ERNST CASSIRER,MARTIN HEIDEGGER,AND THE LEGACY OF DAVOS

In 1929 Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger participated in a momentous debate in Davos, Switzerland, which is widely held to have marked an important division in twentieth‐century European thought. Peter E. Gordon's recent book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, centers on this debate between these two philosophical adversaries. In his book Gordon examines the background of the debate, the issues that distinguished the respective positions of Cassirer and Heidegger, and the legacy of the debate for later decades. Throughout the work, Gordon concisely portrays the source of disagreement between the two adversaries in terms of a difference between Cassirer's philosophy of spontaneity and Heidegger's philosophy of receptivity, or of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), into a situation that finite human beings can never hope to master. Although it recognizes that this work provides an important contribution to our understanding of the Davos debate and to twentieth‐century European thought, this review essay subjects Gordon's manner of interpreting the distinction between Cassirer and Heidegger to critical scrutiny. Its purpose is to examine the possibility that important aspects of the debate, which do not conform to the grid imposed by Gordon's interpretation, might have been set aside in the context of his analysis.     

Existentialist manifesto or conservative political science? Problems in interpreting Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire

Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire is often held to be a paradigmatic book because of either its rejection of positivism in the social sciences, or its anticipation of existentialism in philosophy. The common denominator in these paradigmatic interpretations of the work is its use of various German philosophical influences that, though relatively obscure in France at the time of its first publication in 1938, became prominent features of the postwar Parisian intellectual landscape. During the Cold War, however, Aron was not only a peripheral figure within the Parisian intelligentsia, but also one of its harshest critics. The apparent mismatch between the paradigmatic status claimed for the Introduction as the first French existentialist book and Aron's subsequent critical position towards the leading figures of existentialism in France forms the starting point for a critical re-examination of the book and its paradigmatic interpretations. After seeking an explanation for these interpretations of the Introduction in deeper trends of generational thought, this article suggests that the history of the idea of intellectual engagement offers a more useful angle from which to approach this challenging book.     

Several Thoughts on Newell's Tyrants

This critical review of Newell's Tyrants consists of two parts. The first one departs from questions Jan Pato?ka, the most important Czech philosopher of the 20^th century, raised in the 1970s in the context of his critical reading of a book by Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History. Pato?ka's criticism of Barraclough, suggested here as a starting point for a dialogue with Newell, departed from Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences and his own interpretation of the current phase of history of mankind as the end of Europe and the arrival of a post-European age. The second part confronts Newell's treatments of tyrants usurping power throughout the human history and his efforts to offer a “homeopathic cure for the tyrannical temptations” that we might see emerging in the future with the concept of totalitarianism elaborated in the political thought of Hannah Arendt.     

MAPPING CHILDREN'S POLITICS: SPATIAL STORIES,DIALOGIC RELATIONS AND POLITICAL FORMATION

This article confronts a persistent challenge in research on children's geographies and politics: the difficulty of recognizing forms of political agency and practice that by definition fall outside of existing political theory. Children are effectively “always already” positioned outside most of the structures and ideals of modernist democratic theory, such as the public sphere and abstracted notions of communicative action or “rational” speech. Recent emphases on embodied tactics of everyday life have offered important ways to recognize children's political agency and practice. However, we argue here that a focus on spatial practices and critical knowledge alone cannot capture the full range of children's politics, and show how representational and dialogic practices remain a critical element of their politics in everyday life. Drawing on de Certeau's notion of spatial stories, and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic relations, we argue that children's representations and dialogues comprise a significant space of their political agency and formation, in which they can make and negotiate social meanings, subjectivities, and relationships. We develop these arguments with evidence from an after‐school activity programme we conducted with 10–13 year olds in Seattle, Washington, in which participants explored, mapped, wrote and spoke about the spaces and experiences of their everyday lives. Within these practices, children negotiate autonomy and self‐determination, and forward ideas, representations, and expressions of agreement or disagreement that are critical to their formation as political actors.     

Introduction

This paper is a discussion of Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999). It focuses on three topics central to Bevir's book: his weak intentionalism; his anthropological epistemology; and his priority claim regarding sincere, conscious, and rational beliefs. It is argued that Bevir's position on these issues is problematic in certain important respects, and that some of his related critical claims against Pocock, Skinner and others are misconceived.     

2. BOOTSTRAPPING,SELF‐BINDING,AND OTHER METAPHORS OF ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.     

The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)

This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of labor that tends to over determine Blackness within critical theories. Two visual fields help me with this counter read: William Gerrard De Brahm's 1757 “Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia”, as well as Julie Dash's 1991 images of the porous indigo‐stained hands of former slaves who worked indigo in the film Daughters of the Dust. While these two images oppose one another, their visual conventions enable a break with colonial and humanist scopic regimes like “Black labor” that tend to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor.     

Neon bright: Cool Places,youth cultures and hopeful political-theoretical futures

ABSTRACT

This article provides a reflection on Skelton and Valentine's (1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge.) book ‘Cool Places’. The article focuses upon the excitement, vitality and sense of challenge that the book afforded when the two authors first encountered it. From these personal memories, the article then offers two sets of wider considerations. In the first, and prompted by the authors’ use of the book in their teaching, it articulates how useful, relevant and engaging even contemporary students find the book, and how it offers a key point of reference within and beyond the teaching of ‘children's geographies'. In the second, the authors seek to re-engage the book's lively, hopeful, yet critically-political orientations, offering a series of challenges for future scholarship in the geographies of childhood and youth. Like the rest of the article, these orient around a sense of what ‘matters’ in and to geographical scholarship on childhood and youth.     

HISTORIOGRAPHY: A FIELD IN SEARCH OF A HISTORIAN?

Richard Kirkendall's collection of essays, The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History, examines the history of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from its founding to the present, using that history to illuminate how the writing of American history has changed over the last hundred years. The book provides coverage of all the major dimensions of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association's (MVHA) and the OAH's activities, ranging from the work of its scholarly publications, the Mississippi Historical Valley Review and the Journal of American History, to its role in promoting the teaching of American history. Overall, the essays in the volume tell a story of the organization's progress toward greater inclusion and democracy, falling prey to a Whig interpretation of historiography. In doing so, the book is part of a larger tendency in the way that historians have approached historiography, which in turn reflects their ambivalence about their relationship to the historical process. Thus, even as the very enterprise of historiography is premised on the recognition of how historians are themselves the products of the historical process, historians have revealed the limits to that recognition in their approach to the subject. This essay shows how deeply rooted this duality has been in the study of American historiography and illuminates some of its sources by placing Kirkendall's book in the context of how the MVHA and the OAH have treated historiography over the course of the organization's history.     

Female identity in process in Soraya Nini's Ils disent que je suis une beurette

In this article Soraya Nini's book Ils disent que suis une beurette is subjected to a feminist reading in order to discuss the portrayal of the female socialisation process. Deploying critical methodology including analysis of the narrative, and examining the factor of race, the article points up the continuing pertinence of the category Bildungsroman for women writers of ethnic origin.     

Banal Nationalism 20 years on: Re-thinking,re-formulating and re-contextualizing the concept

This introduction considers the significance of Michael Billig's (1995) Banal Nationalism to geographers, and how this fits into broader trends of nationalism research in the social sciences. Through an analysis of Web of Science citation trends for the book, we illustrate its spatial and temporal reach in terms of the countries where it has been cited and how its impact has developed since 1995. We also briefly examine how political geographers have engaged the concept of banal nationalism in their research, and what sort of questions it has raised for those conducting research on nationalist discourses and territorial identity narratives more broadly. Considering how political geographers might creatively advance this scholarship, we introduce the individual papers included in this special issue and conclude with a brief gesture to future directions for research beyond Banal Nationalism.     

The world turned upside down? Human rights and International Relations after 25 years

This article revisits the arguments of John Vincent's influential 1986 book, Human rights and International Relations and situates them against the context both of the debates of his own time and the debates of the early twenty‐first century. Vincent's arguments are assessed and evaluated in their own terms and compared and contrasted with dominant positions today. The arguments are then assessed in the light of two leading critical perspectives on human rights before considering a final criticism of the possibility and desirability of the current human rights regime in International Relations.     

WONDER: FROM POETICS TO POLITICS

Marnie Hughes-Warrington's book, History as Wonder: Beginning with Historiography, invites readers to reconsider the power of wonder as a critical concept whose theoretical implications go far beyond its evident ability to inspire historical research. Wonder is supposedly a neutral weapon for historians, one that is limited to promoting incessant curiosity about the past. Attempting to move from a poetic and aesthetic vision of wonder to a consideration of the concept's ethical and political uses, Hughes-Warrington claims that “historians since Herodotus have engaged with or responded to the efforts of thinkers who attempt to make general sense of the world, metaphysicians” (xii). In what follows, I challenge Hughes-Warrington's approach by emphasizing and exploring the epistemological questions History as Wonder raises about who holds the power to establish a conventional sense of the world and to what extent historical research may offer general explanations of the world without succumbing to precritical assumptions or metahistorical reductionisms.     

The Inglorious

Abstract

The essay argues that Sheldon Wolin's case for decoupling democracy and liberalism, which he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and 2004), significantly depends on the historical argument Henri Cardinal de Lubac made in his book Corpus Mysticum: L'Eucharistie et l'Eglise au moyen âge (1944 and 1949). Such a claim for the importance of this dependence deepens our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and Lubac for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, the essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin's use of Lubac's arguments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have a better theological understanding of Wolin's complex criticisms of liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political implications of Cardinal de Lubac's thought, we will see some of the conclusions that one political theorist came to after considering a theological argument. Finally, this particular instance of a mutually critical dialogue of faith and political reason raises crucial questions for thinking about the ends of democracy.     

Comments on Yoram Hazony,The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture

Hazony's insightful book advances three theses: (1) The Tanakh, the canonical Hebrew Scripture, is coherent, by virtue of its distinctive vision of the Whole and of the Israelite People's special place in it. (2) The Tanakh is a philosophic as well as a religious text. (3) The study of the Tanakh should find a home in departments of philosophy and political science as well as religion or religious studies. Granting the first and third points, we may raise questions about the second: Does philosophy require a concept of Nature qua Necessity, which is at odds with the Scriptural God's radical freedom? Does Hazony, to present the Tanakh as philosophic, overrationalize it, and therewith offer interpretations that, although fruitful and inspiring, fall wide of the mark? Of particular interest are his translation of the Hebrew word lev, literally “heart,” as “mind”; his sketches of five of the Patriarch Jacob's sons as politically relevant character types; and especially his take on the Patriarch Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac, which understates this text's poignancy and wonder. An alternative reading reveals the Book of Genesis as a set of cautionary tales about the hazards of unaided human reason, for which the Mosaic Law provides a needed corrective. On the other hand, Hazony should not be judged too harshly for his critical comments on a dogmatic strand (but only a strand) of Christian thinking that he associates with the early Church Father Tertullian.     

OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCY IN HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS

In his latest book Frank Ankersmit develops a comprehensive philosophical perspective on the problem of the truth and reference of historical representations. The approach and the wider perspective of the book largely belong to what could be called the postmodernist paradigm, in spite of some recent attempts to interpret Ankersmit's recent work differently. Since his 1983 Narrative Logic Ankersmit has propounded the view that individual statements that constitute historical representations may have reference, but that representations themselves do not. His most recent book remains faithful to this position and elaborates it further. This essay examines Ankersmit's arguments as well as the assumptions and implications of this view.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.