Strukturwandel der Wissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus

National Socialism brought about profound changes for the German academic system. Forced emigration not just sent outstanding scholars into exile, thus closing down promising research venues. In fact, it changed the entire climate of scientific inquiry by removing intellectual outsiders from the scene, whose absence usually precludes any success of innovative research. In most disciplines this led to a dominance of just a few academic ‘schools’ and paradigms, which severely harmed intra‐discipline accountability and innovation. The academic bureaucracy worked more effectively than has been assumed for a long time: practice‐oriented research enjoyed massive state support, and huge research projects outside the universities flourished. At the same time the National Socialists looked ambivalently at the universities themselves. They savored the legitimizing functions of the arts and sciences, and yet they distrusted the professors as exponents of the bourgeois world of old. Contrary to the blooming sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics, the arts and humanities had a hard time demonstrating their practical applicability. In order to prove their worth by means of giving advice to the political sphere, they formed interdisciplinary combines, which were massively funded by the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’. The ‘Deutsche Wissenschaft’, which has been incorrectly marginalized in numerous accounts, served in part to provide a Weltanschauung justification for these networks. While the German academic community in 1945 tried to pick up the threads of the a‐political self‐ understanding of the 1920s, in fact there were numerous continuities to academic life before and after 1945. Among them were the encompassing loss of international contacts, the strengthening of hierarchical structures, and the importance of feasibility criteria for the culture of innovation. The arts and humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) could not regain the lost territory of significance, which they had suffered during the Third Reich. It is mainly their development which showed an amazing persistence of national socialist patterns of view and of concepts of the enemy, which in turn as late as 1968 inspired in part the anti‐bourgeois thrust of the critique of the academic world.     

Identity and socio-economic mobility in Venetian Crete: the evolution of a citizen family (sixteenth century)

This study focuses on the socio-economic dynamics in Crete under Venetian rule, particularly in the sixteenth century, a critical period for the power of the Republic of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. There is an attempt to approach these processes by examining the evolution of a Cretan family named Episcopopulo, which originated from the middle social stratum, the so-called cittadini (citizens). The essay tries, after outlining the socio-political characteristics of the intermediate social group, to illuminate aspects of the history of this family, who strove to find its way in an environment marked by fermentations and changes in the political, financial, ideological and social field. The study, among other things, examines the various professional activities of the family members and the practices they utilized to achieve a decisive improvement in their financial status. It also highlights the strategies they employed to their rise in the social hierarchy, as well as their persistent efforts, after acquiring a title of nobility, to retain and increase their wealth and to enhance their role in the public sphere.     

Bibliometric Indicators of the Scholarly Productivity of Researchers and Scientists in Kuwait as Documented by Citation to Their Published Works

The study uses the bibliometric method of research to examine the productivity of academic scientists and re searchers in Kuwait. The Institute for Scientific Information's Arts and Humanities Index, Social Science Index, and Science Citation Index are surveyed to gather the data by department and year from 1986 through 1995. Analysis of Kuwaiti cited papers show the majority of journals (35%) which cited Kuwaiti institutions are published in the U.S. Analysis of the papers published in 1994 revealed that Kuwaiti's participation in the international scientific literature is higher than those of their colleagues from Morocco or Egypt. The data is discussed in light of theories of bibliometrics and the Bradford Law of Scattering.     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

Methodologically Becoming: Power,knowledge and team research

This article explores the path of methodological and epistemological negotiation travelled by a team of four geographers conducting research among people with transnational connections between northern New Jersey and El Salvador. Having illustrated that all data are contextual, feminist scholars have explored the power relations in which data collection is embedded in order to situate knowledge. The relationship between the dynamics of research teams and the broader political struggles with which they engage, however, remains a blind spot within feminist field methods and writing strategies deployed to 'see accountably'. The authors argue that there is an undertheorised relationship between the politics of academic research projects and the broader political movements with which they engage that may serve as a fertile intersection for feminist research. They explore relationships between team, field, and institutions in the context of negotiating difference among team members and their aspirations for the project. The article contributes to discussions of power, knowledge construction, and the politics of conducting fieldwork as a team by relaying experiences both from the perspective of individuals on the team and the team as a whole. The authors depict their objectives, successes, failures, and research politics; all part of a process of methodological becoming.     

Plastic arts and nation‐building in Israel

This article begins as an attempt to analyse an apparently paradoxical situation created by two events, which occurred simultaneously in 1948: the establishment of Israel as an independent state and the emergence of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) group of artists, acknowledged as the most renowned local artists at the time. The creation of the state of Israel may be considered the high point of Jewish nationalism, when the nation celebrated its distinctiveness. On the other hand, Ofakim Hadashim was a group of intellectuals who aspired to disengage their artistic work from the dominant political processes of the time. The basic claim of its members was l'art pour l'art, which ostensibly contradicted the significance of the general political process. This situation is highly interesting since it challenges the general sociological assumptions about the role of intellectuals in nation‐building processes, and also contradicts the usual explanation regarding the Israeli state‐building process. It concludes that an explanation of the social complexity existing in 1948 can be found in an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted phenomenon embracing a diversity of inherently contradictory practices.     

Intellectuals,Economic Reform and Social Change: Constraints and Opportunities in the Formation of a Nigerian Technocracy

Crisis and economic reforms have changed the status of intellectuals and their relations with dominant élites and policy makers. Because of the technical and ideological nature of these reforms, policy makers have tended to rely on intellectuals as opposed to bureaucrats to shape the agenda of change. This has converted a large number of intellectuals into technocrats and undermined the fabric of academic life in universities. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in developing countries with a large middle class and an economic or financial base that ensures some degree of independence from the multilateral financial institutions. Understanding the success or failure of economic reforms in developing countries requires some analysis of the complex relations between technocrats and political leaders and the societal constraints both sets of actors face. This article explores these issues in the context of Nigeria, whose academic community, bureaucrats and professionals grew in leaps and bounds in the 1970s, following an oil-induced boom. The crisis of the 1980s led to attempts at economic reform and a highly programmed strategy of political change in which academics played a leading role. The article examines the effectiveness of intellectuals in government, and compares the Nigeria case with technocratic experiments in Ghana, Botswana and Côte d?Ivoire.     

Insurgents against Brussels: Euroscepticism and the right-wing populist turn of the Lega Nord since 2013

Under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, the Lega Nord has shifted away from its previous political identity as a voice for Italy’s north and has placed hostility towards the policies and institutions of the European Union (EU) at the heart of its rhetoric. Nowadays, the enemy is Rome no longer: it is Brussels, European institutions, and the threat to the national sovereignty posed by the EU. Borrowing from the Italian political philosopher Nicola Matteucci, we would describe Salvini’s Lega as a ‘populist insurgency’. That is to say, it is a populist party that marries the traditional populist evocation of the virtues of the people against the corrupt elites, with a pervasive glibness of analysis.     

从传道之师到大学教员：现代学术研究职业化趋向

近代知识人的学术研究出现了职业化趋向.所谓学术职业化,就是将学术研究作为一种谋生的职业,学术研究者成为职业学者.随着清末民初现代学术教育体制的建立、科学家群体的形成、专门科研机构的创建、科研成就的取得与科学交流系统的建成,近代学者的社会职业角色开始形成,学术研究逐渐呈现一种职业化趋向,不仅出现了以知识生产和传授为谋生手段的社会职业,而且这种学术研究职业为一定的制度所保障.学术职业化是现代学术体制的重要特征.职业化学者被纳入近代分科化、专门化之学术体制中.现代学术体制以有形之场地和无形之规范,直接限定着学者之学术活动,并间接影响着学者之学术思想.职业化之知识人多遵从现代学术体制从事知识生产,甚至将知识作为稻粱谋,而不再执着于思想之道.这是职业化体制下学术研究的特点及知识人的特色.     

Political economy and social legislation in Germany,ca 1870–1890

Summary

This article examines the nature of academic political theory in Britain in the post-war period, examining in particular the degree to which theorists were able to mount normative theoretical arguments. Traditionally, commentators such as Brian Barry and Perry Anderson have argued that political theory in this period was largely dead between 1945 and 1970 due to the impact of positivism, but I argue this is mistaken for two main reasons. First, it fails to distinguish between the different forms that positivism took in the post-war era. Thus although it is true many theorists tended to claim that moral and political values could (or should) not be discussed rationally, their reasons for doing so varied considerably. For while theorists such as A. J. Ayer and T. D. Weldon justified their positions theoretically, with arguments drawn from behaviourist social science or innovations made in linguistic philosophy, others, such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Anthony Crosland, argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that made traditional political theory irrelevant. Second, following on from this, I argue that delineating more accurately how positivism actually operated helps to explain how political theorists were able to pursue their discipline normatively—albeit that few reacted to all aspects of positivism. Thus if some (such as Karl Popper) were more concerned to insist that political philosophy had something to say in practice, others (such as Michael Oakeshott), reacted more strongly against the proposition that human behaviour can be understood purely causally. Finally, I examine the impact of ordinary language philosophy on post-war political theory, and argue that rather than simply damaging the cause of normative political theory by encouraging a myopic concentration on the linguistic analysis of particular moral and political concepts, over the longer term its effects were much more positive, since it helped to focus attention on the irreducibly normative dimension of political concepts.     

The failure to formulate a national science policy: Israel's Scientific Council, 1948–1959

This article analyzes the failure to formulate a national science policy in Israel's early years by tracing the administrative genealogy of the Scientific Council (1948–59), which was established to manage and coordinate civil applied scientific research in Israel. The failure of the council is analyzed as part of wider debates concerning the future of the academic and scientific research systems and the implementation of Israeli state ideology (mamlakhtiyut) in this period. The story of the council sheds light on important aspects of the formation of Israeli higher education and scientific research institutions and on the close but complex relations between science and politics in the early years of the state.     

To the barracks: the President,the military and democratic consolidation in Portugal (1976–1980)

After two turbulent years in which different pathways for the future of the political and institutional framework of Portugal clashed, the country began a process of consolidation of the democratic institutions delineated between 1975/6. However, the role played by the military in the fall of the previous dictatorial regime and the fragility of the new democratic institutions did not allow their immediate withdrawal from political life. The President of the Republic was a military man and the political parties had agreed to maintain an unelected sovereign body, the Council of the Revolution, which only dissolved in 1982. Based on primary sources that only recently became available, this article presents some elements that help to understand the success of democratic consolidation in Portugal. This long process should not be interpreted as a confrontation between civilians, desirous to put an end to military tutelage, and the military, who at all costs sought to keep their privileges. The dividing line should be placed between those who defended the maintenance of the status quo, and the supporters of military subordination to the civil power.     

Vikings in Brazil: the Iceland Brazil Association shaping Icelandic heritage

Abstract

The Iceland Brazil Association (AISBRA) was established in 1996 by a group of Brazilians of Icelandic descent, more than 100 years after the first generation of immigrants settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The association was the first organisation in Brazil to collectively emphasise and celebrate Icelandic heritage. The association caters to a disparate group of people that had, in many cases, little knowledge about their historical links to Iceland. In spite of the fragmented activities of AISBRA since its establishment, the number of participants has increased, reflecting their growing interest in their Icelandic past. This paper examines how the members of Iceland Brazil Association produce their heritage independently, outside the state recognised heritage, within the Brazilian national context. We analyse how identities are re/shaped in new ways to engage with the past and how values from the past are extracted and turned into contemporary economic, social, and political values. This paper stresses heritage-making as a social imaginary used to define collective identity, which, while based on ancestry, also intersects with ideas of race and class. Representations of their Icelandic heritage allow the members of the Brazil Iceland Association to emphasise their ‘Europeanness’ and thus their associations with whiteness in contemporary post-colonial Brazil.     

The Turkish Oedipus: National Self and Stereotype in the Work of a 1960s Greek Cartoonist 1

This article analyzes a particular type of radical political discourse in Greece—namely the articulation of stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness in the work of Mendis Bostantzoglu, a Greek satirist and cartoonist. The author examines a poem and a sketch published in the 1960s, in which stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness are presented and mocked. Relating their production to their specific historical context and current academic discussions in Greece on nationalism and Otherness, the author argues that the ways in which ethnic stereotypes of “self” and “other” are used to discuss political issues have more to tell about internal Greek issues (such as a critique of the government and its policies) than about Greece's foreign affairs. Such analyses, it is further argued, also lead to a greater appreciation of the complex and implicit sets of meanings negotiated by the stereotypes themselves.     

Of “madness,” against Babylon: A story of resistance, (mis)representation,and paradox in the Caribbean

This article provides a postcolonial feminist account of the complex politics of the Earth People, an anti-systemic movement in Trinidad and Tobago who organised against the post-independence status quo during the 1970–1980s. The purpose of the piece is twofold. Firstly, on a scholarly level, it endeavours to (re)tell a theoretically-driven empirically-based story of the nuances that surfaced during the Earth People's resistance to “Babylon” (i.e. racial capitalism, Western institutions, rise of a post-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie). Secondly, on a political-epistemological level, we are countering conventional ways Caribbean people, histories, social movements, and the region at large are documented, studied, and ultimately written about within mainstream academia. To do so, we outline the fraught politics of (mis)representation that arise in established ethnography, with specific care afforded to the perspectives and political agency of participants from the movement. Our analysis emerges out of fieldwork guided by critical race theories, decolonial critique, feminist ethics, and community collaboration. Our methods included archival research, focus groups, oral histories, go-along interviews, and narrative inquiry with former members of the group. In general, the piece historicises the Earth People's efforts to evade and defy colonial norms, capitalist logics, and Westminster state power by “returning to nature.” Further, we offer a synopsis of movement's worldviews, social relations, and ideological standpoints, which despite being episodically paradoxical and not adopted widely throughout the Caribbean, merit further respective attention and critical scrutiny apropos regional posterity and orthodox academic knowledge production.     

Pierre Bourdieu: from ‘sociologue de la domination’ to ‘sociologue des dominés’

While Pierre Bourdieu's reputation as a sociologist is internationally recognised, the more explicitly political aspects of his thought and life are less well known. This is in part because he operated primarily as an academic, eschewing polemics and, as can be seen from his early publications on Algeria and on education, employing scientific sociological method to analyse and inform. However, from the 1980s, Bourdieu started to become more obviously involved in things political, starting with his support for Coluche in the 1981 presidential campaign and his denunciation of state repression in Poland. In the 1990s, Bourdieu became still more overtly political. This is evident, for example, in La Misère du monde (1993), in his work highlighting the situation in Algeria, his much publicised opposition to neo‐liberalism in general and in his support for the 1995 mouvement social in particular. All these later political prises de position were, Bourdieu insisted, underpinned by his work as a scientific sociologist.     

Debating Belarus: A Framing Comment

A British political scientist and eminent specialist on the politics of the post-Soviet states comments on the divergent perspectives offered in the two preceding papers in the symposium on Belarus in the same issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics. He first briefly reviews the diverse approaches to the study of Belarus evident in the academic literature, and the reasons scholars might be led to the country as a topic of study, especially its suitability as a test bed for several issues of importance in comparative studies (e.g., the nature of presidential power and of political "charisma," of governance without political parties, and an economic model that has appeared until now to have resisted the path of accelerated market reform). Probing more deeply, the author identifies issues of the comparative method of particular relevance to the exchange that warrant further investigation, and goes on to present his own survey data (from early 2011 for Belarus and from 2010 in Ukraine and Russia) in an effort to advance the debate on these issues. In concluding, he suggests a line of further enquiry for understanding better the seeming paradox that is Belarus—the role played by retention of "Soviet" institutions (e.g., trade unions, local councils) that offer a means of communication between ordinary citizens and the authorities.     

An Italian city-state geared for war: urban knights and the cavallata of Todi

The prominent presence of noble families in towns is generally accepted as a distinguishing feature of medieval Italy's communal city-states. Paradoxically, the nobility, as the exclusive supplier of trained and fully equipped cavalrymen, would retain a pivotal position in the communal armies when, in the Duecento, their political power was questioned. In this article a detailed study has been made of the nobility's role in the organisation of the [ac]cavallata (the public obligation to maintain warhorses) as well as in the militia (cavalry service) of the Umbrian town of Todi in the decades around 1300, when Todi as a city-state reached the zenith of its power. It is argued that in Todi cavallata and militia did not coincide in all respects, and also that both institutions were to some extent open to members of the sizeable class of the sergentes. The sergentes were responsible for the ‘rural’ part of the cavallata, and they provided the cavalry of the communal army with light horsemen.     

The Italian Enlightenment and the Rehabilitation of Moral and Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions, among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi—Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and, British Deism. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.