Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

Archaeology as a Tool to Illuminate and Support Community Struggles in the Black Metropolis of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

The South Side of Chicago — the 'Black Metropolis' — has been the site of many struggles over the years: for human dignity and civil rights; against restrictive real estate covenants; and to control present-day gentrification, to name a few. This legacy is inscribed on the landscape above and below ground. Black Chicagoans are keen to preserve the material manifestations of prior struggles and use preservation to benefit the current inhabitants of 'Bronzeville'. These activists have welcomed the author into collaborative projects that use archaeology and historic preservation to further their goals. Excavation at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls and the Bronzeville Cultural Garden has contributed to our efforts to identify and present stories of the Great Migration and its consequences. At stake are our understandings of how racial and other identities shaped life in this community in the past as well as the neighbourhood's role in the city's future.     

Review of Periodical Literature and Occasional Publications

Abstract

'Millenarians in the Pennines 1800–1830: Building and Believing Jerusalem'. The legend of the prophet John Wroe and his nineteenth-century millenarian followers remains a cherished part of Pennine folklore. In Ashton-under-Lyne and other mill-towns, Wroe attracted a following committed to his religious direction, living according to the Old Testament Law, and calling themselves 'Israelites'. In the 1820s, the Ashton community constructed an elaborate Sanctuary and four gatehouses, and called their town 'Jerusalem'. Wroe left Ashton in 1831 after sexual allegations; yet his movement persisted for decades. This article presents a new history of Wroe's Israelite sect before 1830, revealing its continuity — in ideas and people — with earlier religious traditions in the region. The phenomenon of a sect believing Ashton could be the New Jerusalem was not the work of one charismatic leader, nor the outcome of economic and religious conditions in one decade; nor were such beliefs a short-lived replacement for old securities. From a newly discovered archive and a range of sources in international and local collections, the buildings, the rites and the regime emergent in 1820s Ashton are shown to be merely the most prominent episode in a larger and more notable regional religious history. Acknowledging the agency available within this movement challenges existing conceptions of millenarianism in the period.     

“Make Hell While the Sun Shines”: Proverbial Rhetoric in Winston Churchill's The Second World War

M.M. Bakhtin's social construction of Renaissance carnivals, and his views on carnival in general, encounter trouble when tested against a presentday enactment, the Cajun country Courir de Mardi Gras, a processional begging ritual celebrated in southern Louisiana. The living festival reveals structures missing from Bakhtin's élite sources and consequently from his writings: structures that articulate the folk community's autonomous values and cooperative survival strategies. As long as literary studies based on Bakhtin find in carnival only that which opposes élite culture, they will fail to recognise the dimensions of community selfcelebration and self-definition essential to many folk festivals.     

Reinterpreting a Textile Tradition: David McDiarmid's Ecstatic and Utopian Klub Kwilt

Abstract

Appropriating traditional American quilting patterns, and the homely communal ambience of the quilt, self-proclaimed queer artist David McDiarmid proposes in his work, Klub Kwilt (1979), an inter-racial, queer 'community' with its own uniquely appropriate community artefacts. Klub Kwilt is a shiny, reflective art work made in what was then a new synthetic material — laser-etched Mylar. The artist's intention was to materialize and affirm in this work the utopian and ecstatic impulses of the New York gay male, black and Hispanic, underground dance club, Paradise Garage. The utopian world McDiarmid evokes — in a knowing, camp embrace of the synthetic, the showy and the excessive — is one of sexual and musical ecstasy, inter-racial resonance and visual and aural opulence.     

Oliver O'Donovan's Critique of Autonomy

Abstract

More than any other contemporary theologian, Oliver O'Donovan has revived political theology as a field of enquiry. Yet O'Donovan has been consistent in his critique of the modern idea of autonomy, judging it to be at odds with the more communitarian idea of covenanted community found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. He contrasts this modern idea, and its political implications, with the older biblical idea, also adding some basic points from Aristotle's idea of the polis. But unlike many contemporary communitarians, O'Donovan is also able to incorporate the idea of human rights into his political theology. He sees this supposedly modern idea having fuller precedence in the biblical idea of mishpat ("justice"), which he takes to be God's primordial claim on His covenanted community, a claim that sufficiently grounds both individual rights and communal rights and which enables them to function together. However, O'Donovan draws the line when it comes to the modern social contract theory, arguing that it is at odds with biblical teaching that the primary responsibility of rulers is to divine law. While agreeing with O'Donovan's rejection of autonomy and his acceptance of human rights, this paper argues against O'Donovan's theological rejection of social contract theory. Instead, it argues that a social contract is consistent with the doctrine of the covenant; indeed that the very possibility of the social contract is best explained by the doctrine of the covenant, and that this acceptance of the social contract serves the best political interests of covenanted communities (like the Jewish People and the Christian Church) in an otherwise secular world.     

Labour Bureaucracy and Labour Officialdom in Evo Morales's Bolivia

Evo Morales has labelled his government the ‘government of social movements’, and much has been written on relations between social movements and the state in Bolivia since the turn of the century. The Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) — Bolivian Workers’ Central — has, however, remained largely absent from discussions in much of the literature. This article seeks to analyse the position of the COB under Morales, and to explore the nature and consequences of its relationship with the government over the past 12 years. The article differentiates between the concepts of labour bureaucracy and labour officialdom and examines how they can be used as analytical lenses that shed light on the position of the COB today. The author argues that during Bolivia's neoliberal period (1985–2005) the need to look after the COB bureaucratized union structures, as personal needs of the leadership were placed above those of the Bolivian working classes. This then allowed Morales's government to easily co‐opt sections of the labour movements’ leadership to form a labour officialdom, leaving the COB unable to challenge the continuation of the neoliberal structure of the economy and represent the majority of the country's working classes.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

What became of Appleton's ionosphere?

Appleton's papers on ionospheric physics spanned a period of forty years and dealt with all the main regions of the ionosphere. They include discussions of the ionosphere at low, middle and high latitudes, and consider many kinds of ionospheric anomalies and disturbances — the seasonal anomaly, the equatorial anomaly, atmospheric tides, eclipse effects, and the effects of solar flares and magnetic storms. A century after his birth, it seems appropriate to consider where some of Appleton's ideas on the ionosphere led to, and how some of the topics that interested him are seen today. The paper discusses some theoretical ideas that Appleton developed or used, reviews his work on the E layer, F layer and other ionospheric topics, and outlines some of the major developments since his day.     

Conserving Rainforest 4: aural geographies and ephemerality

Works of installation sound art are inherently spatial. Documentation of this form, which dates from the 1950s, involves an engagement with diverse histories of geographical knowledge and oral-historical methodology. David Tudor's Rainforest 4 (1973) is a performed sculptural sound installation which remains the best-known of his pieces. Its durability—when most other of his works remain unperformed, partly because they are too hermetic to decipher or depend on unavailable technologies—belies its “score” which consists of a simple diagram and a few words. Oral history, formal and informal, is not only key to understanding the history of the piece, but is integral to its performance. This paper explores some historical geographies of Rainforest 4 and the aesthetic of ephemerality in live electronic music, for which documentation of performance is secondary. In examining the paradoxes of Rainforest 4's conservation, we explore Tudor's engagement with particular notions of nature and spirituality as well as the social hierarchies and conservative impulse which keep the piece alive.     

Herbert Heaton and Five Principles of The Yorkshire Coal-miners

Abstract

'Herbert Heaton and Five Principles of the Yorkshire Coal-Miners'. Herbert Heaton, born in 1890, was the son of a Yorkshire coal-miner. He obtained his schooling with scholarships from the age of twelve, including an undergraduate career at the University of Leeds. He went on to become a leading economic historian. He taught on three Continents, spending the last thirty years of his career at the University of Minnesota in the United States. His father was not only a coal-miner, but also a lay preacher in the Primitive Methodist Church and active in the governance of his local co-operative. Heaton wrote and lectured about five principles he had learned and adopted as his own, growing up in the Yorkshire coalfields. The five principles reflect how many coal-miners before 1914 believed economic and social justice could be achieved. While the miners changed their beliefs after 1918, Heaton, who never lived in Britain after 1914, retained the Yorkshire principles of his youth.     

3. MENTALITY AS A SOCIAL EMERGENT: CAN THE ZEITGEIST HAVE EXPLANATORY POWER?1

This paper probes the explanatory value of mentality as a social emergent in general and of the Zeitgeist in particular. Durkheim's contention that social facts have emergent properties is open to the charge that it implies logically inconsistent “downward causation.” on the basis of an analogy with the brain‐mind dilemma and mental emergentism, the first part of the essay discusses and dismisses the notion of social emergent properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of their component parts—individuals—and their internal relations. However, ontological individualism need not compel us to methodological individualism. The second part introduces two challenges to methodological individualism. The most radical is Rajeev Bhargava's assertion that the meaning of a belief is determined not by the individual holding the belief but by the entire linguistic community. Bhargava's “contextualism” is closely related to the (post)structural demand that we focus on discourse as a communal entity instead of continuing a delusive quest for the intentions of individual speakers. a more modest alternative is Margaret Gilbert's plea for using “plural subjects”—social groups in which “participant agents” act jointly or have a jointly accepted view—in the practical syllogisms that are central to rationalizing action explanation. The notion of plural subjects lends credence to, and is reinforced by, “situationist” social psychology, which shows how people conform to peer groups, authorities, and roles. building on Wesley Salmon's and Peter Railton's ecumenical accounts of explanation, the essay argues that both individual rationalizing action explanations and explanations based on plural agents can give explanatory information: we need not choose one or the other. The third part discusses how the Zeitgeist can provide added explanatory value in an analysis of the New left. This is possible if the “spirit of the sixties” is seen as representing the values and worldviews of the “sixties generation” as a social group in Gilbert's terms. Radical youth would suspend judgment and pool their wills to conform to what they perceived were the views of the imagined “sixties community” or—rendering more explanatory force—to smaller parts of it in the guise of peer groups and organizations.     

Human ecology and the early history of St Kilda,Scotland

It is 300 years since Martin Martin published hisVoyage to St Kilda, one of the most informative accounts ever published of a seventeenth-century community. Historical treatments of St Kilda have often dramatized its isolation, distinctiveness and «marginality» but Martin's writings suggest that the lifeways of the St Kildans were not very different from those of contemporary Hebrideans. The economy described by Martin was subject to a rigorous regime of communal self-management. This article argues that in late medieval climatic conditions, St Kilda's particular combination of resources—sheltered arable land, seals and sea-bird colonies, including a huge gannetry—would have made the archipelago a valued component of the MacLeod chiefdom and a good target for the annual predatory visit of the sub-chief and his retinue. St Kilda's history should be seen not in isolation, but in a context of regional interdependence, and the archipelago's «marginality» is best understood in a long-term historical perspective.     

‘Fashioned from Nature’

Abstract

This paper examines the situation of the male draper in terms of his relationships to textiles and female customers between the 1870s and the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on accounts of shop work produced by men employed as drapers and drapers’ assistants, the essay highlights the ridicule levelled against men who sold textiles, their work with fabrics and clothing, as well as the service they provided for an almost exclusively female clientele, being widely derided as unsuitable labour for a man. Analysing three first-hand accounts of the draper’s lot — H. G. Wells’s discussion of his years as a draper’s apprentice in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934); William Paine’s Shop Slavery and Emancipation (1912), based on the injustices experienced by drapers’ assistants; and the diary of a Bond Street draper, Charles Cavers, posthumously published as Hades! The Ladies! Being Extracts from the Diary of a Draper (1933) — the essay shows how social constructions of masculinity framed the draper’s work, particularly the handling of fabrics.     

Civil Power and the Deconstruction of Scholasticism in the Thought of Marc'antonio de Dominis

Summary

Marc'antonio de Dominis is well known to historians as a figure in the political and religious culture of early modern Britain and Europe. This article contends that he was also a major theorist of civil power: his critique of Catholic scholastic political thought is compelling and his account of divine right kingship sheds light on conceptual problems that troubled a range of early modern thinkers. De Dominis dismantled the scholastic theory of political power on its own terms, insisting that Almain, Bellarmine, Suárez and others could not distinguish, as they sought to, between the potestas politica in general and the rule of particular princes. By this insight de Dominis could vindicate royal authority against the deposing pretensions of the Pope, the main objective of James I's supporters during the Allegiance Controversy, but his own positive account of how to think about power ran into theoretical trouble which he evidently perceived himself. If the potestas politica cannot be abstracted from a specific regime, and if the prince's absolute sovereignty depends on this fact, can politics be understood only at the level of the particular and contingent? The article closes by setting Thomas Hobbes—well versed in Jacobean polemic—in the context of this question.     

An Island Divided: Politicised Landscapes,Modern Borders,and Shifting Identities

Abstract

This paper looks critically at the division of Cyprus into North and South (the politically unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus respectively) and will consider how this physical division emphasised and further developed a divided identity based on 'ethnic' differences (and the development of the 'other') between the two major populations—Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The Green Line is just one of several recent manifestations in the landscape of social contestations between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities. This paper outlines how the Green Line has structured the lives of people in relation to the ways that they conceptualise their environment, the past and, importantly, the 'other' side. Further, it addresses how this division, this physical line across the landscape, impacts upon the social landscape as it defines and reinforces identity through the processes of memory and forgetting.     

"Silently Farting in the Face of the Empire." Review of Paul and the Imperial Roman Order

Abstract

As the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy ventures more frequently into the sphere of environmental ethics and makes pronouncements on large-scale environmental problems, its effectiveness will consistently be undercut by its commitment to what is traditionally called "Catholic act analysis," which when used to evaluate a host of commonplace actions leads Catholics to believe that they are morally unproblematic. Yet when these same actions are performed day after day and year after year, they contribute to many large-scale environmental problems that are unquestionably harmful—and are often viewed negatively by the Catholic hierarchy. At some point, this pattern of approving morally of certain actions the cumulative, corporate side effects of which cause pernicious environmental problems will strain the Catholic Church's credibility on environmental matters—and until the hierarchy reexamines its commitment to Catholic act analysis, this dilemma will be unavoidable.     

The Exact Men of the North from Tool Makers to Historians

Abstract

This account of northern social scientists, historians, and machine-tool and astronomical instrument makers carries forward the author's construction of an intellectual profile of the North of England in previous articles. Principally by analysing entries in relevant biographical dictionaries, the author has demonstrated that northerners of distinction have been disproportionately numerous among 'men of science' in general and machine-tool engineers and astronomical instrument makers in particular, and — at least since the eighteenth century — among musicians and historians. Astronomical instrument makers and machine-tool engineers were above all exact men; so were the 'new' (scientific) historians like Stubbs and Mandell Creighton who followed the research methods of Leopold von Ranke; while the musicians produced in symphonies and oratorios exactly dovetailed, multi-layered structures of sound. A distinction is drawn between two forms of exactness: one of 'correspondence', the other of 'coherence'. The contrasted social contexts in which they are likely to arise are discussed. Musicians and historians (whose exactness lay in 'coherence') were big-city men; astronomical and mathematical instrument makers were more likely to have come down from the hills. The final result: the North was strongly represented in the front ranks of the nation's historians, mechanical engineers, and musicians; with only weak representation in the foremost ranks of social scientists and imaginative writers.