The Shareholders' Revolt at the Compagnie des Indes: Commerce and Political Culture in Old Regime France

During the 1760s a fierce political struggle developed betweenthe shareholders and the royal ministry over the administrationand continued operations of the Compagnie des Indes. Portrayingthemselves as members of a self-governing commercial republic,the shareholders insisted that ultimate authority rested withtheir assembly and accused the ministry of despotic interferencein company affairs. The ministry, concerned with the financialstability of the company, employed the abbé Morelletto shift the debate from the rights of the shareholders to theadvantages of commercial liberty over the company’s privilegedtrading monopoly. Although the ministry succeeded in endingthe commercial operations of the Compagnie des Indes, the affairhad taken place in the public sphere where the publicist Pidansatde Mairobert and the financier Jacques Necker, among others,extolled the patriotism of the shareholders, condemned the despotismof the ministry, and insisted upon the importance of the companyto France’s international presence. By including an accountof the shareholders’ meetings in his anti-Maupeou publicationsof the 1770s, Mairobert linked the affair to the infamous Maupeoureforms, thereby broadening the patriot attack on ministerialgovernment.     

Citizens and scientists: toward a gendered history of scientific practice in post-revolutionary France

Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist.     

Making sense of the state: Citizens and state buildings in South Africa

Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a ‘thing’ by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theoretically, drawing on work from architecture, cultural geography and urban studies on sensory engagements with buildings; and then empirically through an analysis of South African citizens' accounts of their engagements with state buildings, drawing on focus group discussions in urban centres and observations of state buildings in action. It finds that the state is reified through citizens' ability to think and feel their way from material form to idea, using sight to produce abstractions and metaphors, and the haptic senses to connect to personal memory and fantasy. This layered account of the state, described locally through the analogy of the face-brick, constitutes the making and unmaking of the state-thing that illustrates a deep but ambivalent involvement in it.     

莫普司法改革与法国旧制度的崩溃

1770至1774年间,法国的司法大臣莫普进行了一场司法改革,旨在消除高等法院的反抗倾向,重新树立王权的绝对权威,并使司法体系合理化。虽然改革以失败告终,但它构成了旧制度末年重要的政治转折。国内史学论著中很少提及莫普改革,在国际史学界对它的评价则引起了长期的争论。本文在吸收前人研究成果的基础上,力图探讨旨在挽救君主制危机的莫普司法改革如何加速了旧制度的灭亡,促进了大革命的来临。     

Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West

Abstract

The old Western synthesis, the coming together of self-government, the Christian proposition, modern equality, and the commitment to relieving man's estate, appears to be unraveling. In the European context, it is being replaced by a “pure democracy” that cannot do justice to the continuity of Western civilization. Rejecting the twin temptations of Progress and Decline, Pierre Manent recovers the perspective of the human agent. While the polis or classical city is no longer available to us, the self-government of free human beings remains at the heart of the Western enterprise. Manent shows that the Christian notion of conscience preserved the classical analogy between the soul and the political association and is at the hear of Western liberty. The West as a whole rests on the synthetic and mediating notion of conscience.     

The cultural dimension in comparative research: Making sense of development control in France

There is a tendency amongst planners to think of planning systems as phenomena with an independent existence that may be directly compared. Such a view lingers even where the concept of end‐state planning has long been abandoned, and where it is understood that the context for plan‐making and development control is an important factor in comparing systems of different countries. This paper will argue that systems of plans and development control procedures are essentially creatures of the cultures which give rise to them. They are to be understood as expressions of underlying beliefs about the way that decisions ought to be taken for the administration of a country. This paper presents three cases drawn from the author's own experience of research in France as indicative of the approach. The first, a development control case of the extension to a heavy goods vehicle depot, looks at the cultural factors that affected the way the application was determined. The second, concerning the formal development control agreements between state and commune in rural France, hinges on the understanding of the concept of a plan. The third, a consultation procedure in Lyon, is dependent for its explanation on the status of the participants in the procedure. Such an approach implies a mature understanding of the way in which a country works, not merely of its planning system. It implies an ability to communicate in the language of the country being studied. The paper concludes by suggesting that comparative research has important benefits for the understanding of planning in the home country, because of the way in which, if properly done, it questions the assumptions that are made about the nature and purpose of planning.