The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

ABSTRACT

The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.     

Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and the foundations of history and politics

This article explores the intellectual relations between Carl Schmitt and the German historian Reinhart Koselleck with a focus on the inspiration that Koselleck found in Schmitt's work in the early 1950s. The article goes beyond earlier contributions in the field by illuminating how the most important discursive features that Koselleck drew from Schmitt were utilized toward a very independent intellectual project. This project concerned an attempt to revise modern political thought by means of outlining a new concept of history. Koselleck's concept of history was to depart from all utopian notions of history as a singular, unified and goal-directed process. Instead, it aimed to outline certain fundamental existential structures of the human condition and to take account of the social relations existing among human beings in order to understand (historically) and contain (politically) the potential conflict in human societies. Hence Koselleck believed that his new concept of history would lead to a more responsible foundation of political order and decision making. Following an analysis of how Koselleck developed his project in a dialogue with the work of Schmitt and a number of other scholars, first of all Friedrich Meinecke and Martin Heidegger, the article presents a brief perspective on how his new concept of history was received in the 1950s and on how it came to provide his work with a certain analytical, thematic and argumentative unity.     

Searching for fish names with the Vula’a of Papua New Guinea

This article describes an ethnographic project initiated by a group of people in Irupara village, Papua New Guinea (PNG), who for a period between 2001 and 2010 self-identified as ‘historians’. At the forefront of the group’s concerns was a younger generation unfamiliar with the local language names of fish and fishing techniques. I document the collaborative project developed to address a situation perceived as a loss of language, culture, and identity. As well as providing a valuable lexicon in an Austronesian language, the research brings to light important distinctions between recording ‘history’ and ways of recalling and expressing the past commonly referred to as ‘historicity’.     

A processual study of Inka state formation

Traditional interpretations of how the Inka empire developed emphasize the disjunctive transformation of a village-level society through the agency of a single charismatic ruler. New evidence from the Inka heartland indicates that it was in fact the formation of a centralized state in the Cusco Valley of highland Peru that enabled the rapid campaigns of Inka territorial expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries. By using archaeological data and ethnohistoric documents to develop independent lines of evidence, it is possible to describe Inka state formation processes anthropologically. Settlement and excavation data from the Vilcanota Valley provide several indicators of the development of a centralized Inka state during the Killke Period (c. A.D. 1000–1400), while multiple accounts of the Inka past describe the transformation of Inka society over a period of several generations leading up to the first campaigns of imperial conquest. Both lines of evidence are consistent with the kinds of changes described for other known cases of state formation. The formation of the Inka state and its expansion in the Cusco region created conditions in which the agency of Inka rulers could direct the expansion of a mighty empire in only a few generations of conquest.     

Paouté and Aiaouez: A New Perspective on Late Seventeenth-Century Chiwere-Siouan Identity

A fine-grained spatial and temporal analysis of relevant seventeenth-century French documents reveals that from circa 1650 to 1685 the two terms principally associated with the Ioway, Aiaouez and Paouté, were consistently applied to geographically distinct branches of that tribe. The conflation of these two terms after circa 1700 is the product of both changes in the contact-period cultural landscape and the manner in which it was defined. This conclusion has importance for the use of these accounts as analogues for reconstructing Oneota tradition social organization and highlights the value in applying contemporary theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques to ethnohistoric data.     

Maggi's Croce,Sasso's Gentile and the riddles of twentieth-century Italian intellectual history

Claiming to occupy the forefront of modern thought, Croce and Gentile together dominated Italian intellectual life during the first half of the twentieth century. But though their intellectual interaction continued, they split definitively as Gentile embraced Fascism and Croce sought to recast liberalism in response to the Fascist challenge. Both then suffered eclipse as postwar Italians sought to embrace what seemed the wider western mainstream. Reflecting the recent Italian effort at reassessment, Sasso and Maggi offer major works focused, respectively, on the basis of Gentile's Fascism and the adequacy of Croce's response to his challenging era. Working through the limits of the two studies suggests how we might treat Croce and Gentile in tandem, as central to an innovative, sometimes troubling, distinctively Italian tradition that merits reconnection with the mainstream of western intellectual history, especially as we continue seeking to learn from the disastrous trajectories of Fascism and totalitarianism.     

J.W. Burrow: A personal history

The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come.     

Legal realism and human rights

This essay uses Schmitt's work to cast new light on the relevance of the American legal tradition known as ‘legal realism’ for the history and analysis of human rights. It does so by exploring several of Schmitt's most famous criticisms of international law and human rights, and then suggests how they might correspond with a widespread critical legal tradition in the 1920s and 1930s. This essay describes in detail two fundamental features of this tradition: historicism and realism. It concludes by suggesting that a return to some of these earlier law writers and texts might be a more substantive way to develop a constructive critical position in the fields of human rights and international law than an overreliance on the politically provocative (and problematic) rhetorical flourishes of Carl Schmitt.     

Europe—An historian's view

The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come.     

Histoire embrouillée: Making material histories in Southern Africa

This article examines how historical knowledge about Southern African chiefdoms was produced in D.F. Ellenberger's research archive (c. 1860–1913) and archaeology drawing on his scholarship. I describe a historiographic approach detailing how Ellenberger's work co-opted the material world to create historical facts, obscuring diverse meanings of home, movement, and authority.     

From Inchoate Pronouns to Proper Nouns: A Theory Fragment with 9/11, Gertrude Stein,and an East German Ethnography

Despite the elaborate means human beings deploy to render the world predictable and transparent, we nevertheless continually confront situations which are uncertain and opaque. This is especially so in the modern world, in which supralocal institutions and information mediated from afar allow the actions of unaccounted strangers beyond our face‐to‐face knowledge to affect us closely. One of the chief means we use to gain purchase in such situations is to document them, and documentary’s main technique is to move the at‐first‐unknown persons into an understandable narrative: hence the idea that some unknown others (“inchoate pronouns”) become understandable characters (“proper nouns”). This theory is elaborated through a journalistic documentation of the attack on the World Trade Center, a literary representation of the occupation of France during the Second World War, and an ethnographic depiction of current difficulties in East Germany.     

意识形态话语的纠缠与厘认——全球化视阈下新自由主义、普遍主义与历史主义的再考察

新自由主义的话语谱系是一种普遍主义的思维方法袁它凭借强权与意识形态的诱导袁推行所谓超越时