Qian Mu’s Guoshi dagang : Reflections on a Modern Chinese Conservative

This paper examines the predicament of modern Chinese conservatism. I use the eminent historian Qian Mu (1895-1990) as an example to show that under the influence of modernity and in an effort to preserve tradition, a prominent conservative like Qian needed to “modernize” Chinese tradition so that it could be saved. I will examine Qian’s reconstruction of Chinese history, which was not just a reiteration of China’s past, but a new type of understanding of Chinese tradition influenced by modern Western concepts. By focusing on Qian’s most prominent work, Guoshi dagang, we can get a sense of the struggle of modern Chinese conservatives as they tried to fend off the detractors of Chinese tradition.     

Post-Enlightenment sources of political authority: Biblical atheism, political theology and the Schmitt-Strauss exchange

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

The vanity of dogmatizing: The three ‘versions’

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

The interweaving of sacred and secular: metaphysics,reform and enlightenment in the rivalry between Dom Deschamps and Claude Yvon, 1769–1774

ABSTRACT

The Benedictine Dom Léger-Marie Deschamps and the philosophical Abbé Claude Yvon may indeed be minor eighteenth-century figures, and they both may be considered to have emerged from the Catholic side of something Helena Rosenblatt has dubbed the Christian Enlightenment, but neither of these figures is neatly “conservative” (as Mark Curran defines it), nor are they fully “radical” (in the sense of having contributed to the Radical Enlightenment). Rather, Deschamps and Yvon are among a number of eighteenth-century figures who do not fit neatly into the expected parameters of Catholic, Christian, Religious or Radical Enlightenment. This article argues that the entanglement of both heterodoxy and orthodoxy, and of sociopolitical progressivism and conservatism, is characteristic of Yvon’s and Deschamps’s particular engagement with what Vincenzo Ferrone describes as the cultural revolution of the eighteenth century. This study of these under-examined Catholic scholars further suggests that conventional and tidy scholarly narratives of the history of Enlightenment should be further problematized.     

Religion and the Enlightenment: A Review Essay

Recent studies of the Enlightenment suggest that its relationto religion is far more complex than a simple process of increasingsecularization. The book by Sheehan shows, by examining translationsof the Bible into English and German in the Enlightenment, howreligion was reshaped, leading eventually to the dogma-freeChristianity proposed by Matthew Arnold. Israel's book arguesthat alongside the relatively cautious mainstream Enlightenmentthere was always a radical Enlightenment, heavily indebted toSpinoza, that was rationalist, atheist, and libertarian, andanticipated the dominant liberal values of the present day.Neither of these important studies, however, considers two areasthat remain under-researched: the popular Enlightenment (‘Volksaufklärung’),that is to say, the diffusion of Enlightenment thought amonguneducated people; and the Catholic Enlightenment which flourishedparticularly in Italy, Austria, and south Germany.     

The French Enlightenment attempts to create a philosophy without reason: the case of Diderot and the effect of Helvétius

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity.     

传统图书馆与数字图书馆的关系

数字图书馆是传统图书馆未来发展的方向,但不是唯一的发展模式。     

析20世纪60年代美国保守主义

"60年代"和"保守主义"是学术界关注的两个话题.按照学者们的传统看法,60年代是以激进为时代特征,与"保守主义"无涉.本文展示了保守主义在60年代美国社会运动中所扮演的重要角色.不过,本文更想强调的是,60年代的保守主义也带有鲜明的时代特征,具有与其自身逻辑明显不符的极端性和激进性.本文力图揭示这一悖论,并且认为,应将"60年代"和"保守主义"二者有机结合起来,进而得出有关这两个课题的较为全面和多维的认识.     

略论19世纪上半期德国社会三大思潮

19世纪上半期,自由主义、民族主义、保守主义等三大思潮影响着德国社会的发展。自由主义在德国表现出温和、保守和依赖国家政权的特点;民族主义首先是资产阶级化的知识分子的运动,呈现浓烈的文化色彩;保守主义则以传统、秩序和稳定为原则,展开了与自由主义、民族主义等要求改变现状者的对抗。三大思潮对日后德国历史的走向产生了重要影响。     

‘History Has Begun a New Chapter’: US Political-Opinion Journals and the Outbreak of the Korean War

In the pages of the United States’ leading political-opinion journals, different ideological camps had very different answers to the issues raised by the outbreak of war in Korea in the summer of 1950. Left liberals placed a great deal of blame for the outbreak of war on South Korean President Syngman Rhee, while conservatives and hawkish liberals used the occasion to lambast President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson. Hawkish liberals welcomed the possibility of a global showdown with Communism, while conservatives disapproved of US intervention in Korea for reasons both political and constitutional. In sum, the debate that dominated the pages of US opinion journals in the first weeks and months of the Korean War was both heated and robust, and exposes the ideological fault lines of the early cold war. To wit, hawkish liberals held positions that anticipated the birth of neoconservatism some two decades later. And conservative voices utilised their newfound platforms in The Freeman and The American Mercury to attack the Truman administration on a whole host of foreign-policy issues, revealing in greater detail than has previously been shown the role that international affairs played in the birth of the New American Right.     

试析英美保守主义的异同

英美保守主义具有同源性,都维护传统,坚持宪政,反对极端主义,与自由主义共同构成其社会的主流意识形态。但二战后情况有所变化,美国保守主义者反对新政以来的自由主义,具有越来越明显的极端主义倾向,并自20世纪80年代开始左右着美国的对外政策,给世界带来了某种不稳定因素。     

帝俄藏学的历史与成就

18世纪任职于彼得堡皇家科学院的德国学者搜集到了俄国第一批藏文文献 ,并进行了初步的描述和翻译。 19世纪上半期 ,施密特、比丘林等人的翻译和著述活动使俄国藏学赢得了与欧洲藏学比肩而立的地位。而瓦西里耶夫、卡法罗夫、齐比科夫、谢尔巴茨科伊等学者在 19世纪下半期和 2 0世纪初期将俄国藏学推向新的高度。     

自下而上:罗伯特·达恩顿的法国启蒙运动研究

通过挖掘鲜为人知的档案材料并借鉴社会学家布迪厄的“文学场”理论,罗伯特.达恩顿形成了研究法国启蒙运动的独特路径——“观念的社会史”。此种研究方法将思想史与社会史相结合,力图在社会的网络结构中追踪思想观念的传播。达恩顿认为,被研究者忽视的下层文人和地下出版物是启蒙精神与革命意识形态向社会渗透的重要载体。通过考察格拉布街文人的悲惨境遇与激进思想,勾勒传播畅销禁书的文化与社会环境,他实现了自下而上的启蒙运动研究,并重新阐释了启蒙与革命的关联。达恩顿史学对18世纪法国的思想、文化史研究影响深远,但同时也因其解释框架排除了著名哲人与经典文本而遭受批评。     

Enlightenment and Prophecy: The Jews and Neo-Hellenic Nationalism

ABSTRACT

Even before the rise of nationalism and its counterpart anti-Semitism sensu stricto, anti-Judaic prejudices and stereotypes were widespread in the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. These attitudes arose mainly from the commercial antagonism between the Christian and Jewish communities during the crisis that beset the empire from the seventeenth century onward. To examine these attitudes more closely, this article first focuses on the extreme anti-Judaic discourse in the sermons of eighteenth-century Father Cosmas Aitolos (Cosmas of Aetolia; d. 1779), an itinerant monk, who was canonized in 1961. It then turns to Rhigas Velestinlis’s enlightened vision of a tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-religious republic, which gradually replaced the Sultan’s oriental despotism, in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians were to be equal citizens. But this vision sank into oblivion, as the aspiration to national independence and to ethnical homogeneity prevailed in Greece, as well as everywhere in the Balkans. Although the early advocates of enlightened Greek nationalism embraced the language of citizenship and emancipation, they excluded from it the proviso of multi-ethnicity. Accordingly, they perceived the “Jewish Question” as one of gradually integrating a “foreign” religious minority into the Greek nation by “re-educating them in the values of Hellenism,” in the words of Adamandios Korais (1748–1833), and according them full citizenship only in the generations to come. All three distinctive attitudes towards the Jews are traceable in subsequent ideological trends and conflicts in Modern Greece.