现代西方史家对奥古斯丁政治思想的解读

奥古斯丁在西方政治思想史上具有重要地位。围绕着“政治是否符合人的自然本性”这一命题 ,本文回溯了一个世纪以来西方学者对奥古斯丁政治观的阐释。总的来说 ,比较传统的解释相信奥古斯丁不认为政治符合人的自然本性 ,但 2 0世纪九十年代以来的新观点作了相反的解释。     

抗日战争时期的史家与史学

抗战时期,广大爱国史学工作者紧扣时代脉搏,以抗敌御侮为学术主旨,自觉为抗战提供历史借鉴、精神动力和智力支持,面向大众开展历史知识的普及教育,在抗日民族统一战线的旗帜之下展开思想交锋和学术争鸣;其学术活动在回应时代需求的同时,也使史学自身得到丰富和发展。     

Politicians versus Historians: Lord Avon's 'Appeasement Battle' against 'Lamentably, Appeasement-Minded' Historians

In retirement, Sir Anthony Eden, seeking to safeguard the anti-appeaserimage cultivated following his resignation as Neville Chamberlain'sForeign Secretary in 1938, proved extremely sensitive to theway in which his political career was presented in memoirs,biographies, and histories. Eden, who accepted the earldom ofAvon in 1961, saw himself as refighting old politcal battles,except that by the 1960s his attack was directed increasinglyagainst what he described as ‘lament-ably, appeasement-minded’history professors rather than former politicians. During 1966–7objections to Frederick Northedge's The Troubled Giant evenled him at one stage to consider legal action for defamationof character. The ensuing dispute, highlighting Lord Avon'spreoccupation with the verdict of history, illuminated alsothe varying, often conflicting, perspectives adopted towardsthe past by historians and politicians. ^*Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the BISA BritishInternational History Group Conference at the University ofExeter, September 1996, and the Millennium after 25 Years Conferenceat the LSE, October 1996. I am grateful to the Countess of Avon,the Marquess of Salisbury, the Borthwick Institute of HistoricalResearch at the University of York, the Master and Fellows ofChurchill College at Cambridge, and the Archivist of CarmarthenshireRecords Service at Carmarthen, for permission to quote fromthe papers of the first Earl of Avon, The Marquess of Salisbury,the Earls of Halifax, Lord Strang, and Viscount Cilcennin respectively.I am particularly indebted to Muriel Grieve, Professor Northedge'swidow, for assistance in my research and permission to quotefrom her husband's correspondence and publications, as wellas to Sir Bryan Cartledge, who helped Lord Avon with his memoirs.     

Historians and Their Duties

We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non‐natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of “accountability”. Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. This is not a duty shared with everybody, for the right to truth varies with the audience. Being a historian is essentially a matter of searching for historical knowledge as part of an obligation voluntarily undertaken to give truth to those who have a right to it. On a democratic understanding, people need and are entitled to an objective understanding of the historical processes in which they live. Factual knowledge and judgments of value are both required, whatever philosophical view we might have of the possibility of a principled distinction between them. Historians owe historical truth not only to the living but to the dead. Historians should judge when that is called for, but they should not distort historical facts. The rejection of postmodernism's moralism does not free historians from moral duties. Historians and moral philosophers alike are able to make dispassionate moral judgments, but those who feel untrained should be educated in moral understanding. We must ensure the moral and social responsibility of historical knowledge. As philosophers of history, we need a rational reconstruction of moral judgments in history to help with this.     

AnAnalysis of Political Conceptual Metaphors in American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

By relying on the conceptual metaphor theory,after analyzing all American presidential inaugural addresses,the political conceptual metaphors in these speeches are singled out and their political functions are scrutinized.This analysis lifts the veil covering how metaphor works in politics and practically it can be of great help to decipher American politics and cultures.     

The 1984 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Election Studies

This paper examines the role of leadership in the U.S. House in the context of arguments raised in Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government. It begins with a discussion of the speakerships of Henry Clay and Thomas Reed as counterexamples to Wilson's generalizations (a model that links the degree of preference homogeneity among legislative followers to a leader's decision about whether to exert policy leadership is presented in an Appendix). Next we argue that preference homogeneity, leadership style and institutional structure form a kind of equilibrium, drawing on the history of the House for supporting evidence. Finally we discuss the application of our theory to House Democrats in the 1980s.     

Teaching Political Science in China: Observations and Suggestions from a Foreign Visitor

Abstract

In responding to the other participants in the Symposium on Plato's Philosophers I attempt to clarify the reasons for, and the results of, my attempt to bring out the interrelations among the dialogues in order to determine what Plato thought. Recognizing that the indications of the dramatic dates of some the dialogues are controversial, I argue that the dates point to an over-arching narrative–the story of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. Plato uses his other philosophers—the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger—to bring out the problems that gave rise to Socratic philosophy and the limitations of his responses. Plato makes Socrates his “hero,” because Socrates provides the best account of the human beings who engage in the search for wisdom. By contrasting him with the other philosophers, Plato dramatizes the insoluble problems that make philosophy always a search for wisdom.     

Understanding French education: Historians versus sociologists

Demailly, L., Le Collège: Crise, mythes et métiers (Presse Universitaire de Lille, 1991), 373pp., 100F., ISBN 2 859 39383 8

Prost, A., Education, société et politique; une histoire de l'enseignement en France de 1945 à nos jours (Seuil, 1992), 240pp., 130F., ISBN 2 020 14157 4     

Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project

Most conventional oral history takes a bottom-up approach tothe past, focusing on settings where there is little in theway of a functional written record. This essay discusses thevalue of oral history in the opposite case of the American presidency.The written archive and journalistic record on each presidentis immense. Yet oral history is a valuable resource in thiselite environment, too. There are routine silences in even thebest of presidential papers, which oral history interviews canhelp fill. Moreover, the White House has become a workplacewhere recorded details can be hazardous to one's political health.Accordingly, few presidential aides today keep diaries or notesof key meetings—impoverishing the archive future historianswill use to study the presidency of our times. Oral historythus fortifies a weakening documentary record. This essay exploresthese broad issues and how they are being dealt with in theconduct of the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project.     

Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians

By focusing on the key book‐length studies of the Apollo program that landed American astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, this essay seeks to evaluate the historiography about Apollo in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, dividing the subject into five major areas. The first area is the foreign policy and public policy antecedents of Apollo and its immediate ramifications; some of these efforts have yielded significant studies. The second area involves the evolution of space hardware, in many instances these are overwhelmingly detailed studies of rockets and other space flight technologies. Third, there is a great fascination with the astronauts and their actual flights, and a rich tradition of memoir and narrative exists in this arena. The fourth area receiving attention from historians of Apollo and the lunar voyages emphasizes the history of science, in which much of the focus is on the scientists, scientific findings from the voyages of discovery, and the use of this evidence in developing larger theories about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Finally, and increasingly so in the last 20 years, the Apollo story has been recontextualized through social and cultural investigations of its meaning in modern America. Assessing the five major areas enumerated above, this essay also offers some possibly fruitful avenues of future research.