Nuclear enlightenment and counter‐enlightenment

Given the apocalyptic nature of nuclear weapons, how can states establish an international order that ensures survival while allowing the weapons to be used in controlled ways to discourage great wars, and while allowing nuclear technology to dif use for civil purposes? How can the possession of nuclear weapons by a few states be reconciled with their renunciation by the majority of states? Which political strategies can best deliver an international nuclear order that is effective, legitimate and durable? These have been central questions in the nuclear age. This article suggests that the effort to construct such an order displayed the characteristics of an enlightenment project, with its emphasis on balance and rationality, the quest for justice and trust among states, the feasibility of instrumental regulation, and the attachment to hope and progress. With the Nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty at its heart, it necessarily gave precedence to diplomacy and containment over preventive war. The reasons why this conception of nuclear order was discarded by its erstwhile champion, the United States, in favour of one bearing traits of counter‐enlightenment, are explored. Its alternative strategy can now be declared a failure. Avoidance of a greater disorder depends on recognition that the problem of nuclear order is more than the problem of proliferation, or of non‐compliance, and on recovery—whatever the difficulties—of the cooperative yet pragmatic sensibility that lay behind the prior approach to order.     

Locke's enlightenment

Locke's Enlightenment: Aspects of the Origin, Nature and Impact of his Philosophy. By G.A.J. Rogers (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1998) xiv + 194 pp. DM 78.00, paper.     

The shifting context of academic geography in Canada

Academic geographers are working in a system in flux. A series of interconnecting and overlapping social, political, and economic processes have resulted in a shifting academic climate for geographers and geography departments. This viewpoint brings forward evidence from multiple areas of study to provide a synthesis of this changing context. Challenges to geography include the role of “facts” and “truth” in society, neoliberal university contexts as workplaces, and generational change, among many others. This paper asks more questions than it answers, with an aim to promote an engaged and informed debate among geographers about our “place” in Canada's shifting academic context.     

The chimera of national identity

ABSTRACT. In both popular discourse and many academic works, the existence of national identity is largely taken as given. Although researchers disagree on whether national identities are modern or perennial, and how best to gauge the intensity of identification with a particular nation, there is near unanimity on the view that national identities are real and perceptible entities. In contrast to this view I argue not only that there was no national identity before modernity but also that there is little empirical evidence for the existence of national identities in the modern age either. While it is obvious that many individuals show great affinity for their nations and often express sincere devotion to the ‘national cause’, none of these are reliable indicators of the existence of a durable, continuous, stable and monolithic entity called ‘national identity’. To fully understand the character of popular mobilisation in modernity it is paramount to refocus our attention from the slippery and non‐analytical idiom of ‘identity’ towards well‐established sociological concepts such as ‘ideology’ and ‘solidarity’. In particular, the central object of this research becomes the processes through which large‐scale social organisations successfully transform earnest micro‐solidarity into an all‐encompassing nationalist ideology.     

Communication in context

Dell Hymes. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. x + 245 pp. Tables, diagrams, bibliography, and index. $5.95 (paper).

Albert E. Scheflen. How Behavior Means: Exploring the Contexts of Speech and Meaning: Kinesics, Posture, Interaction, Setting, and Culture. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1974. xii + 222 pp. Figures, bibliography, and index. $2.50 (paper).