On Younghusband, the Last Great Imperial Adventurer by Patrick French

For years,I have been longing to write a reactionto the book entitled Younghusband,the Last GreatImperial Adventurer.Patrick French,the author of this book,is not aTibetologist but in 1994,Harper Collins published hisbook Younghusband,the Last Great ImperialAdventurer.Soon after that,two different Chinesetranslations came out-both in China and overseas(Zheng Minghua is the translator of the former,veryslightly abridged into one volume,and XinjiangPeople's Publishing House,2000,Urumqi).In 1999,Marco Polo Cultural Career Stock Ltd.published thesecond version in two volumes.     

Don Isaac Abravanel and Leonardo Bruni: A Literary and Philosophical Confrontation

Abstract

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the first Jewish thinkers to express republican positions, yet very little is known about his knowledge of humanistic republican conceptions. Had he read Leonardo Bruni’s republican writings? Had he even heard of them? In this essay I attempt to address this philological gap by comparing Abravanel’s republican commentary on 1 Samuel 8 with Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae Urbis, especially the motif of the plea to God to authorize a political regime. This comparison is particularly useful for illuminating their respective positions on republicanism, their shared interests and conceptions, as well as their divergent attitudes to their own political and historical environment. This divergence, I argue, sheds light on the early modern Christian and Jewish receptions of ancient republicanism.     

Isaac Sherman and the trials of gilded age liberalism

Isaac Sherman (1817-81) was a self-made New York merchant and financier. Originally a Barnburner Jacksonian Democrat, he became a Free Soiler and in 1856 a campaign manager for Republican John C. Fremont. An influential Unionist, Sherman subsequently became a self-taught expert on railroad finance, currency, and local and state taxation. This article draws upon the Sherman papers recently acquired by the Huntington Library to offer an interpretive biography of this hitherto obscure but important railroad financier and laissez-faire ideologue. Sherman's activities show the personal and intellectual connections between the Equal Rights and Free Labor ideologies of the pre-war years and the Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism of the post-war period. They also reveal the anxieties of the haute bourgeoisie of the Gilded Age, and the legal stratagems used by Sherman and others to return the United States to the gold standard and overturn the Federal income tax. Finally, Sherman's proposals for local and state tax reform, conterminous with and similar to those of Henry George, reveal the limits of classical liberalism in both its laissez-faire and utopian forms.     

Crisis in consciousness: The thought of Ernst Troeltsch

This article examines the ‘revolutionary liberal’ outlook expounded by the young Italian journalist and intellectual, Piero Gobetti, immediately following the First World War. It considers the historical evolution of his ‘agonistic’ liberalism according to which conflict rather than consensus serves as the basis of social and political renewal. The article traces the formation of Gobetti's thought from his idealist response to the crisis of the liberal state through to his endorsement of the communist revolutionaries in Turin and his denunciation of fascism as the continuation of Italy's failed tradition of compromise. Whilst Gobetti's views presently resonate with a growing interest in the agonistic dimension of politics, it is argued that his elitism and his understanding of liberalism as a ‘civic religion’ reveal challenging tensions in his thought.     

Cultivating the cosmos: spaceflight thought in Imperial Germany

Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919–1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred.