Carl Schmitt on land and sea

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support.     

Drainage on the Grand Prairie: the birth of a hydraulic society on the Midwestern frontier

The Grand Prairie of east central Illinois was notorious for a marshy environment that prevented dense agricultural settlement until late in the nineteenth century. While recent historical–geographical scholarship has focused on innovations in drainage technology, drainage-related laws and institutions, and the ecological impacts of wetland reclamation, it has largely failed to account for the persistence of agrarian structure, and its key component, land tenure, on the Grand Prairie. Late-nineteenth-century reclamation efforts were not quite so transformative as previously believed. The same landed elite that dominated in the pre-drainage era quickly emerged atop a system of public drainage that held the key to the region’s economic future. In this paper, we extend Karl Wittfogel and Donald Worster’s theorizations about ‘hydraulic civilizations’ from the realm of irrigation to that of drainage. While drainage was indeed important in shaping the history of east central Illinois, we argue that a distinctive social order in east central Illinois emerged from, and was shaped by, an older agrarian structure that had developed in response to marshy, unpredictable conditions before drainage began in the late 1800s. The beneficiaries of the old order did not yield power easily, and instead skillfully capitalized on the new opportunities presented by drainage enterprises, to create a ‘hydraulic society’ on the prairie. The new order continued to rely on the exploitation of tenant farmers even as the landscape itself was transformed into the intensely managed and highly productive Corn Belt of today.     

Modelling land use around an early Neolithic timber ‘hall’ in north east Scotland from high spatial resolution pollen analyses

A methodology is described by which spatial patterns of land use were reconstructed from pollen analyses on anthropogenic sediments at a recently excavated early Neolithic timber ‘hall’ in north east Scotland. The anthropogenic sediments were from a deep, small diameter pit within the building. They present numerous taphonomic and interpretative challenges to the analyst, but from this type of deposit, the power to estimate quantitatively the vegetation structure around the archaeological site makes such difficult deposits very significant. A rigorous methodology is firstly described, therefore, by which confidence in ecological interpretation can be established. Secondly, the source of pollen in the deposit is evaluated. Thirdly, the possible pollen source area and structure of the surrounding vegetation are estimated by quantitative simulation modelling. Finally, these analyses are compared with region-scale pollen analyses from nearby conventional wetland deposits with much larger pollen source areas. The pollen assemblages recovered probably reflect land uses adjacent to the ‘hall’ and up to 2.5 km around. Cereal cultivation was the most important land use immediately around the ‘hall’, possibly grown between stands of scrub Corylus (hazel) woodland. These intensive but local-scale land uses cannot be discerned in region-scale pollen analyses.     

Contextualist dilemmas: Methodology of the history of political theory in two stages

This article traces the development of contextualist methodology in the study of the history of political thought/political theory after WWII. It argues that the so-called ‘Cambridge School’, often regarded as the core of historicist contextualism, arose during the 1950s and 1960s in response to dilemmas that were largely internal to (the history of) political philosophy as it was practiced in Britain in an academic culture dominated by analytic philosophy. This first stage of contextualist theorizing, usually associated with Laslett, Skinner and Pocock, was highly influential, but it also contributed to the formation of a new set of problems. These were connected to the diversification and internationalization of the historicist contextualist study of political thought after the 1960s. The ‘second stage’ of contextualist theorizing was shaped by post-analytic and post-modernist impulses among others. Because of the variety of philosophical and conceptual commitments on notions central to the field such as ‘political thinking’, ‘politics’, or ‘power’, it is unlikely that the present historicist contextualist approaches would come to share a unified methodology or theory of historical interpretation.     

Ancient-DNA reveals an Asian type of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Scandinavia

Leprosy is a chronic infection of the skin and peripheral nerves caused by the pathogen Mycobacterium leprae. Its impact on human populations and societies of the past as well as its phylogeographic patterns around the world – at least in modern times – has been well documented. This slow growing bacterium has been shown to exist in distinct ‘SNP types’ that occur in relatively defined parts of the globe. The routes that the disease followed in the past are, however, still uncertain. This study of ancient-DNA typing of archaeological human remains from Sweden dated to early Medieval times provides genetic evidence that a transmission of M. leprae ‘SNP subtype’ 2G – found mainly in Asia – took or had already taken place at that time from the Middle East to Scandinavia. This finding is unique in the history of leprosy in Europe. All human specimens from this continent – both modern and ancient – that have been tested to date showed that the one responsible for the infection strains of M. leprae belong to ‘SNP type’ 3, whereas our results show that there were some European populations that were hosts to bacteria representing ‘SNP type’ 2 of the species as well.     

Counterfactual geographies: worlds that might have been

This paper argues for a renewed consideration of counterfactuals within geography. Drawing upon Doreen Massey's emphasis on notions of ‘possibility’, ‘chance’, ‘undecidability’ and ‘happenstance’, we argue for an engagement with approaches in the humanities that have addressed such issues directly. We review previous uses of counterfactual method in historical geography, particularly as related to cliometrics and the ‘new economic history’ of the 1960s, but argue that a recent upsurge of interest in other disciplines indicates alternative ways that ‘what-if’ experiments might work in the sub-discipline. Recent counterfactual work outside of geography has had a notably spatial cast, often thinking through the nature of alternative worlds, or using counterfactual strategies that are explicitly concerned with space as well as temporal causality. We set out possible agendas for counterfactual work in historical geography. These include: consideration of the historical geographies within existing counterfactual writings and analyses; suggestions for distinctive ways that historical geographers might think and write counterfactually, including experiments in geographies of happenstance, and the exploration of more-than-human possibilities; analyses of the geography of and in counterfactual writing; and study of the political, ethical and emotional demands that counterfactuals make. This discussion and framework provides an extended introduction to this special feature on counterfactual geographies.     

The institutionalisation of ‘colonial geography’ in France, 1880-1940

Between 1880 and 1900, the conjunction of the development of higher education in France with the renewal of colonial expansion resulted in the creation of the ‘colonial sciences’. ‘Colonial geography’ played a key role in the development of these new disciplines, alongside ‘colonial history’, ‘ethnology’, ‘colonial economics and legislation’ and ‘colonial psychology’. This paper considers the social history of this field and of the institutions in which colonial geography was formed. This involves examination of the study of the teaching of ‘colonial geography’ in the universities and French grandes écoles, the gradual professionalisation of scholarship, and the increase in the number of doctoral theses and book publications, which all serve to demonstrate the vigour of the subdiscipline, leading to the emergence of a veritable research community. Under the Third Republic, ‘colonial geography’ in the universities was characterised by great diversity, irreducible to a single or homogenous ‘colonial discourse’.     

Topographies/topologies of the camp: Auschwitz as a spatial threshold

This paper, largely inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp, reflects on the relationship between the ‘topographical’ and the ‘topological’ in reference to Auschwitz-Birkenau and its spatialities. After having discussed the concept of soglia (threshold), we briefly introduce the ways in which the historiographical literature on the Holocaust treats the relationship between modernity, rationality, and Nazism. The second part of the paper is dedicated to an attempt to read ‘geographically’ the entanglements between the camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and the Holocaust. The notion of the camp-as-a-spazio-soglia is central to this interpretation. Auschwitz, conceived as a metaphorical and real space of exception, is contextualized within the broader regional geography planned by the Nazis for that part of Poland; while ‘Mexico’, a specific compound within the camp, is described as a key threshold in the reproduction of those very geographies. The aim is to show how the topological spatialities of the camp were a constitutive element of the overall biopolitical Nazi project of ‘protective custody’ and extermination and that, for this reason, they deserve further investigation and need to be discussed in the relation to the crude calculative and topographical aspirations of that same project.     

Thomas Fitzherbert's reason of state

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms.     

Post-Enlightenment sources of political authority: Biblical atheism, political theology and the Schmitt-Strauss exchange

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography

In 1885, Kropotkin called for geography to be ‘a means of dissipating [hostile] prejudices’ between nations that make conflicts more likely, and ‘creating other feelings more worthy of humanity’. As a body of scholars, we have risen far more ably to the negative task of ‘dissipating’ than to the positive charge of ‘creating’: Geography is better at researching war than peace. To redress that imbalance, we need both to conceptualise more clearly what we mean by peace, and make a commitment to researching and practising it. These arguments are made with reference to the broader literature and research along the Danish/German, Israeli/Palestinian and Kyrgyz/Uzbek interfaces.     

Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces

There is now an emerging body of thought on the dynamics of de-politicization, the ‘disappearance of the political’, the erosion of democracy and of the public sphere, and the contested emergence of a post-political or post-democratic socio-spatial configuration. I situate and explore this alleged ‘post-democratization’ in light of recent post-Althusserian political thought. I proceed in four steps. First, I discuss the contested configurations of this post-politicization and the processes of post-democratization. In a second part, I propose a series of theoretical and political arguments that help frame the evacuation of the properly political from the spaces of post-democratic policy negotiation. This diagnostic is related to a particular interpretation of the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘polic(e)y/‘politics’. In a third part, I argue how emancipatory–democratic politics can be reclaimed around notions of equality, and freedom. In the concluding part, perspectives for re-vitalising the political possibilities of a spatialized emancipatory project are presented. The crux of the argument unfolds the tension between politics, which is always specific, particular, and ‘local’ on the one hand and the universal procedure of the democratic political that operates under the signifiers of equality and freedom on the other.     

Experimental insights into alternative strategies of lithic heat treatment

Conditions in which thermal fractures occur are explored experimentally, and the results are used to assess heat treatment strategies. We conclude that no single ‘critical temperature’ for thermal fracturing or heat treatment can be specified for any particular raw material, as has so often been attempted, because threshold temperatures exist in relationship to specimen sizes. Our experiments show that smaller specimens are resilient to greater ranges of temperature fluctuations than larger ones, and that by manufacturing/selecting specimens of smaller sizes there is more potential to heat them rapidly and to higher temperatures without producing thermal fractures. We hypothesize a continuum of heat treating strategies between a ‘slow and steady’ strategy, which has overwhelmingly dominated past experimental designs, and a ‘fast’ strategy, which has received much less attention. The paper discusses the economic and technological contexts to which different heat treating strategies might be suited.     

The uses and abuses of ‘secular religion’: Jules Monnerot's path from communism to fascism

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911–95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989. In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ‘secular religion’, as Monnerot developed it in his Sociology of Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot's case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot's case is unsettling first because his definition of ‘secular religion’ contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us to rethink what is meant by ‘philosophy after Auschwitz.’ This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheim or Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics.     

Correlating archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records using a Bayesian approach: a case study from Sutton Common,South Yorkshire,England

This paper presents a case study aimed at correlating archaeological ‘events’ (obtained from radiocarbon measurements and dendrochronology) from the site of Sutton Common with a radiocarbon-dated pollen sequence obtained from a palaeochannel deposit adjacent to the area of the main archaeological activity. It demonstrates the use of a Bayesian approach to quantifying whether the timing of palynological ‘events’ interpreted as reflecting anthropogenic impacts are likely to be associated with archaeological ‘events’. The results suggest that Bronze Age activity in the form of a mortuary enclosure and associated cremation burials are probably not contemporary with the palynological evidence for disturbance to the oak–hazel woodland in this period. Subsequent evidence for local woodland clearance and agriculture is estimated to precede the construction of the large Iron Age enclosure in 372 BC, with increases in ‘anthropogenic indicators’ following this ‘event’. The construction of the site does not appear to have had a pronounced impact on the local vegetation, with hazel the only woody taxon to show clear reductions. Despite the use of a substantial number of oak timbers in the enclosure palisade, percentages of oak remain remarkably stable. Later farming activity on the site probably post-dates the end of activity in the enclosures. The value of the methodology is discussed in relation to quantifiable and robust correlations of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental narratives of landscape and human activity.     

Restoring Berlin's Unter den Linden: ideology,world view,place and space

Berlin's Unter den Linden, a primary thoroughfare and ensemble of historic architecture and nationally significant cultural institutions, lay in ruins at the close of the Second World War. The buildings, public spaces, and public art forming this street bore testimony to diverse facets of German history, presenting a range of semantic issues to those interested in their future. Differences in key groups' world view resulted in different interpretations of these spaces, thus different approaches to policy development with regard to their future. Initially, the German cultural elite was determined to restore significant architecture, asserting architectural value while avoiding mention of ‘Prussian’ or ‘German’ identity. However, the German communist leadership viewed these same structures as testimony to ‘Prussian–German militarism’ and sought their effacement. The Soviet Military Administration remained largely indifferent to all but spatial value until 1947, when they began to use architecture to represent the Soviet Union. Finally, with the founding of the German Democratic Republic and import of Soviet ‘socialist-realist’ urban theory, architecture considered progressive was restored as national cultural heritage, although sites with considerable ‘militaristic’ content prompted more debate over their future.     

Google earth and the archaeology of Saudi Arabia. A case study from the Jeddah area

Archaeologically, Saudi Arabia is one of the least explored parts of the Middle East. Now, thanks to Google Earth satellite imagery, a number of high-resolution ‘windows’ have been opened onto the landscape. Initial investigations already suggest large parts of the country are immensely rich in archaeological remains and most of those identified are certainly pre-Islamic and probably several thousand years old. Detailed interpretation of one ‘window’ east of Jeddah forms the basis for illustrating the richness of the heritage and how the satellite imagery can be exploited to shed important light on the character and development of the human landscape. Through this ‘window’ we set out a proposed methodology for future work and where it may lead.     

A review of rock art dating in the Kimberley, Western Australia

This paper critically reviews the various approaches used to estimate the age of the rock art in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They include: (i) the relative superimposition of styles; (ii) the use of diagnostic subject matter (depictions of extinct animals, stone tool technology, introduced European and Asian objects and animals); (iii) the recovery of a ‘painted’ slab from a dated archaeological unit; (iv) radiocarbon dating of beeswax figures, charcoal pigments, organic matter in overlying mineral deposits and ‘accreted paint layers’ (oxalate rich crusts and amorphous silica skin), pollen grains from an overlaying mud-wasp nest; and (v) optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of quartz grains from overlying mud-wasp nests. Future directions for rock art dating in the Kimberley include uranium-series dating of overlying and underlying mineral deposits.     

Missing links: W. V. Quine, the making of ‘Two Dogmas’, and the analytic roots of post-analytic philosophy

This essay argues that post-analytic philosophy finds its origins not only in an invented tradition—that of ‘analytic philosophy’—but also in an invented dilemma: namely, the response to the allegedly overweening dominance of ‘positivism’ in American philosophy. I begin by surveying the problems with the folk wisdom about positivism and analytic philosophy. This pervasive narrative locates the emergence of post-analytic philosophy after a period of hegemony for logical positivism and cognate philosophical subfields. Taking seriously evidence indicating a distinct overlap in the construction of the analytic and post-analytic traditions, I return to the founding moment of American analytic philosophy in the years immediately following World War II. What we see, I suggest, is not a reaction against a clearly defined and powerful logical positivist mainstream, but the careful, piecewise co-ordination of what would become characteristic ‘analytic’ modes of argument, problematics, and tool kits. Willard Van Orman Quine played a central role in this process, and for this reason I focus on the circumstances in which his field-defining 1951 article, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ was written and received. I conclude with the claim that both analytic and post-analytic philosophers relied on a peculiar image of the failure of logical positivism, and of the opportunities that failure presented.     

Constructing the border from below: Narratives from the Congolese-Rwandan state boundary

This article is about the simultaneous subversion and perpetuation of political borders ‘from below’. Using the state boundary between the cities of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gisenyi in Rwanda as a case study, this article shows how people make sense of their border-related social world. By analyzing everyday narratives and practices of people who live on both sides of the border, this article reveals popular geopolitics at work and demonstrates the inchoate character surrounding the idea of ‘the border’. Border talk is examined in key narratives and narrative clusters to emphasize the primacy of certain thematic plots and to reveal which aspects of the border people prioritize and how they attribute meaning to the idea of the border. Views of the border ranging from a desired barrier against the demonized ‘other,’ and as a means of exclusion, to its conception as an institution that may be in need of reform but is essential to economic survival, make clear that approaching the border through narratives means allowing for its historicity and relationality. Border narratives and practices reveal some neglected aspects of violent conflict in the study region and provide insights into state-society relations, an understanding of the state’s legitimacy, and an understanding of the effects of the border as a social construction that influences everyday life.