The Sartre–Camus Quarrel and the Fall of the French Intellectual

Over the past thirty years, the disappearance, if not the death, of the intellectual in France has been the focus of significant conversation and debate. Yet a good bit earlier, two writers who epitomized that very figure of the intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, in works written after their bitter break, seemed to have already sensed this decline. The present essay explores what Camus's novel La Chute [The fall] and Sartre's autobiography Les Mots [The words] share thematically and, in particular, how both works anticipate the fall of the French intellectual.     

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.     

Intellectual property and national security: the case of the hardcastle superheater, 1905–1927

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex and changing relationship between technological development, intellectual property, and national security in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its specific case study concerns an important invention developed by a naval officer. Technological innovations not only were vital to British security but also embodied commercially valuable intellectual property. The state’s interest in acquiring control of the intellectual property to maintain Britain’s naval supremacy was not automatically aligned with the interests of inventors. The alignment was especially fraught in the case of service inventors—that is, inventors in government service, rather than in the private sector. Service inventors, who played a crucial role in maintaining Britain’s naval-technological edge, were governed by special regulations, and they invariably utilized state resources for their inventive work. Exploring these issues sheds important light on the attitude of the British state toward innovation and technological development from the 1850s through the 1920s.     

Views from the “South”: Intellectual Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities. Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic.     

Intellectual Migration and Economic Thought: Central European Émigré Economists and the History of Modern Economics

Summary

This article examines the life and thought of Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor, two Hungarian-born British economists, to suggest how the personal background and émigré status of these economists changed their view of the British economy and the economic policy recommendations they put forward as high-profile government advisers in the post-1945 period. This article combines research on inter-war intellectual migration and the history of British economics and economic policy making after the Second World War. It shows how the large scale migration of Central European intellectuals to the English-speaking countries affected the academic, intellectual and cultural lives of the host countries; it also suggests how economics, a relatively young social science discipline, has been crucially enriched by the contributions of exiles from old Europe, and how the mainstream paradigm of modern economics, the so-called neoclassical synthesis, was the result of the cross-fertilisation of ideas facilitated by the physical movement of academics and thinkers.     

How Much Knowledge is Worth Knowing? An American Intellectual Historian's Thoughts on the Geschichte des Wissens

This essay investigates the origins and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the new field known as Wissensgeschichte from the perspective of an American intellectual historian. It argues that while some historians of science may be ready to embrace a new identity as historians of knowledge, this terminology remains baggy and invites facile applications of Foucauldian theory. The essay concludes with the hope that the history of knowledge approach may instead open up new avenues for conversation and collaboration between historians of science and garden variety historians.     

Eavesdropper on the Past: John W. Burrow (1935–2009), Intellectual History and Its Future

Summary

Focused on the much-debated historiographical and academic status of intellectual history, this article addresses for the first time and in detail the methodological views of the British historian John Wyon Burrow (1935–2009). Making use both of his published works and of unpublished material left to the University of Sussex Library (including lectures, letters, academic projects and biographical sketches), its goal is to provide a thorough account of an original and eclectic intellectual historian and, at the same time, cast new light on the role of the discipline in the scholarly context of the last few decades in Europe and the US. More specifically, the following pages will illustrate Burrow's work and career, with particular attention being paid to his insistence on narrative, imagination, irony and style; present his writings as an original instance of the anti-methodological practice of intellectual history; and study his opinions of what it means to carry out the métier d'historien. Finally, by examining Burrow's idea of the intellectual historian as a creative ‘eavesdropper’ on the ‘conversations of the past’ and as a ‘translator’ of past dialogues, this article will both pose some central questions and advance some proposals concerning the future of intellectual history.     

Cultural Innovation and Translation in the Eastern Cape: Jan Tzatzoe,Xhosa Intellectual and the Making of an African Gospel, 1817–1833

Abstract

This article describes the construction of a truly African Bible on the London Missionary Society's Eastern Cape Buffalo River mission station in the early years of the colonial encounter. Largely unacknowledged in the historical record, the isiXhosa translations were made in an intellectual partnership involving Jan Tzatzoe, a cultural and intellectual intermediary and innovator, and two European missionaries, John Brownlee and Friedrich Gottlob Kayser. A particular focus is Tzatzoe's breakthrough in moving the depiction of Jesus Christ towards Christ as Xhosa healer or ‘physician’. The article builds upon the renewed scholarly attention directed towards intermediaries by examining African involvement in the creation of crucial discourses and the conditions under which colonial texts were produced. It is suggested that Tzatzoe and other African linguistic intermediaries might be thought of as the vanguard of an African intellectual tradition born in the colonial encounter.     

‘Her Cause Against Herself’: Margaret Fuller,Emersonian Democracy,and the Nineteenth‐Century Public Intellectual

Recent interpretations of Margaret Fuller's ideological significance have embedded her biography in an older understanding of Transcendentalism's history that imagines a post‐Brook Farm cleavage between ‘Emersonian individualists’ and more socially conscious communitarians. In late 1844, Margaret Fuller left New England for employment at Horace Greeley's New‐York Tribune, a moment that a number of biographers and critics have imagined as Fuller's own personal Brook Farm, her resignation from the ‘party of Emerson.’ Recent work in the history of Transcendentalism and romantic liberalism more generally, however, has been more careful about confusing romantic individuality with modern bourgeois individualism. This essay furthers the discussion of Transcendentalist ideology by arguing that Fuller's New York journalism was representative of the broad intellectual unity of the movement's democratic experiments – experiments that experientially, socially, and intellectually aimed to overcome the boundaries between the body and the mind, manual and mental labor, and the manual and mental classes.     

The Invention of Prehistory and the Rediscovery of Europe: Exploring the Intellectual Roots of Gordon Childe’s ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (1936)

Journal of World Prehistory - This article re-examines the ‘neolithic revolution’—Gordon Childe’s great contribution to prehistoric archaeology. Childe first articulated his...     

Leo Strauss's Adherence to Nietzsche's “Atheism From Intellectual Probity”

Abstract

The role of labor unions has increasingly been the focus of scholarly analyses in recent years as the world has experienced the most encompassing wave of democratization. In his seminal article proposing a typology of four different modes of labor union behavior depending on their treatment by the former authoritarian regimes, J. Samuel Valenzuela (1989) observed that labor unions will best contribute to a successful consolidation of the new democracies if they do not press excessively for the satisfaction of narrow interests. Conversely, if their demands are too harshly denied by the new democratic elites, unions may be disloyal to new governments and thus undermine the transition process (Valenzuela 1989, 451). In a similar fashion, Adam Przeworski argued that the containment of excessive wage increase demands by unions is critical for the success of economic transition reforms (1991, 181). In her comprehensive comparative analysis of labor union and business roles in democratic transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, Joan M. Nelson concluded that in both economic and political reforms within the transition processes, unions can and do play crucially supportive roles but can likewise cause slowdowns, and stalemates (1994).     

“The Power to Empty Oneself”: Hegel,Kenosis, and Intellectual Virtue

This article considers Hegel's idea of Entäußerung, or kenosis, as a model for an intellectual virtue that enables people to confront difference and disagreement without domination. According to Hegel, Entäußerung involves a refusal to use one's epistemic status – of being one among many reciprocally recognized loci of authority – as a basis for dominating others. The article considers the development of this idea in Hegel's work, addresses affinities between Hegel's idea of Entäußerung and recent feminist theology, and suggests its relevance for thinking about political and ethical conflict.