JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS最新文献

Anticipating sixteenth-century trends in vernacular Aristotelianism, Machiavelli concealed his theoretical engagement with Aristotle behind a veil of examples. Scholars have established that in The Prince, Machiavelli employed topical dialectic to update ancient maxims for the modern era. I show how he used dialectic to occupy and transform Aristotelian commonplaces that justified Renaissance philosophers' appeal to the ideal in political reasoning. These occupations reveal Machiavelli's preference for particulars over generalities as a considered judgment about the suitability of philosophy for popular readers. Machiavelli's covert reading of Aristotle is, I submit, a signal episode in the history of humanism.

The idea of risk, of the willingness to be exposed to the possibility of total failure, is a core value of Adorno's philosophical and aesthetic modernism. This willingness to be exposed to risk is also a quality that Adorno associates most strongly, in aesthetics, with Deweyan pragmatism. Against tendencies to assume an irreconcilability of critical theory and pragmatism, this essay ventures that an appreciation of Adorno's acknowledgement of Dewey in his Aesthetic Theory would mean considering that it is in Dewey that Adorno might have found the closest exemplar of the dialectical, experimental freedom that he desired for his aesthetics.

This article interprets the abbé d'Aubignac's 1715 Conjectures académiques, ou, Dissertation sur l'Iliade-the first text to posit the non-existence of Homer-in light of the Parisian literary underground of the mid-seventeenth century. It shows that the city's nascent street culture influenced regimes of authorship and, ultimately, classical scholarship on Homer. In general, it argues for a history of scholarship in dialogue with the architecture of the cities where it took place.

This article examines the use of astronomical chronology in Jesuit and secular works of history between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It suggests that the highly visible adoption of astronomical records in historical scholarship in Enlightenment Europe by Nicolas Fréret and Voltaire was entangled with debates about Chinese chronology, translated by Jesuit missionaries. The article argues that the missionary Martino Martini's experience of the Manchu conquest of China was crucial in shaping his conception of history as a discipline. Political events that unfolded in seventeenth-century China had a marked effect on discussions about emergent world history in eighteenth-century Europe.

With his essay "Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum," Max Weber pushed the scholarly narrative of the rise of the Ancient Greek polis closer to what was to become the paradigm of the twentieth century: that the unique political development of Greece followed from the rise of a new kind of warrior, the hoplite. But the scholars who would enshrine this "hoplite revolution" theory seem to have been ignorant of Weber. His prescient work is never cited on this subject. This article explores the contemporary origins and Weberian nature of a forgotten version of the "hoplite revolution" theory.

This paper reads parallel scenes in Herodotus and Thucydides to find a shared emphasis on flawed deliberation as the cause of catastrophic defeats for imperial powers. Both texts question the foresight and rhetorical strategies of self-styled wise advisers who ironically advance the very decisions they seek to forestall. Yet both authors also suggest that better strategies of advice could have altered the outcome. In contrast with those who read Herodotus and Thucydides as fatalists showing the futility of wise counsel in the face of imperial aggression, we find that they evince a belief in the constructive possibilities of advice.

This article argues that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured through the late 1970s. These two varieties-Popular Front antifascism and anti-imperial antifascism-were in dialogue but in opposition to one another, and both were transnational mobilizing ideologies. Investigating these two antifascist movements allows us to place Europe in the wider world and demonstrate how anti-imperial activists of color simultaneously "provincialized" Europe and situated it within a global framework. The effort also highlights the need to rethink the history of the European Left through the framework of antifascism.

This article analyzes some of the issues raised by historians after turning to computers for historical research in the 1960s and 1970s. The main point is to enrich this context by looking into the debates computer programmers were having in their own field at the same time. In particular, the use of formal languages to enhance the theoretical basis of both practices is discussed. A second point, the debates in programming, is also highlighted: as historians were turning to computer programming, programmers were becoming historians of their own practice, engaged in methodological discussions on how to write their history.