State-Building in Eighteenth-Century Russia

HUGH RAGSDALE, ed. and trans., and VALERII NIKOLAEVICH PONOMAREV, asst. ed. Imperial Russian Foreign Policy. New York and Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi, 457. $59–95 (US);

E. V. ANISIMOV. Rossiia bez Petra, 1725–1740. St Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1994. Pp. 496. No Price Available;

IA. A. GORDIN. Mezh rabstvom i svobodoi: 19 ianvaria-25 fevralia 1730 goda. St Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1994. Pp. 379. No Price Available;

CAROL S. LEONARD. Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Pp. vii, 232. $35.00 (US);

A. S. MYL'NIKOV. Ikushenie chudom: ‘Russkii prints’, ego prototipy i dvoiniki-samozvantsy. Leningrad: ‘Nauka’, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1991. Pp. 268. No Price Available.     

Late Eighteenth-Century Irish Politics

Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s. By James Kelly. (Studies in Irish History.) Cork: Cork University Press. 1992. xi, 276 pp. ℒ32.00. ISBN 0902561626
The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century. By Jim Smyth. (Studies in Modern History.) London: Macmillan/Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1992. xi, 251 pp. Hardback ℒ40.00; paperback ℒ12.99. ISBN 033354613X.     

Languages of Hegemony on the Eighteenth-Century Kazakh Steppe

ABSTRACT

Were the Kazakhs part of the Russian Empire after Khan Abulkhayir's 1731 oath? For many decades, Russian scholarship insisted that they were, although the work of Virginia Martin, Noda Jin and others has recently suggested other interpretations. My article shows that neither Kazakhs nor Russian officials thought of their relationship as a form of annexation. Instead, the Kazakhs used the arrival of the Qing Empire in Central Eurasia in the 1750s to triangulate between their two more powerful neighbors, maintaining a constant distance from Russian power. For Russian officials, this kind of relationship proved to be advantageous, ultimately because Kazakh mediation enabled Russian trade with Xinjiang. The final incorporation of the Kazakhs starting in 1822 had more to do with the withdrawal of Qing power from the steppe than the expansion of Russian authority.     

The Problem of Toleration in Early Massachusetts

Early Massachusetts is generally seen by scholars as “intolerant.” But this is to employ a misleading dichotomy between tolerant and intolerant societies which obscures the colonists’ understanding of themselves. They believed that their society instead successfully reconciled individual liberty and communal harmony through rational debate, social consensus, and the pursuit of truth. Their response to the Antinomian controversy is highly revealing in this context, demonstrating that they desired to persuade the aberrant back into the fold and that they reserved political intervention for when dissension had serious public implications. It was only those deemed irreconcilable who were ultimately excluded from the community. To approach the topic in this way is to resist the marginalisation of New England from the history of political and social thought by re‐evaluating the ends and actions of the colonists and by providing an important alternative perspective on the nature of toleration and its limits.     

Two Theories of Toleration: Locke versus Mill

Abstract

In her book, Zuckert presents a new interpretation of the Platonic corpus based on the internal dramatic chronology of all the dialogues. According to Zuckert, once the dialogues are ordered in this way, then it is possible to understand Plato's story of the development of Socratic philosophy, especially in relation to the other non-Socratic philosophers: Parmenides, Timaeus, the Eleatic Stranger, and the Athenian Stranger. For Plato, Socratic philosophy is superior to these other types of philosophy because of its acute understanding of both the limitations and the erotic character of human knowledge. It is only with his account of erôs in the Symposium that Socrates was able to account for the ways in which the eternal and intelligible ideas of the noble, the just, and the good could come to be exemplified in the life of mortal human beings, via the cooperative practice of philosophic virtue.     

Andreas Kalvos and the Eighteenth-Century Ethos

Abstract

In the space of a few years the small isle of Zante, one of the Ionian group, produced three important poets: Hugo Foscolo, Dionysios Solomos, and the subject of this present study, Andreas Kalvos. Kalvos was born in 1792, fourteen years after Foscolo and six years before Solomos. His father's family may originally have come from Crete. His mother's family was one of the aristocratic families of Zante—the family name had been inscribed ever since the Venetian occupation of the island in the Gold Book of the island nobility. The marriage of the poet's parents does not seem to have been a success, for not many years after the birth of his younger brother in 1794, the father, taking the two children with him, left Zante for Leghorn, where his brother was consul for the Ionian Islands, and where there was a considerable Greek colony. In 1805 Andreas' mother obtained a divorce fron her husband on the grounds of desertion, and shortly afterwards she married for the second time. She died in 1815, never having seen her children again after their departure from Zante.     

WikiLeaks,Anarchism and Technologies of Dissent

Abstract: WikiLeaks is a controversial organisation that attracts polarised responses. This is not unexpected given its key objective of exposing the secrets and social control ambitions of the powerful. While its supporters laud its pursuit of an informational commons, its detractors condemn its antisocial character, its megalomania—and its anarchism. It is the latter that particularly interests us here. This paper treats the “charge” of anarchism seriously, however, giving it the analytical attention it warrants. It does this by first identifying those characteristics of the organisation that would render it anarchist, and then to conceptualise what this anarchism means. It highlights two important elements of the WikiLeaks story: the anarchical character of the technologies it utilises to foment its dissent; and the anarchical ethos of the organisation's radical politics. We conclude by also considering the tensions and contradictions in WikiLeaks that temper both its anarchism and its social change objectives.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.