Freedom,Religion and the Making of the Modern State in Japan, 1868–89

This paper rethinks the article of religious freedom of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and calls into question the liberalist paradigm employed to understand the Constitution and modern Japanese history. In this liberalist framework, the Constitution manifests the peculiar and authoritarian nature of the pre-war Japanese state. In particular, the 28^th article, which provides for the conditional freedom of religious belief, is seen as no more than a cover for social control by the state. This paper examines the histories of the ideas of religion and freedom, and the religious freedom article, and argues that the most appropriate task is not to measure how much religious freedom the Meiji Constitution failed to guarantee against a de-historicised liberalism, but rather to consider the function of the very inclusion of religious freedom in the Constitution. I argue that the inclusion of religious freedom as a generic type of liberty in the Meiji Constitution was instrumental in the creation of the private modern individual as a subject-citizen. It is through this private individual citizen that the modern state as a public, secular authority was created.     

Venture and Faith in the Commercial Life of the Ottoman Balkans, 1500–1650

British America; Edward L. Cox     

Industrial suburbs and the growth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, 1870–1920

In 1907, the Pittsburgh Survey team recognized that dispersed industrial development had created a metropolitan area stretching 30 to 50 miles from downtown Pittsburgh. Traditional interpretations of metropolitan formation fail to account for the crucial role of industry in this process. Beginning in the 1870s, the transformation from small, craft organized factories to integrated mills, mass production, and modern management organization in steel and other industries led many manufacturers to search for large sites with railroad and river accessibility. They purchased land, designed modern plants, and sometimes built towns for workers. Other firms bought into new communities begun as speculative industrial real estate ventures. Some owners removed their plants from the city's labour politics to exert greater control over workers. The region's rugged topography and dispersed natural resources of coal and gas accentuated this dispersal. The rapid growth of steel, glass, railroad equipment and coke industries resulted in both large mass-production plants and numerous smaller firms. As capital deepened and interdependence grew, participants multiplied, economies accrued, the division of labour increased, and localized production systems formed around these industries. Transportation, capital, labour markets, and the division of labour in production bound the scattered industrial plants and communities into a sprawling metropolitan district. By 1910 the Pittsburgh district was a complex urban landscape with a dominant central city, surrounded by proximate residential communities, mill towns, satellite cities, and hundreds of mining towns.     

The idea of peace in the West, 500–1150

Most of the numerous peace traditions of the early middle ages developed within a framework of three dimensions: monastic, ecclesiastical, imperial. But after 1150 the equilibrium among these three views of peace became upset. The pax ecclesiae and the imperial peace were channeled into papal jurisdiction and the public peace of the lay powers. The monastic peace began to lose its influence upon society at large.     

Enlightenment,revolution and romanticism: the Genesis of modern German political thought, 1790–1800

A recent discovery of an exchange of letters between John Maynard Keynes and the Reverend Kenneth Rawlings from 1936 to 1944 shows the way in which Keynes assisted Rawlings in the establishment of permanent amateur theatre premises in the County Town of Lewes. The timing coincided with the onset of World War II, and additional letters from Rawlings to others including the town clerk, Lord Gage, Margeret Masterman and Major G. H. Powell-Edwards reveal the tensions between the ardent pacifist Rawlings and establishment figures as war approached. Steadied by Keynes and like-minded influential figures, Rawlings wins through triumphantly, the theatre effort viewed as an essential cultural asset during the dark war years. It is noted in the present article that Keynes could observe Rawlings enact what became an aim of the Council for the Encouragement of Music with the Arts, of which he became president soon after its conception in 1940—that of providing a theatre for every town in England.     

The dossettiani and the concept of the secular state in the constitutional debates: 1946–7

It is now generally accepted that the members of the Constituent Assembly who were charged with drafting the Constitution concentrated their efforts on formulating the ideals to be expressed in it at the expense of the institutional arrangements of the new Republic. This has generally been viewed as resulting from a combination of two factors: their weak grasp of the liberal principles underpinning liberal parliamentary democracy, and a concomitant error of judgement in assuming that sufficient stress on the ideals of the Constitution would guarantee the basis of a healthy democracy. This article sets out to examine the input of the most influential Catholic group, the dossettiani, and argues, against the error of judgement thesis, that in fact their rejection of the concept of the secular state was a more fundamental denial of important principles of a pluralist democracy than has usually been supposed. The article also places their contribution within the context of the Church's aim to create a ‘Christian civilization’, and further suggests that the model of Catholic Action which inspired its collateral vision of Catholic forces was corrosive of a pluralist vision of correct institutional arrangements. The article ends by suggesting that these factors may have weighed more heavily on subsequent distortions of Italian democracy than has so far been supposed.     

The culture of reconstruction,European literature,thought and film, 1945–1950

John Trenchard's and Thomas Gordon's ‘Cato’ has generally been seen by historians as the embodiment of neo-Harringtonianism and the polar opposite of Bernard Mandeville's thought. This paper addresses that misreading and places Trenchard and Gordon within a tradition of liberal republican political thought, rather than a civic humanist or neo-roman tradition. It examines the relationship between the political, philosophical and religious beliefs of Trenchard and Gordon and those of Mandeville, arguing that they shared a common framework with respect to the problems of politics.