Pub Date : 2023-09-07DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000161
Timo Pankakoski
This article analyzes Dolf Sternberger's post-World War II argumentation against proportional representation. Sternberger is central in the intellectual history of German democratization. However, he expressed his misgivings about parties and proportionality in a perplexingly antidemocratic register. Proportionality was anonymous, mechanical, dead, and purely mathematical, relying on “mere numbers” and “summing up” as opposed to living, dynamic, and organic political relations—ultimately not a form of political electing at all. Sternberger intentionally mobilized age-old topoi and metaphors which interwar antidemocratic authors had used against parliamentary democracy in its entirety, now skillfully redirecting their force against proportional representation more specifically. Sternberger's intricate metaphorical system linked his anti-proportional views to his theory of active civic engagement and ultimately served pro-democratic aspirations in the altered historical situation. His case exemplifies broader continuities between interwar and postwar discourses and highlights the need to read metaphorical argumentation in historical contexts and pragmatically rather than merely semantically.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-25DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000148
Daniel Wickberg
Three generations ago, intellectual historians wrote books in which central texts and intellectual figures were held to be the sources of entire bodies of thought. The metaphors of “influence” and “origins” were common; particular arguments associated with those texts and thinkers were imagined as shaping and creating traditions of thought. Adjectives like “Lockean,” “Jeffersonian,” “Nietzschean,” and “Kantian” attached themselves to whole strains and schools of philosophical, political, and social thought. Two generations ago, a wholesale shift in intellectual historiography, best represented by the Cambridge school historians Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, but evident well beyond them, pushed historians away from the centrality of major figures and texts understood as shaping long traditions, and toward “languages” and “discourses” that were historically localized and bounded. Individual texts were to be understood not as the source of a stream of ideas, but as creatures of very specific discursive and ideological environments; understanding their history meant understanding authorial “intention” contextually, rather than “influence” and long-term consequence. Along with this turn was a commitment to historical discontinuity and an understanding of the alterity and “otherness” of past ways of thinking. Whatever our vision of Kant might be today, said this school of thought, it is not the Kant of the eighteenth-century world in which he thought, and we should be wary of projecting our contemporary understandings into that foreign world.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-18DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000203
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
{"title":"MIH volume 20 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s1479244323000203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244323000203","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136063476","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 : 2023-08-03DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000136
Aret Karademir
The literature on the introduction of modern Western philosophy in the late Ottoman Empire is predominantly ethnocentric. This is because it reduces the Ottoman version of modern Western philosophy to the philosophical discourses of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals at the expense of non-Muslim Ottomans’ philosophical activities in languages other than Turkish. This article challenges such ethnocentrism and offers an alternative narrative from the perspective of Ottoman Armenian thinkers in the late nineteenth century. With this aim, it analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Madatia Karakashian, Nahabed Rusinian, Kalusd Gosdantian, and Yeghia Demirjibashian.
{"title":"The Introduction of Modern Western Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire: Armenian Thinkers","authors":"Aret Karademir","doi":"10.1017/s1479244323000136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244323000136","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The literature on the introduction of modern Western philosophy in the late Ottoman Empire is predominantly ethnocentric. This is because it reduces the Ottoman version of modern Western philosophy to the philosophical discourses of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals at the expense of non-Muslim Ottomans’ philosophical activities in languages other than Turkish. This article challenges such ethnocentrism and offers an alternative narrative from the perspective of Ottoman Armenian thinkers in the late nineteenth century. With this aim, it analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Madatia Karakashian, Nahabed Rusinian, Kalusd Gosdantian, and Yeghia Demirjibashian.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43294133","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 : 2023-07-07DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000124
Emma Gattey
The second Māori student to enrol at the University of Oxford, Makereti studied anthropology in the intellectual epicentre of the British Empire from 1927 to 1930, participating in transnational academic networks by writing about her own people. Her work was published posthumously as The Old-Time Maori, now acclaimed as an unprecedented work of Māori auto-ethnography. Exploring a forgotten seam of revisionist anthropology, this article argues that reappraisals of Makereti have failed to capture the magnitude of her project of Indigenous resistance writing. Through close reading of Makereti's personal papers and published work, this article uncovers the targeted revisionism of Makereti's scholarship—in particular identifying the unnamed targets of her critique—and how she used the epistemic tools of imperial and salvage anthropology to challenge colonial discourses about Māori. Makereti's engagement with Oxford illuminates Indigenous adaptation of a discipline and institutions often portrayed as sites of incorrigibly imperialist ideology.
{"title":"Writing Back from the Academy: Uncovering the Unnamed Targets of Makereti's Revisionist Anthropology","authors":"Emma Gattey","doi":"10.1017/s1479244323000124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244323000124","url":null,"abstract":"The second Māori student to enrol at the University of Oxford, Makereti studied anthropology in the intellectual epicentre of the British Empire from 1927 to 1930, participating in transnational academic networks by writing about her own people. Her work was published posthumously as The Old-Time Maori, now acclaimed as an unprecedented work of Māori auto-ethnography. Exploring a forgotten seam of revisionist anthropology, this article argues that reappraisals of Makereti have failed to capture the magnitude of her project of Indigenous resistance writing. Through close reading of Makereti's personal papers and published work, this article uncovers the targeted revisionism of Makereti's scholarship—in particular identifying the unnamed targets of her critique—and how she used the epistemic tools of imperial and salvage anthropology to challenge colonial discourses about Māori. Makereti's engagement with Oxford illuminates Indigenous adaptation of a discipline and institutions often portrayed as sites of incorrigibly imperialist ideology.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41512009","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 : 2023-06-07DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000112
Charles C. H. Lee
It is well known that the leading New Liberals L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were critics of the British Empire, and their sympathy with China has been understood as an expression of their anti-imperialism. However, this article argues that this reading is at best one-sided. By examining Hobhouse's and Hobson's ethical and sociological thought, it demonstrates that their Sinophile position drew on a broader concern about the turn-of-the-century moral crisis. Informed by Idealist philosophy, positivism, and evolutionary biology, their quest for a post-Christian ethics led to an appreciation of the harmonic order of Chinese society and its secularism. The leading New Liberals’ earnest study of China on the one hand represented a departure from the Eurocentric position of British Liberals who had seen “stationary” China as a negative object lesson, and on the other anticipated a generation of Liberal/progressive thinkers who were attracted to Chinese culture.
{"title":"The New Liberals and Chinese Civilization: Idealist Philosophy, Evolutionary Sociology, and the Quest for a Humanitarian Ethics in Edwardian Britain","authors":"Charles C. H. Lee","doi":"10.1017/s1479244323000112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244323000112","url":null,"abstract":"It is well known that the leading New Liberals L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson were critics of the British Empire, and their sympathy with China has been understood as an expression of their anti-imperialism. However, this article argues that this reading is at best one-sided. By examining Hobhouse's and Hobson's ethical and sociological thought, it demonstrates that their Sinophile position drew on a broader concern about the turn-of-the-century moral crisis. Informed by Idealist philosophy, positivism, and evolutionary biology, their quest for a post-Christian ethics led to an appreciation of the harmonic order of Chinese society and its secularism. The leading New Liberals’ earnest study of China on the one hand represented a departure from the Eurocentric position of British Liberals who had seen “stationary” China as a negative object lesson, and on the other anticipated a generation of Liberal/progressive thinkers who were attracted to Chinese culture.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44242388","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 : 2023-05-30DOI: 10.1017/s1479244323000100
Thomas Lalevée
The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.
{"title":"Three Versions of Social Science in Late Eighteenth-Century France","authors":"Thomas Lalevée","doi":"10.1017/s1479244323000100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244323000100","url":null,"abstract":"The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.","PeriodicalId":44584,"journal":{"name":"Modern Intellectual History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135642778","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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