The Production and Display of Domestic Interiors in Wilhelmine Germany, 1900-1914

In the opening years of the twentieth century, the German homeassumed new cultural meanings and symbolic significance as asite of economic, political, artistic, and social intervention.This article investigates a range of Wilhelmine institutions—fromthe Wertheim department store and the Prussian Commerce Ministry,to the Applied Arts Movement and the Movement for Art Education—toillustrate the variety of German approaches to promoting newconceptions of the home. Examining the ways in which Wilhelmineprivate and state reformers turned the topic of how one livedand dwelled into a topic of pressing significance, the articleargues that private, commercial efforts and state-driven policyinitiatives interpenetrated to a degree previously underappreciatedin Wilhelmine historical studies. These private and state initiativeswere, in turn, closely tied to the cultivation of German consumeridentities, and to larger efforts on the part of Wilhelmineinstitutions to adapt to the dizzying conditions of twentieth-centurycapitalist modernity. As a result of these developments, specialexhibitions of artistic home interiors originated in premierGerman department stores as well as in the halls of the statebureaucracy; historical ornaments termed ‘modern’in one decade were denigrated as barbaric in another; and generationsof craftsmen battled one another for a legitimacy conferred,to a significant degree, by private commissions, generous statesubsidies, and admission into prestigious exhibitions.     

The Archbishop in the Beleaguered City: An Analysis of the Conflicting Roles and Political Oratory of Makarios

Abstract

In this paper I want to examine the significance of Makarios' combined roles of Archbishop and President of Cyprus for his style of leadership and his political oratory. In so doing I hope to shed some light on certain aspects of ‘The Cyprus Problem’ which has hitherto received scant attention by political scientists and sociologists.     

Immigration as a Political Dilemma in Britain

Informed by evidence drawn from the British case, this article assesses three competing explanations for how and why political elites in Western Europe lost control of postwar immigration and immigrant policy: the liberal thesis, the political-historical perspective, and the political institutional breakdown explanation. The British case casts doubt on the assumption that West European elites did lose control of policy, although, to the extent that perfect control was not exercised, the political-historical argument best explains this phenomenon.     

论德国政治现代化初期的“防御性”特征

德国早期政治现代化道路有其特殊性。这种特殊性主要表现为政治与经济发展的不同步,政治长期滞后于经济。从政治现代化角度出发,造成这种状况的原因主要在于：统治阶级采取了适时而进的“防御性”政策,通过在向资本主义社会过渡、国家统一以及建立宪政结构等关键问题上以攻为守的“防御性”策略,驾驭时局,在顺应时势中保障自身传统利益。     

The church and Catholicism in contemporary Italy

Abstract

The constitutions of modern States may be seen somehow as a form of civil religion that is to be revered and that binds all people of a nation both ethically and legally. Reflecting on the constitutional architecture of a State means going deeper into the structure of societies, laws and mentalities. One of the foremost experts of the history of the Italian constitution and himself an interpreter of the fundamental Law of Italy, in this lecture Judge Sabino Cassese discusses the forms of constitutionalism adopted in Italy from the nineteenth-century Statuto Albertino down to contemporary debate on the ‘updating’ of the Italian constitution.     

The Cross or the Double-Cross: Roman Catholicism,Anti-Communism,and the Political Theology of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

The Venerable and Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen was an advocate of American Catholic patriotism and opponent to the spread of totalitarianism, especially communism. He grounded the two positions in what I call the “ecclesial foundation” in which he defined American citizenship in terms of membership in religious institutions. In Sheen's view, religious institutions provided the ultimate, spiritual ends for humankind. Therefore, the American government had to protect, above all, religious liberties at home and abroad. Totalitarian regimes, which Sheen believed sought to replace spiritual with material ends of the state, violently deprived their subjects of religious liberty and, therefore, embodied the spirit of the anti-Christ. Only the Vatican had the spiritual and moral authority to identify this spirit, and—especially after the Second World War—only America had the military and economic power to confront it. Ironically, this argument was an appropriation of the old Nativist arguments against the Vatican itself. The Nativist argument was that religious liberty of Protestant churches was the source for political authority of the American state to use against the absolute, arbitrary, foreign dictator in Rome. Sheen's appropriation and redeployment of the old narrative persuaded millions of Americans to oppose totalitarian ideologies and view, after centuries of distrust, American Catholics as loyal citizens.     

The public relevance of the church and Catholicism in Italy

Abstract

This article highlights the particular situation of the Catholic religion in Italy which distinguishes itself for its systematic organization, active association-forming and cultural vitality, unrivalled in any other European country either Protestant or Catholic. On the one hand the church in Italy still disposes of such a wealth of clergy and religious figures, dioceses and parishes, educational and social institutions, ecclesiastical groups and associations, and so on, that it can maintain a diffuse presence scattered over the national territory; it deploys numerous forces and resources which form an integral part of normal social relationships that animate civil society. On the other hand, the church and Italian Catholicism today are particularly active at a cultural level, with their contribution of ideas and experience on vital questions arising in social coexistence (ranging from the family to bioethics, from religious freedom to the secular State, from national identity to the multiethnic presence, and so on).