State-Building in Eighteenth-Century Russia

HUGH RAGSDALE, ed. and trans., and VALERII NIKOLAEVICH PONOMAREV, asst. ed. Imperial Russian Foreign Policy. New York and Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi, 457. $59–95 (US);

E. V. ANISIMOV. Rossiia bez Petra, 1725–1740. St Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1994. Pp. 496. No Price Available;

IA. A. GORDIN. Mezh rabstvom i svobodoi: 19 ianvaria-25 fevralia 1730 goda. St Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1994. Pp. 379. No Price Available;

CAROL S. LEONARD. Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Pp. vii, 232. $35.00 (US);

A. S. MYL'NIKOV. Ikushenie chudom: ‘Russkii prints’, ego prototipy i dvoiniki-samozvantsy. Leningrad: ‘Nauka’, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1991. Pp. 268. No Price Available.     

Andreas Kalvos and the Eighteenth-Century Ethos

Abstract

In the space of a few years the small isle of Zante, one of the Ionian group, produced three important poets: Hugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, and the subject of this present study, Andreas Kalvos. Kalvos was born in 1792, fourteen years after Foscolo and six years before Solomos. His father's family may originally have come from Crete. His mother's family was one of the aristocratic families of Zante—the family name had been inscribed ever since the Venetian occupation of the island in the Gold Book of the island nobility. The marriage of the poet's parents does not seem to have been a success, for not many years after the birth of his younger brother in 1794, the father, taking the two children with him, left Zante for Leghorn, where his brother was consul for the Ionian Islands, and where there was a considerable Greek colony. In 1805 Andreas' mother obtained a divorce fron her husband on the grounds of desertion, and shortly afterwards she married for the second time. She died in 1815, never having seen her children again after their departure from Zante.     

Kinship terms in the Nabataean inscriptions

This paper examines one of the most important aspects of Nabataean social structure, namely kinship terminology. It examines the linguistic derivations, meanings and social significance of kinship terms, and compares them with those found in other Semitic languages.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

Church and state in the Italian crisis

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which the positions and policies of the church have changed during the three principal phases of relations between the Catholic Church and the State since the founding of the Italian Republic. The first came after the Second World War when the church embarked on its democratic novitiate; the second was dominated by reformist project of Cardinal Montini; the leading role in the final phase during the papacy of John Paul II and the broader crisis of which the church was also part was played by Cardinal Ruini.