Before marx: Socialism and communism in France, 1830–1848

Edmund Husserl devoted much attention to the analysis of internal time consciousness beginning as early as the turn of the twentieth-century. His various notes and lectures were left unorganized and unpublished until Husserl's capable assistants were given the responsibility of organizing his work for publication. This paper provides a social and philosophical account of the redaction of Husserl's materials on time consciousness as it involved the activity of his famous assistants Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden and Martin Heidegger. Special attention is given to the way that both Stein and Heidegger appropriated Husserl's work and at the same time challenged fundamental elements of the master's phenomenology.     

Anti-Politics: modern politics and its critics in Denmark, 1830–1848

The rapid politicization of the public sphere in Denmark between the two European revolutionary waves of 1830 and 1848 created not only enthusiasm, but also sharp criticism of institutionalized and segmented politics as inherently alienating and inauthentic. Such anti-political criticism was expressed from a range of different positions: philosophical, poetical, religious and social. This article maps and analyses the conflicting subject positions from which anti-political criticism was articulated as well as the different spatio-temporal delimitations and modalities of politics within each position.     

The “new” social history and the anthropological history of modern Mexico

Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. xvii + 425 pp. including appendices, bibliography, and index. $42.50 cloth.

Beezley, William H. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ix + 181 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $19.95 cloth.     

The English Interpreters in Dahomey, 1843–1852

ABSTRACT

Commercial and diplomatic relations between Africans and Europeans in West Africa in the pre-colonial period depended on the existence of persons who had sufficient knowledge of both European and African languages to be able to act as interpreters between the parties, and such persons were more usually Africans than Europeans. This article collates biographical information on four persons who served as interpreters to successive British visitors to the kingdom of Dahomey between 1843 and 1852, including official government missions seeking to persuade the Dahomian king to cooperate in the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. The lives of such men may be thought of as involving the ‘transcending’ of ‘boundaries’, not only in acting as brokers in contacts between Africans and Europeans, but also in themselves occupying an ambiguous liminal position between the two. In their role as interpreters, they were subject to contradictory pressures, from the Dahomian state and the various European interests involved in the negotiations, and at the same time sought to advance their own personal interests. Beyond the intrinsic interest of these biographies, this article is conceived as a methodological exploration of the possibility of extracting an African voice and perspective from mainly European sources.