheme and as a recipe for action. It argues that the émigrés’ adherence to the Kreis structure explains the friction between them and their hosts. By following the attempts of former Geistkreis members to create Kreis-like institutions in America, the article shows that the Kreis was more than mere organizational form. It represented an epistemical commitment to knowledge making as a collective effort, and the preference of general theoretical knowledge over specialized research. It also entailed an intermingling of “work” and “life” that did not conform to American norms.
{"title":"Thinking Outside the Circle: The Geistkreis and the Viennese “Kreis Culture” in America","authors":"Ohad Reiss-Sorokin","doi":"10.1017/S1479244321000676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000676","url":null,"abstract":"Besides their ideas and social networks, émigré intellectuals bring with them practices for engagement with intellectual work. This article focuses on one such practice: the intellectual Kreis [circle]. It focuses on the Geistkreis, an interwar Viennese interdisciplinary intellectual circle. Based on archival research, the article uses a number of case studies to show that the Kreis was employed by the Viennese émigrés as a mental scheme and as a recipe for action. It argues that the émigrés’ adherence to the Kreis structure explains the friction between them and their hosts. By following the attempts of former Geistkreis members to create Kreis-like institutions in America, the article shows that the Kreis was more than mere organizational form. It represented an epistemical commitment to knowledge making as a collective effort, and the preference of general theoretical knowledge over specialized research. It also entailed an intermingling of “work” and “life” that did not conform to American norms.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"20 1","pages":"168 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45278236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-15DOI: 10.1017/S1479244321000652
Guillaume Lancereau
This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.
{"title":"For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914","authors":"Guillaume Lancereau","doi":"10.1017/S1479244321000652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000652","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":"20 1","pages":"88 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43633355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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