East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

Italy’s unification and its discontents: Giovanni Verga’s Cos’è il Re?

ABSTRACT

The article, ‘Italy’s Unification and its Discontents: Verga’s Cos’è il Re, focuses on the mental confusion of the protagonist, Cosimo, which becomes symptomatic of the southern rural masses’ disenfranchisement from the unification process. Verga’s political disillusion with the new state, for which he fought, comes to the fore, underlining how the Savoy kingdom’s constitution was no guarantee of a real improvement for the rural masses. Verga’s story contrasts the Savoy king, whose power is limited by the constitution, with the Bourbon Monarch’s Corpus Mysticum, as described by Ernest Kantorowicz, whose power is absolute, like that of Jesus Christ. The story denounces, then, the paradox that the Bourbon monarch, in his paternalistic governance, was better for the impoverished rural masses than the constitutional Savoy king. Moreover, Italy’s unification under the Savoy sovereign further developed a national discourse that systematically racialized Southerners because of their subaltern position within the nation.     

Robespierre's Éloge De Gresset: Sources of Robespierre's Anti‐Philosophe Discourse

One of the most important debates in the field of eighteenth‐century French intellectual history concerns the ideological significance of the rise of the cult of the Great Frenchmen. Taking this debate as a frame of reference, the paper attempts a close reading of Robespierre's Éloge de Gresset (written in 1784, published in 1785). Usually dismissed by Robespierre scholars, this text is, in fact, a very important document offering clues not only to Robespierre's intellectual formation, but also his appropriation of what he regarded as the official and conventional rhetoric of his age. These questions engage the larger debate regarding the origins of the French Revolution, in particular its ‘cultural origins’, and its intellectual origins, defined as the distillation of and interactions between competing representations of society and its relation to the public sphere. The thesis proposed is that Robespierre's eulogy of Gresset indicates that his anti‐philosophical ideas came from a much broader array of sources than previously believed. Among these sources, Gresset's 1740s–1750s polemics against the philosophes pointed the way towards the type of criticism of the Enlightenment that underpinned Robespierre's cultural revolutionary politics.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

Re-examining the Australian public's attitude to military casualties: post-heroic or defeat-phobic?

Australia, like most other developed democracies, is often alleged to suffer from ‘casualty phobia’. The perception that the Australian public will not tolerate casualties in foreign conflicts has shaped the decisions of both civilian and military policy makers. Measures taken to protect Australian forces from casualties may, for instance, also serve to increase the risk to civilians in the country to which they are deployed. The USA underwent a similar debate some years ago. Innovative public opinion research techniques—especially ‘survey experiments’ which allow researchers to establish causal relationships by consciously manipulating one variable while holding others constant—have established that the American public are not reflexively casualty-phobic and that the impact of casualties on public opinion can be outweighed by other factors, such as the public's confidence in the mission's overall success. In this article, the author replicates one of the key survey experiments from the US debate, suitably adapted to Australian conditions, with a nationally representative sample of Australian voters. The author finds that the same pattern holds in Australia as in the USA: casualties do lower public support for a given mission, but the mission's chances of success matter more.     

Women and the Public Sphere

In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds drew not on one, but on multiple, contrasts. However, recognising such variations does not necessarily provide us with new analytical tools. This article examines some of the ways in which twentieth-century commentators have attempted to categorise these contrasts. In particular the article critically engages with Habermas's definition of the public sphere and suggests the advantages and disadvantages of using his notion through a discussion of the relationship of the British women's suffrage movement to the debate over citizenship in the 1860s.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

Critiquing the heteronormativity of the banal citizen in New Zealand's mediated civil union debate

This article extends Billig's (1995) landmark thesis on banal nationalism by considering how processes of national deixis circumscribe the boundaries of citizenship and forms of belonging within nation-states. Drawing on critical analyses of sexual citizenship, the article provides a discursive analysis of the debate over civil union in the New Zealand mainstream press during 2004–2005. It argues that this mediated debate represented an historical moment where the routine deictic flagging of the nation, and the correlated flagging of the ‘banal citizen’, fundamentally broke down, thereby allowing this unmarked and ‘ordinary’ process to be systematically examined. Four major discourses are identified in press coverage: ‘Homosexual’ subjects as abnormal and disordered, tolerance, equality and human rights, the sanctity of marriage and the preservation of the family (and the social order). Although the passing of the Civil Union Act does mark a (faltering) step forward in sexual equality, we argue that the presence of these discourses suggests that forms of both ontological and cultural heterosexism persist in New Zealand society. Despite the Act conferring new legal rights, ultimately we conclude that the four discourses act to restrict the extent to which ‘homosexual’ subjects are considered ‘valid’ and ‘legitimate’ citizens. In continuing to structure the public politics of sexual citizenship in New Zealand, these discourses have influenced recent debates over legislative moves towards ‘marriage equality’ in ways that raise concerns over the continuation of heterosexist norms, as well as exclusionary forms of homo-nationalism. More generally, this research demonstrates the effectiveness of Billig's work as a valuable and productive analytic lens to explicate concerns over the exclusionary nature of citizenship itself.     

Howard's way? Public opinion as an influence on Australia's engagement with Asia, 1996–2007

Using the typology developed by Douglas Foyle, this article argues that John Howard behaved as a ‘pragmatist’ in dealing with situations where public opinion was relevant to Australia's engagement with Asia. Howard adhered to his own views on the relevant issues while attempting to lead public opinion in the direction he believed desirable. During the 1996–2007 period the most relevant issues relating to the impact of public opinion on Australia's Asian engagement were Australia's relations with Indonesia and Asian immigration. In the case of Australian–Indonesian relations the Howard government had to deal with various situations where an activated public opinion threatened to undermine the long term Australian approach that gave primacy to Indonesian concerns. Political leadership entailed developing a response that the government believed to be appropriate to Australia's long term objectives, while also attempting to persuade the public that this was the case. In the second instance policy developed in a more ‘deliberative’ context: Howard modified his earlier stance that was critical of Asian immigration, but continued to adhere to a strongly ‘integrationist’ position. This position was consistent with both his own views and his perception of public attitudes on the matter.     

Hawaiian health and the filibuster of Walter Murray Gibson

ABSTRACT

Scholars know Hawai‘i’s “minister of everything” as an upstart who rose to prominence by defending Hawaiian sovereignty. Few have noticed that Walter Murray Gibson’s influence stemmed from a paternalistic campaign to improve Islander health and expand the labor force for an emerging plantation complex. Improbably, public health presented Gibson, an excommunicated Mormon missionary, with a platform to pursue his lifelong dream of ruling a Pacific empire. This article explores the entangled issues of health, labor, and empire amid disparate and unpredictable colonial incursions in the Hawaiian Islands after 1860.     

Do ‘in vitro children’ exist? The ‘ontological choreography’ between public debates and private experiences in Poland

ABSTRACT

Children who were born used IVF in Poland are subject of vivid discussion nowadays. In this article, we probe the ontology of the in vitro child: do in vitro children exist? If so, how and where? We analyse how an ‘IVF child’ is constructed through public discourses and private narratives. We explore media publications, as well as doctors’ and parents’ narratives concerning IVF children. A very strong voice in the debate has Catholic Church, which opposes medically assisted reproduction. Our main interest in this text are the answers of children and adults born using in vitro. Even young children recognize some focal points from the debate over assisted reproduction and refer to them. Their narratives show that they feel interpellated into existence by various discourses. In this manner, we argue, being an ‘in vitro child’ in Poland is a political status, not a biological one.     

New idols: Catholicism in the face of Fascist totalitarianism

Abstract

This article explores the attitudes of the Vatican and Catholic culture towards Fascism and Fascism's political religion during the pontificate of Pius XI, in the context of the Catholic church's rejection of modernity as a new epoch of paganism that took the form of political mysticism. It shows that despite the Concordat of 1929, the papacy reacted with growing alarm to the Fascist regime's ‘sacralization of politics’ that threatened to make Catholic religion a handmaid of the totalitarian state.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

National identity in Northern Ireland: stability or change?

ABSTRACT. This article addresses a set of fundamental, long‐term factors associated with the Northern Ireland conflict: the pattern of underlying values and attitudes, especially those related to identity, that have helped to shape the nature of intercommunal competition. Using all generally available public opinion data, the article explores in particular the nature of national identity and of related forms of belonging for political behaviour. It notes the mutually reinforcing character of political loyalties within the Protestant community (where national identity, communal affiliation, constitutional preference and party support tend to coincide in a ‘Protestant‐unionist’ package) and the failure of this to be matched within the Catholic community (where the components of the ‘Catholic‐nationalist’ package are less closely interrelated). It concludes by speculating about the implications of these value configurations for political development, suggesting that they are unlikely to contribute to any fundamental political change in Northern Ireland in the short or medium term.     

An Essay on the Context and Formation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Thought

SUMMARY

This essay combines the study of Humboldt's sources with a critique of the treatment of this subject in most studies of Humboldt and his linguistic thought. One crucial issue is the date of his early ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, which is our first evidence of his mature thinking about language. This text is conventionally dated 1795, thus ruling out that Humboldt might be indebted to the anthropo-linguistic philosophy that he explored in Paris a few years later. But a host of facts make the date untenable and the debt unquestionable, including incontrovertible evidence that ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ relies on Condillac's argument for the anti-idealist principle that the distinction between subject and object is the absolute precondition for self-awareness and reflection, and thus, by the same token, for the concept of Weltansicht. ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ also shows that Humboldt was inspired to choose Condillac's and Destutt de Tracy's argument over that of Fichte for what Berkeley disapprovingly called ‘outness’. This analysis exemplifies the critique that is advanced in this essay.     

Italian identity: Catholic responses to secularist definitions,c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.     

After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space

School children's use of their home during the after-school hours has become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two different sets of empirical data: children's accounts of their after-school spaces and media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children's accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension of children's ‘proper places’.     

Collingwood's New Leviathan and classical elite theory

R. G. Collingwood's New Leviathan (1942) presents an account of two ‘dialectical’ political processes that are ongoing in any body politic. Existing scholarship has already covered the first: a dialectic between a ‘social’ and a ‘non-social’ element, which Collingwood identifies in Hobbes. This essay elucidates a second: a dialectic between Liberals and Conservatives, which regulates the ‘percolation’ of liberty and the rate of recruitment into what Collingwood calls ‘the ruling class’. The details of this second dialectic are to be found not in Hobbes, but in the work of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, yet Collingwood's connections to these fathers of ‘classical elite theory’ have not previously been discussed.