Tzvetan Todorov,the ‘Responsible Intellectual’, and the new world disorder

This article assesses Tzvetan Todorov's intellectual evolution from structuralist literary critic to ‘responsible intellectual’. It contrasts his notion of the responsibility of the intellectual with traditional definitions of commitment, and analyses why for Todorov figures such as Camus, Aron, and Tillion are exemplary, whereas Communist intellectuals are not. The article examines Todorov's positions vis‐à‐vis current crises and controversies, including the bombing of Kosovo, the validity of the ICT, and America's war in Iraq. Finally, it discusses Todorov's ideas for a stronger and more independent Europe as articulated in his most recent book, Le Nouveau Désordre mondial.     

Nationalism and war commemoration – a Latin American exceptionalism?

Recent scholarship on collective memory and nationalism in Latin America argues that – in sharp contrast to Europe – war commemoration has been of little importance to the memory work of states in the region. The article challenges this claim. A comparative‐historical analysis of school textbooks and school ceremonies in twentieth‐century Mexico, Argentina and Peru reveals that the commemoration of major civil and international wars was central to official national narratives in these countries. The article further identifies important qualitative changes in war commemoration over time, especially with respect to how commemorative discourses portrayed agency and assigned responsibility for military victories and losses. These changes are situated within broader transformations of nationalism and new alignments in the politics of nationhood and memory.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed in this issue International Relations theory Just war and international order: the uncivil condition in world politics. By Nicholas Rengger. Dilemmas of decline: British intellectuals and world politics, 1945–1975. By Ian Hall. Thucydides and the modern world: reception, reinterpretation and influence from the Renaissance to the present. Edited by Katherine Harloe and Neville Morley. The silence of animals: on progress and other modern myths. By John Gray. International organization, law and ethics Exit strategies and state building. Edited by Richard Caplan. Statebuilding. By Timothy Sisk. Conflict, security and defence In defence of war. By Nigel Biggar. British generals in Blair's wars. Edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan. The strategy bridge: theory for practice. By Colin S. Gray. Perspectives on strategy. By Colin S. Gray. Governance, civil society and cultural politics The Oxford Handbook of the history of nationalism. Edited by John Breuilly. The naked communist: Cold War modernism and the politics of popular culture. By Roland Végsö. Political economy, economics and development The global economic crisis: a chronology. By Larry Allen. Constructing capitalisms: transforming business systems in Central and Eastern Europe. By Roderick Martin. The rise of the People's Bank of China: the politics of institutional change in China's monetary and financial system. By Stephen Bell and Hui Feng. Energy, environment and global health South African AIDS activism and global health politics. By Mandisa Mbali. International history 1 1 See also Michael Brett, Approaching African history, pp. 1524–25.
Europe: the struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present. By Brendan Simms. Unfinished empire: the global expansion of Britain. By John Darwin. China's war with Japan, 1937–1945: the struggle for survival. By Rana Mitter. The Punjab bloodied, partitioned and cleansed: unravelling the 1947 tragedy through secret British reports and first‐person accounts. By Ishtiaq Ahmed. From Lenin to Castro, 1917–1959: early encounters between Moscow and Havana. By Mervyn J. Bain. Europe The passage to Europe: how a continent became a union. By Luuk van Middelaar. Translated by Liz Waters. Why Europe matters: the case for the European Union. By John McCormick. Europe, strategy and armed forces: the making of a distinctive power. By Sven Biscop and Jo Coelmont. NATO's European allies: military capability and political will. Edited by Janne Haaland Matlary and Magnus Petersson. Transformations in Central Europe between 1989 and 2012: geopolitical, cultural, and socioeconomic shifts. By Tomas Kavaliauskas. Democratic institutions and authoritarian rule in Southeast Europe. By Danijela Dolenec. Russia and Eurasia Hard diplomacy and soft coercion: Russia's influence abroad. By James Sherr. Russia, the West, and military intervention. By Roy Allison. Sovereignty after empire: comparing the Middle East and Central Asia. Edited by Sally N. Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch. Middle East and North Africa 2 2 See also Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch, eds, Sovereignty after empire: comparing the Middle East and Central Asia, pp. 1515–16.
The power and the people: paths of resistance in the Middle East. By Charles Tripp. Israel has moved. By Diana Pinto. Identity and nation in Iraq. By Sherko Kirmanj. Sub‐Saharan Africa Business, politics, and the state in Africa: challenging the orthodoxies on growth and transformation. By Tim Kelsall and others. Al‐Shabaab in Somalia: the history and ideology of a militant Islamist group, 2005–2012. By Stig Jarle Hansen. Approaching African history. By Michael Brett. Routledge handbook of African politics. Edited by Nic Cheeseman, David M. Anderson and Andrea Scheibler. African agency in international politics. Edited by William Brown and Sophie Harman. South Asia 3 3 See also Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Punjab bloodied, partitioned and cleansed: unravelling the 1947 tragedy through secret British reports and first‐person accounts, pp. 1504–05.
Shooting for a century: the India‐Pakistan conundrum. By Stephen Cohen. Righteous republic: the political foundations of modern India. By Ananya Vajpeyi. Why growth matters: how economic growth in India reduced poverty and the lessons for other developing countries. By Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. An uncertain glory: India and its contradictions. By Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. East Asia and Pacific Will this be China's century? A skeptic's view. By Mel Gurtov. China goes global: the partial power. By David Shambaugh. The China choice: why we should share power. By Hugh White. Shooting star: China's military machine in the 21st century. By Mikhail Barabanov, Vasiliy Kashin and Konstantin Makienko. North America Empire of ideas: the origins of public diplomacy and the transformation of U.S. foreign policy. By Justin Hart. Confront and conceal: Obama's secret wars and surprising use of American power. By David E. Sanger. Latin America and Caribbean Enabling peace in Guatemala: the story of MINUGUA. By William Stanley. Breves narrativas diplomáticas. By Celso Amorim.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

NEITHER/NOR

An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines the advent of antihumanism as a cultural figure out of a network of intellectual crises in interwar and postwar France and ties this advent to the more general consequences of secularization in the modern age. Bracketing political judgments, and eschewing dialectical methods, Stefanos Geroulanos shows how the critique of humanism that emerged from disparate quarters of French intellectual life resulted in a series of negative positions that rendered the human void of any conceptual content and thereby unsuitable as a basis for future political action or philosophical investigation. In addition to basing his analysis on two rigorously sketched concepts of his own design, “antifoundational realism” and “negative anthropology,” Geroulanos deploys a striking use of conceptual irony to show how the critical efforts of his protagonists often led to theoretical cul‐de‐sacs and a heightened measure of existential despondency. The treatment of the emergence of antihumanism as a local phenomenon among a segment of French intellectuals nevertheless encounters problems when it abandons the terrain of historical argument for an engagement with broader metaphysical concerns. By participating in the discourse of its subjects, An Atheism that is Not Humanist finds its way into cul‐de‐sacs of its own, in which, for example, the ostensibly political bearing of efforts to transcend mere politics for broader considerations of the “theo‐political crisis of modernity” remains unclear. Finally, by accepting the terms of the phenomenological diagnosis of metaphysical crisis in the interwar years, the book compromises certain of its genealogical aspirations, especially with regard to the legacy of Third Republic idealism and the specific qualities of post‐phenomenological structuralism.     

Conservative intellectuals and feminism: The Australian case

This article discusses conservative intellectual attitudes to feminism, with reference to the journal Quadrant. It is argued that a conspicuous failure to seriously address the issues raised by feminist writers is both short‐sighted and self‐defeating, since such issues are not as compartmentalized as Australian conservative intellectuals appear to think. Contrasting attitudes to feminism are explored with reference to the respective approaches of conservative writers, John Carroll and Ronald Conway. While this comparison reveals that it is possible for conservatism and feminism to co‐exist, it is shown that Conway is almost alone among Quadrant intellectuals in appreciating this.     

THINKING AFTER HITLER: THE NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY1

This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post‐1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize‐winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German‐language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.     

New light on How Labour governs: re‐discovered political writings by V. Gordon Childe

Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957), the foremost prehistorian of his day, was an active socialist intellectual within the Australian Labor Party between 1917 and 1921. Unable to accept that intellectuals could be active as intellectuals in the Labor Party, commentators have misconceived the argument of How Labour Governs and distorted Childe's political position. Some have argued that Childe set out with a Second International model of the Labor party (a conduit for working class interests) that he was forced by the end of his book to renounce. Socialists, on the other hand, have seen the book as Childe's rejection of labourism in favour of syndicalism. The four rediscovered political essays by Childe considered in this paper show continuities and an important change in Childe's thought Before and after the publication of How Labour Governs Childe advocated a positive role for the Labor party in socialist politics. Moreover he came to understand that the party played an active role in the formation of the class, a role that could either bring forward or set back the prospects for socialism.     

新中国知识分子政治参与问题探析——以1956—1966年高校干部群体为例

在十年社会主义探索时期,高校知识分子干部积极参政议政、建言献策,为新中国建设特别是高等教育事业作出重要贡献。由于知识背景、身份地位、人生经历不同,他们的参政行为呈现出各自不同的特点。但在"左"倾思想指导下,高校知识分子干部参政议政在客观上也对党的决策和国家政治生活产生过一定的负面影响。它不仅恶化了党与高校知识分子之间的关系,而且造成了许多高校知识分子的人生悲剧。这也是党在领导高校工作中必须吸取的一个沉痛教训。     

Identity and social solidarity: an ignored connection. A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations

The article comments on the ongoing de‐Europeanisation and re‐nationalisation of Europe from a historical perspective. The article argues that the building of national community from the 1870s onwards focused on the problem of social integration where the development of emotional feelings of belonging and solidarity was linked to the building of institutions for social politics in mutually reinforcing dynamics. The social question emerged in the wake of the spread of industrial capitalism. Its role is underexplored in the study of the building of national and European communities. The social question draws attention to the institutional capacity of nation states rather than nations based on emotions. Nationalism did not only mean the building of friend‐ enemy distinctions through ethnicity but also national socialism as a conservative reform strategy against class struggle socialism. This contention between two approaches to the problem of social integration moulded together national communities through emotions and institutions without deploying the concept of identity. The article outlines this development, culminating in the (West) European welfare states as nation– states in the strong sense of the merger of these two terms, and how it came to an end in the 1970s when a reverse development began towards social disintegration at the end accompanied by accelerating nationalism and xenophobia. The identity concept was mobilised in 1973 as a tool in the European integration project to compensate for the erosion of social institutions by means of emotions. It was taken over and politicised from having been a technical term in mathematics and psychoanalysis. The politicisation of the identity concept was an indication of a deep identity crisis in Europe and its nations. The identity therapy failed, and the identity crisis remains, accompanied by an ever louder nationalistic and xenophobic vocabulary. Emotions replace institutions. The methodological focus of the article is on the semantics around key concepts such as social politics, solidarity and identity in their historical context as forward‐looking and action‐oriented concepts in the construction of community. This approach with a focus on past futures is an alternative to the application of the retrospective analytical concepts of ethnic and civic nationalism outlining present pasts.     

The ages of man. A study in medieval writing and thought

It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sources, and Wollstonecraft scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present—this article applies a revised Rezeptionsgeschichte approach to tracing her intellectual influence on the woman question and organised feminism in Europe. Although the Memoirs and post-revolutionary politics everywhere dampened and even drove underground the reception of her persona and ideas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft's reception in nineteenth-century continental Europe, like the United States, was more positive and sustained in comparison to the public backlash she faced as a ‘fallen woman’ in her homeland of Britain through the bulk of the Victorian era.     

Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

Abstract: This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post‐colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re‐articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post‐colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio‐politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter‐colonial than post‐colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.     

“Bawdy Songs and Virtuous Politics”: Ambivalence and Controversy in the Discourse of the Greek Left on rebetiko

This paper explores the interrelations between politics and music as they appear in the ongoing debate about the rebetiko genre, within the intellectual circles of the left‐wing movement in the post‐war era. Through the analysis of the rebetika texts and biographical material, the ambivalent attitude of the Greek Left movement about the political context and the class affiliation of rebetiko are exposed. The Left saw popular music as a pedagogic means for inculcating class‐consciousness among the masses and promoting optimistic utopian images of a possible communist future. In the framework of this politically motivated consideration, the attempt of left‐wing intellectuals to interpret and evaluate the rebetiko genre led to various ambivalences and controversies within the Left movement.     

Socialism,Antifascism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Intellectual Dialogue (and Discord) between Andrea Caffi and Nicola Chiaromonte (1932–1955)

Summary

This article reconstructs the personal and intellectual friendship between two cosmopolitan intellectuals: Andrea Caffi (1887–1955) and Nicola Chiaromonte (1905–1972), who met while in exile in Paris in 1932. After a brief recapitulation of their previous biographies, and an overall presentation of their participation in the revolutionary antifascist group ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ (GL) in the thirties, this article provides a detailed analysis of their dialogues and disagreements in the forties and fifties on the topics of socialism and revolution, antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, utopia and history. Particular attention is devoted to their contribution to the debates in the antifascist journal of GL (published in Paris, 1932–1935) and in the radical journal of Politics (published in New York, 1944–1950). Examined closely, the friendship between Caffi and Chiaromonte appears as a sequence of convergences and divergences, understandings and ruptures, which reflect the tensions and lacerations of the European civil war and its post-war legacy (intertwined with and overlapping the cultural Cold War). Looked at again from a distance, however, it reveals a fundamental intellectual unity—a profound apolitical affinity in a century of radical politics which had fed wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes.     

Western leveraged pedagogy of Central and Eastern Europe: discourses of homophobia,tolerance, and nationhood

This article focuses on the relations between the two geo-temporal categories – Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and West/Europe – in discussions about sexual politics, homophobia, tolerance, and nationhood. It contributes to the existing literature about homonationalism and sexual nationalisms by introducing CEE to the debate's geographical loci, so far mostly invested in West/Europe and its relations to Islam. It argues that it is important to consider CEE in sexual nationalism debates because of its framing as the European (homophobic) Other in the emerging discourses of ‘homoinclusive Europe’. This article introduces the concept of leveragedpedagogy, which captures the specificity of the West/Europe – CEE discourses of sexual liberation, advancement, and backwardness. Leveraged pedagogy is a hegemonic didactical relation where the CEE figures as an object of the West/European ‘pedagogy’, and is framed as permanently ‘post-communist’, ‘in transition’ (i.e. not liberal, not yet, not enough), and homophobic. Such ‘taking care of’ CEE, it is argued, is a form of cultural hegemony of the Western EUropean liberal model of rights as the universal.     

Mystical theology,ecumenism and church-state relations: Francesco Bellisomi (1663–1741) at the limits of confessionalism in early eighteenth-century Europe

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the biography of a little-known Italian priest, Francesco Bellisomi (1663–1741), in order to trace the intellectual and political dimensions of religious reformism in early eighteenth-century Europe. Its primary objective is to demonstrate the causal relationships between three trends: firstly, pietistic spiritual reform influenced by mystical theology; secondly, ecumenical dialogue among Protestants and between Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians; and thirdly, the political articulation of the non-confessional state. By following a persecuted Bellisomi from Pavia to Rome, and then on to Venice, Vienna, Halle, Berlin and London, it depicts the strands connecting the political, intellectual and religious environment on the Italian Peninsula, within the Holy Roman Empire and in the British Isles. From the latter seventeenth century, the equation of confessionalism – the alliance of a confessionalising church and a centralising state – was being undermined across Europe. One factor in this process was enthusiasm for a supra-confessional ecclesia universalis, the nature of which was highly contested. Bellisomi’s life offers a unique window onto this networked and inter-confessional intellectual culture.     

On Women's Reason,Education and Love: Women and Men of the Enlightenment in Spain and France

This article is an exploration of the ways in which Enlightenment discourse constructed the sentimental and intellectual ‘nature’ of women and of the ways cultivated women could situate themselves within this context. They were able to produce a discourse which shared Enlightenment arguments but also displayed a vital and intellectual distance from restrictive definitions of femininity. The lives and writings of three eighteenth-century French and Spanish women, Mme d'Épinay, Josefa Amar y Borbón and Inés Joyes y Blake are taken as case-studies. Their participation in the cultural debate of their time and their agreements and disagree-ments with intellectuals and politicians such as Rousseau, Thomas and Cabarrús are examined. The terms of the debate on gender were established in two different national contexts, particularly in regard to the thorny issue of the politics of love and feelings: the similarities and differences between France and Spain are discussed.     

Maya heritage: entangled and transformed

This article discusses two aspects of heritage – entanglement and transformation – that became clear during a recent cultural heritage project in Yucatan, Mexico. Regarding entanglement, heritage becomes relevant only when coupled with other concerns, ranging from politics to livelihood to personal biographies. An unpredictable array of entanglements came into being during the project and these entanglements elevated the impact and visibility of local heritage to an unanticipated degree. Transformation refers to the claim that heritage is not frozen in the past. Instead, it is in motion and subject to change. The transformations of heritage discussed in this paper are examined from the perspective of a mobilities paradigm and understood, in part, as resulting from the experience of performing heritage for outsiders for the first time. In so far as the heritage project precipitated changes in identity, this paper explores what is meant by Maya identity and argues that it is a fluid construct that can be both anchored in the past and negotiated in the present. This perspective makes sense of an event in which contemporary people anchored their identity in a spectacular 1000-year-old ruin, but falls short of explaining the uneven recognition of smaller ruins.     

Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander’s 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers’ relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers’ personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.     

Remembering the past against the grain: an analysis of the reconstructions of the past in The Sunday News's ‘Lest We Forget’ column

Memories of the nationalist struggle are fervently contested in Zimbabwean public spaces such as the media. This paper examines the emergence of the counter‐hegemonic historical narratives in the state‐controlled media that seek to subvert the dominant nationalist discourses propagated by the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). Focusing on the Sunday News's Lest We Forget newspaper column, the paper analyses the representations of the role played by the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in the liberation struggle, a nationalist movement whose contributions are marginalised and obscured in the official nationalist historiography. Given that in Zimbabwe the state‐owned media are generally viewed as mouthpieces of the ruling party, this paper identifies the tensions in the Sunday News as alternative historical memories are being reproduced and sustained. Drawing upon the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, this article argues that alternative historical imaginations are rekindled in the state media.