What can the concept of friendship contribute to the study of national identity?

ABSTRACT. This article argues that understanding national identity requires a reappraisal of friendship as a political sentiment. Although studies of nationalism underscored the transformation of face‐to‐face interactions into ties between ‘distant others,’ they failed to acknowledge how sentiments of friendship may be involved. First, following theorising in political philosophy, the Aristotelian paradigm of civic friendship is conceptually applicable to modern civil society based on characteristics such as volition, commitment and sentiment. Second, feminist scholarship has delineated how an implicit discourse of male fraternity underlies the historical realisations of the modern social contract and mediates the notions of both patriotism and nationalism. Finally, networks of male associations and transformations in collective affection from small settings to large‐scale societies contributed to the magnification of a politics of friendship. Consequently, rather than viewing fraternal friendship as a relic of traditional societies, it should be studied as a unique aspect of modern nationalism.     

American education‐the image in the mirror

Solon T. Kimball. Culture and the Educative Process: An Anthropological Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press, 1974. x + 285 pp. $10.00 (cloth).

George D. Spindler, ed. Education and Cultural Process: Toward an Anthropology of Education. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. xii + 559 pp. Tables, figures, appendixes and indexes. $6.95 (paper).     

Max Mara and the origins of Italian ready‐to‐wear

This article charts the establishment and expansion of the ready‐to‐wear Max Mara label before the birth of the Max Mara group in 1967. Until recently, little consideration has been given to the evolution of Italian fashion, and few histories of dress or Italian culture even mention its presence before the 1970s. Still fewer acknowledge the crucial emergence of fashionable ready‐to‐wear in Italy in the 1960s, in which Max Mara played a key role, and which anticipated the international success of ‘Italian style’ in the 1970s and 1980s.     

A Leading Arsenal of Democracy: American Rearmament and the Continental Integration of the Canadian Aircraft Industry, 1948–1953

This article shows how the Royal Navy under the leadership of John Fisher exploited the British Consular system in Germany and Denmark to obtain both open-source and covert intelligence between 1906 and 1914. This structure was initially constructed with the tacit support of the Foreign Office, replacing an earlier intelligence network in France and Russia. The intelligence collected by the consuls reflected the Royal Navy's strategic priorities at the time. The most important subject concerned German coastal defences, a detailed knowledge of which was essential for the Admiralty's offensive littoral strategy. From 1908 Charles Hardinge attempted to restrict the Admiralty's use of its Consular Officers for intelligence purposes, with limited success. The consuls continued to provide essential intelligence for the Royal Navy up until the outbreak of war.