WHAT,AT LONG LAST,IS HISTORICAL THEORY FOR? REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL THEORY IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

The term “post-truth” is a capacious trope that collects threats to the stability of shared knowledge on many fronts—digitally spread disinformation, ignorance and resistance to science, unabashed lies in the public sphere, mythologizing by resurgent nationalist forces, and so on. History is particularly vulnerable to this array. Post-truth threats to serious history produced to professional standards for research and reasoning by historians free of coercion, intimidation, or pressures for co-optation are too blatant to need explanation. Avenues of response to the politicizing of history have been protests by public intellectuals and academics and a growing scholarly literature recording the imposition of memory laws by the police powers of numerous states. Attacks on empirical history, and the academic freedom required to sustain it, provoke clear responses, but the situation of historical theory is more problematic. Historical theory is a superstructure of analysis that presupposes the free production of history that invites and justifies the cultural work of theorizing. Reading Karen S. Feldman's Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality, an erudite, philosophical contribution to historical theory advancing a severe critique of history's fundamental powers of representation against a widening background of nationalist state-sponsored policing of history, produced an acute cognitive dissonance in this reviewer. In this essay, I frankly acknowledge this dissonant experience and lay out some of the most egregious causes of it in history distorted and undermined to nationalist ends in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and beyond. I pose the question of whether the intellectual work of theorizing history can continue with any confidence when the ground on which theory stands is being eroded and distorted.     

CLASS OR COMMUNITY? MARX,THE RUSSIAN COMMUNE,AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY

This article explores the relationship between class and community through a discussion of peasant struggles and the commune during the Russian Revolution. Doing so, we show how Marx's class‐oriented reflections on community can help us to understand the role that the peasantry plays (or should play) in processes of social transformation. This enables us, first, to understand the relevance of communal forms for Marx, who believed that communitarian ways of life were crucial for overcoming a value‐based society. It is, in fact, a mistake to divide Marx's intellectual trajectory into two periods: a categorical Marx, who authored Capital and critically analyzed the classical theory of value, and a phenomenological, empirical Marx, who in the last years of his life abandoned writing Capital and focused instead on studying the Russian peasantry. Second, it enables us to discuss new externalist visions, such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, which postulate that the subordination of contemporary peasant communities is rooted in epistemology, culture, and local power relations. These theories are related to the old social‐democratic canon, which conceives of social classes as preconstituted entities and of capital as a parasitic externality that is incommensurable with social dynamics. The experience of the Russian peasantry calls into question all externalist and ontological perspectives.     

WITH OR AGAINST HAYDEN WHITE? REFLECTIONS ON THEORY OF HISTORY AND SUBJECT FORMATION

This article reflects on Hayden White's understanding of the subject and explores how best to move forward discussions in theory of history after his arguments about narrativity. To do so, I reconsider his arguments in light of more recent feminist and queer theorizations. Through a reconstruction of the current international new wave of feminism and LGBTQ+ activism as a rich and complex social movement that involves a narration of its own (practical) past, I will recontextualize and revaluate White's insight from the perspective of Judith Butler's theory of subject formation. The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I will recall White's ironic and existential stance on language and narrativity in the representation of reality and in relation to social beliefs. Second, I will again raise the question of the value of narrativity, as framed by White, in the context of the publication of a recent feminist manifesto. It is here that another issue will emerge as crucial: the relationship between the limits of linguistic self-consciousness and the question of the subject. In the third part, my argument will take a partial turn “against White” and toward Butler's subject formation theory. My claim will be that there is a residue of the belief in the sovereign individual in White's insistence on self-consciousness. However, I will also show that his suspicion regarding the psychological impulse toward narrative closure can be re-elaborated as the challenge Butler is facing with their theory of subject formation: that of critically resisting the belief in our being coherent and self-sufficient individuals. In the fourth part, I will present Butler's refiguration of the thesis of the subject's opacity in terms of the primary relationality that binds human beings to one another, and I will offer a new understanding of the individual, norms, agency, infancy, and ethics. Finally, I will conclude that we are bodies in history and that theory of history can find a promising line of research through this conception of the subject, a conception that reframes how we understand the intimate links between political consciousness, historicity, and embodiment. I also claim that this line of research constitutes an ethics for our historical undoing.     

A THEORY OF SHELTER: ICELAND’S AMERICAN PERIOD (1941–2006)

This article is predicated on the assumption that small states need economic, political and societal shelter in order to prosper, and applies this theory to the case of Iceland in the period 1941–2006 – from the American occupation of Iceland to the closure of the US military base in the country. The authors argue that Iceland enjoyed essential shelter, for its development and prosperity, from the United States. The US also provided extensive diplomatic and military backing to Iceland, and profoundly influenced societal affairs in the country. Furthermore, Iceland received extensive societal shelter from the Nordic states, and economic and political shelter from international organizations. However, American and Nordic shelter did not come without costs.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY ABOUT THINKING HISTORICALLY: IS HISTORICAL THEORY A HISTORICAL OR A METAHISTORICAL PRACTICE?

This intimidating and massive collection of twenty‐nine extended, diverse essays by distinguished scholars, organized around the general theme of the current state and future direction of historical theory, raises some fundamental questions about historical theory as practiced over the past half century as well as about the distinctive nature of historical theory within the broader context of the production of historical knowledge. The editors of the volume suggest that the postmodern linguistic turn in historical theory, especially as articulated by Hayden White and Michel Foucault, marked a decisive, epochal turning‐point in human historical self‐consciousness, the attainment of a mature stage of autonomous metahistorical reflection on the essential nature of what it means to be historical, on historicity per se. What came before is imagined as a series of preliminary stages, what came after as a working out of implications and consequences. I suggest that a close reading of the implicit and explicit arguments of the individual essays reveals a rather different kind of historical moment, one in which postmodern historical theory has increasingly been demystified of its alleged metahistorical status, and has emerged as a situated object of historical reflection and thus has itself become increasingly defined as historical, recognized in its particularity as a temporally and culturally framed form of historical knowledge.     

ARE EU COUNTRIES LESS INTEGRATED THAN U.S. STATES? THEORY AND EVIDENCE*

ABSTRACT A belief that EU integration is incomplete is often predicated on a comparison to U.S. states. Yet, with low barriers to trade and factor mobility between EU countries, is this belief correct? To address this question, we develop three theoretical predictions regarding the distribution of output and factors across members of an integrated economic area with harmonized policies and free movement of goods and factors. Empirical tests strongly support these predictions for U.S. states and 14 EU countries. Constructing a measure of integration, we find that EU integration rose from the 1960s to equal that of U.S. states by 2000.     

THE CONCEPTS OF “LI(礼)” AND “FA(法)” AS WELL AS THEIR LEGAL EXPRESSION IN ANCIENT CHINA AS SEEN IN THE EXCAVATED QIN AND HAN DOCUMENTS:A DISCUSSION OF THE THEORY OF THE CONFUCIANIZATION OF ANCIENT CHINESE LAW

<正>I.The problem of the relationship of li and fa in ancient Chinese law Because of differences in culture,an independent law system,the Chinese Law System,came into being with its differences from other law systems of the world,which are represented by the Continental Law System(also known as the Code Law System)and Anglo-American Law System(also known as the