Daily life in the country. The co-existence of Jews and Christians at the end of the Weimar Republic

Godwin's controversial claim for earthly immortality in the first edition of Political Justice has been largely dismissed by scholars as a flaw in his philosophy or as absurd speculation which Godwin cannily omitted from the later editions of the text. In this paper, I will demonstrate, not only that such claims were not nearly as idiosyncratic or eccentric as they have been presented, but that they constitute an intrinsic part of his overall philosophy regarding perfectibility and human progress. Moreover, by examining the revisions made to Political Justice in the second and third editions, it will be possible to prove that the essence of his argument regarding material immortality was not as radically altered as is widely accepted. I will further show how the population controversy of the 18th century forced Godwin to apply his perfectibilist theory to contemporary demographic challenges and how he defended his concept of immortality from both the principle of population and, more particularly, Malthusian philosophy.     

Politics of Immortality: Hobbes on “Humane and Divine Politiques”

Hobbes anticipates many important features of liberalism, including rights, the sovereign state, social contract and constitutionalism. Yet in his insistence that the sovereign will have final authority in matters of faith he appears to repudiate what we have come to consider the core liberal assumptions regarding separation of church and state. In this article, I argue that Hobbes takes this approach because of the political challenge posed by immortality (the promise of eternal rewards and the threat of eternal torment and damnation after death). Hobbes regards immortality as one of the most important factors that transform a religion from a means to strengthen the sovereign's authority, a “humane politiques,” to a “Divine politiques,” where others come to exercise countervailing claims on subjects' loyalty. Because immortality presents such a profound challenge to Hobbes' political remedy founded on the judicious use of fear, he adopts a twofold strategy to moderate its political influence. The first is a redefinition of who shall speak and what shall be said about immortality. The second strategy is to elevate the demands of this-world, by promising an eternal peace that will ensure a commodious life.     

Rigour,gate keeping and security: A debate with Bellamy and McDonald

I am pleased that Bellamy and McDonald have explained why they used an altered version of solidarism. Had they cited the post-1977 sources, rather than Hedley Bull's 1966 paper, in their article, my reaction would have been different. However, they have responded with further charges. Given space constraints, I respond to some, but not all, of their charges. This rejoinder is divided into five parts. The first defines the English School (ES), while the second discusses security in the ES. The third addresses the claim that I portrayed human security as a threat to the ES and the fourth examines the argument that I regard ES texts as sacred. The final part speculates about what we might learn from this debate.     

Science, text and space: thoughts on the geography of reading

The idea of a 'geography of reading' provides a potential point of conversation between the cultural and scientific wings of our profession. Here I explore some dimensions of the geography of reading scientific texts. Drawing on a number of theoretical pronouncements – Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons', Said's 'travelling theory', Secord's 'geographies of reading', Beer's 'miscegenation of texts', Fish's 'interpretive communities' and Rupke's 'geographies of reception'– I focus on the spaces where scientific theories are encountered. The argument is that where scientific texts are read has an important bearing on how they are read. This realization points to a fundamental instability in scientific meaning and to the crucial significance of what might be called located hermeneutics. As a case study in the development of a cartographics of scientific meaning, I explore the different ways in which Darwin's fundamentally biogeographical theory of evolution by natural selection was construed in a number of different settings. The sites I have chosen to illustrate this are the scientific communities which congregated around the Charleston Museum of Natural History in South Carolina, the Wellington Philosophical Society and New Zealand Institute, and the St Petersburg Society of Naturalists in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. In each case the encounter with evolution theory, and the ways it was interpreted, are shown to have been shaped by local cultural politics, thereby disclosing the critical role that space plays in the production of scientific meaning.     

TWO CULTURES OF THE POSTHUMAN FUTURE

The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological‐scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological posthuman as a previously nonexistent and other‐than‐human central subject, the latter theorizes a postanthropocentric subjectivity of beings still human. In doing so, it extends the already familiar emancipatory concerns of the human world over the nonhuman, with special attention paid to the ecological other. Despite the occasional claims of critical posthumanism to bring humanities and technological‐scientific approaches to a shared platform, the prospect of technological beings of unparalleled power and the ecotopia of species equality do not fit together very well. In this article I argue that, in their present shape, technological posthumanity and critical posthumanism represent hardly reconcilable social imaginaries and two cultures of the posthuman future. My intervention is a plea for developing a more profound and mutual understanding of both. Instead of advocating particular agendas that nevertheless claim validity for the entirety of planetary life and the entire scholarly enterprise of knowledge‐production, we could invest more in efforts to come to grips with both social imaginaries and venture jointly into the creation of the conceptual tools of a new knowledge economy of understanding the rapidly changing world and our own (post)human prospects.     

‘Make No Little Plans’: Anatomy of Planning Ambition and Prospect

This review paper applies a critical geographic perspective to analysis of planning ambition and prospect. Its point of departure is that planning, an applied spatial science, has lacked consistent review from critical geography in recent decades. The consequences of this drift for planning conception and practice are considered, focusing on the influential construct, the compact city. The review finds evidence of serious epistemological and methodological flaws in planning thought and ambition; failings that were earlier identified and analysed in the break with positivism in geographical sciences. The consequences of these limitations for planning thought and practice are considered. Broadly they undermine the ability of the compact city ideal to address what is arguably the most critical threat facing humanity, climate change. Specifically, the proposition that urban density has straightforward influences on human behaviour, including resource use, is without scientific foundation. Planning has a critically important part to play in climate response: securing the resilience and well‐being of an increasingly urbanised human species. Urban compaction may not achieve these ends.     

Fish Stories: Science, Advocacy, and Policy Change in New England Fishery Management

Once the poster child for government-sponsored overfishing, New England by 2005 had become a fishery conservation success story. This article develops and deploys a problem-definition framework to explain the dramatic shift from a permissive to a protective fishery management regime in New England. I argue that neither new and improved scientific information nor pressure from powerful commercial interests caused government officials to modify their approach to fishery management. Instead, environmentalists used lawsuits to threaten fishery managers' autonomy and thereby forced them to replace fishers' risk-tolerant definition of the problem with environmentalists' more precautionary one as the basis for management. Environmentalists had legal leverage because they were able to demonstrate convincingly a substantial discrepancy between what the agency's governing statute required and what managers actually did. Two factors were critical to environmentalists' success: a compelling and credible scientific story about the relationship between fishing and the health of fish stocks, and an explicit conservation requirement in the language governing fishery management.     

The politics of metaphysics: Adorno and Bloch on utopia and immortality

The hypothesis underlying this article is that any narrative of the emergence of modernity—as the one developed by Blumenberg, for example—that leaves behind the eschatological component is incomplete, since it removes from the tradition of modernity a great deal of the Protestant religious experience which shows deep obsession with the thought of the end of the world. Through a confrontation between Adorno and Bloch, the article argues that the notions of utopia and human liberation imply logically the idea of immortality.

For Adorno and Bloch the dream of immortality is the dream of matter; both of them believe that the act of human transcendence must cling on to the bodily stuff out of which we are made. Yet, whereas Bloch postulates the positive existence of a transcendent space, Adorno eschews any ontological commitment. The article argues in favour of Adorno's negative approach, showing that, after Auschwitz, what both philosophers take as the truth‐content of theology cannot be automatically transferred into dialectical materialism.     

WHAT WAS CRITICAL HISTORY? A READING OF RICHARD SIMON'S HISTOIRE CRITIQUE DU VIEUX TESTAMENT

The roots of our modern critical historical attitude are usually set in one of the following phenomena: (1) the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns; (2) the establishment of historiography as a scientific discipline; and (3) the newly gained awareness of anachronism. However, these accounts either neglect the normative character of the above‐mentioned phenomena or operate with an a priori definition of “critical history,” which leads them to retrospectively attribute the concept of “critique” to historical realities that have not used the term to denote their attitude toward or their treatment of the past. Rather than starting from an a priori definition of what “critical history” is, I propose to inquire into what “critical history” was at the moment when it was first conceived as such—namely in Richard Simon's Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. I will begin by presenting Simon's conception of critique, which entailed: (a) a grammatical and philological treatment of the text in question; (b) a historical and cultural contextualization of this text; and (c) a specific type of judgment to be applied to what is written therein. Since this last aspect constitutes the key to understanding critique's attitude toward the past, I will, in the second part, focus my attention on the notion that plays a pivotal role in the exercise of “critical judgment,” that is, on the concept of tradition. Last, I will propose that since Simon's critical history does not seem to be completely autonomous in relation to its object, the roots of our modern call for normative autonomy vis‐à‐vis the past should be sought with the authors whom Simon opposed in his work, but from whom nonetheless he inherited the term critique: Protestant authors such as Scaliger, Casaubon, and Cappel.     

1. ACTS OF GOD? MIRACLES AND SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION1

God, at least as an active agent, is excluded from today's scientific worldview—including the worldview of the humanities. This creates a gulf between a godless science and believers in God's active presence in the world, a gulf that I argue is unbridgeable. I discuss the general methodological question from the starting point of a 1652 episode in a Norwegian valley, where God reportedly saved two brothers stranded on an islet by providing just enough fresh, edible plants each day for them to survive until they were found by a search team after twelve days. I resist four temptations to take easy ways out of a real dilemma: whether to accept or dismiss this and similar miracle accounts. The first is to explain evidence and refuse to consider the events about which the evidence reports; the second, to deny that reports of miracles represent a problem since biblical actors and authors lacked Hume's concept of inviolable laws of nature; the third, to become resigned to a putative epistemological gap that renders impossible any dialogue on religion with actors from the early modern period; the fourth, to restrict our studies to asking what the events meant to the historical actors without passing judgment on the truth value of their beliefs. I suggest that when doing historical research, historians are part of a scientific community; consequently, historiographical explanations must be compatible with accepted scientific beliefs. Whereas many historians and natural scientists in private believe in supernatural entities, qua professional members of the scientific community they must subscribe to metaphysical naturalism, which is a basic working hypothesis in the empirical quest of science. As long as the supernatural realm is excluded from the scientific worldview, however, historians’ explanations of miracles will differ fundamentally from the explanations proffered by believers.     

The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot,Ruin, and the Rationalized Market

This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.     

3. HISTORIOGRAPHY WITHOUT GOD: A REPLY TO GREGORY1

This reply aims both to respond to Gregory and to move forward the debate about God's place in historiography. The first section is devoted to the nature of science and God. Whereas Gregory thinks science is based on metaphysical naturalism with a methodological corollary of critical‐realist empiricism, I see critical, empiricist methodology as basic, and naturalism as a consequence. Gregory's exposition of his apophatic theology, in which univocity is eschewed, illustrates the fissure between religious and scientific worldviews—no matter which basic scientific theory one subscribes to. The second section is allotted to miracles. As I do, Gregory thinks no miracle occurred on Fox Lakes in 1652, but he restricts himself to understanding the actors and explaining change over time, and refuses to explain past or contemporary actions and events. Marc Bloch, in his book The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, is willing to go much further than Gregory. Using his superior medical knowledge to substitute his own explanation of the phenomenon for that of the actors, Bloch dismisses the actors’ beliefs that they or others had been miraculously cured, and explains that they believed they saw miraculous healing because they were expecting to see it. In the third section, on historical explanation, I rephrase the question whether historians can accommodate both believers in God and naturalist scientists, asking whether God, acting miraculously or not, can be part of the ideal explanatory text. I reply in the negative, and explicate how the concept of a plural subject suggests how scientists can also be believers. This approach may be compatible with two options presented by Peter Lipton for resolving the tension between religion and science. The first is to see the truth claims of religious texts as untranslatable into scientific language (and vice versa); the other is to immerse oneself in religious texts by accepting them as a guide but not believing in their truth claims when these contradict science.     

THE UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS OF LATE CRITICAL THEORY

Martin Jay's sweeping account of reason in Western philosophy provides the context for understanding the crisis that the Frankfurt School thinkers faced when they spoke of the “eclipse of reason.” In the background of the thinking of the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse is a hankering for a more substantive conception of reason that bears affinities with what Hegel called Vernunft (reason), which he contrasted with Verstand (understanding). According to Jay, the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers never quite succeeded in elaborating this substantive concept of reason and grew increasingly pessimistic in the face of the self‐destruction of reason. Habermas sought to elaborate a communicative theory of rationality that did not fall into the misleading promises of Hegelian Vernunft but could nevertheless provide a normative basis for the critique of instrumental, strategic, and systems rationality—a normative basis for critical theory. Jay presents an extremely lucid account of Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative rationality. He concludes by reviewing some of the outstanding problems and questions that have been raised about the adequacy and success of Habermas's project. I seek to do justice to the strengths and weaknesses of Jay's narrative, and I focus on a number of deep, unresolved issues that confront the future of critical theory in its attempt to develop an adequate conception of rationality. I also raise concerns about what precisely is distinctive about critical theory today.     

The “Science” of Policy Development During Administrative Rulemaking

The legitimacy of government agencies rests in part on the premise that public administrators use scientific evidence to make policy decisions. Yet, what happens when there is no consensus in the scientific evidence—i.e., when the science is in conflict? I theorize that scientific conflict yields greater policy change during administrative policymaking. I assess this claim using data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I identify policy change—what I refer to as “policy development” in this article—between the FDA's draft and final rules with a novel text analysis measure of shifts in regulatory restrictions. I then go on to find that more policy development does occur with scientific conflict. Moreover, using corresponding survey data, I uncover suggestive evidence that one beneficiary of such conflict may be participating interest groups. Groups lobby harder—and attempt to change more of the rule—during conflict, while an in‐survey experiment provides evidence of increased interest group influence on rule content when scientific conflict is high.     

National League of Cities and the Ephemeral Nature of Significant Supreme Court Cases

For many years, I taught third‐year law students at the Dickinson School of Law (Penn State's law school now, a private institution then) a seminar entitled “The Constitution.” For a semester we would seek to get to know the document through a careful reading of it, along with some of the works that those who wrote the Constitution would have read and some that they wrote, various essays by legal scholars and political scientists, and various Supreme Court cases. The goal was to get these budding young attorneys to try to determine what, if any, relationship there might be between what the Constitution says and what we now say it says.     

Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances*

This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustained protest action emerged at the site amidst initiation of test borehole drilling activity by the pipeline company. In this paper, I engage with the potential of geotheorizing children’s relations as a critical response that interrupts dominant understandings of what is seen as appropriate for young children’s curriculum. I consider the effects of refiguring children’s subjectivities through geologic and geontological relations for the normalization and resistance of settler colonialism’s human-centric and extractive structurings.     

Science in Dispute: Debating the Authority of Knowledge in an Environmental Contestation

This paper is an examination of science, as it is understood and contested between conservationists and developers in an application to construct a salt mine in Western Australia. If the salt mine were to go ahead, it would have become the largest salt mine in the world, adjacent to a World Heritage Area. Thus, the application triggered significant local interest in the potential environmental impacts on surrounding ecological systems. As the only means for the public to have an impact on decision‐making is through the environmental approvals process, much of the debate revolved around the validity and legitimacy of knowledge gained through ecological science. This paper focuses on the ways in which the conservationists and developers moulded and shaped scientific knowledge to fit their opposing beliefs, values, and aims. However, rather than focus on the overtly political manipulation of science, I examine why particular interpretations of science are considered legitimate by some participants in the dispute, while others are not. In particular, I ask, what does it take for particular scientific ‘facts' to be considered legitimate? To do so, I examine how the conservationists and developers came to conceptualise and frame science within the dispute. I argue that for members of either group to consider any scientific knowledge legitimate, it is first judged on its ability to resonate with their own worldviews, experiences, and aim.     

Mars is an awful place to live

Abstract

Some believe that the planet Mars holds promise as a new home for humankind and that it could become the focus of a large scale colonisation effort at some undefined point in the future. In this paper I support the assertion that Mars holds promise as a site for human scientific, and possibly commercial, exploration, but I question the idea that Mars will be colonised in a manner akin to the New World. The surface of Mars is physically extreme. Mean annual temperature is—60°C, the ultraviolet radiation flux is a thousand times more damaging to DNA than that found on the surface of the earth, and there is little or no liquid surface water. The atmosphere is unbreathable and the soil may be toxic. Although Mars is less awful than the most awful places in the solar system (such as the radiation bombarded surfaces of the Jovian moons), it is considerably more awful than the most extreme places on earth, such as the continental interior of Antarctica and the High Arctic. I suggest that the polar model of human settlement is the most accurate from which to extrapolate the future of human Mars exploration, but even this model is optimistic. Using the most hopeful assessments of colonisation prospects, the human population of Mars would be a maximum of about three million people, and would most probably be substantially less. Understanding the most likely social trajectory of human Mars exploration is not only sociologically interesting, but it is practically important for determining how Mars exploration programmes should be presented to the public.     

Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie

History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.