MIT architecture and values: Gehry’s Stata and Holl’s Simmons

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 initiated a billion dollar building program featuring buildings by world‐renowned architects, including Frank Gehry and Steven Holl. Gehry’s Stata Center, which houses computer scientists, and Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitory raise questions about the relationship of architecture to MIT’s values. Many MIT faculty, students, and administrators celebrate Gehry’s Stata and Holl’s Simmons as expressing the inventiveness, energy, and excellence of the people within them and as moving the campus into the twenty‐first century. Others ask if MIT has lost its way by choosing elite, costly buildings at an institution historically characterized by utilitarian and functional values.     

Progress,decline and redemption: understanding war and imagining Europe, 1870s–1890s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which ideas of and discourses about Europe were influenced by some readings of war and war violence from the 1870s to the 1890s. This aim is pursued by considering the dichotomy progress/decadence, a crucial opposition for grasping images and notions of Europe as well as interpretations of warfare violence. The article focuses on the works of Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the young Paul Valéry at a time when, in intellectual and academic circles, there was an increasing fear of European decadence and degeneration.     

The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy

This essay reviews a new history by Lucia Ceci of Italo-Vatican relations during the Fascist period, and evaluates its contribution to the vast but often polemical literature on the subject of Church–state relations in modern Italy. Ceci offers a detailed, sophisticated analysis that focuses specifically on leadership and decision-making in the Fascist regime and the Vatican respectively. Her argument that the Vatican’s relations with Fascist Italy were conditioned by a strategic choice to maintain diplomatic relations in exchange for autonomy in the state and civil society, while compelling, makes some contradictory and unconvincing claims. Ultimately, what is needed is a conceptual framework that can account for the complex reality of a relationship characterized by points of mutual interest and complementarity but also fundamental disagreement and open conflict.     

Hegel’s Philosophy and Common Sense

Although, as many scholars have noted, Hegel appears to dismiss common sense, I argue that his claim that speculative philosophy can provide the rational ground for what is implicit in ordinary consciousness amounts to a critical vindication of common sense. Hegel’s attitude to common sense/ordinary consciousness is thus more complex and intriguing than either the longstanding consensus on his dismissal of and disdain for common sense, or the McDowellian attempt to ally Hegel’s position with later-Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy. Hegel’s critique of ordinary consciousness, I conclude, should be read as a nuanced philosophical vindication of common sense.     

Republican patriotism and Machiavelli’s patriotism

The theories of republican patriotism, especially articulated by Maurizio Viroli, promote Machiavelli's patriotism as the archetype of patriotism without nationalism. The upshot is that in Machiavelli's republicanism, the ideal of liberty as non-domination cultivates moral obligations towards humanity. Rather than engaging in debates on the tension between republican liberty and republican imperialism in Machiavelli's writings, this article tackles this interpretation with textual evidences that shed light on Machiavelli's patriotism prone to the same problems as those Maurizio Viroli sees in nationalism. More specifically, I argue that Machiavelli's patriotic aspiration neglects the role of regulative principle in guarding patriotic loyalty from degenerating into collective selfishness.     

Between ideology and pragmatism: the ČSSR,the GDR and West European companies in the 1970s and 1980s

The article deals with Czechoslovakia's and East Germany's relations with West European enterprises and private businessmen in the 1970s and 1980s, and explores more specifically their licensing agreements and credit policy. The author shows their importance for technological modernisation and the realisation of so-called consumer socialism in both countries. It focuses on the political and business elites of both countries, and devotes special attention to the question of the ideological versus technocratic approach of the politicians and company directors as well as their impact on economic planning.     

Pilote ‘hebdomadaire’ and the Teenager Bande Dessinée of the 1950s and 1960s

Launched in 1959, Pilote magazine was an original bande dessinée publication. Unlike most other magazines read predominantly by children, Pilote's unique collaboration with Radio Luxembourg facilitated its recruitment of ‘teenager’ readers captivated by the transistor craze that had rejuvenated radio by the end of the decade. The magazine also sought to endear itself to parents and the increasingly powerful educationalist lobby by adopting a sober pedagogical profile both in strips and accompanying textual content. Pilote thus sourced a new category of BD reader in the school-going teenager and, as the 1960s progressed, the volatile tastes and radicalisation of this category of reader necessitated a near ceaseless revision of the magazine's content to enable it to maintain market share. This article concerns itself with Pilote's struggle to align itself with dissident youth discourse of the 1950s and 1960s and analyses the socio-cultural impetus for thematic departures in bande dessinée it published.     

María Zambrano’s and Albert Camus’s communal ethics

ABSTRACT

Maria Zambrano and Albert Camus had much in common, especially their sympathy for the Second Spanish Republic and their ethical vision. Both intellectuals employed literary forms to explore philosophical ideas allegorically, explicitly notions related to exile and solitude. Works included in the study are ‘Delirio de Antigone,’ La tumba de Antigone, and Delirio y destino [Delirum and Destiny] by Zambrano and The Plague and The Myth of Sysifus by Camus. Zambrano’s works are interpreted as allegories of Franco’s Spain, while Camus’s novel and essay represent Vichy France under the Nazis. Like Camus, Zambrano was a master of blending political, philosophical, and literary themes and genres.     

Islamism and Iran’s Islamic Period Museum

The Islamic Period Museum of Iran was established, almost 16 years after the Islamic Revolution, as an addition to the previous National Museum building – the Iran Bastan, or Ancient Iran Museum – in 1996. By examining the components of state Islamism, the space of the museum and key exhibits, this paper reveals the analogous relationship between the museum and state ideology. That relationship suggests that the museum embodies fundamental ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in Iranian state Islamism. Those ambiguities and inconsistencies are only concealed, in the museum as in the ideology, by employing traditionalist rhetoric with regard to religion and identity.     

Manent and Perreau-Saussine on MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism

This essay examines Pierre Manent’s and Émile Perreau-Saussine’s critique of Alasdair MacIntyre. Both criticize MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism as an apolitical Aristotelianism, arguing that it is a deficient because it neglects Aristotle’s question of the best regime. In examining MacIntyre’s narrative biography of Justice O’Connor in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, I show the merit of this critique, in that it obscures what the applications of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism are in the modern polity. While MacIntyre is not without a strong reply to their objections, I conclude that the deeper, unresolved disagreement MacIntyre has with Manent and Perreau-Saussine is over how to characterize modernity.     

Collective Biography and Europe’s Cultural Legacy

From the 1990s onwards there has been growing interest in the study of biography. As opposed to those who are skeptical of the biographical method, we defend the historiographical importance of collective biographies by contrasting them with biographical collections. By discussing the historical background of biography as a branch of history, and by focusing on the aims, methodology and outcomes of collective biographies, we attempt to show how they both extend and deepen our concept of historical research.