MISREPRESENTING MARX: A LESSON IN HISTORICAL METHOD

In this book Jonathan Sperber deploys his extensive knowledge of nineteenth‐century European social and political history, and his diligent research into sources that have become readily available only recently, to produce a substantial biography of Karl Marx. We find, however, that Sperber is mistaken in his treatment of Marx's ideas and of the intellectual contexts within which Marx worked. In fact, we suggest that he is systematically mistaken in this regard. We locate a root source of the error in his reductive approach to theoretical ideas. In section I we focus on the claim, taken for granted in the book, that Marx's ideas are instantiations of “materialism.” By detailed reference to the record of Marx's writings, we show that there is no justification for describing Marx as a “materialist” in the usually accepted senses of that term. In section II we review how Soviet and other interpreters of Marx, taking their lead from the later Engels, insisted that “materialism” was fundamental to Marxism. We suggest that Sperber's presentation of Marx's thinking as “materialist and atheist” aligns far better with such interpretations than it does with what Marx actually wrote. In sections III and IV we criticize Sperber's “contextualist” approach to dealing with ideas in history. His approach may seem reminiscent of Quentin Skinner’ s, but where Skinner deploys the discursive conventions prevailing in a past time to illuminate theoretical ideas, Sperber reduces theoretical ideas to context. We name Sperber's approach “theoretical nominalism,” a term that we use to denote the view that theoretical ideas are nothing but interventions into particular situations. We end by suggesting that greater attentiveness to philosophy and theory would have enriched Sperber's efforts in this book.     

“Genocide is Fascism in Action”: Aron Trainin and Soviet Portrayals of Genocide

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Soviet legal scholar Aron Trainin’s evolving writings on international law. Initially, Trainin formulated aspects of his concept of “crimes against peace” as a sort of Soviet alternative to Raphael Lemkin’s crimes of barbarity and vandalism. Crimes against peace both converged with the larger international movement to outlaw aggressive war, provided a Soviet alternative to proposed international crimes that they believed would threaten Soviet sovereignty, and provided a Soviet response to Lemkin’s proposals to outlaw mass killings. During World War II, Trainin articulated the Nazi extermination of the Jews as “crimes against peaceful civilians,” linking the Nazi atrocities to his concept of crimes against peace. Trainin’s concept of “crimes against peaceful civilians” encompassed the atrocities of the Holocaust while also asserting that the Soviet experience of the war – most notably Soviet sacrifice and suffering – meant that the Soviets should determine how international criminal law punished the war’s perpetrators. After World War II, when it became clear that genocide, rather than “crimes against peace” or “crimes against peaceful civilians,” was becoming the primary concept in international law to understand mass killings, Trainin portrayed the concept of genocide according to the perspective of Soviet propaganda, opposing an international criminal court for genocide, supporting the concept of cultural genocide, and portraying genocide as an inevitable outcome of capitalism. At the same time, Trainin and the Soviets never abandoned his concept of “crimes against peace,” portraying capitalism as inherently bound up with war and genocide. Trainin was the most significant genocide scholar in the Soviet Union, and his work exemplifies both the ways in which Soviet approaches to international law converged with other approaches, and the ways in which the Soviet Union diverged from non-Soviet international law.     

Joseph Levenson and the possibility for a dialogic history

In contrast to the criticism that his work represents a Euro-centric view of China, we argue that Joseph Levenson’s understanding of China involves a third dimension – Judaism – at the level of his historical perspective and methodology. Built on in-depth analysis of Levenson’s work, in particular his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, as well as his unfinished yet profound writings on Judaism and Jewish history, we find that his understanding of Jewish tradition plays a crucial role in his analysis of the history of modern China. We argue that what Levenson practiced was a historical methodology that we name “dialogic history.” We believe that dialogic history provides us a potential answer to the question of how we can understand another culture without being imperialists, essentialists, or Orientalists. Dialogic history is also history in action because when this kind of dialogue is conducted, a new space can be created in which history is no longer a one-sided monologue.     

Natural Law in Dryden’s Translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio

This article examines the influence of natural law philosophy upon four of Dryden’s translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio published in his final collection Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700): “Sigismonda and Guiscardo”, “The Wife of Bath, her Tale”, “Palamon and Arcite” and “Cymon and Iphigenia”. Situating Dryden’s tales alongside the writings of his philosophical, political and literary contemporaries as well as their classical sources, it argues that Dryden’s distinctive choice of vocabulary and innovative amplifications of his originals constitute a subtly provocative interrogation of the use of natural law rhetoric within the seventeenth century.     

Dimensions of remapping: Heinrich Schiffers and his mental map of Africa

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Athenäum publishing house in Germany planned a revised and extended edition of Heinrich Schiffers’ (1901–1982) successful book Wilder Erdteil Afrika (English translation: The Quest for Africa). The bestselling author had published several monographs about Africa since the 1930s, and authored and edited numerous works after World War II. Nearly all of these works, whose substantial print runs are testament to their popularity, are characterized by an engaging combination of text, images, and cartographic material, creating narratives and mental maps about Africa, its history, and the colonial past. In his later writings, he stressed the importance of “relearning” with regard to Africa and struggled to remap the imaginative geography of Africa. In this paper, I examine the characteristics of Schiffers’ imaginative geography and the change in his writings and maps. I explore whether his concept of “relearning” was an epistemological decolonization or if there were any continuities found in his imaginative geography. In order to grasp the specifics of his thinking, his geography will be briefly compared with that of his contemporary, Frankfurt zoo director Bernhard Grzimek.     

Forms of secularism and multiculturalism: Charles Taylor and Ireland

This article seeks to frame the work of the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor in terms of its significance for Irish culture. Taylor came to wide prominence for his work on multiculturalism, but the varying ways he understands this term are especially important for Ireland. “Multiculturalism 1” speaks to the kinds of difficulties between nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. “Multiculturalism 2” speaks to the more widely understood meaning of the term, which is connected to a cultural diversity that is often born of immigration. Taylor has had a strong role in the emergence of the term “interculturalism” to describe a form of cultural diversity that explicitly seeks to balance the needs of minority and majority cultures, and in Canada and Quebec that term has taken on a different understanding than the one that is common in Ireland. That work on interculturalism also strongly underwrites Taylor’s work on secularism, and he traces that social phenomenon in ways with clear relevance for Ireland. Although Taylor’s explicit engagement with Ireland is rare, it is clearly time to bring his work into the mainstream of studies of Irish culture.     

Antiquarianism and abduction: charles vallancey as harbinger of indo-european linguistics

Scholars generally dismiss the ideas of the eighteenth-century founder of the Royal Irish Academy, Charles Vallancey, who argued for links between ancient Irish, Phoenician, and Scythian languages and cultures. Vallancey's antiquarian writings were widely known at the time and impacted upon thinkers such as William Jones, who first correctly articulated the links between Indo-European languages. Earlier, Vallancey had hypothesized similar links and a “common source” of world languages, relying on Irish origin legends and supposed similarities between Ireland and the “Orient.” Though inaccurate, his ideas spurred fuller investigations, prompting philologers in new directions. The father of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, argued for the value of speculative reasoning, outlining the logic of discovery. For Peirce “abduction” is the beginning of the scientific method, the formation of a hypothesis. Reading Vallancey's speculations as abductive suggestions accounts for his prominence at the time and asserts his influence in the history of philology and linguistics.     

Oppressive Rhyming: George Orwell on Poetry and Totalitarianism

In George Orwell’s 1984, the poet Ampleforth observes that “the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes.” In this article I connect Ampleforth’s observation to Orwell’s many other writings on language and political control and then show how Orwell’s discussion of poetry’s resistance to political manipulation enhances Tocqueville’s and Burke’s accounts of totalitarianism. Specifically, Orwell illustrates how an easily “rhyming” polity is particularly vulnerable to totalitarian politics, while a society containing considerable disorder in its language and politics can be strongly resistant to such tyranny.     

On national dress and the problem of authenticity in Ulysses

This article considers James Joyce’s representation of Irish dress, arguing that his ambivalent treatment of it accurately reflects his fractious relationship with the Irish Revival movement. The article begins with a discussion of the metaphor of performance and relates this to issues around “authenticity”. From here, it discusses Douglas Hyde’s thoughts on dress, as presented in “The Necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland”, contextualising these within a brief history of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Irish dress history, and recognising the important work of women in this. Assessing Joyce’s depictions of Irish dress, especially in “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Cyclops” and “Circe”, this article argues that Joyce sees Irish dress as a contingent and fragile cultural performance.     

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

Postmodernist Histories

ABSTRACT

Since 1829, it has been the received and accepted scholarly opinion that Jonathan Edwards did not read the writings of George Berkeley and thus was not influenced thereby in the development of his own Idealism. This essay contends otherwise. With new evidence available, it is shown to be highly probable that Edwards has a historical as well as conceptual connection to the Idealism of Berkeley. A historical connection is argued for by utilizing Edwards’s “Catalogue” to establish a timeline that illustrates when he penned his own Idealist writings in connection to when he read Berkeley. A conceptual connection is argued for by focusing upon both several idiosyncratic Berkeleyisms of style and two Berkeleyan theses also found in Edwards’s writings. Finally, the conceptual connection between the two are strengthened, after demonstrating how Berkeleyan Idealism singularly differs from other prominent Early Modern Idealisms. By examining what Edwards read, how he wrote, and how he thought, a reasonable case is set forth for affirming a historical and conceptual connection between Edwards and Berkeley. Thus, after two centuries of dispute, there is finally justified merit for labeling Edwards as a Berkeleyan Idealist.     

Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom

Abstract

This article examines the rift in Leibniz’s conception of determinism after being rebuffed by the Parisian theologian Antoine Arnauld in their correspondence of 1686. As, in addition, his study of surds infracted his confidence in the “complete concept,” Leibniz embarked on a new, dynamic doctrine of substance or “law of the series.” In the literature, this strategy has been widely (mis)understood as “tweaking” the system to allow some self-assertion of free will. But as this article will show, it amounts to a revolutionary conception that culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine. As all forms of determinism are profoundly entangled with human self-perception, the Leibnizian Kehre invites us to a new engagement with human freedom and autonomy and the disentanglement from a philosophical position for which neither a metaphysical nor an empirical proof can be given.     

Western plague literature,the Irish Famine and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

This article places Castle Richmond, Anthony Trollope’s controversial Irish Famine novel, within the context of Western plague narratives as outlined by recent plague narrative scholars and by René Girard in his seminal 1974 essay “The Plague in Literature and Myth”. By demonstrating Castle Richmond’s conformity to a very particular cluster of attributes found in Western plague literature, this article helps expand our reading of Trollope’s novel, a work that is otherwise often seen as an incoherent failure. This article proposes that Trollope used Western plague discourse to structure and organise his response to Ireland’s Great Hunger. I contend here that we see in his novel’s construction the scaffolding of Judaic, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Renaissance plague narrative traditions, traditions that follow a predictable pattern of transgression, punishment, near social collapse, atonement achieved by expelling or sacrificing a scapegoat or scapegoats, followed by the restoration of an improved social order. This line of reasoning encapsulates Castle Richmond’s overt logical structure. Yet, this article goes on to argue that there are numerous ways in which Trollope undermines the logical “inevitability” and the “divine ordination” of the Famine which his use of Western plague discourse implies.     

Memes,masculinity and mancession: Love/Hate’s online metatexts

Since it first aired in 2010 on Radió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, Irish crime drama series Love/Hate has enjoyed record audience ratings. However, while serious TV critics and the show’s producers have praised it as a complex and incisive commentary on crime in Ireland, the more participatory online cultures of the Journal.ie, Twitter and Facebook have constructed a distinctly less highbrow set of discourses around the show. This analysis of the Journal.ie’s Daily Edge recaps demonstrates how participatory Laddish humour and what Jean Burgess refers to as the “vernacular creativity” of memes have functioned to prioritise a cohesive set of engagements with Love/Hate that are underpinned by fantasies about the recuperation of male power. Moreover, by creating a sense of “in-groupness” around the series, the Daily Edge and its tertiary texts have produced a heavily gendered sense of consensus about who “we” in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland are.     

E.A. Markham’s St. Caesare: the other “Ulster”?

This essay examines the invented Caribbean island of St. Caesare and its relation to the representational space of “Ulster” in Montserratian poet E.A. Markham’s collection Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems (1993). As the title of the book implies, it unites two of the poet’s home islands, Ireland and Montserrat. Ireland was Markham’s home at the moment when he drafted many of these poems, as he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine from 1988 to 1991. However, as a Caribbean writer of Afro-Irish heritage, Ireland is also home in that it represents a “hinterland”. Of the Caribbean islands, Montserrat is the most closely identified with Ireland owing to its Irish cultural inheritance, which has earned it the nickname “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This article surveys Markham’s depictions of St. Caesare and “Ulster” as analytical spaces that enable him to chart the palimpsestic topologies of Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The author argues that Markham limns St. Caesare and “Ulster” as transatlantic mirror images to allow for critical relationality between Montserrat and Northern Ireland.     

Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty.     

SCHOLARSHIP AND PERIODIZATION

Davis argues that the familiar periodization dividing European history into medieval and modern phases disguises a claim to power as a historical fact. It justifies slavery and subjugation by projecting them onto the “feudal” Middle Ages and non‐European present, while hiding forms of slavery and subjugation practiced by “secular” modernity. Periodization thus furnishes one of the most durable conceptual foundations for the usurpation of liberty and the abuse of power. In part I, devoted to “feudalism,” Davis traces the legal, political, and colonial struggles behind the development of the concept of “feudal law” in early modern France and England and unravels just how that concept hides colonial oppression while justifying European sovereignty. In part II, devoted to “secularization,” she demonstrates the failure of twentieth‐century critics of “secularization” like Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to break out of the limits imposed by the medieval/modern periodization. Part II concludes with a look at conceptual alternatives in the writings of Amitav Ghosh and the Venerable Bede. Three limitations of this book are worth mentioning. It traces the political history hidden by the concept of “feudalism,” but does not trace the political history hidden by the concept of “religion.” It offers no answer to the question of how to break the link between scholarship and politics without ending up in a logical impasse or reinforcing the link. It does not address the possibility that answering this question may require breaking with the terms of professional historical inquiry. Perhaps the question could be answered in terms like those that led Wittgenstein to characterize his Philosophical Investigations as remarks on the natural history of human beings.     

“Mad” Elves and “Elusive Beauty”: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien's Mythology [1]

Contrary to Tolkien's refutation of “Celtic things” as a source for his own mythology, this article attempts to show how his work has been inspired by Celtic folklore and myth. The article is not just a source study. It concentrates on one main example from Tolkien's early literary writings that betrays a Celtic influence. At the same time it discusses Tolkien's complex attitude towards “things Celtic” within the context of his strong sense of English identity. Finally, it seeks to explain Tolkien's derogatory comments on Celtic material as a result of popular ideas of “Celticity.”     

Antiquarianism,archaeology, and aporetic immanence in Beckett’s prose

Beckett derides those antiquarians unaware of “the rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object in his 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry”. However, Beckett will come to incorporate into the late prose specific terminology used by archaeologist, including those involved in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, who were contemporaries of the same antiquarians he scorns so contemptuously in his early career. This paper traces and examines the Irish antiquarian elements in relation to megalithic archaeology in Beckett’s prose. The elements of antiquarian archaeology in Beckett function to present the existence of those populating the work as mediated by the aporia between ancient and modern epochs. Allusions to antiquarian and archeological terminology contribute to the issues of representation in Beckett’s work. Instances where historical material resides in Beckett’s prose will be analysed through the logic of reverberation. Based on the physics of sound, it will be argues that the fragments of historical material act like artefacts which do not represent historical discourse but reverberate within an aporia of chronological time.